This post is modified from a UU service I led about International Women’s Day.

As we celebrate International Women’s Day in the United States, there are some things I think you should know.

On International Women’s Day, one of the top internet searches is “International Men’s Day.” If you didn’t know, International Men’s day is in November. But people only search for it in March when we celebrate International Women’s Day. On Twitter, 40% of all tweets about International Men’s Day occur on – International Women’s Day. For some reason, many people are deeply uncomfortable with the existence of this holiday, even though it has been around for over 100 years.

The United Nations Office of the High Commissioner on Human Rights created the Working Group on the issue of discrimination against women in law and in practice in 2011 to identify good practices related to the elimination of laws that discriminate against women. In December of 2015, the group issued a report on the status of women in the United States. The group sent a three person delegation to investigate for 10 days in Washington DC, Alabama, Oregon and Texas. Some of their key findings:

– The United States has not yet ratified the Convention on the Elimination of All of Forms of Discrimination Against Women or CEDAW, and is one of only seven countries to have failed to do so.

Not listed in the UN Report, but a fact familiar to me from my own following of this issue, is that opposition to CEDAW stems largely from the Christian right who objects to the fact that many countries who have ratified the treaty have gone on to legalize abortion or liberalize their abortion laws. Abortion is legal in the United States, at least nominally so and last year at our General Assembly, Unitarian Universalists passed a statement of conscience supporting Reproductive Justice. However, the World Congress of Families on the other hand is vocal and active in opposing US ratification of CEDAW because they fear it would hamper their efforts to make abortion illegal in the United States.

Moving on, the UN working group noted that”

Women hold 19.4% of Congressional seats and 24.9% of seats in state legislatures. This ranks us 72nd in the world in terms of women’s representation in government.

Not only do we have a lack of representation of women in government, some women cannot vote at all.

“changes in voter identification laws which increase bureaucratic requirements for voter identification, in particular are problematic for women who change their name in marriage. And policies which reduce the number of voting centers can make registration and voting less accessible for the poor, of whom a majority are women.”

Side note, for more information about Unitarian Universalists working to restore the Voting Rights act, look up the James Reeb Project.

The report continues,

“we are shocked by the lack of mandatory standards for workplace accommodation for pregnant women, post-natal mothers and persons with care responsibilities, which are required in international human rights law. The US is one of only two countries in the world without a mandatory paid maternity leave for all women workers. The Group regards it as vital that 14 weeks paid maternity leave for pregnancy, birth, and post natal related needs be guaranteed for all women workers in public and private employment and advises that best practice is payment from a social security fund which does not impose the direct burden on employers.

“In the United States, the wage gap is 21%, affecting women’s income throughout their lives, and increasing women’s poverty in old age. During the last decade little improvement has been made in closing it. Education increases women’s earnings but does not eliminate the gap, which is in fact largest for those with the highest levels of educational attainment. Women’s earnings differ considerably by ethnicity: Afro-American, Native American and Hispanic women have the lowest earnings.”

“Women own over one third of US firms, mainly in small and medium size businesses. However, the Small Businesses Administration has a stated goal of awarding only 5% of federal contracts to women-owned businesses. This goal has never been reached.”

In the United States, maternal mortality has increased by 136% between 1990 and 2013. These numbers also hide distressing ethnic and socio-economic disparities. Afro-American women are nearly four times more at risk to die in childbirth. States with high poverty rates have a 77% higher maternal mortality rate.

The working group acknowledges the significant efforts deployed at the legislative and institutional levels to lower the prevalence of violence against women. However, they share the concerns on the alarming high rates of violence against Native-American women. We also share the concerns regarding the fatal consequences for women of lack of gun control, in particular in cases of domestic violence. Our group also deplores police brutality and the increased number of homicides of Afro-American women by the police. Our attention was also drawn to numerous cases of violence against LBTQ women, including homicides.

I suggest you read the whole report, which elaborates on the points above and also discusses gender disparities in poverty, access to health care and reproductive justice in further detail.

