First Circles of Kansas conference

On Sept. 11, the Circles of Kansas Community of Practice 2013 was held at Trinity Heights Methodist Church in Newton. This was the first such meeting of Circles for Kansas.

Organizers hoped for around 25 people; more than 100 signed up. People came from across the state, some from Circles groups already formed, others just beginning, while others were in the exploration stage.
What is always inspiring to me are testimonies from Circle leaders--people in poverty who are working to get out. One such leader, Jo Lewis, made this insightful comment: "We're all in the same boat but have different paddles. Mine was a fork."
Heather Cunningham, the National Circles Training Center coach, spoke to the group. She noted the importance of community practices. She said that workers spend one-third of their time looking for information and are five times more likely to ask a co-worker for it.
She said there are more than 1,000 Circles groups in over 70 communities in 23 states and part of Canada. The first national conference for Circles was held this year. The second one will be held April 28-May 2, 2014, in Fort Collins, Colo.
The conference had breakout sessions in the morning and afternoon. In the first slot, I sat in on "Conflict Resolution Language" with Jeanne Erickson. She distinguished unnecessary conflict from genuine conflict and emphasized focusing on people's interests, not their positions. There was too much to summarize here, but it was excellent. She recommended the book Getting Past No: Negotiating in Difficult Situations by William Ury.
In the afternoon, I sat in on "Trauma, the Brain and Your Circle" with Wanda Pumphrey, also excellent. She talked about the long-term effects of trauma on the brain and how the prefrontal cortex--the thinking, analytical part of our brain that moderates our fight or flight behavior--may shut down. She talked about ways Circles can support the healing process. Here's a good quote: "Healing starts as soon as someone listens to you and your story."
Over the lunch period, Ed O'Malley, director of the Leadership Center in Wichita, talked about the Circles vision. He mentioned three things Circles groups need to do:
• increase their comfort with ambiguity,
• hold to the purpose,
• create the container for the work.
Heather Cunningham closed the conference with a short presentation about leadership. She said that if we make leadership something bigger than ourselves, we fail to recognize it.
I came away further encouraged to continue being involved in this important work of being with people who are working hard to get out of poverty, in the face of huge systemic barriers. I bristle each time I hear some politician (or anyone) talk about how lazy poor people are. I've never met such courageous and resourceful people. I want to say, Just try to walk in their shoes.

A lesson on the Civil Rights Movement

Whenever a film says it is “inspired by a true story,” you can bet there isn’t much in it that’s true.

Such is the case for The Butler, directed by Lee Daniels, a highly fictionalized account of Eugene Allen, who served as a butler in the White House during the administrations of eight presidents, from Truman to Reagan.

In the movie, Allen is named Cecil Gaines (Forest Whitaker) and begins working in the White House during the Eisenhower administration. Daniels uses this framework to juxtapose this man’s faithful service with the racial turmoil going on in the country over these years.

The film wants to show us and help us feel the pain of African Americans during the years of this man’s life (he died in 2010). So we witness Cecil’s father being shot to death in the cotton fields by the white owner, who has just raped Cecil’s mother. While this didn’t happen to Eugene Allen’s parents, it likely happened to many others.

And the movie has Cecil’s older son, Louis (David Oyelowo), conveniently take part in just about every important event of the civil rights era, from the Nashville lunch-counter sit-ins to the Freedom Rides and even being present in the motel room with Dr. King just before he is shot. Then, of course, he joins the Black Panthers.

While such coincidence is beyond belief, it nevertheless introduces audiences who don’t know to these important events and the impact they had on the country. We also witness the various presidents as they try to decide how to respond to this movement. Meanwhile, Cecil continues his service without voicing any political opinions on the job.

Home is a different story. There he quarrels with his son, opposing his actions and worried for his safety. And his wife, Gloria (Oprah Winfrey), left alone while Cecil works long hours, turns to drink for solace.

Daniels has made a dramatic yet didactic film that serves well those who haven’t taken the time to watch such documentaries as Eyes on the Prize or Freedom Riders. He has assembled an impressive cast of actors, including the wonderful Whitaker in the title role, plus Terrence Howard and Cuba Gooding Jr. The actors who play presidents are well-known (Robin Williams as Eisenhower, John Cusack as Nixon, for example) and, because of that, distracting. I had to laugh when seeing Jane Fonda playing Nancy Reagan.

