Buttons (August 12, 2007 by James Montgomery Jackson)

At the beginning of May I made one last patrol through our place in Kentucky looking for anything I may have forgotten to pack to take back north for the eight to nine months we planned to be here. I have a checklist to ensure I don’t leave behind anything irreplaceable, but I’m not prescient at anticipating other needs. We have only been back for a bit over three months and already I know my guesses were not perfect. We have several caulk guns sitting on a shelf in the Kentucky garage and now have a set in Michigan. Several times I have wanted a reference book and it is in the wrong state’s library. This happens when I am in Kentucky as well.

So, I was on my last ramble, opening drawers and closets, trying to anticipate the future and I ran across a small collection of buttons. “Hmm,” I said to myself, “this may be the basis for a sermon.” Jan agreed and so here we are today with my collection of saved buttons.

When I was growing up, back when garages were used for cars, not as storage and back before the ubiquitous self-storage sites mushroomed from the earth’s crust, my mother instituted a policy before Christmas each year of going through our toys and games and pitching out the unused to make room for what Santa would bring. That policy cost me my Davy Crockett Coonskin hat and other treasures that if saved and if (and this is a HUGH if) they had been in good shape I could now be an e-Bay millionaire. However, I used my stuff hard and it was mostly junk when it hit the trash can.

Now I come from New England stock – you know, the ones who build barn extensions to the extensions their parents built to the extensions their parents built. Well you get the picture. So there has always been a struggle between my New England genes, which strongly recognize the survival strategy of keeping everything because you just never know, and my mother’s lessons. The older I have gotten, the more my mother’s lessons have won. I periodically go through “cleaning out” phases and years of “treasures” hit the trash can.

Over the years I have had perhaps a hundred or more buttons and yet the collection now consists of less than ten. Those I keep still have meaning or lessons for me. So here are a few, starting with the most recent.

In the 1990s while I lived in Cincinnati there was a push to change the city charter to prohibit legislation to protect against discrimination based on sexual orientation. The proponents of this change coded their message by using the advertising slogan “Equal Rights, not Special Rights.” Using specious, inflammatory arguments and massive advertising funded by outside interests they won and for 13 years Cincinnati had to exclude any reference to sexual orientation from its anti-discrimination laws.

I was proud to wear my “Straight But Not Narrow” button. I keep it to remind me to stand up whenever anyone’s rights are at stake, not just my own. Although many versions of his poem have been published, as near as I can tell Pastor Martin Niemöller wrote it this way:

When the Nazis came for the communists,
I remained silent;
I was not a communist.

When they locked up the social democrats,
I remained silent;
I was not a social democrat.

When they came for the trade unionists,
I did not speak out;
I was not a trade unionist.

When they came for me,
there was no one left to speak out.

It grieves me that we must have clauses under the category of “Thou shall not discriminate,” but today it seems necessary. Being born a white male to middle class parents in a rich country I know little of discrimination on a personal level. As I grow older and infirm I will likely get a taste, unless this country changes materially in the next few years. No matter, as long as there is discrimination against any subset of us, it is discrimination against all of us and I will find it appropriate to wear a button similar to the “Straight but not narrow.”

When the Cincinnati charter amendment was finally overturned I was no longer a resident and so could not vote in that change. But here is what happened: Leadership for the change came from big business, the same big businesses who throughout the nineties implemented corporate policies against sexual orientation discrimination.

It illustrates a lesson I learned only after a long period of tilting at windmills. Working within the power structure can succeed; outside of it rarely does. Keep that thought on hold for now; we’ll pick it up with a button from an earlier time.

I, and I suspect many of you, are drawn to those things that reinforce our beliefs. I received this next button, Life is Contingencies, as part of an advertising campaign for a then new bi-monthly magazine, Contingencies, published by the American Academy of Actuaries of which I was a member. I keep this button because it reaffirms my beliefs on so many levels. 

Life is a series of events that were not anticipated or likely to occur, but did. People find some congruence of events, for example that we have a common acquaintance from our distant pasts, and ask “what are the chances of that?” The answer, of course, is 100% for it happened. But what they mean is who would have thunk it?

Life is dependent upon chance. I would probably never have become an actuary if I hadn’t volunteered in migrant day camps and Head Start programs and then answered an ad for a lab technician. Who would have thunk it?

