Legislative Ministry and Community Organizing

Yesterday, I was asked to become a member of the Board of the Unitarian Universalist Legislative Ministry of New Jersey (what a mouthful–I’ll refer to it as UULMNJ hereafter). It’s a nice concept: an organization of the New Jersey UU congregations that join together to bring about change from a liberal religious perspective. Why should conservative ideologies be the only voice speaking on the morality of public policy? I’m pretty sure I’ll accept, although I have some misgivings.

My main concern comes out of the nature of UUs and their relationship to their movement. Most religions are top-down institutions. This makes it relatively easy for them to speak with one voice and have a focused message. UU is a bottom-up sort of institution. There is no dogma or belief system that is imposed from above and each congregation is essentially  independent, calling its own ministers and really crafting its own spiritual structure for and by its members. It is this kind of democratic (small d) and free-thinking spirit that makes UU appealing to me and others. The problem is in trying to organize a group of these free spirits into some sort of coherent political group. How do you choose an issue and then come up with a position on that issue when there are  countless UUs pressing for different positions on different topics of great importance to them and who are not used to being told what will happen from above (and who, in fact, have left other religions to escape such top-down decision making). On a congregational level, this is difficult but possible. On the State level? Can these cats be herded?

But, while the UULMNJ faces difficulties, it would be wonderful it worked. It is a marriage of two of my great interests in life. And it isn’t like my days are chuck full of interesting and meaningful activity. (If they were, I wouldn’t have started this blog.) I like the Director and it seem like it fits in with the arc of my life recently.

I met the Director, Rev. Craig Hirshberg, when I was taking community organizing training with her in Valley Forge, PA with people from Building One America. I had actually taken a similar course at Drew University years earlier, taught by the Industrial Areas Foundation (and Michael Gecan, whose book “Going Public” is really wonderful). Both groups grow out of the movement begun by Saul Alinsky and are related to the group that trained Obama. (One of the teachers in Valley Forge was actually the guy who trained Obama.) Going through the training provided an interesting way of viewing Obama, which might be the subject of an good article, although I suspect it has already been written.

Someday, I’ll write more about the training, but the link here is that they are all about the exercise of power, which you get through organized people and organized money. Their methodology is to build power from below by engaging in an endless series of one-on-one, in-depth conversations with individuals who have some level of influence in the community, which allow you to build a network of people whose interests will mesh in future, enabling you to mobilize them on an action that you want to take. We were each urged to build our own power structure by engaging in these meetings. I realized during the training last August that, if I wanted to have a power structure of my own, I should have done that when I was on the Town Council and people were interested in talking to me (although I knew when I was on the Council that my real power was extremely limited and individuals with real power really weren’t interested in me at all–there was little point in attending political events outside of Montclair, for example, because if you weren’t the mayor, you were just the fifth guy on the left). My feelings were confirmed in the coming months, as the fact that I was no longer an elected official evaporated all of my VIP status. (My friend Jerry Fried, who was Mayor and convinced me to run with him, was much better at this sort of building of a power base while in office, although I am not certain he was doing that intentionally. Of course he had the advantage of the mayoralty, but it appears that he has managed to retain at least some mild political relevancy.)

Which gets me back to the UULMNJ. While I am not absolutely certain I want to build a power base, it is pretty clear to me that, if I am to do so, I will have to do it through the UUs. On a Congregational level, I have done that on certain level. It helps that I was President and now the head of Membership and everyone knows me, but I do work at it too. So getting involved in the UULMNJ is another step in exploring the possibility of UU-based power. I’d already agreed to help out Craig with UULMNJ by giving her assistance in designing her position papers and trying to give their presentations a more consistent tone (thereby combing my interests in art/design and writing). Which is all to say that saying yes to being a member of the UULMNJ Board seems like a logical step for me to take.

