Birmingham Sunday 2007

On this Sunday, I visited the 16th Street Baptist Church, where Addie Mae Collins, 14. Denise McNair, 11; Carole Robertson, 14; and Cynthia Wesley were struck down by hatred and racism. On September 15, 1963, Ku Klux Klan bombers killed four young girls and wounded more than two dozen other people in a church on Sunday morning. Their deaths came just a few weeks after Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. led the March on Washington and gave his famous "I have a dream" speech.

I'm traveling with the Chicago Children's Choir, as they celebrate their 50th anniversary with a concert tour of civil rights sites in the South. It is a privilege to spend time with these young people and a joy to hear their music. And I am on pilgrimage, walking on sacred ground, standing in the places I could only watch on television and pray over as a young teenager on a Minnesota farm in the early 1960s.

Today in the 16th Street Baptist Church, the choir sang "Birmingham Sunday."

On Birmingham Sunday a noise shook the ground.
And people all over the earth turned around.
For no one recalled a more cowardly sound.
And the choirs kept singing of Freedom.

I know we were standing on sacred ground. This is the very church where Denise and Addie and Carole and Cynthia prayed and sang and went to Sunday school. This is the very church where, on Monday night after Monday night, brave people gathered from 1958 onward to plan and work and organize to win freedom and justice and equal rights. I stood with members of the congregation and guests and two choirs and we all linked arms and sang "We Shall Overcome" in the same church where Dr. Martin Luther King and Dr. Ralph Abernathy and Dr. Fred Shuttlesworth sang the same anthem.

This morning I talked with elders in Birmingham. Some of them were not much older than me, but we are the elders now. They marched and they shrugged off threats and they persevered in the civil rights movement. It's better now, they said, but not all better.

The world is better now, they said, because Birmingham is integrated and so is the whole country. It's not better because integration has not ended prejudice or discrimination—that will take generations, one told me. He also said that he saw the same divisions, setting one race against another, playing out again as politicians try to turn African Americans against immigrants, black against brown, inciting and pandering to prejudices.

Another way in which it is not all better is that the children and grandchildren do not feel the same things we felt. "The same things" does not signify the pain and the fear and the loss of so many good people. "The same things" signifies the commitment to struggle for a justice, the joy in comradeship in the struggle, the faith that a better world is possible and that it is our job and our privilege to build it.

I hope that this tour gives at least some of our children a taste of the past, a taste of the struggle for justice and the joy that is in it, a taste of the faith and the hope that are needed to join in that still-vital struggle for peace and freedom and justice.

The Sunday has come and the Sunday has gone.
And I can't do much more than to sing you a song.
I'll sing it so softly, it'll do no one wrong.
And the choirs keep singing of Freedom.

[The song, "Birmingham Sunday," was written by Richard Fariña]

End times

What do you say as life winds down? I know it is right to visit old friends and family, but I don't know what to say. And that's complicated further as family paths diverge so far that the only bridges are shared names, weddings, births, deaths.

I could talk about next week's trip to the South, next month's work, impending graduation and college plans, but I cannot banish the looming thought that the person I tell the stories to will not be here to see the graduation, indeed might not be here when we return from the southern trip.

What if I asked outright how he feels about life coming to a close? But the immediate family doesn't want to talk about this, and it's not my place to raise the questions they so gracefully avoid/evade. So I sit in the room, listening to the conversational patter about relatives I don't know and the stories so well-worn that even I remember them.

I hope that just being present serves as a sign of respect and affection. That may have to be enough.

Juana

I met Juana in May. She was one of the people who fasted for ten days to try to move the conscience of the nation toward comprehensive immigration reform. I wrote an article about Juana and the fasters then. A few weeks later, I saw another article about Juana, this one written by a student in a journalism class at St. Thomas.

And today was the third time that I saw news about Juana. Yesterday the immigration agents found her and took her away in handcuffs. Today I saw her nine-year-old daughter crying. Today I stood with Juana's friends, and I cried, too. Patrick Ness, a stalwart young activist, said, "Our hearts are broken tonight." And not just for Juana Reyes, but for every immigrant mother torn away from her children because the laws give her no way to be here legally. A few weeks ago, another immigrant mother who had lived in Minnesota for more than a decade was deported, leaving behind her husband and children. They have legal status. She does not.