The last thing I think you should know as we plan to celebrate International Women’s Day in the United States is that the Department of the Treasury has announced last year that they will soon put a women on our $10 dollar bill. This was met mostly with approval and in that sense, we are doing better than our allies across the pond. In the United Kingdom, British feminist Caroline Criado-Perez advocated for putting a woman on their 10 pound note. Jane Austen was selected. However, during her campaign, Criado-Perez was subject to relentless threats of violence that went on for days. At one point during the frenzy of hate filled messages, she counted fifty men threatening to rape her in a single hour. Now I’m not saying that American feminists are never treated this way. For example, political analyst and writer Zerlina Maxwell was treated similarly when she suggested that teenagers be instructed about sexual ethics and consent as to reduce incident of sexual assault. She also received rape threats for days on end. However, no one has subject our Treasury Secretary Jacob Lew to such abuse when he announced that there would be a woman on the American $10. Good job, America!

So who will be the woman we put on the $10? My top three picks are Emma Lazarus, Rachel Carson, and Rosa Parks.

Writing in a op-ed for the New York Times, Linda Chavez wrote:

Emma Lazarus is my nominee to be the first woman on U.S. currency. Lazarus’ words, inscribed on the base of the Statue of Liberty, have come to symbolize America as a nation of immigrants. She was no immigrant herself, having been born into a prominent New York family whose Sephardic Jewish ancestors traced their roots back to colonial times. Nonetheless, she managed to capture the unique aspects of American immigration. What other country in the world has welcomed so many people from across the globe and given them the opportunity to rise as high as their talents and hard work would take them? Most important, the United States confers on immigrants an equal claim to consider themselves Americans as those born here.

Lazarus’ words are a profound statement of American Exceptionalism. They remind us of who we are and where we come from:

Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,
I lift my lamp beside the golden door!

And they remind us, too, of what we’re capable of doing: Turning those tired, poor, huddled masses into Americans. At a time when immigration once again roils American politics, putting Emma Lazarus’ on the bill would be a fitting tribute not only to women but to these principles.

Rachel Carson

Rachel Louise Carson was an American marine biologist and writer. During her career working for the US Bureau of Fisheries she began to notice the harmful impact that pesticides, especially DDT had on wildlife. She was concerned as early as the mid 1940’s and gathered evidence for many years. In 1962, she published her second book, Silent Spring which documented the harms of pesticides ranging from damage to fish and wildlife to impacts on human health, and as suggested by the title – the extinction of several species of birds. Although the book was reviewed by other scientific experts at the time, Carson immediately faced harsh criticism from chemical companies like DuPont. Others accused her of being a communist. However her work was very influential and inspired the passage of the Federal Insecticide, Fungicide, and Rodenticide Act – a law which many of us owe the safety of our drinking water, seafood and environment to today. She is credited by many to be the mother of the modern environmental movement, using science as the basis for a change in policy. Although she died of breast cancer in 1964, Carson was posthumously awarded the presidential medal of freedom by Jimmy Carter in 1980.

Rosa Parks

Many Americans know the story of Rosa Parks and her role in kicking off the Montgomery bus boycott in 1955. But history has sanitized her legacy and there is so much more to her that we should learn. Rosa Parks organized local chapters of the NAACP at a time when the organization was outlawed. She helped black women who were victims of sexual assault, most notably Recy Taylor who was raped by a group of white men in 1944. Parks led the effort calling for a criminal investigation and justice long before the Second Wave of feminism or Take Back the night rallies when feminists fought to bring the unspeakable out into the light. She helped campaign for John Conyers when he was first starting out in politics and worked in his Detroit office until she retired in 1988. Parks was friends with Malcom X, believing that the Civil Rights Movement needed all kinds of people involved – from church leaders to radical activists. It saddens me that when I was in school I was taught Rosa Parks was just a lady who was tired on a bus and not the tireless and influential force for Civil Rights that she actually was. If you want to learn more, I strongly recommend the book “The Rebellious Life of Mrs. Rosa Parks.”

So, now that you know my picks, which American woman do you think should be on the $10?

See Also – Feminist Coffee Hour: Women on the $10

Episode Eight: Rebecca Lynch and Millennial Women In Politics

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Listen to episode in browser/Right click to download file

Discussed in this episode:

We discuss the need for more women in American politics, especially young women and interview former NYC City Council candidate Rebecca Lynch.

