Calling All Actions

I went to a meeting with Christo tonight for a group that wants to become the New Orleans chapter of a national organization called "Call to Action." Basically, it's a Catholic group that wants to bring inclusivity into the church, primarily in the arenas of opening up ordination to women and married people and making the church more inclusive to LGBT people. I didn't really know what to expect, but I know for sure that that wasn't it. When we showed up, one of the people milling about asked if we had the right place - we were the youngest people in the room by about 50 years. If it's not quite that much, it's the result of a small miscalculation and not hyperbole.

Now, I'm used to being the youngest person at church events. In fact, when I went to mass with Steve at one point in the Fall, the parish director was so excited to see young people show up to the service that he took us out to dinner and asked us about joining the parish. But I wasn't expecting people who had stuck with the church for so long to be the ones actively trying to organize to change it. It was incredible hearing their perspectives, though, as they had all actually lived through Vatican 2 and could talk about what things were like before that, as well as to reflect on how things have evolved over the 50 years since then. It was a very interesting perspective to be able to share.

I guess when I think about it, maybe the oldest generation has the most dissatisfaction with the way that the church is run today. Many of the people my age that have issues with the church just leave. But older people have spent more time as part of the church, have developed a stronger identity as Catholics who go to mass, and have more invested in Catholicism. In fact, one of the women at the meeting tonight mentioned that if not for her children, she might not be a practicing Catholic at all anymore. She had 6 children, only half of whom still go to mass. It turned out that everyone who was part of that conversation (excluding me) had children who were grown, and at least one of each set had stopped going to mass. And the parents, who I was talking with, identified with their children's reasons for leaving the church. But for some reason it was strong enough for them to organize, but not strong enough to make them just leave.

I think this experience lends itself to an interesting commentary generally on the human condition of developing an identity as part of a group, and specifically on religion as an organization. What does it mean to be Catholic if you disagree fundamentally with a large number of decisions that have been made and consistently re-affirmed by the leadership of an organization, especially one as hierarchical as the Catholic church? You agree to be part of a group that shares certain beliefs, and then fight about what those beliefs are. To what extent are you really PART of that group, and to what extent do you even want to be? I like to think about what would happen if one of these people, or I for that matter, could somehow erase our history of personal experience with the Catholic church and then if we were asked to decide which, if any, religious organization we would be a part of. How many of us would choose Catholicism, with all of its brokenness and judgement and exclusivity? Certainly there are a lot of things that I love about the Catholic church, but are those things worth also being connected to all the things I disagree with?

I suppose in some ways it's not entirely dissimilar from campaigning for political change. If you're affiliated with a political party because you believe in many of their positions, but you take issue with some of their other stances, you generally stay in that party and fight to shift it closer to your ideals. You don't just give up on the whole thing and call it a wash. Most people don't, anyways.

It's beginning to feel like I'm rambling, so I'll close. I guess the take-away from this is either that old people can be progressive and fight for change, or that young people are less-invested in the church. Or, of course, that the success of organizing efforts is limited by the ability of the organizer to reach all of the intended audiences, which could have been a huge factor in play here. Oh yeah, and that self-imposed identities are funny. That's a pretty big one too.

Back To The Basics

It's amazing how relative all of our experiences are. It causes me to wonder about how much objective reality can possibly exist across people, when so much of my personal reality can be affected by my present surroundings. I'm beginning to think that human beings are more myopic than we are rational, but because we fail to recognize this to be the case we have tricked ourselves into thinking that we're primarily rational. And we ARE, I think, as long as we agree to stay short-sighted. Everyone has been in the position where they were SO cold that all they wanted was to be warm, and then after about 5 minutes inside a house with the same sweater on that they were wearing outside, they're sweating and ready to open the door for some cold air. It's because you didn't actually want to be WARM. What you wanted was to be warm-ER. And in your quest for immediate gratification, you overdid it. Because frankly, we're not very good judges of what we need when we're uncomfortable. The human desire for self-gratification overwhelms the natural penchant for moderation just about every time.

I think people get this way about food too. People think they're really really really hungry, and then they eat too much and they feel sick and they're really really really full. Equally unpleasant experiences. And while the latter experience is generally more avoidable than the former, with remarkable consistency it follows the former as if it were the necessary consequence of getting very hungry.

The reason why I began thinking about this was, like most situations where I begin thinking about things these days, while I was sitting in jail. Without getting into any details, I was talking with a guy about some options for getting moved in jail because of some issues that were going on, and one of the options was to be placed in a highly restrictive setting that we'll call "lockdown." There are pros and cons of being on lockdown, depending on your situation, but one of the most obvious cons is that there's potential for you to end up in a cell, many times by yourself, for up to 23 hours per day. When talking with this guy about his options, and getting to that one, he had a lot of questions about the conditions on lockdown that I did my best to answer. The way we were talking about it, it was as if we were talking about going to jail. Here's the thing- he's already IN JAIL. He's been in jail for quite a while now. But the little things, like having a day room, having time out on the yard (even less than weekly, in the least restrictive option), 15 minutes of family visitation per week, phone privileges... the prospect losing or changing any of those things really made me feel like we were talking about sending a free person to jail.

What it really made me wonder was how much freedom -I- have, and what would have to be taken away for me to feel like I've lost it. If there's jail within jail, could there also be jail within freedom? Or freedom beyond freedom? Like many musings, this brought me back to my favorite concept - value (I know I love value for a number of reasons, chiefly because a housemate of mine once told me so) . I think freedom is defined not as your abstract ability to do whatever you want, but your ability to access things that you value. I'm not permitted to own or use heroin, based on the laws of Louisiana (and the US, for that matter). I don't feel like my freedom is restricted in any way by this prohibition, however, because I have no interest in ever owning or using heroin. Some people think differently. I'm not allowed to go into stores unless I have a shirt on, based on common convention and municipal regulations. I do sometimes feel like my freedom is restricted by this, however, because if I had it my way people would never have to wear a shirt unless it was cold enough to warrant one for the heat retention. Again, some people think differently. At any rate, that rule restricts my freedom, while heroin laws do not.

But does the requirement to wear a shirt restrict freedom, in the abstract, any more than the restriction from using heroin? I don't think so. Or, to be more nuanced and less clear, I think that you can't answer that question because freedom doesn't really exist in the abstract, or if it does, it can't really be qualified, only quantified. A place with 5 restrictions might be more free than a place with 55 restrictions. But it's hard to say that one thing is NATURALLY more restrictive on freedom than another. It depends on what people value. If heroin were made legal, I would be no more free than I am right now, because a right that you don't exercise isn't a right at all.

So I find myself thinking that I may have an abundance of freedom, because I can do just about all of the things that I want to do. In fact, there are a number of things that I am free to do, but choose not to. But I wonder if the amount of freedom available to me has limited my ability to conceive of other things that I would value more, if I only had more freedom to do them. If it were easy to sprint, we would have no use for jogging.

Caveat- this, like all posts on this blog, is experimental. The stream-of-consciousness musings that help me try to wrap some of life's less-ordered parts into a more manageable package. I try pretty hard to separate my personal identity from my ideas, so feel free to disagree publicly or privately. In a few days I might disagree too.

