Sadly, some of the illustrations are just as topical today as they were 117 years ago. Like this one, titled “The Monster of Monopoly”:
“Monopoly is rapidly swallowing the whole country. We are thankful, however, that all this greed cannot and does not escape the public eye. It is to be hoped that very soon public opinion will deal a crushing blow to this monster.”
I also like this illustration, titled “Montain of Money,” showing a rich man with too much money:
“It is time to call a halt when the income of one man is so great that he could not handle it himself in cold cash, while the income of his workers is not enough to keep them decently alive.”
But my personal favorite of all the many illustrations in the book is this one, titled “The Idol of Monopoly”:
“The workers of America have made unto themselves an idol called Monopoly, which many of them still admire and worship. Oh workers! This is not your god.”
I’m sure that Rev. Harris felt that even the golden calf of old was not worshipped with such devotion as the idol of Monopoly.
On May 1, 1886 — 138 years ago today — the American Federation of Labor called a general strike to demand the eight hour day. The strike culminated in Chicago with the Haymarket Massacre a few days later. As the demonstrators were peacefully leaving the demonstration, someone exploded a bomb. The police fired wildly into the crowd, killing and wounding both police officers and demonstrators. Eight people were arrested, even though there was no evidence that they were involved with the bomb, and four of them were executed. In 1893, it was finally declared that all eight were innocent —far too late for the four who had been unjustly executed. Unitarian Universalist blogger Patrick Murfin tells this story better than I can.
Eventually, the eight hour day was established as the norm for workers. But that began to change in this twenty-first century. With hardly any workers in unions, many corporations have been been emboldened to do whatever they want. Amazon delivery drivers are often forced to work 10-12 hour days (I used to hang out with an Amazon delivery driver, who told me this). Walmart employees are only given part-time work (which means no benefits), then forced to work irregular schedules that don’t allow them to pick another job. By the 2010s, Google hired contractors to run its infamous Google buses; the contractors paid crap wages and forced the drivers to work split shifts. As for the big executives, they just kept giving themselves raises. By 2020, the typical CEO was paid 351 times the salary of the average worker. There are still lots of great companies out there, places you’d want to work (some ofwhich are owned by Unitarian Universalists), but on the whole the conditions for workers are getting worse, not better.
As for the two political parties, neither one of them seems to care much about the shrinking wages of the middle class, lower middle class, and working class. The Democrats used to be the party of Big Labor, but with the demise of unions, I guess they figure they have little incentive to deal with workers’ issues. The Republicans at least pretend to pay attention to the needs of workers, and I give them credit for that — but when push comes to shove, they always seem to support the big corporations.
The Unitarian Universalist Association (UUA) has never been a strong supporter of the needs of workers. The denominational magazine often carries articles about supporting the rights and needs of people of color, immigrants, LGBTQ+ folks, and women — all of which is great, we need that. But there aren’t many articles about workers needs.
I understand. It’s just not our thing. I can accept that. We’re a small denomination. We can only do so much; we’re probably overextended as it is. If the UUA doesn’t want to support unions, or workers’ needs and rights, that’s OK with me. Focusing on a few things is a good idea.
But personally, I support unions and unionization. I spent 12 years punching a time clock in various jobs in the residential construction business, and another year and a half punching a time clock in a health food store. While I never worked in a unionized workplace, I was grateful for eight hour days, overtime pay after eight hours, workers compensation, OSHA, and benefits packages — all of which, as I learned from older workers, only happened because of unions. Even though I was never a union member, I would have been much worse off financially through my twenties and thirties if it hadn’t been for unions.
Vera Brittain served as a V.A.D. (Voluntary Aid Detachment) nurse during the First World War, serving in Malta, France, and London. Having seen the horrors of the “Great War” first hand — and after having her fiance, her brother, and her two best male friends die in the war — she became a committed pacifist. In 1937, while the threat of another European war kept growing, she said this in a pamphlet published by the Peace Pledge Union:
“I hold war to be a crime against humanity, whoever fights it, and against whomever it is fought.”
[Quoted in “Vera Mary Brittain,” Poetry Foundation website, https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/vera-mary-brittain accessed 29 April 2024.]
With these songbooks, you can get lead sheets for Malvina Reynolds’s most famous songs — for free. I’m especially pleased to see this, since I lost my copy of There’s Music in the Air during our move from California to Massachusetts.
The Malvina Reynolds Songbook has “God Bless the Grass” (p. 29), “It Isn’t Nice” (p. 40), “Little Boxes” (p. 44), “Magic Penny” (p.50), “Turn Around” (p. 81), and “What Have They Done to the Rain” (p. 90).