There’s a bit of a jump cut about 3/4 of the way in. It’s not you, it’s us. We had a tech problem.

Women candidates need to step up to the plate

Rebecca discusses insufficient outreach to women candidates with the National Women’s Political Caucus NYC Chapter.

***

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So I had a very successful tweet last night:

What's extra creepy about the Hyundai ad is that the daughter seemed to actually want to kiss the guy, but Daddy said no… #NotBuyingIt

— Elizabeth (@MissCherryPi) February 7, 2016

The #NotBuyingIt hashtag was started in 2012 by the Representation Project as a way to call out sexist commercials during the Superbowl. It’s since continued, growing every year. And I believe this year we have reached a threshold, because to my dismay the #NotBuying hashtag was overrun with trolls to the point where it was mostly sexist bullying and trolling rather than media criticism. I am STILL getting angry responses to the above tweet over 15 hours later. How long will people be butt hurt? Start an over/under betting pool in the comments.

I’ve been on the internet long enough to expect trolls. What I am surprised about (and maybe I shouldn’t be) is that so many people will watch this ad and think “Yes! *That’s* responsible fatherhood.” And not “I feel sorry for that girl.”

The “over protective father being played for comedy meme” is pervasive in our culture as this ad shows. And it’s incredibly sexist, perpetuating ideas of women as property and alienating teenage girls them from a healthy relationship with their own fathers and boys their own age.

What gets me is they hypocrisy of at least some of my detractors. It seems like I got two flavors – general MRA and Christian Patriarchy. The MRAs are giant hypocrites on this one. Men who sling around “incel” and “kissless virgin” as fates worse than death are excited by a commercial where a Dad constantly prevents his daughter from kissing her suitor. This seems counter productive. Unless they really do think that kissing is bad. If that’s the case, then a change of rhetoric is needed. Stop pretending a lack of intimate contact is a bad thing. Isn’t it a badge of honor that you didn’t sully some young woman with your filthy mouth?

As for the Christian Patriarchy types, I suppose that it’s exciting to see a famous comedian and a major corporation expressing their worldview on such a big platform. But they dropped the ball when they started annoying people on Twitter. No one has ever changed religions because some stranger disagreed with their tweet. Maybe take out your own ad next time. It’s what the Scientologists did.

Here’s some of my favorite things that you might have missed from 2015!

Television

Of course, I love Jessica Jones. But a close second is the BBC miniseries adaptation of Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell. Bertie Carvel, Eddie Marsan, Charlotte Riley, Marc Warren, Ariyon Bakare and the rest of the cast deliver wonderful performances. Given that this is my favorite novel, I had very high expectations and I am entirely pleased and delighted.

Books

I agree with all of the critics who selected Between the World and Me for their top pic. If you haven’t read it, go read it right now.

My honorable mentions are:
You’re Never Weird on the Internet by Felicia Day Funny, charming, and heartfelt. I was blown away and inspired by how vulnerable Day made herself on the page.

Rad American Women A – Z by Kate Schatz This book is amazing and I want to buy a copy for every child I know.

We Believe The Children by Richard Beck If you understand the McMartin trial, you understand contemporary America. Beck explains the convergence of politics, sexuality, feminism, history and psychology that allowed innocent people to lose their freedom. What compounds the tragedy is that in a few of these cases children were being abused, just not by their day care providers who went to prison or the satanic cults of our fevered imaginations.

I’m Not A Terrorist But I’ve Played One on TV by Maz Jobrani The funniest book I have read this year. Read this if you need a laugh.

Favorite Play
Allegiance. If you get to go see this, please do. It’s an important story about America and a moving, beautiful, brilliant play.

Favorite Tweet of 2015

"There's coffee in that nebula"… ehm, I mean… in that #Dragon. pic.twitter.com/9MYrqIOXnI

— Sam Cristoforetti (@AstroSamantha) April 17, 2015

Favorite Novelty Twitter Account
Emo Kylo Ren

Favorite Guilty Pleasure of 2015
Following the Dean Skelos and Adam Skelos trial. I listened to the phone calls so many times. If schadenfreude is a sin, I am going to hell in a handbasket.

