Good Night and Merry Christmas . . . Peace

Darlene Love has a Wish for Christmas

Christmas Isn’t Complete for Me w/o The Waitresses

The Anonymous 4 With a Carol for Yule

A Merry Solstice!

Break out the cakes and ale! Let’s have a dance to celebrate the return of the Light. Peace, All.

Joan Jett and the Lads Kick Out the Seasonal Jams

One of My Favorite Traditional Carols, with Bagpipes

Since It’s Christmas, and Since Affordable Housing and Homelessness are in the News, Re-posting from 2005 . . . .

Back then, I worked at a housing finance agency in Vermont. I ran a statewide public awareness campaign, trying to get the message through that affordable housing was essential. I was planning to attend a conference on homelessness when I got a call the evening before, asking me to deliver the keynote, as the planned speaker, a friend of mine, had to be home with a sick child. I cobbled this together in the car on the way home:

Thank you all very much. Pinch-hitting for someone as remarkable as Rita Markley is a pretty tall order, but, looking around the room, I see a lot of friends and partners, and that makes it a little easier. 

Thanks, in particular, to the organizers of this conference and to our hosts here at Johnson State. President Murphy, we appreciate Johnson State’s mission of promoting community responsibility and community service; because at the core of what all of us in this room are doing is a sense of responsibility to others. 

We go to work every day trying to provide safe, decent, affordable housing to Vermonters, and when we succeed, we make people’s lives better. And when we do that, we’ve made our communities, our state, our country and the world a little bit better. And that’s not a bad way to spend your time. 

Most of you don’t need me to stand up here and recite the statistics that show how important this work is, but let me just mention a couple of things so the rest of the folks here this morning have an idea of what the housing environment in Vermont is like right now. 

The median price of a single-family home in Vermont will hit $185,000 this year. That may not sound like a lot if you’ve lived in places like Boston or New York or D.C., but consider that the median household income in Vermont is about $46,000. That buys a $120,000 home. So there’s a pretty big gap there. 

Rents are climbing, too. Just under half the people in Vermont who rent pay more than 30 percent of their income to keep a rented roof over their heads, and there are a lot of folks who’re paying 50 percent. Nearly 60 percent of Vermont’s workers are employed in jobs whose median wages aren’t high enough for them to afford the rent on a modest two-bedroom apartment. 

And, on any given night, no matter how cold it gets, there are hundreds of Vermonters—we don’t know exactly how many—who are out there homeless, and we’re pretty sure, based on statistics we do have, that one in four of them is a child.

We do know the fastest-growing portion of our homeless population is families with at least one full-time worker. Note the artwork around the room here; this panel was drawn by an 8-year-old homeless girl in Burlington. Both her parents are working full-time, and they live in a shelter. They’re lucky, in a way—all our homeless shelters have more clients than they can take care of, and that means that, in January, when it’s 40 below, somebody’s kid is sleeping in a car. 

Now, there are people out there who seem to find us and the work we do objects of amusement, or maybe scorn. In their eyes, we’re irrelevant to social progress, or even an obstacle. They preach the Gospel of the Market, saying over and over that if we would just get out of the way and let the Market do its work, everything would be all right. One of their favorite axioms is, “a rising tide lifts all boats,” meaning that we all do well when the economy is doing well. So the key to people’s health, happiness and security is to work for a more vigorous economy. 

However, in my experience, this axiom only applies to you if you can afford a boat. If 

you can’t, then you’re in the water treading away, and unless somebody throws you a life preserver, eventually you’ll get tired and you’ll sink. In the last 25 years or so, boats have gotten more and more expensive, and the supply of life preservers has certainly gotten smaller. 

Now, I regard this whole concept of the Market as an interesting theory that hasn’t yet been proven in practice, or at least hasn’t yet delivered on all its promises. The term Market is really nothing more than a shorthand way of describing a couple of basic human activities, the exchange of goods and services for cash and the accumulation of wealth. As human activities go, I see nothing wrong with either one unless it’s taken to an extreme. But as a theoretical foundation for running a just society, I see some shortcomings. 

For example, it hasn’t been adequately explained to me why, when the Dow Jones is 

flirting with 11,000 and productivity is high, more than a million more people fell into poverty in the last year, or why 800,000 working families have lost health insurance coverage, or why Rita’s homeless shelter has 29 families on its waiting list or why our food shelves and fuel assistance programs are already stretched to their limits – in some cases, past their limits – and it’s only mid-November. 

And the Market seems to be creating a lot of low-wage jobs in Vermont and around the country, rather than high-wage jobs, which means people are working and still struggling rather than building the kind of comfort and security they dream of. In fact, here in Vermont, the jobs with the highest levels of employment generally pay the lowest wages. So we need to do a little work there. 