Night Out Against Crime

Today was the annual "Night Out Against Crime" in New Orleans. The idea is that people go out in their neighborhoods, meet people in the community, talk about public safety, and build relationships with their neighbors. You know...to meet the people you're surrounded by, which will make crime that happens to other people seem more real to you. Then everyone will be more likely to stand up against crime, or something like that. These events pop up all over the city. They're mainly hosted by by community organizations or churches, but any group could set up a little block party and have a NOAC event.

I had a minor heart attack when I got to the NOAC event that my office was going to have a table at. I didn't see anyone from our office (which isn't common, and is a larger conversation for another time) when I got there, but I DID see the district attorney himself, Leon Cannizzaro, at the event chatting with a few police officers. Other than me and the guys that made the film they showed at the event (called Shell Shocked, which is actually turning out to be a pretty good commentary on violence in the city), Leon and the cops were the only white people in the park. As if we didn't have enough people getting confused between our office and the DA, we have an official spot at an event where the DA shows up and there's nobody from our office around. It was a little discouraging. Our community outreach directer was there, who I saw later, so it wasn't a COMPLETE no-show. Might as well have been though.

When I was walking back I was drawn to the sound of music down Rocheblave St. Now, I wasn't in what one might call a "safe" part of town. I had walked from Tulane and Broad to Claiborne and Orleans, and then I was walking down Lafitte St back towards Broad to catch the bus. So, I was wandering around the Treme and mid-city around 8PM - not outrageous, but definitely nothing like any of the neighborhoods I've lived in before. When I made it to the event on Rocheblave, I saw that it was being hosted by the Greater Zion Baptist Church, mostly because there were tables with the name plastered to the front, and partially because of the music coming from a stereo positioned in the doorway of the church. One of the deacons walked over to me and introduced himself - in fact, several people introduced themselves to me and everyone was very welcoming. The deacon asked me "do YOU live around here?" He was trying to be genuine, but there was no way that he could hide the incredulity. I can imagine what was going through his head- it didn't really make sense for me to be living there, but it also didn't make any sense that I would be there if I didn't. Not really a high-traffic area, and besides that I was the only white person on the block. Probably within 10 blocks. Actually, it was even more distinct than that. Not only was I the only white person there, but I was one of the only men there at all. If you don't count the deacon, I was probably the only male between the ages of 15 and 35. I wish I were joking.

And that brings me to my issue with the Night Out Against Crime, which is similar to the issue that I had with the Orleans Parish Prison Reform Coalition speak-out sessions against the Department of Justice: the people whose presence is truly needed don't come out. If we believe what everyone says at these events (and in general, really), which is that most of the violence in the city is committed by and against young black males, then how can we do any good when those people aren't part of the movement? All the mothers in the city who have lost their sons to violence can hang out together and commiserate, but until they can bring the remaining sons out to see the hurt that is caused to the community by violence, then we might as well just call it like it is and have support groups instead of community action events. Are the kids that go to church the ones that keep getting shot or getting locked up for gun charges? And if not, then maybe the church should close up shop for a little bit and the congregation should go spend some time outside of the corner stores where people hang out. You have little to no legitimacy when you're not part of that life experience. That's why I'm the wrong person to start the movement, I'm very aware of that. But I'm only slightly more wrong than a grandmother who knows everyone in the neighborhood; because neither of us has ever been told that we have to go shoot the guy who killed our brother so that they don't come after us too. She has a better understanding of the effects of the problem than me because she's probably felt them more acutely, but that doesn't give her the legitimacy needed to change an entire culture. An entire lifestyle.

So what do we end up with? A big gathering with a bunch of kids that are too young to understand what's going on and a bunch of adults whose experiences don't seem relevant to the group that people are most concerned about perpetuating the cycle of violence. We've basically hit every group that CAN'T DO ANYTHING about the problem. To a very limited extent, if you can get the local politicians involved, they can work to improve opportunities and make the system more navigable for the young and under-resourced, and potentially limit violence in that way. But no politician, no matter how powerful, can waive their magic wand and fix the whole problem. There's an entire history that can never be fully resolved, and there's a long way to go before people are willing to give that up. A narrative has been set in motion and so many people have been socialized with that narrative, that the only way to stop the violence is to rewrite history or adopt a new narrative. Neither of those things can happen without the support of the people who buy in to that narrative the most. And those people the ones that are conspicuously absent from most of the community organizing events I've seen so far in the city. Maybe, just maybe, it's going to take more than free hot dogs and a few ads in the Gambit to get somewhere with the highest murder rate in the country.

Vote for the Crook. It's Important.

I truly wish I could say "only in Louisiana." I guess to a certain extent, I can. Nowhere else that I know of do they have celebrity bartender nights featuring former governors, or bumper stickers that read "vote for the crook. It's important." And I feel confident that even if those two things were true other places, you'd be hard-pressed to find people chanting to re-elect someone that just finished serving 10 years in the federal penitentiary for embezzlement and corruption charges. But that was just another Tuesday evening for me in downtown New Orleans.

Let's back up for a minute and explain. Edwin Edwards was the governor of Louisiana for like 4 different terms over the last 40 years. He's 84 now, and he literally JUST got out of the federal pen this year. His most recent election was in the 90s, when he ran against former KKK Wizard David Duke. If you've listened to really old bounce music from New Orleans, one of the first beats to become popular featured "**** David Duke" on loop. David Duke was understandably quite unpopular with the minorities of Louisiana, among others, and it led to a serious third-party campaign which endorsed Edwin Edwards with the phrase "Vote for the crook. It's important." Everyone knew E2 was a thief. But at least he wasn't a Klansman. Truly, this represents the triumph of the lesser-of-two-evils philosophy of voting.

What's important here, I think, is not so much to dwell on how funny/terrible that election was, or how cool it is that former governors tend bar in New Orleans for a night just so that their loyal supporters can sit around and talk about how much better they would be doing in the current situation than Bobby Jindall is (although that was quite an experience). I think it's important for us to think about how and why we end up with this false dichotomy of having to choose one of two candidates, and this serious difficulty of not really supporting either one. How did the people of Louisiana find themselves choosing between the crook and the racist?

Well, as in all things, there are tons of complications and nuances when we get into the specifics of those two people and the political climate of Louisiana at the time, but I'd like to focus on the more basic issue of the way that one becomes an option at all in this political world that we observe and sometimes feel like we participate in. You get on the ballot (read: become an option) when you get endorsed by a major party, or when you get some largely inaccessible amount of people to signal that they support your candidacy (before you're on the ballot, mind you). That means that you pretty much either need to have a lot of support from people already within power in the party, or you need to have enough independant power and wealth to get your message out to a ton of people outside of the election process. Most people understand the importance of a republic over a democracy in that we need people we support to make decisions for all of us, because those of us that are doing real jobs that make the country run day-to-day don't all have the time, information, perspective, education, and/or intellect to decide what is in our best interest and how to pursue it for every single issue that comes up. That's why we elect a small group of (theoretically) elite people to make those decisions on our behalf, and we expect that those people will work in our best interests because we elected them to do just that, and we picked the person that we thought would be best at doing just that.