There’s Music in the Air has all of these except “It Isn’t Nice,” but it also includes “You Can’t Make a Turtle Come Out” (p. 94). This songbook also has the lesser-known but hilarious song “Let Us Come In” a.k.a. “The Party-Crashers’ Carol” (p. 48). (Somewhere I have a 3-part madrigal-type arrangement of this latter song, which I’d be happy to share to anyone who wants it.)
Tweedles and Foodles has songs I’ve never heard before. It’s also unusual in that it has both guitar chords and simple piano accompaniment. Looks like there’s some fun songs in there — “Rabbit Dance” looks like fun, and maybe I’ll learn it.
Thank you, Nancy Schimmel, for your generosity in giving away your mother’s music for free!
I’ve started reading an article about combining ecojustice education with music education. It’s kind of theoretical, but there’s good content buried beneath the academic prose style. I’m fascinated with the topic, because our ecojustice camp curriculum includes singing and natural soundscapes as crucial curriculum components.
Below is the abstract of the article (followed by a full citation and a link to the full article):
“Children who are supported throughout childhood and adolescence to both maintain their sense of wonder in nature, and honor and explore their wild human nature, are well positioned to mature into soulcentric adults capable of living into their purpose in service to both their culture and the whole of life. However, our society’s ecocidal culture and unjust institutions often replicate oppressions and promote egocentric behaviors that preclude thriving. Additionally, many children are alienated from nature and are thought to have nature-deficit disorder, which can include both mental and physical maladies. In this article I explore conceptions of ecojustice education to further illustrate pathways for curriculum development in music education that might encourage children and adolescents to maintain their sense of wonder in nature, fully develop their sensory capacities, support their mental and emotional wellbeing, attune more carefully to their wild nature and soul’s purpose, and contribute to the environmental and social commons — all which might support human flourishing and the continued survival of our species.”
Citation: “Music Education for Surviving and Thriving: Cultivating Children’s Wonder, Senses, Emotional Wellbeing, and Wild Nature as a Means to Discover and Fulfill Their Life’s Purpose,” by Tawnya D. Smith, Music Education, School of Music, College of Fine Arts, Boston University, Boston, MA, United States. Frontiers in Education, 16 April 2021, Sec. Educational Psychology, vol. 6, 2021 — https://doi.org/10.3389/feduc.2021.648799 — Link to the article.
Our congregation here in Cohasset, Mass., operates a preschool. The school is currently updating its child protection policy. As part of their research, the school’s governing board found the YMCA’s Child Abuse Prevention Policies.
If you deal with child safety issues, the whole policy is worth reading. But I especially appreciated three parts of this policy document.
1. First, they offer guidance on what constitutes appropriate and inappropriate physical interactions. Appropriate physical interactions include:
Side hugs
Shoulder-to-shoulder…hugs
Pats on the shoulder or back
Handshakes
High-fives and hand slapping
Verbal praise
Pats on the head when culturally appropriate
Touching hands, shoulders, and arms
Arms around shoulders
Holding hands (with young children in escorting situations)
Personally, I’d be more restrictive than this list— e.g., I’d be very reluctant to pat a child on the head, or touch shoulders. And I’d only put arms around shoulders in extreme situations, e.g., when comforting a crying child. Nevertheless, I think this is a good summary. I’ll let you look at the actual document to see what constitutes inappropriate touch. (No sitting on laps! No piggyback rides!)
2. Also worth looking at is the YMCA’s straightforward summary of appropriate electronic communications. No private messaging with a Facebook “friend” who is under age! No “friending” under age people on any social media!
3. Third, I really appreciated their policy on “Managing the risk when one staff member is alone with one youth.” We have policies where you should never be alone one-on-one with a legal minor. And there are always times when it seems necessary, e.g., when talking about a young person about behavior issues. Straightforward guidance — if you have to have a one-on-one, do so in a public place where you are in full view of others (I’ve done this where I made sure my supervisor was nearby, and deliberately watching). If you have to meet in a room, leave the door open. If a young person discloses abuse, etc., document it immediately.
A final comment: What I especially like about this document is that it answers just about all the questions I’ve ever gotten from volunteers and paid staff when I’ve done training in child abuse prevention policies.
Nym Cooke, well-known scholar of early American music, will be offering a webinar on “The Sounds of New England Congregationalism in the 18th C.” under the auspices of the Congregational Library and Archives. Info about how to register may be found here. And to whet your appetite, here’s the first sentence of the description:
“The ‘sound of Congregationalism’ — the musical sound, at any rate — changed markedly several times during the hundred years from?1720-1820, as musical philosophies shifted between two sets of poles: ritual and art, and worship and performance….”
