AS A FRIEND of mine often says about the world at large, “I worry, I worry.”
As a religious leader in this community, and also as an activist, I worry, too.
When I was younger, believe it or not, we Boomers were aware that we had a responsibility. Many of us Boomers have lost our way. I, for one, apologize and can hear your “OK, Boomer,” loud and clear.
For as long as I remember, our parents A.) told us we should go to school and be good students, and B.) that they would pay for college. They kept their promise as best they could and, mostly, it worked.
They understood that it was their job to see that we ended up better off than they were, that their job was to help us make our way. They understood, as grandchildren of immigrants, that as a society we were the Great Experiment.
We broke free from England (and ironically I write this on the day of Queen Elizabeth II’s death, requiescet in pace) to make this happen. Before the split from England, as a society, we collectively set out to change things, to make things better, to have religious freedoms, but sometimes, even then, we failed each other.
The Gospels are pictures of the world at unrest, as places of injustice.
The world is not that much different today from then, but very different from a generation ago. There is less hope and much more anger.
My tradition, the Episcopal Church, goes all the way back to Luke/Acts to allow deacons to model ways in which the people of God might “serve all people, particularly the poor, the weak, the sick, and the lonely … to interpret to the Church the needs, concerns, and hopes of the world” (the Episcopalian Book of Common Prayer 543).
But for many of us white people (BIPOC have known better and lived through much worse), there has never been such a sense of unrest with one another in this country.
To us, everything seems broken.
Younger folks reading this, trust, some of us were as interested as you are in change. We fought, for years. We just got tired. There is a reason the Great Retirement is happening at the same time as the Great Resignation. We’re opting out, too.
Those of us fighting for change knew what government was for: to provide those services that capitalism won’t or even can’t provide. Some things just wouldn’t get done. Ever. Copyright protection was so much a part of the original intent of that Founding Fathers that it was written into the Constitution itself.
As Catherine Zaller Rowland, Associate Register of Copyrights and Director of Public Information and Education for the Library of Congress noted in 2020, “[September 17, tomorrow, as this column appears in print] is Constitution Day, which is a day of great celebration in copyright. [… .] In article 1, section 8, clause 8, the Constitution states that Congress has the power to enact laws to ‘promote the progress of science and useful arts, by securing for limited times to authors and inventors the exclusive right to their respective writings and discoveries.’ And Congress obliged, passing the first federal copyright law in 1790, updating it throughout the years to address the changing times.”
The original idea was that copyright would expire, and all federal documents are without copyright by law. Other social nets were in place.
But now government seems to collapse around all of our heads, and as those original ideas got lost in translation, the Church has necessarily stepped up as government funding gets cut. This doesn’t always work. We need new models for change and new models for social service.
It’s important that the Church is there and I am pleased to serve in a congregation with a long history of social efforts. But we, Christian and non-Christian alike, all need to work together to get government and society functional again. And to do that, activists need, first and foremost, to get out the vote.
I’m not going to tell you who to vote for (ask me if you run into me downtown) but don’t lose faith on Constitution Day.
We need to get the country running again. It broke during the pandemic.
Jobs, however, are up and there is a new energy everywhere.
If we can reclaim civility, we can reclaim our country, but we need to open to all, and fight the ugly parts of America — its centuries-long history of racism, sexism, homo- and transphobia and ableism, and begin to heal.
I start by acknowledging that I write this essay on the traditional lands of the Coast Salish and S’Klallam People, and pay my respect to elders past and present, but there is still much for me and for all of us to do, every day, until we get things right this time.
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Issues of Faith is a rotating column by religious leaders on the North Olympic Peninsula. The Rev. Dr. Keith Dorwick is a Deacon at St. Andrew’s Episcopal Church, Port Angeles/St. Swithin’s Episcopal Church, Forks.
