Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
— William Butler Yeats, The Second Coming
“What is built on the basis of force, and not on the truth about the equal dignity of every human being, begins badly and will end badly.”
Howard Lutnick, current Commerce Secretary of the United States, went on the March 20 episode of the podcast All In. Lutnick’s appearance generated a cluster of headlines when he said that his 94-year-old mother-in-law would not call social security if she missed a check, because she would trust it would come next month.
Those comments, obviously, are so out of touch with reality that they appear as the utterances of a fool on Opposite Day.
Lutnick’s comments scream of a man who has had a secretary do everything for him for so long he has forgotten how to do anything useful. Regular middle-class and working class families of all stripes are used to having to wait in line, stay on hold, speak up when an error manifests itself on a bank statement or hospital bill. If they do not, the error goes unfixed; the fraudulent charge goes unreversed; the problem does not fix itself, because we do not have a phalanx of employees magically fixing all our problems for us.
I grew up watching my mother shake down medical insurance companies one after the other to cover healthcare expenses for her six children. Far from perpetuating fraud, she was simply trying to force profiteering corporations at phonepoint to do their damn job and cover her children’s medical care, as she was indeed paying them monthly to do.
We are very well-accustomed to the lesson capitalism inculcates: if you do not protest to get what is owed to you theoretically, it will become, practically, the profits of another. Whether harassing insurance offices to accept medical claims that they have been contracted to cover, pestering landlords to get your security deposit back, showing up at the social security office over and over again: the squeaky wheel gets the grease that would otherwise become fat lining the pockets of billionaire profiteers like Howard Lutnick.
Second, Lutnick’s mother-in-law is, in fact, the mother of a billionaire. So I should hope that his two billion and change provides for most of her monthly expenses rather than a social security check. Most social security receivers are not so lucky. They depend on their checks to pay rent, to buy groceries, pay for car repairs and insurance, childcare, food, groceries, diapers, home repairs, clothing, transportation, the list goes on. If you are one of the 60% of Americans living paycheck to paycheck, you are certainly going to speak up when a paycheck goes missing. It is one of the few security fences between you and homelessness.
Third, in our faith tradition, persistence is a virtue, not a vice. Instead of calling insistent old ladies petitioning government offices “fraudsters,” Jesus extols them as models for prayer. The widow petitioning the unjust judge may have a righteous cause or she may not. It doesn’t matter, the crooked system will bend to her will because she does not give up. Be like her, Jesus says. (I am once again asking for an icon of the Pestering Widow.)
This particular billionaire’s comments seem to underscore how far removed the billionaires running this country (through Signal group chats with sundry invited journalists) are from the realities of women, of mothers, of working class families, of the working poor trying to make ends meet, of immigrants.
They rejoice over the killing of Yemenese freedom fighters and shrug their shoulders at the suffering they cause by trampling over the rule of law, dismantling due process and sentencing an innocent man to life in an El Salvador prison.
Pondering these headlines, I thought of the Yeats line:
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
The worst are full of passionate intensity: I thought of this when Pete Hegseth, Secretary of Defense, responded to his extreme blunder of letting the editor-in-chief of a prominent national magazine into a group chat celebrating the death of people they don’t know but want to die (forgive them father, they know not what they do). I thought of a frat bro in a college class: a lot of bluster, denial, personal attacks, and a general degrading of the classroom dialogue. Frat bros who haven’t done the reading bring the discussion down to their level: puerile, insulting, and degrading. They refuse to elevate their own minds outside of their minuscule comfort zone, and they refuse to let anyone else reach higher than themselves.
The worst are full of passionate intensity: I thought of the junior lawmaker asking the governor of Texas to send their incarcerated population to El Salvador.
The worst are full of passionate intensity: re-reading The Long Loneliness this Lent, I was struck again by Dorothy Day’s powerful experience of imprisonment for marching for women’s right to vote in Washington D.C. But this experience in the infamous Occoquan Workhouse taught her exactly how to see the government: as thugs. The “gentlemen” who ruled were so scared of those they had power over joining in the conversation, changing the terms of the debate, they would give lie to their own gentlemanliness to brutally beat and harrass the ladies marching for the right to participate in the democratic conversation.