But somehow in the process of outsourcing decision-making about what we should do as a country to state-wide and national delegates, we've also outsourced the decision-making about who should be the decision-makers. That's where things get dangerous. We, as a people, lose our agency when we no longer control the fates of our politicians, which is what happens every time a primary goes by that no one cares about. If you had to choose between the primaries and the actual election, you really have more of an opportunity to shape policy by voting in the primary that the actual election. I'm not one of the people that thinks we should throw out the two-party system all together and open up elections to be a free-for-all. I've seen multi-party systems that worked and that failed, and I think that even the ones that succeed lend themselves even more to the base political tactics of favor-trading that lines pockets without solving any problems. But I think that the nomination system for parties needs to be more vigorous and accessible, and that's as much our fault as the big, rich, born-and-bred politicians behind the curtains at the National Conventions. Until we demand options that are better than and different from what we've been dealing with, we're not going to get anywhere. That means changing our focus in a few ways. That means focusing more on who makes it INTO and OUT OF the primaries, instead of waiting for the candidates to be selected before we consider the election to have begun. It also means focusing less on what law school a potential candidate went to, and more on what they've done with their lives. Finally, it means focusing on answers instead of rhetoric. I love rhetoric. I got my BA in rhetoric. But if we really want to get answers from our candidates at debates instead of double-speak, how about not voting for anyone that doesn't give concrete answers in debates? How's that for a movement? Watch all the debates during primaries, and keep track not only of what answers people gave, but who answered the questions at all. If you can't tell me what you believe in, either you don't know the answer or you're too weak to defend yourself to people who disagree. Either way, I don't want you to represent me.

Maybe if we pay more attention to the things that matter in a candidate and how people become one, we can improve the entire field. But if my options are to vote for the crook or the Klansman, I'll vote for the crook every time. It's important.

Those Less Fortunate

This is a phrase that I see a lot: "those less fortunate." I read about it in news articles; I hear about it from JV’s talking about their clients; I see it on virtually every cover letter for someone who wants to intern at our office; when people congratulate me for “taking a year off” (see older post on that whole idea). I think that phrase has, like many things, lost the original depth and nuance of its meaning and become a shallow, bland placeholder phrase. When people say “those less fortunate,” it can refer to any number of groups and situations, but it primarily means people that have less money, less education, less privilege due to their race and class. Some people that make it a point to sound progressive also include things like gender, sexual orientation, and ability in that list, but primarily people talking about the less fortunate mean the former list much more than the latter. I think the following applies with equal force to any of them.

When we use the label “less fortunate” to refer to the social position and struggles of these groups of people, what we’re really doing is admitting that our privileged position over them is not the result of something we’ve done or earned, but it is primarily because we had better luck than them. We are fortunate. We’re the lucky ones, as Allison Krauss might say. We have what we have not just because we deserve it, but because somewhere along the line we drew straws, great big humongous cosmically relevant straws, and some people got the short ones, but we were not those people. Some of us got the awesome wide ones you can get at Burger King, the ones that are so big you can actually drink a milkshake through them without it folding because you had to suck too hard. Other people got bright, colorful Krazy Straws that glow in the dark and light up as you drink through them and maybe even change colors. And then “those less fortunate” got a coffee stirrer that has been chewed on by a cat a few years ago so it’s all twisted up and liquid won't travel through it. As one might guess, the coffee stirrer is the shortest of the available straws in this situation, and the guy or girl who picked it got totally screwed. And it’s not their fault they ended up with the bad straw, that’s just it – they’re less fortunate. They don’t deserve the short straw any more than I deserve the Burger King straw, or the Olsen twins deserve the Krazy Straw. But that’s the straw they got, and they’re stuck with it.

But this is the other thing about “the less fortunate”: just because the difference between my situation and theirs is based on luck, that doesn’t mean that it’s completely out random. The straws didn’t all appear out of thin air, nor did they group themselves together and organize the picking of themselves. It’s true that neither coffee stirrer girl nor Krazy Straw guy did anything to deserve the straw they randomly picked-- but at some point SOMEONE was putting all the straws together, and they put the Krazy Straw and the Burger King straw and the coffee stirrer all in the same handful, knowing full-well that someone was going to get each of them and that would affect their life. Or at least their straw-related happiness.

So here I am with a pretty good straw. I can consider myself fortunate. I see other people with pretty crappy straws. They can consider themselves less fortunate. In the same way that I didn’t do anything to make myself fortunate, and they didn’t do anything to make themselves less fortunate, I didn’t do anything to make them less fortunate either. I’m not the guy that put all the straws together, I just benefit from it. This is a very difficult situation for me to wrap my head around and to figure out what is really right. I, like most people, feel like I worked hard for the things that I have. I started with a good straw, but I also had to take what I had and make something out of it. It’s not like everything just worked out for me automatically just because I had a pretty good straw, right? I know people that had straws as good as mine that didn’t work as hard as me, and many of them aren’t in as good of a position. But then again, if I look at the people with the really good straws, the ones way better than even mine, I notice that many of the ones that didn’t work as hard as I did are still better off than me, and the ones that tried as hard or harder than me ended up WAY better off. As egocentric as I am, even I can extrapolate that experience to presume the way the people with the coffee stirrer feel when comparing their lives to mine.

So what’s the take-away here? First of all, I think it’s important to remember that I am, and most of the people reading this are, extremely fortunate. We have more, in terms of most measures of social capital, than the average person in this country, let alone the world. Second, that our position is based largely on just that – good fortune. And for many of the people that are missing out, it’s not their fault that they drew the short straw; they’re just unlucky.

Here’s one crazy idea, just to throw out something both concrete and controversial. In the grand scheme of things, it’s not that radical, but just think for a minute about the possibilities. What if there were a 90% estate tax? And all the proceeds were divvied out across the country, were earmarked solely for public education, and were allocated in proportion to the number of students at each school? If you really want to start eliminating luck from the equation, you have to simultaneously get rid of the advantages that come from inheriting wealth, and the (separate but related) disadvantages that come with inheriting poverty. Because you inherit poverty just as much as you inherit wealth. And in many ways, it’s easier to squander your wealth than it is to overcome your poverty. Of course it’s not a solution, but wouldn’t it be an interesting start?

What I think is especially appealing to me about this plan is that you’re not taking away anything that someone EARNED, except the person who died, and I don’t think that person has much of a legitimate claim to it once they’re dead. I’m not sure people have the right to inherit wealth. If there is an argument along those lines that I’d be receptive to, I think it would be more that a person has the right to leave their money to whom they want, but even that I think is inaccurate. If you want people to have things you have, you should give it to them while you’re living. Once you’re gone, you don’t really have a claim to it anymore. That’s my current position, anyways. Which isn’t quite socialism, because you could still have as much wealth as you could personally acquire. You just wouldn’t get to start with so much that the rest of the players can’t compete. And competition, as we all know, is the heart of Capitalism, our national religion.

A New Perspective on Sex (Offenders)

One of my more ongoing projects over the course of this year is one that I stumbled upon in November, and have been sort of working on here and there for the last 6 months. Over the last month or two it's gotten more attention in my office, and we've got a few people that are actually interested in the issue. Enough that I feel comfortable having a lot of interns working on this project...and I mean a LOT. We've probably already expended 200 hours of volunteer labor on this grand scheme that is evolving as it goes, but maintains the same basic goal: find housing for registered sex offenders.