The Market people will say, “hey, Life’s not fair.” True. Even . . . “duh!” But when you 

fall back on that bit of obvious “wisdom,” you’ve thrown off any feelings of obligation for making things more fair. And that’s wrong. The Market is not some invisible hand shaping our lives, a hand whose motives and means are outside our control. We have the power to decide how fair life will be. We can make decisions, promote behaviors, allocate resources, pass laws that lessen the unfairness of life. 

Sometimes, I hear people talk about the Market in almost religious terms, and I get the feeling it’s the secular equivalent of Intelligent Design. In fact, I’m wondering now whether we should start up a movement to insist that altruism is taught alongside capitalism in our schools. Any of you legislators in the audience want to introduce that as a resolution in the session come January, give me a call; I’ll be happy to help you write it. 

When we have people cold and hungry and sick and without hope because they cannot provide for the basic necessities of life, then there is a problem. We need to make a few tweaks to the system. 

When we ignore our responsibilities to people who are cold and hungry and sick and without hope because they cannot provide for the basic necessities of life, then we are actors in a tragedy. 

And to the extent that some people are required to be cold and hungry and sick and 

without hope in order for society or the Market to function, then we have entered the realm of sin. 

Many of the same people who preach the Gospel of the Market also like to talk about sin, about morality, about values, about personal responsibility. I welcome that public conversation, because I agree that we should examine our individual lives and how we live as a community. However, I think the conversation is focused too narrowly right now. It’s mainly about sex, and who we have it with and when, and where, and how and to what purposes. Now, I consider sex to be a very important human activity, and there is certainly a moral dimension to how we express ourselves sexually, but it’s certainly not unique in that regard. In fact, I often think some people’s preoccupation with other people’s sex lives is really a kind of voyeurism. 

There’s a much wider moral discussion that should be taking place. Is it morally 

acceptable that some child is sleeping in a car when its 40 below outside? Is it morally acceptable that people can work one job, two jobs, even three jobs—Vermont has a lot of those people—and still not be able to afford housing or health care or feel any kind of confidence they’re building a secure future for their children? Let’s have a real conversation about morality and behavior . . . and about personal responsibility. 

I know some people don’t think we need to have that conversation, because, to their 

minds, if you’re poor, it’s your own damn fault. You’re either too lazy or stupid to be a productive citizen, and what happens to you is just tough luck. 

You know, I used to work in Washington, D.C., and one of my jobs was in an office 

about six blocks from the White House. Across the street, in front of a coffee shop, there was this guy panhandling. He’d claimed this piece of sidewalk as his turf, and he was out there every day. I became one of his regulars. I’d go get something from the shop, then I’d give him my change, or if I had a bill, I’d give him that. And we got to the point where we’d say “hello,” and “see ya.” 

Now, I was renting a house down there, and I paid my rent by putting the check into the landlord’s bank account every month. There was a branch about two blocks from my office, so on the first of the month, I’d walk over and deposit the check. One time, I went in, and there he was, putting what he’d gotten in his paper cup that day into a bank account. This guy had a savings account. No matter how hard, or even how miserable his life was, he was still trying. 

I go to a lot of public meetings on affordable housing around the state, and I’ve lost track of the number of times I’ve heard, “what kind of people are going to live there?” And I say, it’s the waitress who brought you your dinner and that $40 bottle of wine the other night. It’s the guy who sold you those $100 Nikes you’re wearing or bagged your groceries. It’s the woman who watches your kids at the day care center, making eight bucks an hour. It’s the ambulance driver who’ll run you to the hospital. That’s the “kind of people” who’re going to live in the housing we want to build. 

And some of the people who’re going to live in that housing are poor and trying to make it, looking for a place to live so they can maybe start working on a better life. 

And that is why our work is important. 

We’re about to begin the season where something like a billion people around the world are going to celebrate the birth of a man who said that we should treat others as we would like to be treated; that we should not judge, lest we be judged; that we should love those who don’t like us; and that we should comfort those who suffer. He was also the guy who brought the best wine to a wedding reception, but that’s another story. 

And on the night he was born, he and his mother and father didn’t have a place to stay.   So they spent that night in a barn. 

Now, you may not be one of those who embrace the religious institutions that have grown up based on this man’s life and beliefs, but even so, those ideas are a pretty decent framework for a good life and a good society. They are the basis of our work, and I want to thank you for the work that you are doing. 

Let us go now in peace together to serve our sisters and brothers. 

Thank you.

I Have Never Heard this Carol the Same Way Since I Watched “Love Actually”

In fact, now this is the version I hear when I think of it.

Anyone Else Remember Watching Mitch Miller?