Hope not Hate Vigil October 12th

"Hope Not Hate" Candlelight Vigil in Memory of the 10th Anniversary of the Deaths of James Byrd, Jr. and Matthew Shepard 

Central Texans Come Together in Support of Hope not Hate

Fact: From 2001 through 2006, there have been 1,862 reported hate crimes, but only 9 prosecutions. 

WHAT: "Hope Not Hate" - Hate Crimes Candlelight Vigil

HOSTED BY: The African American Diversity Ministry of MCC Austin at Freedom Oaks, Equality Texas Foundation, Soulforce, University Baptist Church, and Church of the Savior.

WHEN: Sunday, October 12, 2008, 5:00 pm

WHERE: University Baptist Church, 2130 Guadalupe Street, Austin, TX 78705.

WHO: Rev. Dr. Stephen Sprinkle, Associate Professor of Practical Theology, TCU’s Brite Divinity School.

Equality Texas Foundation educates and engages the public about policies and their effect on Texans of all sexual orientations and gender identities and expressions.

On Sunday, October 12, University Baptist Church will host "Hope Not Hate", a gathering on the 10th anniversary of the hate killings of James Byrd, Jr. and Matthew Shepard. 

Equality Texas Foundation, The African American Diversity Ministry of MCC Austin at Freedom Oaks, Soulforce, Church of the Savior, and University Baptist Church invite the public to attend a candlelight vigil where Central Texans will gather in support of hope not hate and to honor and remember the victims of hate crimes in Texas and across the country.

The keynote speaker for the gathering will be Rev. Dr. Stephen Sprinkle, Associate Professor of Practical Theology at TCU’s Brite Divinity School. Austin Police Chief Art Acevedo will also offer his remarks. Childcare will be provided and the evening will be ASL interpreted.

“It is important that we not let our lasting images of these two men, James Byrd, Jr. and Matthew Shepard, be images of them as the victims of hate. Rather, we are called by their memories to do all we can to ensure that hate will never be the final word. We are called to join our hope for a more just, fair, and compassionate world with our actions in a way that brings about true and lasting change,” stated Rev. Karen Thompson, Senior Pastor, MCC Austin at Freedom Oaks. Paul Scott, executive director of Equality Texas Foundation added, “We continue to educate Texans that hate crimes still occur across the state and that our fellow citizens are targeted for physical harm because of prejudice, ignorance, and fear.”

It's in the Numbers-Armageddon It?

You have doubtless seen the sign somewhere..."if you are lucky enough to live in Austin, then you are lucky enough!".

OK. I was born here, nobody loves Austin more than I do and yet I realize Austin isn't perfect as a place to live. We are lucky, though. We have beautiful natural features (no, I am not talking about the people but there are a lot of gorgeous folks here), we have amazing cultural events, great community activism,more than our share of local quirkiness, and we were fortunate to escape the natural firsthand wrath of Hurricane Ike two weekends ago.

And now we have a number for it. Here in Austin we are lucky 13! SustainLane just released their 2008 US City Sustainability Rankings. The rankings attempt to measure

which cities’ public transit, renewable energy, local food, and development approaches are most likely to either limit or intensify the negative economic and environmental impacts of fossil fuel dependence.

So overall, in terms of who fares well in the "most likely to survive" category, Austin came in Lucky Number 13 on the list this year (improving one spot from last go round in 2006).There's a lot of this "how will we survive" stuff going around. On Bravo TV's second season of their reality show (which I promise you I only read about) "Top Design", episode 2 "Artsy Bunker" ostensibly reflects the producer's feelings that "Design needs to be functional as well as stylish ... functionality of the room is a priority. The designers are faced with a challenge about survival and will have to work in teams to create a fashionable yet functional space -- the real challenge however, will be if they can survive working with each other." Umhmmm - isn't that always the way.

