May,2021 Megillah
RABBI'S NOTES
Five-and-a-half years ago, after the 2016 election, MCJC’s Justice Group was born. It was conceived out of the dread many of us felt about an impending Trump administration. We’ve met monthly ever since, and it’s continued to be a big and lively group with wise and brilliant people working conscientiously. I’m proud of “the Justices,” and personally I can’t begin to imagine how I would have gotten through the last few years without them.
And it has made me aware of an intellectual mystery that continues to perplex and engage me. All of us come together month after month with huge passion for a better community, country and world, and with chagrin and fear about the many ways this seems so far away. We talk about the issues that move us most, we read, we small-group, we bring in speakers, and then we try to come up with practical, doable, useful projects that bring justice closer. It is so difficult! What we often come up with feels small next to the giant concern it is trying to address.
I am fascinated and driven slightly mad by that gap between our passion about issues and our ability to generate useful ways to address them. Sometimes I imagine a giant power plant (our passion, distress, yearning for justice) and a long, uninsulated wire that loses amps all along its path, until it finally arrives in a little spark. To mix metaphors, all that raw passion goes into the bottom of a still, gets heated up, evaporates into the copper tubes, and distills into a tiny drop of action.
As you probably are too, I’m on the mailing lists of a gazillion organizations I admire that advocate for issues I care about. Most of these groups have a lot more expertise and resources than our little Justice Group, but more often than not they too are calling on their memberships to “write your elected official about Measure XYZ” or “send $3 so we can hire people to call you to urge you to write your elected official about Measure XYZ.”
I’m not really disheartened by this. It makes me realize that meaningful change largely comes about not through quantum leaps, but through small, unglamorous acts done by diligent people over a long time. I think of the legend of Rosa Parks one day boarding a bus in Montgomery, Alabama, announcing, “I am tired” and sitting down at the front of the bus: poof! the Montgomery Bus Boycott was born. In fact, Rosa Parks was an accomplished community organizer and part of an ongoing campaign preparing for and continuing from that afternoon on the bus. I’m sure there were endless meetings, agendas, notes taken and typed, chairs set up and put away, and debates in order to generate that electrifying moment on the bus.
Sometimes there are bolts of lightning: the murders of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor, or of Michael Brown before them; or Alicia Garza tweeting “Black Lives Matter” into our shared lexicon. After them, however, there are long journeys to productive change. What can we actually do to insure that Black Lives Matter?
BLM itself went from being a meme to an organization to a march to a platform to an ongoing organization with, yes, meetings, chapters, agendas, campaigns.
(Along the way it split into several organizations and spokespeople and campaigns….) All those little droplets of concrete activity, all those meetings, schedules, agendas, notes.…
What can we do here? One small but crucial step is to take a look at policing in our own community. A number of organizing groups on the Mendocino coast—including the MCJC Justice Group, the South Coast Organizing for Radical Equity (SCORE), and Showing Up for Racial Justice (SURJ Mendo Coast), and others—have come together to call for an audit of the Mendocino County Sheriff’s Office. (Unless you live in one of the four incorporated cities in Mendocino County, your policing is handled by the MCSO.) The audit will call for information about expenditures, contracts, hiring and firing, and also about conditions at the county jail, arrests, use of force, and more. This is a first step toward an informed conversation about public safety issues in our community, what any of us thinks about them or has experienced, and what can be done to bridge differences of opinion.
There is never a time when police departments should operate without public awareness and input. But the current moment offers that jolt of energy to move us, maybe a little faster and further than we would have gotten without it. We are invigorated by the shared passion of people all over our country to stop more police killings of unarmed Black people and find better paths to public safety in their communities.
Which will inevitably lead to more meetings, phone calls, zooms, notes, lists—tiny electron charges that so slowly, so arduously bend the arc of our universe a bit toward justice.