The best lack all conviction. Do we? I thought of the community that gathered outside a Guatemalan mother’s ICE check-in. Ranjani Srivansan’s roommate, who sent ICE away from their door without answering. I thought of Rafael, who told us that you can make a difference for one starfish sitting on the beach. I wonder what would have happened if more people had stopped near Rumeysa Ozturk, who was kidnapped off the street by masked men. I always hoped my neighbors would intervene more if five to six masked thugs surrounded me on the street.
My friends and I stopped to help a man who had fallen in a K2 haze in Port Authority Bus Terminal. What I love about New York City is that, instantly, others stopped to help us. A man offered us a water bottle, another man lept in to help us move the fallen man out of foot traffic.
New York City’s urbanism forms us into the knowledge that we need each other. You can’t have a city of eight million without some soupçon of cooperation amidst the rat race. If one person stops and says to the crowd: this here is a person, our neighbor, we cannot walk by him, others will respond. The promise of solidarity is that we will not be alone.
I thought of that moment when I think of the passionate intensity of the worst of us. Do not let the fear of the frat bros running the classroom eclipse the fear of God, that moment of cooperation to help just one starfish whispered. Bullies are very loud, they shout so loudly is hard to hear the student making an excellent, insightful contribution to class. But if you tune your ears toward the quiet voices, there’s a lot of beauty in them. The quiet voices, I think, are those saints we so often freeze in stained glass but are who are very much alive.
The whole point of saints is that they were not afraid—they rejoiced even—even tho they had considered all the frat bros and all the facts.
The darkness drops again; but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?
— William Butler Yeats, The Second Coming
Mr. Brown’s Bylines
“Feeding Neighbors with America’s Grow-a-Row,” by Mary Grace Mangano in Plough Magazine
I walked away from the Religion News Conference in D.C. in early April with half a dozen magazines—the best part—and was delighted to open up Plough’s Spring edition on the Amtrak, only to find Mary Grace’s lovely article about a new local food initiative, designed to bring fresh, local produce to farmers markets and food pantries in areas without access to good food. They also began gardening and culinary skills classes so that recipients of the food could learn how to cook it. She writes:
America’s Grow-a-Row is committed to land stewardship and sustainable agriculture, utilizing no-till farming, cover crops, and crop rotation to encourage growth and retain nutrients in the fields. The staff and volunteers use drip irrigation lines and integrated pest management, and they work with the local township to receive leaf mulch and other organic matter. The farm also has its own apiaries with about 2.6 million bees, whose pollination improves the apple yield.
Read the full article at Plough.
“One Path, Many Guides: My Interfaith Vocation Story,” by Cyrus Habib, SJ at the Center for Interfaith Studies in Africa
Look, it’s not every religious' vocation story that begins with an encounter with the Dalai Lama, so we have to stan an interfaith king. Cyrus’ story of finding God in a variety of religious and cultural paths all threaded into the still small voice of peace we so desperately crave—the silence where we find our true selves—is a lovely, gentle pilgrimage through faith and cultures. He writes:
One day, a friend invited me—somewhat improbably—to join him at Mass. I had no real interest in organized religion, and aside from a few childhood memories of Midnight Mass, Catholicism meant little to me. I agreed to go mostly out of curiosity about the music, which my friend promised would be “medieval and spooky.”
I didn’t have a sudden awakening. But I did feel something unexpected: a deep interior stillness I hadn’t known I needed. I found myself returning to that chapel at Blackfriars Hall the following week, and then the next.
A Thing of Beauty is a Joy Forever
From the Archives
What’s the State of Maternity Leave in the U.S. Catholic Church?, March 25, 2022
I can’t believe it’s been three years since Kelly Sankowski and Issy Volmert and I published our report on maternity leave in Catholic dioceses across the United States. We contacted 176 dioceses and learned that, at the time, only four had 12 weeks of paid leave (families are entitled by federal law to 12 weeks off of work after the birth of a child, although lack of pay means that a woman takes an average of two weeks off after birth).
Kelly and Issy are a dream team—literally. The type of reporters and writers who inspire you to be better and work harder. Kelly wrote the beautiful March cover story for US Catholic on the history of the Eucharist and Issy is covering state politics in Michigan for the Associated Press and recently wrote on sexual harassment in state governments in the eight years since the #MeToo movement launched.
Since our report, 16 dioceses have updated their policies, as I learned last year. Recently, two friends asked me what a story was I had worked on that had made an impact, and it was easy to think of an answer. You can explore our data or read the report here.
You are spot on and share these troubling insights beautifully.