I realize that many people have a hard time feeling sympathy for registered sex offenders. That's part of the reason why they need so much help. It's so easy, politically, to earn points by throwing the book at them. Not only is it a minority that everyone loves to hate, but they're pretty much exclusively convicted felons, meaning you don't even have to worry about losing their votes! Add to that the fact that the vast majority of convicted sex offenders (at least in New Orleans) are indigent African-Americans, and you're got guaranteed results from increasing punitive regulation on them. Here's the thing about sex offender registration: it's existence alone proves that the system is broken. Let's break that down for a minute.

You're arrested for a crime, convicted, and sentenced. What does that mean? It means the police think you did something wrong, and they along with the DA's convince a judge or jury that you did it, and therefore you must be punished (unless they farm a plea out of you, but that's a different story). Sentencing is intended to serve a few purposes: punish the offender, deter future offenses by the offender and others, and keep the good, law-abiding citizens safe from the criminal while (s)he is being rehabilitated. Go to jail, do your time, pay your fees, do your community service, finish the restitution, and then go about your way. That's how it's supposed to work, right? But with "sex offenders," you serve your time and then get out only to be monitored for the next 15 years, 25 years, or the rest of your life. That means you register your name, picture, and charge in public domain; circulate it to every neighborhood you ever move to (and pay $600-$700 each time for the privilege of doing so); report to probation/parole; and conform to a whole host of crazy regulations, including random drug tests and searches for contraband (which includes any materials with sexual encounters, human or animal). Technically, I imagine many rated-R movies and more than half National Geographic publications meet this broad classification.

What is the purpose? To punish them even more? For all other charges, a probationary period is used in lieu of serving the full sentence; for "sex offenders," it's in addition to the full sentence. Shouldn't sex offender registration be sort of like a specialized probation, where you serve part of your time in the community, but with added restrictions? Also, the public record of all the information would be a special kind of public shaming that even the US wouldn't condone for sheer punitive purposes. People here still sort of believe in 8th amendment rights.

It turns out that the most logical explanation for the requirement, and the one that most people will give you (as a valid justification for the rule), is that people need to know where these dangerous people are so that they can be safe. There are maps, public databases, neighborhood watch groups. There are fliers, newspaper ads, and bulletins every time a new one moves into a neighborhood. Many of them have a special condition saying that they can't live within 1000 feet of a school, church, playground, daycare, or "place where children generally congregate." Basically, it’s clear that the people who made the law think that children are unsafe when within three football fields of such a person. If these people are so dangerous that we need to know where they live and keep them physically separate from our children, why are they being released? I'm not trying to argue that everyone convicted of a sex offense should die in Angola (the largest state penitentiary in Louisiana, and one that houses only life-sentence or death-sentence inmates). I think that this is a clear reflection of the fact that everyone admits jail doesn't work. It doesn’t rehabilitate or deter future offense, because if it did, we wouldn’t have to worry about these people when they got out.

I don’t have all the answers. I might not have any of the answers. But I know where to start, and where you start is to stop ostracizing people and then wondering why they haven’t been properly socialized. And no, socialization isn’t always effective, nor is it always good. But when it comes to deviant behavior, it seems pretty clear that taking a bunch of people with closer ties to the underground economy than the formal one, and forcing them out to the fringes of society, is not going to encourage civic engagement and participation. And that doesn’t just apply to sex offenders—that’s just what’s on my mind right now.

Yesterday

I started writing this entry on Friday, February 11. It is now Tuesday, February 15. "Yesterday" here now refers to "5 days ago," but is still a kind of cool story. Without further ado:

Yesterday was a productive day. Started with a meeting with the education liaison and teachers for OPP, where we spent 2 hours learning about opportunities to get classes. There are 48 slots in GED classes for people above the age of 19 in OPP. There are about 3,000 prisoners that fit this category (there are another 500 that are 19 and under).

I got back to my office to see an email titled "Armed man may be in our bld", about someone who allegedly stabbed someone in our building and was still at-large, NOPD suspecting he was still in the building.

Around the same time, I got copies of the sick call request forms that people use in jail to request medical attention emailed to me from the jail doctor. It took a little while because he had to ask the Sheriff's permission to send it to me. The sheriff is going to start hating me- in the last few weeks I've been associated with people bothering him for marriages in jail, sick card forms, "ambushing" the educational partners, and photo motions. I dig it.

Next, I did some training on intake and did intake. That included me coming within literal seconds of being arrested. But let's not get into that right now.

Coordinated volunteer work on getting this Spanish-speaking guy married before his trial, because he'll probably get deported afterward (or serve more time, then get deported).

Then I wrote memos and did bond calls for my intake people.

Got home in time for dinner and meeting Brian's dad.

Went to Le Bon Temps to see Soul Rebels with a few of my housemates and one of their friends from out of town.

Got home at 3AM.

Got up at quarter to 7.

Start over.

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That's a bit of a dramatic example of a day, but really not a whole lot different from how my life goes. Probably the biggest difference between that and an average day for me is that I had contact with more clients than I usually get to these days. Today I spent a few hours at a clinic with a client of ours, but other than that I spent most of my time doing volunteer recruitment, coordination and training. But enough about work. I feel like I always talk about work. That's probably because that's the most relevant and time-consuming part of my life right now. But there's more to my life than my work, although maybe the world would be a little better if there weren't, and I'll talk about it a bit now.

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I didn't work at all this weekend. I laid out for a while, went to a (miserably attended) "Know Your Rights" presentation, biked around, gave blood, went to mass and dinner with the National JVC board, went to a dive bar with housemates and FJV's for a friend's birthday, ate copious amounts of pancakes, wrote a letter, made hummus and flatbread, went to a coworker's boyfriend's art show and out with some coworkers after, bought fabric and spray paint to finally make a "New Orleans Hornets"-themed bag toss set, and actually slept for almost 8 hours one night. On the agenda for this week is coaching our house's intramural basketball team, finally making those bags I keep talking about making, and hosting our America-themed party on Friday night. Oh yeah, and getting an MRI in the morning. That will be interesting. I don't think it even makes sense to talk about the shoulder until I figure out what happened with it. There's too much uncertainty. Everything will be fine though- that much I know. At least I got a whole season of softball in before it blew up.

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The Stacy boys are considering having the next FOSAA reunion in New Orleans. I can't decide which is worse- how much my housemates are unprepared for FOSAA, or how much FOSAA is unprepared for NOLA. Either way, I can't wait to see how it pans out. Things like this can only end up one way - flawlessly.

Indigence.

Right now I'm sitting at work, taking a break from writing a particularly complicated memo that involves me basically making a lot of decisions that I'm not qualified to make. That seems to be a pretty standard sentiment in my office, and I think it might be a pretty standard sentiment everywhere. This particular endeavor involves defining a bunch of fundamental concepts that we're using to rewrite the way that we determine indigence. Basically, it has come to our attention that the forms and system we've been using to see who qualifies for a public defender are both doing, but not doing well (a distinction that has been made recently in other online literature). So we're going to come up with a new system and new forms that will be easier to fill out, more clear, and help us better determine who is indigent.