Similarly, set for wide release this coming Thanksgiving weekend, we have "The Road". A movie adaptation of Cormac McCarthy's bleak but enthralling story of a father and son struggling to survive after a nuclear explosion. McCarthy's vision of what it takes to live through a nuclear winter makes gasoline lines and hurricane cleanup look pretty tame by comparison, but perhaps that is the point to take away. We don't want to go there...ever.We know where we don't want to go- but do we know where we should be headed?

Higher up SustainLane's chart, that's where.

The categories used to determine sustainability are: Air Quality, City Commuting, Energy & Climate Change, Local Food / Agriculture, Green Building, Green Economy, Housing Affordability, City Innovation, Knowledge Base, Metro Street Congestion, Metro Transit Ridership, Natural Disaster Risk Planning / Land Use, Waste Management, Tap Water Quality, and Water Supply.

Here are the results, the top 50 for 2008.

This nifty little graphic demonstrates where we here in Austin are leaders and and where we still need a little work.

I'll admit it - I was (very) discouraged to see we came in 31st out of the top 50 in the "local food and agriculture category". Clearly not enough of us are taking full advantage of our amazing resources in that arena. CSA farms like Tecolote, Farmer's Markets, Wheatsville Coop, Greenling, many restaurants, even our own yards. We have so many wonderful choices it is hard to swallow that so few are availing themselves of the options to eat locally.

But just for a moment, just for today, please pause, fellow Austinites, and pat yourselves on your green backs. We have made progress in the past two years. Then, it is back to work, and let's see how far up the list we can move before the next ranking is released in two more years. We've got a lot to be proud of, and a lot to improve upon. Ready, set, GREEN!

Come along with me

Every once in a while, I get the wild idea that insisting we all keep working to secure equal rights for every single American - including those in the glbt community - is overblown, if not misguided.

"Relax", I tell myself. "this is all going to fix itself once all the folks older than I am have relinquished their grip on the political system. Give it a rest - once all the people younger than I am vote in sufficient numbers to put equality into practice in our institutions and systems, we will home free.".

Then I remember the current presidential race is still too close to call and that many people are seemingly willing to overlook McCain and Palin's anti-glbt stance when it comes time to vote. One more Supreme Court Justice appointment and a lot of choices we currently have may disappear. Forever.

On top of that, unfortunately, in a country where churches and politicians are free to treat any group of citizens as though they are somehow "less than" or "other", we have incidents like the following happening with dismaying frequency...

From a local news affiliate...

Austin police are investigating another violent, unprovoked attack of a passenger aboard a Capitol Metro bus. The victim says he is the target of a hate crime because he is gay.

The attack on Jason Daley left him with stitches and severe bruising around his right eye. A police report confirms he was attacked around noon Friday, September 12, while Daley was a passenger aboard Capitol Metro bus number 339 in North Central Austin.

Daley says the blow knocked him unconscious."The next thing I know I'm coming to and I have blood and glass all in my eyes and the bus driver is still driving," he said. Daley identified his attacker as a black male, in his mid 20s. He says the man punched him in the face because he is gay.

On August 9, a security camera captured another random attack of a man on a Capitol Metro bus, but there was no security camera on the bus Daley was a passenger on. Of the 400 Cap Metro buses, only about a fourth are equipped with security cameras. That could change as Daley's attack is investigated.

"And then if there are incidents reported and the need arises what we'll do is increase our security on certain routes," said Adam Shaivitz, a spokesman with Capital Metro.

"In this case, in the middle of the day on a bus on public transportation is a true concern," said Paul Scott, executive director of Equality Texas. Daley's case is being monitored by Equality Texas, which focuses on the rights of gays and lesbians. Scott wants to be sure if and when the attacker is charged, he is prosecuted under the state's Hate Crime Act.

Daley is worried his eyesight will be permanently damaged and he's afraid to get back on a bus, but he's not afraid to stand up to those who commit hate crimes.

"I will not allow it. I will do anything I can in my power to make sure this does not happen to anyone again," says Daley.

Capital Metro says physical assaults aboard buses are rare with only four reported so far this year. During that same time period the transit company says it completed approximately 35 million trips.