The Longest Road Trip

I am going to end up writing a lot about baseball, since it is something that I love and have spent probably too much of my life watching and reading about. Since it is too early to write about what is going on with the Mets this year, I thought Id warm up with my favorite story from the Australian Baseball League (maybe I’ll write about how I ended up there in a different post):

It is probably January 1990, the first year of the ABL. I’d been working in the “Commissioner’s Office” (they actually called George Anderson the General Manager) for a few months and had been named General Counsel. The League was sort of staggering through its first year. Almost all of the clubs were undercapitalized, there was no television coverage and very little sponsorship money. The teams had to get around a huge continent to play their games and Australians were not used to going to baseball games and certainly not used to paying for the privilege. (Actually, in the summertime, it seemed like Aussies preferred to go to the beach, sail, play tennis or golf or the like, rather than go to spectator sports.) The talent level in the ABL was wildly uneven, from guys who would end up in Major League baseball to guys who wouldn’t make a college team in the US. But it was fun, the players weren’t paid much of anything and, to Aussies, the games seemed incredibly short compared to cricket, where a test match lasts four days and includes tea breaks.

While there were a lot of teams struggling (there was one story I heard about an owner hiding behind cars in the parking lot when one of his creditors showed up), no one was hurting as bad as the Sydney Metros. They were owned by this guy named Bill, who had all kinds of good marketing ideas and had potentially the most valuable asset in the League. Unfortunately, he had little money and as it turned out, a lousy team. While all of the other teams had worked out relationships with MLB franchises which sent over and paid for four players (and provided other types of support), Bill went it alone. The American players he got (and they let him have two extra Americans) were decent I guess (but overall not good enough), and they hurt his bottom line. The Metros played at the Sydney Football Stadium (Rugby League and Aussie Rules), which probably seemed like a good idea but wasn’t. It was too far from downtown for tourists to decide to go and too far from the suburbs to get families to show up on the spur of the moment. The stadium had the wrong dimensions for baseball, and therefore had a ridiculously short porch in right (bad for his miserable pitching). To make matters worse, the stadium was enormous, so even if he got a couple thousand fans, it was going to look empty. And to make matters even worse, the Metros started the season against the best team in the ABL and were just demolished and humiliated by astronomic scores over the three game series. It was painful to watch. They never recovered.

So fast forward two months. The Metros are solidly in last place and have been kicked out of their stadium for not paying their rent. George and I are sitting in the ABL office in Sydney just hoping that they can make it to the end of the season. There have been a number of dust-ups with Bill  already and now the Metros have to make the road trip to Adelaide and Perth. This is roughly like going from New York to Atlanta to Los Angeles. The ABL had a deal with a domestic airline that gave us discounted tickets, but you still had to pay and Bill and the Metros were pretty much broke.

So Bill had the bright idea of renting a minibus and driving the team to Adelaide. There was nothing in the ABL Rules (which I had written) saying that you had to fly and he got the players to agree, even though that meant that most of them would have to take an extra day off of work to go. So off they went. It had to take them at least 15 hours. They got to Adelaide and predictably, were swept in a doubleheader and then lost the next day.

But then the Metro had to go to Perth. Bill told his team that he couldn’t afford to fly them there and they were going to continue on the bus. Now you have to understand that the drive from Adelaide to Perth is not just around 36 hours long, it is mostly across a desert called the Nullarbor Plain, which is flat and treeless and you basically drive for hour upon hour without a bend in the road, a hill, a sign of civilization or a living thing. Most of the Australian players told Bill exactly where he could shove his minibus and bought their own plane tickets back to Sydney (which is when George and I first heard news of this debacle).

This left poor Bill and the Metros with eleven players (his Americans, a few teenagers and couple of guys who didn’t want to pay for their plane tickets). They drove the 36 plus hours to Perth, arriving at the stadium there about an hour before game time. They pulled into the parking lot behind the center field fence, without a chance to even shower. They were too exhausted to walk around the stadium to the entrance, so they just tossed their equipment bags over the fence, climbed over and staggered to the dugout. Of course, they proceeded to be swept in the three-game series, which featured Bill putting himself on the team to pinch hit (which actually did violate the ABL rules).

The team was written up in Sports Illustrated for having the longest road trip ever, the only mention that the ABL got in SI that year and probably in the following year too. George made sure the players got to fly home.

I occurs to me after writing this that most of the small group of people who are likely to read this story will have already heard it. Just the same, it’s a good one.