Runner up – Victor Frankenstein starring Daniel Radcliffe. Expect camp silliness. Fun if you don’t take it seriously.

Favorite Tumblr of 2015
Nihilisa Frank

Best New Podcast
Feminist Coffee Hour, obvs. (We will be back on January 7!)

Favorite Comeback
MST3k is coming back! With Felicia Day and Patton Oswalt!

Favorite Videos of 2015

Lobbyist Claims Monsanto’s Roundup Is Safe To Drink, Freaks Out When Offered A Glass

Why Every Prank Eventually Goes Wrong

Marshall Islands Poet to the U.N. Climate Summit: “Tell Them We Are Nothing Without Our Islands”

Link Roundup – Stuff You Should Read if you missed it the first time

Northwest Tribe Says Proposed Coal Terminal Would Be ‘Like Putting A Freeway Inside The Reservation’

Our responsibility to help rescue Puerto Rico: New York City was in a similar spot in the 1970s

You hate politics? Try it some time

Women candidates need to step up to the plate

We Should Have a Better Condom by Now. Here’s Why We Don’t.

Problems Too Disgusting to Solve

Body Ritual Among the Swimsuit Models in the Horny Hell of SwimCity

How Men’s Rights Leader Paul Elam Turned Being A Deadbeat Dad Into A Moneymaking Movement

My Favorite Political Flavors Posts
Seven Seasons Of Questions About Odo
Building A New Way – Black Lives Matter at UU General Assembly
The Signal To Noise Ratio Of Blood Flow To One’s Genitals

Happy New Year! Thanks for reading!

This post contains spoilers for Star Wars: The Force Awakens, and tangentially some of the EU novels.

Karen send me a link to this post by Rachel Paige at Hello Giggles, “77 Questions about The Force Awakens.” I had a fun time thinking about these but one of them jumped out at me.

37. Why didn’t Leia train in the Force, just like Luke?

There’s three reasons for this which can be explained by or inferred from the Expanded Universe novels and one I thought of just recently. Maybe in future movies we will get a canonical explanation, but this is what I’ve got so far:

4. Leia is just too damn busy. In the novels, Leia is a politician and a bureaucrat with an active career running the Republic. In TFA she’s a General (When I saw the words “General Leia Organa” in the opening crawl, I almost died of happiness) but that would still be an incredibly demanding career. She’s also a wife and a mother. Training to be a Jedi is just one more thing on her to do list for her to feel guilty about not getting around to.

3. It brings up bad memories. It takes Leia years to come to terms with the fact that Darth Vader is her biological father. Her career as a leader (whether in politics or the military) is what her adopted family groomed her for and what she is good at. Becoming a Jedi would feel a lot like choosing Vader over her loving parents who were not Sith Lords.

2. That’s Luke’s thing. This is conjecture, but Leia is a bit of a “type A” personality. She’s a perfectionist and what’s the point in taking on Jedi Training when Luke is already the best there is?

1. This is the saddest one and something that struck me in a moment of fridge horror. Jedi are immortal. Whey they die, their bodies merge with The Force and they become “Force ghosts” forever. That’s an awfully long time to live without Han Solo.

There’s an idea floating around our cultural conversation that has too long gone unquestioned. This is one of those fallacies that is so much a part of our rhetoric that we hardly even recognize we are perpetuating it. It’s the idea that sexual arousal is inherently meaningful aside from one’s personal subjective experience or actual participation in sex with a partner. And this is not only wrong, but it can be very harmful.

If anything, we don’t have enough compassion, education or care around human sexuality. And I wish we lived in a world where we took care of ourselves and each other in that way. As we do not, I think that our ignorance is part of what lets this fallacy flourish.

Here’s what I mean. I see this on the Red Pill, but it’s in other places too. It’s the idea that a person getting sexually excited means anything else than their particular brain was stimulated and is now sending the signal “hey there goes a good person to mate with.” So when someone says they wouldn’t vote for Hillary Clinton (or Bernie Sanders) because they aren’t hot and don’t want to look at someone old on TV – they are falling victim to this fallacy – that the amount of blood flowing to their junk can tell them anything meaningful about who should be president. (Insert Martin O’Daddy/Marco Rubio-oh-oh-OH joke here.)