Why does that matter? Mostly because we like the word "indigent" and all of its variations. But we also need to know because my office is only allowed to represent people who are indigent, or who are "unable, without substantial financial hardship to himself or to his dependents, to obtain competent, qualified legal representation on his own." There are some basic guidelines provided by the Public Defender Act of Louisiana, but there are also a lot of areas that need to be interpreted, especially if you're determining indigency for people who don't automatically qualify because they get public assistance (like food stamps or public housing) or make less than 200% of the Federal Poverty Guidelines (which for one person totals out to be a staggering $21,660 per year). So, for example, you have to consider someone's assets to see if they qualify for a public defender. And their monthly expenses. And their debt. And how many dependents they have (and their ages). Astrological sign is optional.

It has somehow become my responsibility to sit in an office on Tulane Avenue, look at a computer, and use these (and other) criteria to decide who can and can't afford to hire their own private attorney. Me, the same person who calls families every week to ask them if they can help bond their child/friend/fiance/parent/cousin out of jail, and about half the time hears a familiar "I don't have that kind of money to bond him out." On a $10,000 bond. $7,000 bond. $5,000 bond. Bonds that would cost less than four digits to get a bondsman to get someone out of jail!

But those really aren't the people we're talking about here, determining who qualifies for a public defender. If they're still in jail for the trial, they're going to qualify for a PD pretty much regardless. But what about the people who sold their car to pay the guy's bond? Or used their entire monthly SSI check as a down payment with a bondsman, and owe that much again with no idea how to pay it off?

The point isn't that some people are poor and can't afford lawyers or bonds. The point is that I am acutely aware of how little I know about that entire lifestyle, and yet I'm the one that is saying "You can afford a lawyer, and you can't." How do I know who can afford a lawyer? If you make a thousand dollars more than the income cutoff, do you have a thousand dollars to spend on a lawyer? I'm inclined to think not. It's sort of hard to think of a system that doesn't reward people for bad spending habits, if you count assets like money in the bank against people. If two people have the same income and family unit size, but one of them has saved up a thousand dollars and the other one has no bank account and $19.24 in his pocket because he really likes to buy po boys for lunch, should you tell the first person to pay for a lawyer and the second person he can have one for free?

I suppose it's the nature of the beast that you're going to screw poor people over no matter what. Fortunately, I can take comfort in knowing that plenty of organizations thrive on that purpose, so I'm not alone. And I'm a pretty social person, so that's nice. But basically, you're inevitably going to punish people for saving money, or make poor people hire lawyers that they can't really afford (and go into debt, which leads to a whole slew of other problems), or give a free lawyer to people who can afford their own, which clearly and noticeably detracts from the level of service we can provide to the clients of ours who really need us. And I, with my vast knowledge of and experience with (A) supporting a family, (B) living close to the poverty line, (C) chronic bouts of unemployment or underemployment, and (D) any other of a host of issues that our (potential) clients deal with, am going to sit around the office on a Thursday night and write a policy to determine how much money really is enough before it would cause you "substantial financial hardship" to hire a lawyer.

It's ok. I live in solidarity with the poor, right? I'm volunteering, and living simply, and making less than half of minimum wage. I'm just the man for the job, aren't I?

Sometimes I make myself laugh.

520208

As of Thursday night, 3,000 people have been arrested in Orleans Parish since I started work here on August 18th. That's 121 days. That's 24.8 people per day...I think we can safely round to 25. There are couple of things that stand out to me about this:

1.) Holy crap! I've been working here for four months already!

2.) If this rate keeps up, 9,000 arrests will happen in the year I spend working here. That doesn't quite mean 9,000 different people because some of those will be the same person getting arrested more than once in a year, but that seems to happen about once per day.

3.) If New Orleans' population is 485,000, that means that in the last 4 months 0.6% of the city was arrested. If it keeps up all year, 1.85% of the city will have been arrested. (As an aside, OPP's 6,800 average prison population represents roughly 1.5% of the city's population).

I'm going to take this opportunity to just throw out some musings about the work so far:

Most of the people come through first appearances for one of the following things:

-Domestic Abuse Battery

-Possession of illegal drugs

-Illegal possession of a gun, whether because of where you are, you're a convicted felon, you also have drugs on you, etc.

I just got the pricing list for things in prison. Some of it is reasonable, and some not so much. Ex:

Ramen - 68 cents

Bible - $5

Koran - $12

2 Ibuprofen pills - 49 cents

Toothbrush - $2.12

Boxers - $3.45

On my last intake day, which was Saturday, 24 people came through for First Appearances. We give practice levels for how serious a charge is, 1-5. 1 is a misdemeanor, while 5 is life without parole. No one that came through on Saturday had a level 4 or 5 charge. Even so, the total bond set for all 24 people was $389,500. If they all used a bondsman to get out, they would be paying between $50,635 and $58,425 total to be released. Not a single one of those 24 people had an income for their entire family unit that was even half of $50k.

All of those people who don't bond out will probably stay in jail for an average of 2 months before they even get arraigned (where they get to plead guilty or not guilty).

That's enough depressing stuff for now. I'm going home tomorrow morning, and I'll forget all about all of this. I'll have fun, visit people, laugh, and not give OPP a second thought. My clients, on the other hand, will be sitting in jail. They don't get the luxury of going on vacation, or going to see their families, or forgetting about how screwed up everything is. Because that's their life. It's just my past-time.

Taking a Year Off

Before I get into the article, I’d like to give a basic synopsis of what I’ve been up to for the last two months while I wasn’t updating this blog. Unfortunately, I’m not sure I can do it any justice. Taking two months of your life and focusing it into a few experiences, stories, or even themes is an uncompromisingly daunting task. I'll see what I can do to, in the words of Kipling, "splash at a 10-league canvas with brushes of comet's hair." We’ve had great times for the holidays, including:

-giant parties hosted by Steve’s work (Project Lazarus) for Halloween, overwhelmingly populated by flamboyant gay men

-Thanksgiving dinner of 11 people at our house, for which we all cooked something and I made the 2 turkeys (one original, one Cajun-style)

-Perhaps more importantly, a Thanksgiving-day football game in the part

-Certainly more importantly, I introduced the house to the traditional Fennellian fare of turkey slop

In general, life has been great and fairly busy. I work a lot, but I’m getting a lot done and I like the people I work with as well as most of the work I do. It looks like my job functions will start to change in about a month, when Virginia finishes at school and becomes a full-time employee and we get one more employee from Australia named Sam. From there I’ll be doing more work, in the most general terms, on building institutional knowledge. In practical terms, I’ll be doing a lot of training (both actual and materials), rebuilding and reformatting the office’s Wiki (which needs about as much work as a gutted home), and coordinating all the volunteers that will start coming in. That’s not all set in stone- like all things at my office, it’s sure to change based on what crises come up here and there. But the idea is that once I don’t have a full load of intake to be doing, I’ll have at least some time to devote to those things.