The Butler also serves to give us a glimpse of African-American domestic life in a middle-class home during these years. We also get a glimpse of Cecil’s Christian faith. The real butler, Eugene, was a long-time, active member of his church.

Daniels’ film has been number one at the box office for the past few weeks. It’s good that audiences are being exposed to stories of African Americans and their struggle to find freedom and dignity in a country that too often denies them that, especially since many of these viewers will not take time to watch documentaries that tell a fuller, truer story.

Are family issues only women's issues?

One of the conversations going on in our society is a debate about work-life balance: how to balance one’s work life with the responsibilities of parenting. However, the conversation is happening almost exclusively among women. Men remain largely excluded from the debate.

In the July/August issue of The Atlantic, Stephen Marche’s essay “The Masculine Mystique” comments on this exclusion of fathers from debates about balancing work and parenting. He notes that “decisions in heterosexual relationships are made by women and men together,” and “when men aren’t part of the discussion about balancing work and life, outdated assumptions about fatherhood are allowed to go unchallenged.”

Marche challenges a myth perpetuated by Sheryl Sandberg’s popular book Lean In: that talent and hard work can take you to the top. He calls this “pure balderdash, for women and men.” Denmark now has more social mobility than the United States. 

The central conflict right now, Marche writes, is “family versus money.” The Pew Research Center released a study in March called “Modern Parenthood” that found about half of all working parents say it is difficult to balance career and family responsibilities, with “no significant gap in attitudes between mothers and fathers.”

Marche discusses women’s rise to economic dominance within the middle class. While “it is an outrage that the male-female wage gap persists,” he writes, “over the past 10 years, in almost every country in the developed world, it has shrunk.” And “of the 15 fastest-growing job categories in the United States, 13 are dominated by women.”

However, the “top leadership positions remain overwhelmingly filled by men.” According to the World Economic Forum’s “Global Gender Gap” report, he writes, “women around the world hold a mere 20 percent of powerful political positions. In the United States, the female board-membership rate is 12 percent—a disgrace.”

But Marche calls this a “hollow patriarchy: the edifice is patriarchal, while the majority of its occupants approach egalitarianism.” Nevertheless, men wield power. He notes a paradox: “Masculinity grows less and less powerful while remaining iconic of power. And therefore men are silent. After all, there is nothing less manly than talking about waning manliness.”

A 2008 Pew study asked cohabiting male-female couples, “Who makes the decisions at home?” In 26 percent of households, the man did; in 43 percent, the woman did.

This hollow patriarchy “keeps women from power and confounds male identity,” Marche writes. He notes parenthetically that “the average working-class guy has the strange experience of belonging to a gender that is railed against for having a lock on power, even as he has none of it.”

While enlisting men in the domestic sphere may be a good idea, Marche writes, “the solution is establishing social supports that allow families to function.” Sharing the load of parenting equally doesn’t matter if the load is unbearable. And it will only become bearable when things like paid parental leave and affordable, quality child care become commonplace. In every state, the average annual cost of day care for two children exceeds the average annual rent, he says.

Marche blames men for failing to make themselves heard in this debate. “Where is the chorus of men asking for paternity leave?”

Meanwhile, the society sees parenting as a women’s issue. The U.S. Census Bureau, when it refers to child care, "considers mothers the 'designated parent,' even when both parents are in the home," Sandberg writes. “When mothers care for their children, it’s ‘parenting,’ but when fathers care for their children, the government deems it a ‘child-care arrangement.’ ”

Marche concludes, “As long as family issues are miscast as women’s issues, they will be dismissed as the pleadings of one interest group among many.”

The African-American male as a human being

In the early hours of Jan. 1, 2009, Oscar Grant, a 22-year-old African-American man, was shot in the back while being held by police at Fruitvale Station in Oakland, Calif. He later died. In the days and weeks following, Grant was alternately labeled a saint or a villain, a loving father or a drug dealer. Ryan Coogler’s extraordinary debut film shows that he was actually a complicated human being. 