Recently on the Red Pill, a guy dismissed Philippa Rice, best selling illustrator and author as:

a low value woman’s musing about being the queen of a loser

I wanted to respond that she’s probably laughing all the way to the bank, but I didn’t. Because according to this guy, her creative or financial success mean nothing if she can’t give him a boner. She has no other value as a human being.

It goes the other way too, an attractive person is seen as being capable regardless of their qualifications. Tons of dudes said they’d vote for Sarah Palin for this reason, as if being attractive means she would be a good leader. Note to those dudes: voting for a person is not an effective way to get that person to sleep with you.

It’s not just manosphere misogynists that do this either. I was giggling over Rachel Bloom’s “Fuck Me, Ray Bradbury” when I sent it to my podcast co-host Karen. She said, “I don’t want to police her sexual choices or her celebration of her sexual choices but wanting to fuck somebody is not a compliment. It doesn’t compliment them for their accomplishments.” And as much as I still like that song, she’s right. Maybe we should lay off the “That person is such an awesome writer/artist/scientist that I want to have sex with them” proclamations. They add nothing to the conversation aside from an acceptable way to say “Hey everyone my genitals are pleasantly engorged right now!”

And this can get really gross really quickly. I’m disturbed by David Tennant fans trying to change the meaning of Jessica Jones from a revenge fantasy to one about unrequited love. If any given person wants to fuck Kilgrave, brilliant, enjoy your mind control fantasy. But that does not mean that the other characters in the show should feel the same way! Any given fan’s personal pants feelings about David Tennant do not and should not have any impact on the plot of the show. Those feelings of lust don’t make Kilgrave not a rapist – which is why I will judge you if you ship Kilgrave and Jessica.

It’s hard to know how big of a leap there is from defending fictional rapists because the actor who plays them is hot to defending actual rapists because you think the accused person is hot. And it happens all the time. “James Deen [/other famous actor/athlete] can’t be guilty because I personally would have wanted it, ergo she must have wanted it.” As I said, really disgusting, really fast.

In an ideal world, everyone would be healthy and fulfilled in their sexuality. But we need to stop giving that delightful rush of hormones an intrinsic meaning other than “Ooh. I think I’d like some sex now.” It’s meaningful in discerning one’s own sexual desires but says nothing about anyone or anything else.

If you like this post, you might also like:
The Projection of Hate – Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, Rolling Stone and Right Wing Sex Panic
Confessions of a Pickup Artist Chaser

Last week, Deport Racism PAC offered a $5,000 prize to anyone who would interrupt Saturday Night Live and call Donald Trump a racist. And so the show got out in front of it. Sonia Saraiya wrote in a review of Donald Trump hosting SNL:

This was most on display in the opening monologue, when a man heckled Trump, yelling “You’re a racist!” It was a plant—Larry David, who had been in the cold open, reprising his role as Bernie Sanders—but the punchline, if there was one, went nowhere. Trump was unflappable, because he knew the heckle was coming, and David’s “character” immediately admitted he’d taken cash to yell at Trump. In a few moments of adroit comic shuffling, the show introduced racism, let Trump defuse it, and then revealed it as insincere. That’s a set of actions with profound commentary for what it means to allege racism in this media climate; naturally, then, no performers of color were on stage. To include them would have meant underscoring how messed-up the bit was, and “Saturday Night Live” was not interested in critical thinking last night.

Rumors are circulating that Deport Racism PAC is linked to the Hillary Clinton campaign, but as the Daily Dot explains, all we really know is that the PAC was founded by a Clinton supporter.

But the PAC’s link to Clinton is irrelevant when you consider Saraiya’s critique. Larry David legitimized Donald Trump. His “joke” was that we all know Trump isn’t really a racist. C’mon you guys it’s just internet crazies and angry Latin@s saying that.

And in response, Deport Racism PAC has said that they’re giving the money to Larry David.

#LarryDavid wins the $5,000 "bounty" from https://t.co/PcIfWXCmnT for calling Trump a Racist on #SNL. Joke or not, it was true. Go Larry!