Apart from work, the home life is pretty good. My housemates and I still get along well, and we’re still making time to do things together even as we each start to have more things to be doing apart from the community as well. I’m starting to form some good relationships with some of my coworkers and one of my neighbors, which is a nice feeling. I’m making time to go to the gym a few times a week in the morning before I go to work. Marecca (from the other community) usually goes with me, which is nice because I don’t have quite enough motivation yet to get up by myself as often as I do because she’s going with me. Steve (also from the other community) and I have been chilling a lot recently too, and we’re starting to teach each other songs on the guitar. Pretty soon we’ll be able to have a pretty sweet jam session. We learned Nelly’s “Just a Dream” last night, which was a ton of fun. Yesterday we had a cookout in the backyard- it was 75 degrees and it was one of the first things that I organized in New Orleans that I felt like was really a success. It was just a perfect day, and everything fell into place like Amanda Pedro putting a puzzle together.

There are still tons of people around New Orleans that invite us to come see them, and we’re not very good at all about keeping in touch with them. It’s something that I wish we would take advantage of more, but since I’m not really the contact for any of the groups, it’s sufficiently inconvenient for me to do so that I usually just don’t bother. But we’ve gotten to hang out with the Duchense sisters, Sister Helen Prejean and the sisters of St Joseph, the Jesuit Residence at Loyola, a zillion different church communities, and about half a dozen service corps (ACE, TFA, CY, Americorps, and a few other religious groups).

In terms of news, I suppose there are a few updates that are worth sharing in case people don’t know, so that you can’t say I never told you:

-My computer is pretty much officially dead. One of my neighbors accidentally decided it was thirsty a few months ago, and it never recovered. Pretty much everything important was backed up on my external hard drive, it just makes it a little harder for me to update the blog and stuff. If I’m at work I’m too busy to do anything else, even if I stay late, so I just need to remember to ask a roommate to borrow a computer to do something like this while everyone else sleeps. I’m still the last to bed and one of the first to get up in the community. Steve says I’m a vampire.

-The van, most recently named the “Lean, Mean, Green, ‘Bama Machine” is also no more. One of my housemates got in an accident a few weeks ago. Everyone’s ok, but the car is definitely totaled. So that’s going to make road tripping a little harder.

-On that note, I’ll be flying home for Christmas. I’m getting into Charlotte on December 21^st, and then Matt and I are coming to Havelock on the 23^rd. I’ll be there til a stupid hour of the morning on the 28^th, when I fly back home to New Orleans out of New Bern.

I know that’s a terribly concise relation of my last two months, but no amount of writing at this point can really do justice to everything that’s gone on. Hopefully I can be better about it from now on. Moving on to the actual entry that I was meaning to write:

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The irony of an article whose title is about taking time off after not updating this for two months and preparing to go home for the holidays is not lost on me. It’s not necessarily intentional, but I suppose that it dovetails rather nicely. I’ll keep it relatively brief, since I’ve already written a lot today.

Most people have no idea what it is that I’m doing this year. It’s kind of a strange place to be, working but being called a “volunteer” and getting paid for what I do by the organization I work for. My coworkers say I’m on a fellowship, which isn’t quite true but close enough that it does a better job of explaining my role than anything else they could say. Among people that do have some familiarity with how my situation works, there are generally two different categories.

The first are the people who just don’t get it. They understand what I’m doing, but don’t understand why. They wonder why I would waste time doing something where I don’t make money, I’m not going to school, and I’m not going to advance.

The second are the people who sort of get it. They understand what I’m doing, and understand that the work is important and valuable to society. They’re excited that I’m doing something good for the less fortunate in society. They say things like “It’s so great of you to take a year off to help people.”

Clearly, these two groups have very different ideas of the importance of social work, and that’s fine. To be expected. Probably even good, to a certain degree, because cynicism is as necessary as idealism if you ever really want to get anything accomplished. I think the important thing to realize that in a very fundamental way, they are both terribly mistaken. Allow me to explain.

The first group of people basically see little value in investing your time, effort, and money (in terms of opportunity costs) in something that won’t help you personally. The second group sees great value in doing that while you’re young and you have a lot of both time and effort. But at some point, both groups agree that in the long run, there are more important life aspirations than to sacrifice everything to help others. For group 1 it’s explicit; for group 2 it’s implied by saying “taking a year off.” What is the year “off” from? It’s taking time away from what really matters, and what really matters to them is what really matters to most people, which is getting a good education so you can get a good job and have a good family life and be comfortable. And that’s a grand ideal. But that’s not what really matters.

For those of us that have read the bible and believe that some parts of it are, if not true, at least good guidance in justice or morality, we must demand more of ourselves and each other. The goal of our lives isn’t to make ourselves comfortable. Many amazing people that either haven’t read it or don’t assign it even that much credibility have reached a similar conclusion. What really matters might in an academic sense be bringing yourself happiness, but there should be no better way of doing that than working to bring God’s kingdom to earth, which can be done by secular means as effectively as (if not more than) by any others. Jesus would not have been remarkably sympathetic to the Invisible Hand argument for social optimization. We have an individual responsibility to actively bring justice to the oppressed. That is not negotiable. What could be a more important goal? What could one possibly value more?

So if you think about it, I’ve been taking the last 22 years of my life off. And if I go on from here to live a normal life, then I’ll be taking the rest of my life off too. I think that most people who “take a year off” have, in reality, only had one real year on. The rest is just sort of a break. Or a distraction. A tangent perhaps. But how can we justify the goal of human existence in terms of the individual struggle to achieve greatness, rather than in terms of the collective struggle to overcome misery? And in the end, coming from where we are right now, is it even possible to achieve one without achieving the other?

So from now on, whenever I hear about “taking time off” to do service, I’ll be asking myself the question “taking time off from what?” And if whatever it is requires you to take time off from it in order to do service, is it really something you should be doing at all?

Tales

It's an interesting situation, having tales to tell and no time with which to share them. The good news is that I've started keeping notes of the interesting client interactions I've had at work- my office is all going to compile them for the year, I think, and then we might make a book. We'd have to make the NYT Bestseller list to come close to making enough money to bring us back to minimum wage for the hours we work. I'm really diving into the whole thing though, and I love it. I don't think it's fair to say that any of the clients are really my friends yet, but I've had really good connections with a few of them, including some really warm smiles, a few that come try to talk to me even when they've been called up to talk to their lawyer or investigator and not me, and most recently, a fist bump (separated by 3 inches of plexiglass). Those are almost as rewarding as looking on the screen and seeing someone getting released. I have to be careful about getting too comfortable with them though- I'm beginning to convince myself that I understand what my clients are going through because I've talked about studied it and fought against it so much since I got here. But in reality I can never understand what these people are dealing with, because I've never been arrested (no matter how hard I've tried on certain occasions). I have to find a happy medium. Or maybe a not-so-happy medium, if I really got deep enough into their shoes.