What makes the film Fruitvale Station important is that it avoids the polarizing, simplistic notion that a person is only either a saint or a villain. Coogler shows Grant’s humanity: He is a loving father and a convicted felon; he loves his girlfriend but cheated on her; he loves his mother but lies to her.

The film opens with a cellphone video taken by a bystander of the actual Oscar Grant being shot. Then we switch to Dec. 31, 2008, the last day of his life, and watch Michael B. Jordan’s remarkable portrayal of Grant.

On the verge of a new year and only three months out of prison, Oscar is looking to change his life, to begin anew. He tells his girlfriend, Sophina (Melonie Diaz), that he is committed to her and their daughter, Tatiana (Ariana Neal).

After dropping off Tatiana at preschool and Sophina at work, he goes to a grocery to try to get his job back. He’s been fired for showing up late, though he hasn’t told Sophina or his mother (Octavia Spencer) this. He says to his former boss, “You want me to sell drugs?”

Oscar has an easygoing nature, and Coogler uses the device of showing his cellphone texts to portray his quick navigation of relationships as he moves from one difficulty to another. We witness his struggle to be a better person in the face of systemic forces that try to hold him back. Finding legal work to support him and his family poses a huge problem.

All the while, as he seeks to change, as he expresses his delight in Tatiana and his affection for Sophina, our gut wrenches because we know what’s coming.

Oscar and his friends are on the train after celebrating the New Year, when a white thug he encountered while in prison baits him into a fight. Later, the police are called and hold Oscar and several of his friends on the platform, and a white officer, struggling to handcuff Oscar, shoots him. (He later claimed he thought he was grabbing his taser instead of his gun, and he served 11 months in prison.)

Coogler has created not only an important film but an excellent film. He shows the complicated humanity behind the stereotype of the young African-American male. The film’s pace, editing, acting and writing are superb, and we come away sad and angry about one more wasted life because we’ve come to know this man—his aspirations, his struggles, his potential.

That the film was released around the time of the Trayvon Martin trial was unintentional yet raises many parallels. A young African-American male, killed by someone overreacting with a gun. Still, Coogler steers clear of racial polarizing. Oscar has several positive interactions with whites.

Fruitvale Station succeeds in portraying a specific human in his realistic complexity, and that story resonates with us viewers who see Oscar’s tragic death as something that affects us all.

The echoes of history in our lives

Colum McCann, whose novel Let the Great World Spin won the 2009 National Book Award, engages us once again with a multinarrative work that is more ambitious, if not quite as marvelous as his previous novel. Nevertheless, it is an arresting, lyrical work that is well worth reading and savoring.

TransAtlantic (Random House, 2013, $27, 304 pages), his sixth novel, mixes historical figures with fictional characters over several centuries, all with a connection to Ireland and the United States. It distills the reverberations of history in our lives.

He begins in Newfoundland in 1919, when two aviators Jack Alcock and Arthur Brown, prepare to make the first nonstop flight across the Altantic, to Ireland. McCann captures their love of flying and their strong connection to each other: “… they have long ago mapped their minds onto each other’s movements: every twitch a way of speaking, the absence of voice a presence of body.” They both see the point of flight being “to get rid of oneself. That was reason enough to fly.”

The next chapter is set in 1845-46 in Dublin, where Frederick Douglass has arrived on his international lecture tour after publishing his narrative of growing up in slavery. He finds welcome and sympathy for abolition but also encounters widespread famine among the Irish people.

The third chapter, set in 1998, follows Senator George Mitchell as he works on bringing bitter sides in Ireland together for peace talks. After an agreement is reached, Mitchell understands that peace will only come if enough people want it. “Generations of mothers will understand this,” he muses.

Halfway through the novel, McCann switches from stories of historical figures to fictional stories of women who had some connection to Alcock, Brown, Douglass and Mitchell. This is where the novel comes alive.

McCann opens Book Two with a vivid description of Lily Duggan tending to wounded soldiers on a Civil War battlefield. Lily, who was a maid in the house where Frederick Douglass was staying in Dublin, is a widowed mother who has followed her young son when he enlists. After he dies, she remarks on “this fool-soaked war that makes a loneliness of mothers.”

Lily later marries and has five sons and one daughter, Emily, who is the subject of the second chapter in Book Two. She, a writer, and her daughter, Lottie, a photographer, report on the flight of Alcock and Brown in 1919. In 1929, they travel to Ireland to visit Brown (Alcock has died).