— Deport Racism (@DeportRacism) November 8, 2015

Irony is dead.

In declaring Larry David the “winner” they either don’t get the “joke,” are pretending not to, or don’t care. I’m leaning towards the latter. Which should make it very hard for anyone to take them seriously as a legitimate anti-racist organization in the future. So in this weekend’s showdown between a xenophobic megalomaniac and a nominally anti-racist PAC, the winner was Lorne Michaels. He played this whole thing expertly, as he should, having been in television for so long.

But in not using satire to speak truth to power, Michaels and David reveal that the game is rigged. Trump looks good, SNL has some of the best ratings in years and Deport Racism PAC insists that they also won somehow. What’s left is a meaningless discourse that’s more about getting attention than making a coherent point or changing anything. “Both sides” are feeding off of one another like a snake eating it’s tail (an example of the tagline for my podcast about the “political ouroboros.”) And the end result is that Trump improved his reputation. After all, that liberal Larry David didn’t think he was a racist!

I truly believe that the totality of American politics is a lot more than Donald Trump. But from conversations with friends and family who aren’t glued to Twitter, cable news and alternative media the way I am most people aren’t thinking about what Paul Ryan will do as Speaker, the climate conference in Paris or the TPP. When most Americans hear “politics” they think “Donald Trump.”

I am becoming increasingly alarmed by the presence of white supremacists on social media and the internet in general. While structural racism has always been a part of the United States, it feels like we are going backwards if people feel comfortable expressing these viewpoints openly. Cracked recently had a podcast about this, and after inadvertently responding to a white supremacist on Twitter, and seeing #BoycottStarWarsVII trend on Twitter it seems like these people are everywhere. So I’m going to take Amanda Marcotte’s advice, and I’m going to feed the trolls.

I have written before about how dog whistle rhetoric Republicans use about “taking their country back” feels strangely isolating to me. In general I pass as a white person but every once in a while I am reminded that my status as the daughter of a Latino immigrant means my privilege is conditional on the whims of other white people. And the whole idea that there is a “white genocide” going on is just such a reminder.

The slogans and propaganda of white supremacists are becoming more and more commonplace online. “Antiracist = antiwhite” and “#WhiteGenocide” pop up when you’d least expect to see them. Like in the responses to this tweet about the governor of Minnesota congratulating the Lynx for the WNBA championship.

The entire concept of “White Genocide” is preposterous and offensive. Immigration is the foundation of the United States, and I believe that we are better equipped to deal with it socially and culturally than much of Western Europe, simply because we have been doing it on a larger scale for longer. But they will figure it out eventually. Underneath alarmist rhetoric about immigration is a fear of white women having children with non white men. That’s at the core of the obscenity “cuckservative” – a conservative who doesn’t oppose immigration (or doesn’t oppose it strongly enough) is therefore assumed to be sexually aroused by the idea of their white wife having sex with a man of color. Underneath the racism is misogyny and natalism.

And this is where it gets personal. As an American with a white mother and a Latino father, I can’t help but feel unsettled by these attacks. That there was something nefarious about their marriage or something wrong with my existence and my heritage. On another level, I can take some sardonic pleasure in knowing that such terrible people consider me to be “wrong.” But it’s unsettling.

There is no wrong way to have an ethnicity or a nationality. The existence of immigrants and people of color is not genocide, and to say so is both bigoted and contrary to the founding principles of this country. So many great Americans were immigrants or the children of immigrants. And we are better and stronger and richer for their contributions. Anti racist does NOT equal anti white. But to be anti-immigrant is anti-American.

Image Credit: Shane. Released under a creative commons license.

In The Guardian, this week there’s a profile of a therapist who counsels wealthy clients who deal with the unique stresses their money brings them.

“We are trained to have empathy, no judgment and so many of the uber wealthy – the 1% of the 1% – they feel that their problems are really not problems. But they are. A lot of therapists do not give enough weight to their issues.”

….