Some interesting experiences since my last update:

• Volunteered at the Ritz Carlton for the 10-year anniversary of Cafe Reconcile, a job training center for at-risk youth that one of my roommates works at
• Went to Plaquemine's Parish for a Baptist church service, followed by a boil. It was amazing- they treated us just like family. I learned how to boil and how to do the bus stop (just a groovier version of the electric slide); Lester responded to that with "So that means you're black now!" It really felt like a compliment. I don't know how many other places in the US that would be true for people.
• Won our first work-league softball game...and lost like 3.
• Broke the door at a bar (but not permanently- it was screwed up before I got there, I promise!!!)
• Got stopped by a cop on the street while walking. Didn't get searched. Didn't get booked. He didn't even run my ID. How different my life is from my clients'.
• Had a great birthday that included a brass band concert (Soul Rebels- AMAZING), a block party in uptown for the Abita pubcrawl, some people over at the house to hang out afterwards with beverage sponsored by my wonderful brother, and a cookout sponsored by my amazing grandparents with my housemates. The whole thing was outstanding.
• Picnics on the Fly, which is this field on the banks of the Mississippi River, with the housemates
• Volunteering at the Good Shepherd Gala, which was a fundraiser for the charter school that Catherine, one of my roommates, works at.
• Listening to great live music on Frenchmen Street, including a sweet reggae band and the New Orleans legend known as Kermit Ruffins.
• Finishing up a set of cornhole boards and sewing the bags for the backyard.
• Impromptu Shirtless Mechanic Night, after one of the tires of the van popped.
• Actually, in the same week the van was out of commission because of the flat tire and my laptop was out of commission because a neighbor of mine decided that it was thirsty. That reminded me that my idea of simple living still needs some refining. I can get along just fine without them. I think I’d be pretty sad to lose my guitar though. I’ve been playing that a lot lately, especially once my roommates are sleeping. I definitely sleep the least of anyone in my house, so I just go out on the porch at night and play some.

In other news, I cut off all my hair. A few pictures are on Facebook.

Craziness

Here is a brief outline of some ridiculous things that have happened so far in Nawleans:

Midway to Mardi Gras- my first second-line ever. It was basically just a parade through the streets in our neighborhood, where we all got dressed up in ridiculous costumes and danced around. I made a dress out of a pillowcase. It was wonderful.

Chick-Fil-A Bowl- I went up to Atlanta over Labor Day Weekend to stay with the FOSAA boys. It was just like the old days- maybe even TOO much like the old days. We had a blast though, and the Atlanta JV's met us out on Sunday night, which was a lot of fun. Molly, Jordan, Bernadette, Jayne, Mackenzie, and Sarah all came to have a drink with us and chat. It seems like they're enjoying their time in ATL. If the city weren't so spread out it would probably be better for them, but they seem to be doing pretty well despite the sprawl. The game was epic. I was so giddy during the fourth quarter, I felt like a child. And pre-game tailgating with Michael, Britt, Dori, Hannah, Meagan, Lauren, Ryan, Kelly, and everyone else was exactly what I needed on a sunny Saturday afternoon.

Office League Softball- I joined the team and we had our first game on Wednesday. We were quite bad, which is nice because I fit right in. Definitely room for improvement though- we're in training mode right now. Definitely. Just like all things we do at the office, we're understaffed and underresourced for our games. The other team had batting gloves. BATTING GLOVES. That's all you really need to know to understand the situation. It was super fun though, and most of the people on the team were very inviting to me, which is always appreciated. That's also where the other attorney, Carlotta, gave me/PTS props.

Who Dat Nation- my first experience in NOLA during a Saints' game. It was out of control- schools got out early and courts closed for the opening game. I mean...the game started at 7:30 and schools were letting out at 2. Sections of court closed for the afternoon. There are people in jail in New Orleans right now that have to wait extra days, weeks, or even months for their court date because it had to be rescheduled. That was pretty appalling. On the plus side, most of the housemates went out to a sports bar for the game and it was incredibly fun. Standing room only in a massive bar, and everyone was really excited. I ran into Donna, one of the public defenders at my office, randomly at the bar. It's true what they say about it being a small city. She's one of the 2 attorneys who has actually said to me, in a social setting outside of work, how appreciative she is of the work that I do at pretrial. It's really nice to get that kind of validation, but that's really just the culture of the office. When someone wins a case, another attorney in the office emails the entire staff listserv about it and your inbox is useless for the afternoon because it's just filled with congratulatory "reply all's" to them.

Police Interactions- I got pulled over by a cop yesterday while walking down a sidewalk, going home from work. The cop questioned me a little bit, and then once I finally "proved" I was coming home from work at OPD by showing him my ID badge, he told me I matched the description of someone they were looking for who was walking around and posing as an AT&T repairman to get into people's houses. I really squandered my golden opportunity to test out one of my favorite cop ploys: usually cops write in the police reports that someone they questioned was touching their pocket repeatedly, which they say gives them reasonable suspicion to search them for drugs. I kept meaning to pat my pockets repeatedly if I ever ran into a cop to see if they'd do it to a well-dressed white guy, but I completely forgot to do it in the heat of the moment. Even so, it's pretty clear that I got out of that incident easily. What if I didn't have a job I was coming from, or a way to prove it? Or even if I did...what if they didn't believe me and took me down to booking? And then if they haven't found the person yet, or the description includes something like "blue jeans and white t-shirt with dreadlocks" and you match it, you get booked. That's all there is to it. And then you spend 2 months in jail waiting to even get a chance to plead not guilty. And then wait another month or more to start trying to prove that it wasn't, in fact, you. That happens to a lot of people; just not to people who look like me.

Work Issues Generally- I had my first of a number of things. I had my first seriously mentally ill clients, I've done my first photo motions with the court, I've gotten my first medical release waivers together, I've gotten my first truly appreciative clients and families, as well as my first truly hostile ones. I've cost a guy about an extra month in prison. I've saved a guy months, too. In case you were wondering, it doesn't feel like it balances out. I'm finally getting the hang of innovating office processes and I'm starting to get things done more efficiently. I'm starting to codify policies that we're coming up with so that we don't have as much brain drain every time someone leaves or moves, which is especially important when we have so many volunteers coming in and out that need to be trained or retrained. I absolutely love my work. It's sort of a nice problem to have that I can look at the clock some days and have accidentally worked 11 hours, and then knowing that I have to go home to see my community even though I'd really like to just finish this one thing...plus this one other thing...and then this thing. It never ends.

Gotta run to catch a bus now for the 10-year anniversary of Cafe Reconcile- we're volunteering for it at the Ritz. Hillary's placement is there so we've been getting the low-down on everything. Can't wait!

"Man, that ain't even how it happened!" - 1/3 of my clients

The First Week of Nawleans

Yesterday marked my first full week in NOLA as a JV. There are tons of things to talk about, and I’m not really inculcated enough into any of them to give a very comprehensive account. I think that, for purposes of simplicity and concision, I’ll break down the experience thus far into 3 sections: work, community, and the city. I guess I should probably mention some things about orientation in Houston as well, so I’ll start with that.

Orientation: We were in a gorgeous retreat center called Circle Lake, outside of Houston. There were really nice cabins and the grounds were outstanding- lots of little walking paths, gardens, lakes, and wildlife. It was really peaceful. That’s where I met all of my fellow JVC-South participants, and fell in love. It was one of those places where I really felt like we were all there for the same reasons, and a lot of us seem to be in about the same place in life. That said...my community is definitely still the best. As an unbiased observer, I can say that with a reasonable degree of scientific certainty. Actually, we were kind of “that guy” collectively sometimes, but that’s just because we got along so well. We had some good talks by staff and presenters, also some less-than-good talks from the same, but lots of time to reflect and meet each other and do some community-building stuff. As much fun as it was, though, after 4 days of it I think we were all ready to get to our placements.