Click here for video clip.

What's next? It will be OK for me to punch you because you are wearing a button for the "other" political candidate? It will be all right for me to punch somebody else because they are not carrying a Bible? If you are listening to music I find offensive it is fair game for me to use my fists to express my disapproval?

What can you do? First of all, REGISTER TO VOTE. Those of us who are fed up with divide and conquer style politics have a way to make that message heard loud and clear on November 11th.

If you live in Texas, check out the Equality Texas website. Volunteer, donate, call and let them know you support equal rights for every Texan. They will let you know how you can help.If you live elsewhere, check out the Equality Federation site to find information for your own state. Find out about your local elections and see if there are any referendums or races where glbt issues are in play. Again. Volunteer, donate, call and ask what you can do to help.

If it has come to the point where we will allow "certain people" to be attacked in public without those acts fueling any sense of publicly expressed moral outrage, then we must certainly have lost sight of our own souls somewhere along the way.

Please... Don't turn away. Don't pretend it is fine to allow the attacks on the glbt community to continue. Do something to publicly demonstrate it is important to you, personally, for every single person in this country, no matter who they love, to be able to go out in public safely, without fear of physical attack.

Come, be impatient along with me. The time for change is now.

Topped

For the record, I am providing this mellow James Taylor track as an ironic aside. As laid back as this song is, it serves as the precise and exact opposite of the vibe around my house today. Read more to discover why.

After weeks (and weeks) of waiting - it has finally begun. We are getting our new roof.

The saga began with a hail bearing thunderstorm, one that devastated much of the Central Texas area way back in mid May, knocking out windows, shattering vegetation and battering roofs.After something of an insurance company runaround, we are at long last getting our turn at a roof replacement.

Today a crew showed up a little after 8AM. The foreman, who I'd met once previously on a planning trip for the work to be done, explained to me that his crew would spend today tearing the old damaged roofing off, and then the supplies for the new roof would be delivered, stored to one side of our driveway, and it would take, depending on how full a crew they could field here, 4-5 days to have our new roof fully installed.I'd been through this one time before, at least 15 years ago, so my recollection has faded a bit. I do recall lots of debris surrounding the house, and pretty much having our driveway be off limits for the duration.

There was also noise. Lots of noise. In conversation with my daughter today, she reminded me of how our relatively otherwise non-trainable labrador retriever, also subjected to our first round of roofing crew exposure, had to her dying day thrown worried glances upwards when prompted with "where are the roofers?!?".

All of which brings me to a bit of a cultural observation.

I've noticed, with other work crews we have had at our house, they had a very different approach to a flower bed versus a sidewalk than I do. When I look at a sidewalk or a driveway, I see a sturdy space that should be used to hold anything heavy. When I look at a lawn or a flower bed, I see a space that should be worked around.

This is apparently the opposite of how the work crews view it. They will carefully place their heavy tool bags right to the side of the driveway, in the flowerbed, right on top of whatever is growing there. To their eye, an area with plants is to be used, while an area with poured concrete is to be protected.

Which makes sense when I recall trips we've made to Central America. I can't know for sure where all my roofers were born, but I can safely guess most of the 5'2" and shorter crew were not born here in Central Texas.

When my husband and I visited a remote area of Guatemala with a group from our church, we learned the most impressive improvement anybody could make was to add anything permanent in terms of structure.Permanent in that part of the world meant either poured concrete, or more likely, cinder block.

If you had something made of cinder block or poured concrete it showed you were prosperous. You could afford impervious building materials, rather than using hard wood trees which were all around you. Even more important for certain indigenous groups who had returned from exile in Mexico where they'd lived for 11 years to escape government supported genocide, when you were using cinder block or cement, it showed you were there to stay.

This morning, after I left my house for an hour long walk with friends for exercise (another concept definitely foreign to these men who get plenty of exercise without setting aside time specifically for that), and returned to see our front yard and beds already fielding all sorts of packing materials and torn off debris, I tried to take it all into stride.Whatever damage is done by the bulk of our old roof landing in the beds out front, it will be temporary. None of the plants there should be killed outright in the space of 4 or 5 days.