Brown confesses that he failed to mail a letter written years earlier by Lily that Emily had given him to carry on his transatlantic flight. This letter, unopened, becomes a symbol in the novel for the history that lives within us, even if unacknowledged.

The third chapter in Book Two belongs to Lottie, who has married, has a daughter and a grandson, and loves to play tennis. Back in Chapter Three, she was the elderly woman in a wheelchair who played tennis and told Senator Mitchell he had an “awful backhand.” Now, in 1978, she visits her daughter and son-in-law at their cottage on a lake, where a tragedy soon occurs.

Finally, in Book Three, we are with Hannah, Lottie’s daughter, now alone with her dog in 2011. About to lose her cottage to the creditors, she tries to find a buyer for the unopened letter she has inherited. Despite the implausibility of such a letter remaining unopened for 92 years, we as readers want to know what it says. One of its sentences sums up the theme of this absorbing novel: “We seldom know what echo our actions will find, but our stories will most certainly outlast us.”

Even if not quite the feat of Let the Great World Spin, a rare gem, TransAtlantic is really good. McCann has a deft touch with language, whether describing a beach “penciled by a series of soft sand ripples” or capturing the diction of the Irish: “Sure the two of us are deaf anyway.”

What moves the narrative, finally, is the voice of women, those whose lives run parallel, in the shadows, beside the historical figures we think move history. We learn that “the ordinary people own [history] now.”

When Hannah opens that letter she realizes a lesson this book teaches: “What mystery we lose when we figure things out, but perhaps there’s mystery in the obvious, too.”

War on the poor

The 2012 documentary The House I Live In by Eugene Jarecki finally came up in my Netflix queue, and I watched it, spellbound. Afterward, I thought, had I seen it in 2012, it would have made the top five of my year’s top 10 films. And not because of its technical expertise, though it’s fine. No, because it is so important.

Some people hear that and think, I don’t want to be preached to; I don’t want to feel guilty; I don’t want to have to think about hard subjects. Your reaction is up to you, but for what it’s worth, this film offers good insights into a larger reality that may change or enhance your perspective.

House addresses the war on drugs. It looks at its beginnings during the Nixon administration, when drug abuse was not particularly a problem in terms of crime, but it drew voters. So there you go.(Interestingly, Nixon stipulated that two-thirds of the funds go toward treatment. That's far from the case today.)

The film uses historical footage and many interviews. The most engaging interviewee, in my mind, is David Simon, creator of The Wire, an outstanding series that first played on HBO. He is articulate, knowledgeable and passionate. He speaks not only from his head knowledge but from his experience as a reporter working with police in Baltimore.

The film also gets personal. Jarecki narrates it and notes that it began as an exploration of what happened to the son of the African-American woman, named Nannie, who worked as his parents’ housekeeper and helped raise him. Partly because of her being gone while working for the Jareckis, she intimates, she wasn’t around her adult son as much, and he got into drugs and eventually died of AIDS from a contaminated needle.

The film goes on to explore the judicial system that has filled our prisons with nonviolent offenders whose crime is often selling drugs. Because of harsh sentencing requirements established by Congress during the Reagan and Clinton administrations (and carried on by others), judges are handicapped in handing out sentences to those found guilty of drug offenses. Jarecki interviews a judge in Iowa who eventually resigns out of frustration about the harsh mandatory sentences.

He also interviews a prison guard in Oklahoma who loves his job but comes to see that the judicial system is broken and that most of the prisoners he oversees should not be there.

Who benefits by putting nonviolent drug offenders in prison for five to 20 years at a time? Politicians who win votes from a fickle and ignorant populace. Private prisons who rake in billions of dollars housing nonviolent prisoners at a huge cost to taxpayers (more than $20,000 per year per prisoner). Corporations who get all these poor people off the streets.

Simon says at one point, “They might as well say, Let’s get rid of the bottom 15 percent of the population.” That’s the effect of this so-called war on drugs. It destroys individual lives; it destroys communities. It costs all of us.