I signed up as soon as I heard about it. I’m fascinated by the soundscapes of New England congregational-polity churches, so I’ve already been using Nym Cooke’s website “Early American Sacred Music.” I can’t wait to hear more from this top-notch scholar.
Our congregation — as is true, I suspect, of many older congregations — is in the process of researching our past relationship with non-White people. Some of the questions we’re currently wondering about:
Was slave labor used to build our 1747 meetinghouse? (Almost assuredly yes, but we can’t document it yet.)
What was the social status of non-White people? (People of African and Native descent could not sit on the main floor in the 18th C.; we believe this was also true of indentured White servants, but we can’t yet document that.)
Did the congregation have non-White members in the 18th or 19th centuries? (A couple in the first half of the 18th century, both Native, then apparently none until the 20th century.)
These questions are difficult to research. So I was grateful to learn about the Atlantic Black Box website. The subtitle of the website sums up their efforts: “Researching and Reckoning with New England’s Role in Colonization and Enslavement.” I’ve been finding lots of resources for doing local history research on non-White people. Their short essay on “Researching Slavery and Black Life in Early New England” alone has already proved to be quite helpful to me.
If you’re part of an older congregation in New England — definitely worth checking this out.
Everything you wanted to know about mosses in a free ebook, written in a style understandable by laypeople: Bryophyte Ecology by Janice Glime et al. I’m especially enjoying the chapters about the other organisms that live in mosses (tardigrades! slime molds!) and bryophyte phenology. Maybe it’s more than you really want to know about mosses, but hey, it’s a free book by a working scientist about a really cool taxon of organisms.
Another story for liberal religious kids. This one is from the Yoruba tradition. While this story has a mythological elements — it tells how Tortoise got the joints in its shell — it is also a morality tale. Tortoise is another animal trickster figure who is featured in many stories — sometimes he gets the better of others, but sometimes, as in this story, his greed gets the better of him. Another Yoruba story about Tortoise.
Once there was a shortage of food throughout the land. Àjàpá the Tortoise, who was a very sensible animal, was friendly with a man named Tela. Tortoise was sick with hunger, because he didn’t know where he could get food. But Tela knew where he could get food. Now and again Tela went to this place, and got food and ate it there.
At last Tortoise said to Tela, “You look well-fed, but I get nothing to eat. You are my friend, yet you never show me where you get food.”
“I thought of taking you,” said Tela, “but I know you to be very clever. I fear that you will go to my place without my permission. Because of that, I have not told you.”
Tortoise kept asking, though, and at last Tela promised to take him to the place. When they got to the place, Tortoise saw it was just a rock. But Tela sang:
“This rock must open because I, Prince Tela, the owner of the house have come!”
Then the rock opened and Tela and Tortoise went inside. They found plenty of food, and they ate until they were full. After they had finished, they left the place, each going to his own home.
The next day Tela was away from home. So Tortoise went all around the countryside, inviting all the people to come to Tela’s place to get food. When everyone arrived at the place, Tortoise sang:
“This rock must open because I, Prince Tela, the owner of the house have come!”
The rock did not know that it was not Tela who sang, but Tortoise. So the rock opened, all the animals went inside, and they finished all the food in the store.
When they had finished eating, Tortoise said, “I will be the last to go.” But just as Tortoise was leaving, the rock closed and trapped him, half in and half out.
Just then, Tela felt hungry. When he got to the rock, he saw the head of Tortoise sticking. Tela said, “How is it that I find you here? When I brought you here the day before yesterday you promised you would not come, but now you have come, and from all the footprints in the dirt it looks like you brought friends with you.”
But Tortoise was in pain, and said only, “Get me out and don’t talk.” Tela, being hungry, commenced to sing:
“This rock must open because I, Prince Tela, the owner of the house have come!”
Just as before, the rock opened. Now Tela was very hungry, and because of the food he thought lay before him, did not stop to talk with Tortoise. But when Tela went in, he saw that all was eaten, and nothing was left.
Tela was so angry that he caught Tortoise up and was about to crush him. “Have patience and I will tell you all,” said Tortoise, and he told the entire story. And Tortoise added, “I have to admit that there is something that always makes me tell things I ought not to tell.”
“I have no time for this sort of thing,” said angry, hungry Tela. He dropped Tortoise on the rock and smashed his shell all to pieces.
Then the big ants and other insects gathered round, and tried to put Tortoise together again. They did the best they could, but they could not mend his back properly. So it is that the joints where the insects mended the Tortoise show on his back to this day.