Whether or not I will survive the noise is another issue. At the moment it sounds as though a truck is being assembled right above my head.

Not only are there fairly alarming crashing and tearing noises happening at random intervals, this is all regularly punctuated by shouts in Spanish and yelps that make it sound like whoever is up on my roof is in constant peril of death or dismemberment.

Sharing the ambience of their work environment is partly my bad, the noise level inside slightly exacerbated by open windows as I take full advantage of a delightfully cool and now slightly overcast 72 degree morning, fully 20 degrees cooler than it was at this time yesterday. The novelty of a cool breeze coming in through the doors and windows is worth a little (no, a LOT) of extra noise.

I have tried to live my life embracing the idea that anything that doesn't kill me outright will make me stronger.

By the end of the next 4-5 days, I am destined to be a lot stronger.

Underneath it all, I both respect and admire these men who are putting in a very full day of hard physical labor up on top of our house, all in order to do this job. And, when all is said and done, we will get a new roof out of the process and go back to our relatively quite lives. These men will go on to the next house, and start all over again.

Maverick or Not?

Maybe John McCain used to be a "maverick". Lately he seems to be just another steer. The Obama campaign, which is wisely not spending a lot of money in Red Texas, has this ad out where there are more voters to be found. Take a look:



I keep reading that if Barack Obama does what I thought I wanted him to do, which is to avoid negative campaigning and sticking to the issues, etc, keeping what I see as the moral high ground, that he will likely lose the election.

So what do I want to see more - a candidate who sticks to his principles and loses the election or somebody who does what it takes to get elected?

When I think along those lines I start to hear a high pitched screaming noise in my head.

Somehow I am guessing this is one of those "fooled you!" tricky questions being framed as "either/or" that actually has some sort of more thoughtful "both/and" kind of an answer. I hope so.

Four (or more) years of another theocratic leader (and if McCain isn't one his running mate Palin most certainly is) makes me want to go out and tear stuff in half. Like, say, my voter registration card.

Don't get me wrong - I won't stay home from the polls. Just don't expect me to pay attention to the campaigning. Please. I don't think I've got the stomach for it.

All Buttoned Up

Mean Girl

I didn't watch either convention "live" this year.It is not that I think conventions or presidential politics are unimportant, I know they are very important indeed.It is because I get despondent when I witness the degree to which our political conventions have been diminished by their transformation into a tightly scripted 3-4 day commercial. I am discouraged by the complicity of the network coverage with the sound bite of the day. I'm frustrated by both the parroting of the party line by purportedly independent voices as well as the self generated faux dramas where the story centers upon the newscaster. I am dismayed by the tokenism repeatedly demonstrated by the camera shots played and replayed. It all makes me a little bit nauseated.

After reading about Sarah Palin's big speech Wednesday night, I reluctantly watched the video online. The reports of her seeming to relish being the attack dog for those formier Bushies now running McCain's campaign for him were not exaggerated. She was into it, folks.A politician behaving in a politically opportunistic way wouldn't bother me so much except that Sarah Palin, beside being papered with "Republican" and "candidate" labels, is also calling herself a "Christian".

That is bad news for the church I fear, and apparently ELCA Pastor Kelly Fryer agrees. She had this to say about Palin in a recent post: "She belittled Obama, throwing down one scathingly sarcastic line after another, without regard for the facts (check out this AP report), attacking his personal character and his motivations with even more bloodlust than she took on his policies (i.e., "there are some candidates who use change to promote their careers..."), ridiculing him for his work as a "community organizer" (?!?!?), ripping into him like he was a piece of raw meat tossed into her cage at the end of a day-long fast. For goodness sake, she tore into him for being willing to TALK to our enemies ("...he wants to meet them...!") and wanting to make sure that when we arrest people we READ THEM THEIR RIGHTS.