“Picnic” and “Belleville”

Last week we saw two shows in New York on consecutive nights. What was interesting is that each was about unhappy and even tormented characters, with lives in various stages of collapse (which one might say is the outline of all dramas), but the plays are separated by 60 years. It got me to thinking about the nature of revivals and what makes a play dramatically viable over decades.

“Picnic”, written by William Inge in 1953, is basically a play that is about sexual repression and longing in the lives of a group of women. It really is a pretty famous work and was a big movie (although not as big as his “Bus Stop”). It would be nice to say that it is “timeless”, but it really isn’t. The attitudes about women, which probably rang very true int he early 50s, really seem sort of foreign today. So it is one of those plays that isn’t quite old enough to be interesting as a period piece but reflects a sensibility that is hard to relate to today. Even if it has some themes that might make it last (and might make it more interesting if seen further in the future), now it seemed really dated. Of course, Tennessee Williams was writing in roughly the same era, but his plays are still fascinating, so it is clearly not the mere passage of time that matters.

Which is not say “Picnic” wasn’t enjoyable. In some ways it is a classic sort of Roundabout Theater production. They have a way of picking revivals where you wonder why they picked that one and then they produce the hell out it. And this had all the classic Roundabout characteristics: beautiful sets, lighting and costumes, talented actors, including at least one or two famous actors (in this case, Ellen Burstyn). I’m not sure that it could be done a  whole lot better. But it ultimately could not be really moving because you never felt viscerally attached to the characters. It felt more like you were watching something that had happened in the past, which is certainly not what you are thinking when you watch “Streetcar” or “Long Days Journey”.

“Belleville”, in contrast, is a new play by Amy Herzog that we saw at the New York Theater Workshop. It is a play about a couple living in the Belleville section of Paris, whose lives are falling apart. It is nothing if not current, as a few of the plot lines rely on drugs (both psychotropic and weed), multiculturalism and cell phones. It was very well acted and so brutal that it was almost painful to watch on occasion. It was interesting to watch and I think it will stick in my head for a while. It’s a bit manipulative, but I guess most good drama is. And it is a good example of a NYTW production. They try to push the boundaries and offer opportunities for new talent.

So how does “Belleville” compare to “Picnic”? Is it a play that someone will be seeing in 2073? Herzog is a rising young playwright, so I suppose that this might be a play that will be a revival of its own some day. But I have a feeling that, although it is powerful, it may become dated quicker than “Picnic” (if that matters). I guess that is one of those things about revivals. Would “Picnic” be revived if Inge hadn’t written all of those other things? If Herzog goes on to an acclaimed career, will my grandchildren go to a revival of her early play, “Belleville”, and walk out saying “It was pretty interesting, but it was so teens!”

Stepping into the ether

I never really thought I’d do this for some reason. And I can’t say exactly what prompted me to start this now. I guess it is partly that I am looking for some purpose in my life after a relatively purposeful period that recently came to an end. Being President of the Unitarian Universalist Congregation at Montclair for three years and serving of the Montclair Town Council for four years (mostly at the same time) was invigorating and, in the case of the Council job, pretty frustrating. Now that it is over (I was term limited at the U and chose not to run for re-election), I look back on all of it with general fondness, while at the same time being glad that I am no long doing it. But it was all so consuming, that there is something of a void that needs to be filled.

At the U, I’ve kept pretty busy. I’ll probably write about that in future posts. But it is somewhat around the edges and it can be frustrating, especially when I don’t agree with what the latest Board is doing. As for the Town stuff, I somehow thought that I’d be able to continue to do something in some capacity. But the new Council does not seem to be interested in using me. (It actually goes a little deeper than that and relates to their whole theory of government, I think, and I’ll probably write about that in the future too.) One thing I have certainly learned is how quickly you can go from a somebody to a nobody when you are no longer an elected official.

So I am sort of thrashing about, thinking about what I am going to do. Artist? Lawyer? Political activist? Writer? Some combination? Something completely different? So maybe this will be a way for me to think out loud about this and other things. Geronimo!

The Incredibles

It seemed like a good way to start a blog: with a photo of the family. So much of my life is wound up with them in one way or another.