During my delivery into this world I rolled over, entangling myself and taking an extra hour an a half or so to be born. My mother was not pleased with this turn of events which caused me to be born 1:00 am on October 27. Nineteen years later, having already surrendered my 2S deferment because of its unfairness to the poor, I held my breath awaiting the results of the first draft lottery, which occurred in December 1969. October 27^th drew number 262 meaning my chances of being drafted were nil. Had I been born an hour earlier on October 26, my lottery number would have been number 7.

Much of our individual lives is framed by the chance encounters and events that are thrust upon us. We Unitarian Universalists have eliminated original or individually perpetrated sin as the cause of misfortune. Yet many in the US still hold onto the myth that the measure of our virtue is the size of our wealth. I reject that our individual success is God’s favor upon us for being among his chosen people as vehemently as I reject that destroying the World Trade Center on 9/11/2001 was God’s punishment for our sinful ways.

At one level, life is a series of chances, contingencies that taken as a whole define us. At another level, life is a contingency, a possibility for which we must prepare. That is considerably different from God rewarding or punishing us for being American. It is pure chance that I was born in the richest country in the world as it neared its zenith of power.

It is one of those scary, grown-up realizations that our life as we have lived it was a choice. I am not suggesting we all start on a level playing field. We do not. Those with money have advantages. Males have advantages. Whites have advantages. Those with good health have advantages. I refuse to feel guilty about any of those advantages, given that I had no control over the initial throw of the dice. The question becomes what do I do now?

Regardless of the advantages we started with, if we choose to drift with the tides we will be crushed upon rocky shores, or shunted to some backwater tide pool. Yet if we prepare for life, we can live it. We must embrace life’s contingencies and seize the moments we have in this great mystery of life.

I received this third button in the mail as part of a 1970s era promotion for a new line of Clairol hair products. I was immediately struck by its message: Try a little KINDNESS. I threw away the sample and promptly pinned the button on my jacket and wore it there for several years. At its deepest level this concept resonates with my sense of what is right in human relations. Think about how your relationship with every other human will change if your first thought is to try a little kindness.

Mark Twain said that “kindness is a language the deaf can hear and the blind can see.” I am convinced that if we all tried a little kindness in everything we do we would not have to spend much time working for peace; we would be living in peace. Albert Schweitzer said “Constant kindness can accomplish much. As the sun makes ice melt, kindness causes misunderstanding, mistrust and hostility to evaporate.”

Since today seems to be my day for public confession of some of my many failings, I have to admit that my inner knowledge and outer practice of kindness are not at the same levels. I know from past experience that each and every act of kindness I perpetrate leaves me changed for the better, but in my rush to live MY life, I sometimes forget the positive rewards I receive from my kindness to others and focus only on my current trivial objective at the moment.

Retirement has helped me achieve a better balance between knowing how to act and acting, at least in some trivial matters. I have always been good at merges: letting one car in to the line in front of me. From time-to-time nowadays, I find myself, when the lines are unequal, letting a couple of vehicles in – much to the cursing frustration of my former selves in the line behind me who think that if they are 2.4 seconds later for a meeting the world might end.

I’ve learned to better follow parental advice to “say something nice or say nothing at all.” Most of you labeled yourselves as “Amiables” when we talked last year about Social Styles. You probably took those words about saying something nice to heart from the very start. For me, the “Analytical Driver,” you can translate my conversion to mean I remember more often to keep my mouth shut.

And yet this idea of kindness is richer than common politeness and courtesy, not that they are unimportant. By focusing on kindness we have a framework for developing right relations in each of our human interactions. We will still have conflict because we will always have competing goals, but if we infuse our relationships with kindness we may find much of our angst over conflict disappears as ephemeral clouds dispersed by the strong winds of kindness. In practicing kindness we find solutions that meet more objectives; we find some of our original objectives are no longer important to us.

Harold Kushner summarizes this by noting “When you are kind to others, it not only changes you, it changes the world.”