Can you imagine the blisteringly nasty things she would have had to say to Jesus when he started up with that whole love your enemies thing? Or maybe that passage wasn't in her hymnal, either." You can read the rest of what Fryer has to say here.The whole mess reminds me of a friend of mine who once said "I love Jesus - it's the Christians I can't stomach."

If, by "Christian", we are talking about folks like Sarah Palin, then I can't stomach us either. Sarah Palin might worship Jesus on Sunday mornings, but nothing I have seen or heard from her so far would indicate that she has a clue about what it means to try to follow Jesus' example.Last I read in my Bible, that was pretty much the central idea of Jesus' life and radical ministry...that we are to put down the stuff we figure out on our own by looking at the ways of the world around us and try to pick up the behaviors of Jesus.

Behaviors along the lines of recognizing everybody as equal in the sight of God. Telling the truth. Respecting people who might be different than we are.

To be considered a follower of Jesus takes a lot more than a consistent stand against legalized abortion. I guess it is a good thing Sarah Palin is now known to be a woman who will rise to the occasion to overcome a challenge. For her to honestly try to "be a Christian" as opposed to simply being "known as a Christian"? She has her work cut out for her.

Holidaze

I love love love three day weekends. There is something wickedly delicious about an extra day off. Be it a break from school or work, I always felt like I was playing hooky on those "extra" days off, even though I was playing along with everybody else for the most part.

And that "for the most part" is the itch I want to scratch today.

My husband is a semi-retired neurosurgeon who previously ran one of the first exclusively pediatric neurosurgery practices in Central Texas. He took emergency room call for the City of Austin's trauma center for years and years. Guess what never closes - even on a holiday? Yup. The hospitals and their emergency rooms. And it is a good thing they don't because illness and accidents are calendar blind.Even when it came to his office pratice, we were always under pressure to stay open and hold office hours when school was out for a weekday holiday so kids could come see him and not miss classes. Clearly this was the parents talking - I never met a kid worth their salt who wasn't all in favor of missing school to come see us in the office.Today, my oldest is at work. He has a job at the Lake Austin Resort and Spa as a chef, and they are open every weekend, so he has to work. He had to work on Christmas Day, same reason. All the restaurants open today? Filled with staff who don't get Labor Day off. Stores with sales going on? Same thing.As I was resting from some labor of my own out in our front garden beds this morning, I watched as the workers for the company who holds the garbage contract for our neighborhood came, as they do every Monday, holiday or not, to pick up our trash. These guys weren't off today, either.Then I caught the tag end of a Weather Channel report my husband was watching about the impact of Hurricane Gustav on New Orleans and the surrounding areas.Whether or not they went to work today, millions of folks along the Gulf Coast, especially those who were forced to evacuate, well, none of them are "off" today in the sense they are relaxing, hanging around watching sports or sharing a fun meal with their families and friends. Neither are the firefighters or police or rescue workers who stayed behind to keep New Orleans safe while the storm does its worst.The simple fact of it is that in order for most of us to take a day off, it means a lot of other people have to go to work to keep the support services we all depend upon up and running, "just in case".

And then there are all those who work really hard day in and day out without a designated employer or paycheck either one. Men and women who work in every sense of that word, trying to keep families together, put healthy food on the table, keep houses and clothes clean and people and animals cared for, A lot of those folks never really get a day "off", especially when the ones who typically go to a job or to school are home rather than out from underfoot.

So today, on this particular Labor Day "Holiday" - I am sending a shout out to all the folks who are WORKING today, just like any other day. In a union or not, paid or not, if you are working today, I salute you. If you are at home today, taking a well deserved day "off", then I hope you too will give just a moment of thought to all the folks who reported for work today so you can enjoy your holiday. For all the designated employees out there, I hope you enjoy your work and that you get paid a livable wage for your efforts. I am also hopeful you will get a comp day in return for working this holiday, giving you a more personal three day weekend all your own. And finally, I hope you will feel great about having that extra day and appreciate the fun that comes with that sense of of a little extra time to call all your own.

You earned it.