Simon points out that it also hurts police and fighting violent crime. He says that when police go out and arrest people for possessing drugs, they make money. First, they confiscate whatever drugs or money is on the people they arrest (and get to keep it). They get paid extra for overtime, since it takes time to do the paper work. And at the end of the month, they can say they made 60 arrests, which looks impressive to the public and their superiors. Meanwhile, a detective may work hard on a murder case and make one arrest in a month. He gets no overtime pay and little credit from his superiors because he hasn’t brought in money to the department.

In other words, the war on drugs is a moneymaker for those in power. But for most of us, it’s not. Instead it takes our resources and invests them in prisons and police rather than in education or health care. It ties up the courts with cases that need not even come to the courts.

Jarecki interviews offenders and family members. He notes that for years the war on drugs was a war primarily on young African-American men, who were filling the prisons and unable to get jobs when they got out, since they were felons.

Simon points out that when an economy fails a community, when the people there cannot find jobs that allow them to live, an alternative economy emerges. This happens all over the world and throughout history. We should not be surprised. People will try to survive. Fix the economy, create jobs that provide a living wage, and the drug trade will diminish rapidly.

Since the late 1990s, many more poor whites have entered prison because of the emergence of meth. Again, the use and sale of this drug comes out people’s desperate circumstances. Blue collar jobs have been disappearing, and people can’t find work.

If you watch House, be sure to check out the extras. In one, called “Jury Nullification,” Simon points out that juries are not required to go by the judge’s instruction or the letter of the law. They can rule as they see fit. Simon says that if he’s on a jury, he will never convict anyone charged with a nonviolent crime.

I’ll stop. This is an informative and heartbreaking film. I highly recommend it.

Graphic images in media

Should U.S. media publish graphic images of war, abortion or car accidents? Or do such images do more harm than good?

Conor Friedersdorf raises such questions in “The Gutless Press” (The Atlantic, July/August). 

He discusses coverage of the trial of Dr. Kermit Gosnell, the abortionist convicted of delivering babies alive and then murdering them. This coverage included descriptions of what Gosnell called “fetal demise” far more graphic than anything normally found in the media.

Friedersdorf points out that “members of the pro-life movement have long believed that they can win converts by confronting Americans with ‘what abortion really is’ in the most-graphic terms possible.”

On the other hand, critics of U.S. drone strikes wish “more Americans saw graphic photos of the results: the charred corpses, the severed arms and legs, the bloodied children.”

While many pro-life activists charge the U.S. media with a pro-choice bias, the fact is, writes Friedersdorf, “the American media sanitize almost all death." He adds, “During the Iraq War, an American could watch hours of TV coverage without ever seeing the dead body of a U.S. soldier.”

While the news media have grown less likely to publish explicitly violent images in recent decades, portrayals of violence in film and video games have intesified.

Why the change? Friedersdorf believes it’s about not offending the audience. “And because consumers do not want grisly images, neither do advertisers,” he writes. At the same time, the military has clamped down on access to combat scenes.

Friedersdorf notes that “other countries’ media do not contrive such a bloodless world.” He cites a study that shows that foreign media are generally more willing to show graphic images.

Susan Sontag, among others, have argued that showing graphic images might lead to other responses than “shocking people of conscience into action.” They may, in fact, inure us to horror.

Graphic images of war certainly haven’t stopped violent killings, Friedersdorf notes. But that doesn’t mean they haven’t had an impact on public thinking. He cites certain images from the Vietnam War and the photos of torture at the Abu Ghraib prison as examples.

Friedersdorf goes on to point out that “images in media determine not just what we see but how journalists describe the world, and thus what we know about it and how we talk about it.” It might be harder for the government to talk about “collateral damage,” for example, “if an article or TV footage included the image of a bloody corpse,” he writes.

Likewise, he adds, “it is difficult to discuss ‘fetal demise’ abstractly when the accompanying images show the little arms and legs that were dismembered.”

Without doubt, images are powerful. Think about artwork depicting scenes from Scripture (no photos are available): David holding Goliath’s severed head, soldiers killing infants on Herod’s orders, Jesus’ crucifixion. We may read these stories without fully appreciating their horror.

Friedersdorf concludes that “the case for publishing graphic images of killing has less to do with the merits of a specific policy view than with photography’s power to keep us from evading a subject entirely.”

We need to face what’s going on in our world, and images can help us do that.