The second to last button for today dates from the late sixties: “Work for Peace.” How sad that 40 years after I acquired this button it is as necessary to work for peace as it was when I got it. I don’t know what in our genetic make-up causes Homo sapiens to instinctively react with violence when faced with obstacles, but we do. I briefly considered reciting all the wars fought in the world during the last fifty years. The sad truth is we would have had time for nothing else in today’s message. I look at this button from time-to-time with guilt. Its message is clear: peace takes work – continued, everlasting work. Some here in this congregation have done their part. I am not one of them. My youthful enthusiasm for changing the world has been worn down by the reality of man’s inhumanity to man and my inability as one person to stop it. And yet there have been such one persons in the past and will be in the future:

I hope I will keep forever embedded in my mind the picture of the man refusing to allow the tanks in Tiananmen Square to proceed without running him over. Perhaps in such circumstances I could find equivalent courage, but I doubt it.

Today’s last button is the only candidate pin I own. It is from a campaign before I was allowed to vote. Under today’s rules I would have been eligible since I turned eighteen a week prior to the 1968 elections, but back then we considered those eligible to be drafted and sent to Viet Nam were not sufficiently mature to vote. You had to be twenty-one for that and many died in that war before they had to right to vote for the Congress who approved it.

Eugene McCarthy was one of the first politicians who risked his career by opposing the president and leadership of his party over the Viet Nam war. Only after he lost the New Hampshire primary to President Johnson by 42% to 48% did Bobby Kennedy jump into the race. Back in the dark ages of which I write most delegates were not chosen through primaries, but in the back rooms of the political establishment and Hubert Humphrey became the democratic nominee. Humphrey lost a close contest to Nixon with 42.7% of the popular vote to Nixon’s 43.4%. Wallace and his American Independent Party siphoned off 13.5%, mostly from democrats, swinging the election to Nixon.

McCarthy’s approach to the issues and campaign were directly opposite those used by George Wallace. Choosing General Curtis “let’s nuke the commies in North Viet Nam” Le May as a running mate, Wallace split from the Democratic party primarily over segregation issues and formed the American Independent Party. This splitting off rarely has the desired effect of changing the group from which one splits, and often provides power to those in the other party with whom the splitter disagrees even more strongly than they do with their original party. Such has been the case three times in my memory: Wallace split the democratic vote and provided Nixon the win. In 1992 Ross Perot gathered 18.9% of the popular vote. While he pulled votes from both major parties, he drew more from the Republicans and Clinton defeated the first president Bush in his reelection attempt. Most recently in 2000 Nader’s Green Party garnered 2.7% of the vote, more than sufficient to swing the Gore/Bush race from a Gore victory to a squeaker for Bush.

Now in any of those elections you may have been pleased or not about the eventual outcome, but there are deeper lessons to be learned. Why on earth keep a McCarthy pin? Because I need to remember that a single voice speaking the truth can make a difference. Of course McCarthy did not get the nomination and once bitten by the presidential bug he tried for the nomination multiple times with little success. However, by speaking about an issue the leaders wanted to sweep under the rug he brought the debate into the open air, where democracy’s battles should be fought. A periodic glance at the McCarthy pin reminds me that silence in a democracy is not golden.

Secondly, the results of the Wallace, Perot and Nader runs demonstrate that trying to change a system by tearing it apart works less well than changing it from within. After the 1968 race, the McCarthy and Kennedy supporters took control of the Democratic Party machinery and changed the nominating process to favor state primaries over backroom candidate selection. The attitude of a pox on both your houses doesn’t accomplish a darn thing. Only by digging into the power structure and changing it does real change occur.

For example, businesses have and will continue to adopt green policies when they find it improves their bottom line. Not before. Oh sure, there will be a few companies led by people who care for more for the planet and its inhabitants than the bottom line, but in a capitalistic economy they are the exception. The United States is run by the moneyed for the moneyed. The way to rapidly change their behavior is to find ways they can monetarily do well by doing Good (with a capital G). If they can do Good and stay monetarily even, most business leaders will do the right thing.

Our challenge as Unitarian Universalists is to find the right monetary arguments to convince the powers to do Good. For that we need to work the system from within. That is not my nature nor, I suspect is it for many of you. My instinct is to throw verbal stones. And so I turn to Eugene McCarthy and thank him for showing me how it is done. I’ll know I have fully incorporated this knowledge into my life when I look at his button and realize I no longer need it.

I look forward to that day.

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