For Juana and for Sarah, the law gives no way out of their predicament and no way into the United States. For millions like them, there is no line to stand in to become legal residents.

In a few days, I will be going on a Freedom Tour of cities where the battle for civil rights was waged four and five decades ago. I believe that the plight of immigrants like Juana and Sarah challenges us to another battle for human rights.

The precautionary principle and RDF

I'm ready to put up a Neighbors Against the Burner sign in my yard, because I'm convinced that burning refuse-derived fuel (RDF) is a bad deal – economically and on environmental/health grounds. On the other hand, I want to be clear that this doesn't mean I'm against any power plant going up across the freeway at Rock-Tenn. I'm not. I believe that a power plant burning non-RDF biomass fuel can and should be built to provide affordable energy for Rock-Tenn's recycling operation, and possibly also for district heating in some part of the Midway neighborhood.

For background on Rock-Tenn and why it needs a new power source, see
Re-fueling Rock Tenn: environmental and economic challenges
Who's on First? Keeping track of the players
Following the money: who pays and who profits
Garbage or green energy: a look at the issues around RDF

The economic down-side of RDF should be easy to see. For starters, consider the fact that the current RDF production plant in Newport has been subsidized by taxpayer dollars since its beginning. Or the fact that the RDF fuel produced in Newport is so undesirable that the plant has to pay Xcel Energy to take it and burn it. If taxpayers are going to pay millions of dollars in subsidies every year, I'd rather see the money go to paying farmers to grow prairie grass for fuel and/or to increasing the Twin Cities' recycling percentage, currently about 40 percent to something closer to the 60 percent recycling/composting for municipal waste reached by the Netherlands and Austria. or the 69 percent recycling/composting rate achieved this year by San Francisco.

Health and environmental issues are harder to pin down. Hours of discussion at public meetings and hundreds of pages of reports do not conclusively prove that burning RDF causes cancer or heart attacks or other health problems. Note the weasel word: conclusively.

The British Society for Ecological Medicine's report says:

There are no certainties in pinning specific health effects on incineration: the report makes that clear. However this is largely because of the complexity of exposure of the human race to many influences.

Cancer may take 10 or 20 years to develop. Birth defects may have multiple causes. Some people are more vulnerable to contaminants than others. Some contaminants build up in the body over time. Some contaminants interact with others in ways that have not yet been identified. People move, so studies of public health around incinerators do not find all of the exposed population.

So scientists speak cautiously. The evidence linking municipal waste incinerators to health problems "is consistent with" causality for adult and childhood cancer and birth defects. The evidence "suggests" a wide range of illnesses connected with municipal waste incinerators.

The British medical report goes on to discuss the precautionary principle.

This principle involves acting in the face of uncertain knowledge about risks from environmental exposures. This means public health measures should be taken in response to limited, but plausible and credible, evidence of likely and substantial harm.

When it comes to RDF, plenty of evidence points to probably dangers. The garbage that goes into the system includes a wide variety of toxic materials. Burning RDF has produced fine particulate emissions (a health hazard in themselves), as well as toxic metals and hazardous organic compounds. Burning RDF also leaves a residue of ash, which is classified as hazardous waste and has to be put somewhere.

Proponents of RDF talk about new emissions control systems and about gasification. Of course, they also say that current systems work just fine.

I don't buy the arguments. If ever there was a case for the application of the precautionary principle, RDF incineration is that case. We do not need to add more fine particulate emissions to the Twin Cities' already-polluted air. We do not need to risk emissions of heavy metals and toxic organic compounds. We do not need to make our city the laboratory for conclusively proving –twenty or thirty years from now – that RDF incineration actually causes pulmonary or cardiac illnesses or cancer or birth defects.

Time and time again it has been found that what we did not know about chemicals proved to be far more important than what we did know. As an incinerator generates hundreds of chemicals, including new compounds, we can expect many unpleasant future surprises.

There are alternatives to RDF. We do not need to take a chance with the health of our cities and of future generations.