From the Bible to the Lannisters of Game of Thrones, it’s easy to argue that the rich have always been vilified, scorned and envied. But their counsellors argue things have only gotten worse since the financial crisis and the debate over income inequality that has been spurred on by movements like Occupy Wall Street and the Fight for $15 fair wage campaign.

“The Occupy Wall Street movement was a good one and had some important things to say about income inequality, but it singled out the 1% and painted them globally as something negative. It’s an -ism,” said Jamie Traeger-Muney, a wealth psychologist and founder of the Wealth Legacy Group. “I am not necessarily comparing it to what people of color have to go through, but … it really is making value judgment about a particular group of people as a whole.”

The media, she said, is partly to blame for making the rich “feel like they need to hide or feel ashamed”.

I actually am going to recommend some Biblical advice for the wealthy. But first I want to point something out. There’s a reason that people are protesting the rich, and it’s not because they are rich. No one is protesting Bill and Melinda Gates or Richard Branson or Warren Buffet or even Michael Bloomberg (well maybe they were but that had more to do with his actions as mayor rather than his wealth). They’re protesting the Waltons and the Bankers and big business because those are the people who are using their wealth to harm people. The financial crisis ruined the lives of people who had nothing to do with Wall Street. Working conditions exist in the United States and in US owned companies abroad that should not exist anywhere on Earth, much less in a country prides itself on American Exceptionalism. The judgement isn’t on the circumstance of happening to be wealthy but on how that wealth was accumulated and then what was done with it afterwards.

Money probably does bring unique challenges to family dynamics and social interactions, but the idea that the wealthy are unfairly judged is absurd. And like Adam said, there’s a very easy solution to fix the perception of being an evil rich person. GIVE YOUR MONEY AWAY! Give it to the poor, to homeless shelters and food banks, give it to schools and libraries, parks, museums, animal shelters, medical research, and abortion funds! There’s a lot of people who need it, and it will soothe some of that guilt and the public admiration will make you feel a lot less judged.

Image credit: OpenClipArt.org by vokimon

Last Sunday, my UU Congregation had a service called “This I Believe” based on the popular NPR series, which Google tells me was actually started by Edward R. Murrow. I was invited to participate and share what being a Unitarian Universalist means to me. Here’s what I said:

People sometimes ask me how Unitarian Universalism is a religion at all. There are no dieties we are required to pray to. And what I say is that it’s a religion because we believe things about how the world should be that past a certain point we cannot prove to be true on a chalkboard, the way one could solve a math equation.

For me, Unitarian Universalism is a moral framework that is both challenging and rewarding. Most faiths have things that they require of members. But being a UU is difficult because we must be the ones who calibrate our consciences to right and wrong and check ourselves against them. Without the specter of eternal hell fire looming over our heads, some see us as a soft and easy denomination. When trying to explain our denomination, many of us have been asked, “Oh, so you can just believe whatever you want?” But as any of us who have contemplated these issues as UUs, this is not the case. Like a college student with newly found freedom might eat junk food every day for every meal, some people who leave traditional religion (and some who are still members of it) fall into narcissism, nihilism and apathy. Unitarian Universalism pushes us away from those things. I’m not saying that we can’t be a bit navel gazey at times, but we are also encouraged to look outwards. We care deeply about and find meaning in so many things and we turn those cares into actions. People in our trademark bright yellow Standing On The Side Of Love shirts can be found doing work for causes that fight poverty and bigotry and protect the environment. And this is the challenge of Unitarian Universalism, to both live our personal lives by our morals and values, and to guide our actions to change the things about the world which are unjust.

I believe that we each have a moral imperative to do good works and to care for each other. I try to make this belief the basis of my actions, but it’s not always easy. Being lazy or judgmental are strong temptations for me, and easy bad habits to fall into, even though I know that if I do, I will only harm myself and others. Unitarian Universalism helps me live out my ideals by making room for many different types of people with a variety of beliefs. I share my denomination with people who may think differently than me on some things, but what I love about Unitarian Universalism is that we share the same values. Our Seven Principles call us to act with honor and to seek justice. And when we can agree on that – and we only need to pay attention to the world around us to see that there are so many who do not, when we can agree to act with honor and seek justice, everything else will fall into place.

Image credit: UUA Chalice by Scott Abbotts