The City: I don’t really know that I’m able to comment too much on the city right now, even though we’ve been making a pretty conscious effort to go out and see as much of it as we can. I think that the biggest things that I can say about it so far are that the layout is a little confusing, being the Crescent City and all, and that the people here are super great. It’s like the traditional Southern and European hospitalities are working together to make most people here really friendly. I was a little bit worried that being in a big city would make that harder to find, but it seems like that was unfounded. There are so many beautiful houses and buildings; even in middle-income places you can find really sweet architecture. As my roommate Catherine put it, a lot of them look like beach houses- they look like they have themes and stuff.

Community: As long as I’m talking about one of my roommates, I’ll move on to a little discussion about the whole community. So, my house has 6 people: Ali, Brian, Catherine, Hillary, Lindsey, and me. The other side of the duplex is a different community, where Alex, Marecca, Maya, Nicky, and Steve live. So far we’ve been getting along really well- no major drama and we’ve been hanging out a lot, both within community and cross-community. We’ve gone out a few times to listen to live music, played some sports, gone for a run, gone to mass, meandered around the city, and just hung out around the house so far. I imagine there will be a lot more of all that this year. I’ve probably been the least accessible member of our community because I’ve been working so late, but whenever I’m home I’ve been doing what I can to spend time with people instead of going off and doing my own thing. Not that it’s really a sacrifice- I like these people a lot.

Work: I don’t really think there’s any way to describe my work without using the words “overwhelming” and “hectic.” And it’s not one of those things where that will change as I get more used to the work. I think that, in reality, it will get more overwhelming once I’m better at what I’m doing, because I’ll have more responsibilities. Right now people are going easy on me because I’m the new guy. Of course, “going easy on me” still involves working some 11-hour days, but there’s always so much to do and so few people to do it. And in a lot of cases, failure means that someone spends time in jail that they don’t have to. Or doesn’t get their medicine in jail while they’re there. Or goes back to jail instead of being free to go. Friday was my first experience where I realized that if I, personally, didn’t succeed at a very specific (and difficult) task, a person was going to jail. I was thinking that as I sat down and talked to him, and made phone calls trying to straighten the situation out. It’s a lot of responsibility to have on your third day of work. But everyone I work with is a generally excellent person- they’re motivated, they’re educated, and largely smarter than me. They keep me pretty much at capacity, which I’m very grateful for, because I realize how hard it is to give someone enough work to keep them busy, but not so much that things aren’t getting done. I have yet to make my first truly massive blunder, so be prepared for the post where I work my head through that whole experience. Don’t get me wrong- I’ve made plenty of mistakes. Just none that have cost anyone years of their lives yet. I figure it’s probably inevitable though. That’s all part of the job though. Starting today I have my own “cluster,” which means that 3 court rooms are essentially mine. For the next year. And all of the clients that work in those court rooms are also mine.

This is pretty long already, and I realize it’s very cursory, but I don’t want to write a novel here. I’ll try to be better about keeping this updated so that I don’t have to write 1000 words to say pretty much nothing next time.

“God’s salvation is open to EVERYONE.”- Priest at the gospel mass we went to today. I found it to be a useful reminder that as little as we know about how the world works, we know even less about how Heaven works. You never know who could be on their deathbed and see angels.

(Living) for God

I've been toying around with an idea for a long time, but was never really able to fully articulate it. Over time I kind of forgot about it, but every once in a while it resurfaces in my mind and I ponder it a bit more before I give up and mull something else over. Or just don't think about anything. I do that pretty frequently as well. Anyways, I was reminded of it a few weeks ago during a (surprisingly) good homily at my home parish and I've been meaning to get around to writing about it for a while. It seems like the kind of thing that might be appropriate for this type of blog. Without further ado, I'll get into it as best I can:

We hear a lot about how blessed we are that Jesus chose to die for our sins. Now, I won't say that we all "get" that and appreciate it as much as we can, because I don't think that as humans we are capable of understanding the full extent of what he did. But I think that most of us have gotten about all that we can out of that idea. Martyrdom is not specific to the Catholic, or even Christian, faith, and I think that we all have a pretty healthy respect for righteous martyrs. But I don't think that's the important part of the story of Jesus. It's easy to die for a person or a cause. It only takes one decision- one moment, one hour, maybe even one day, but then it's over. And through the course of that short period of time, you have the solace of knowing that you are making the greatest sacrifice you can make, and after you're done you never have to do it again.

What's truly inspiring about the story of Jesus is not that he died for us, but that he lived for us. Even to set aside the whole "leave an eternity of unbridled joy in fullness with God and become human" thing, which was probably a bigger sacrifice than experiencing a human death, Jesus was amazing because every single day he did all he could to save the people around him. It just so happened that it took him about 33 years for that to include death. But living for people is much harder than dying for them. When Jesus said that we have to take up our crosses and follow him, I think he meant that every single day we should be living for others as much as he lived for them, and as much as he died for them. He was telling us to do everything in our power to love God, and to love each other, and that it's not going to be easy. In fact, it's going to be very hard. At some points it's going to be a sacrifice of everything that you value, even your friends and your flesh and your dignity. That's what it means to pick up your cross the way that Jesus did when he died. And that's what it meant to pick up your cross the way that Jesus did even while he lived. Jesus didn't get free time, unless he ran off and hid in the desert- and even then Satan wouldn't leave him alone. Jesus didn't get to just hang out with his friends- he visited with sinners and sick people and tax collectors. He didn't have a job or a house- how often do you think he had to sleep on the dirt in the open, hungry from missing dinner? Living for God is harder than dying for God. It's harder because of all the uncertainty. You don't know if you're doing the right thing, or how much longer you should be doing it, or if you should be doing something else instead. Plus you have to see your failures and inadequacies. That leads to questioning. Confidence is hard to foster among people who live for others, because there are so many problems and so few flawless ways of dealing with them. You can tell yourself as much as you want that what really matters is that you're trying your best, but I doubt very many people are persuasive enough to truly believe themselves.

Unfortunately, we don't always get the opportunity to die for something we care about. For most of us, the best we can do is either find something to live for, or just stumble through a capricious existence that benefits from frequent returns but lacks any deeper value. I'm not convinced that there's one best answer that works for everyone. Because the truth is that living for something is hard, and the benefits are generally not tangible. I think this next year in New Orleans will be a good opportunity for me to decide which category I fall into. Unless I happen to find something to die for, I'll have to make the decision relatively soon. And spending a year trying to live for something will at least give me the taste for what that's like.

I hope that posts in the future are a little more upbeat than this one...I realize it's kind of a downer. Hopefully it was worth trudging through. Don't get me wrong or put me on suicide watch- I'm not trying to say that living is bad. I'm just trying to point out that living for something is hard work, and maybe we should reconsider the "important" parts of our faith tradition.

"Our deepest, most innately human desire is to sacrifice ourselves for someone else"- Fr. John Gillespie

Questions

So, a week or two ago I got a very thoughtful email from the person who is currently in the position I will have next year, introducing herself and offering to answer questions I have about the next year of my life. It's certainly something I want to take her up on, so I've been trying to put together a list of questions I want to ask her so that I don't have to keep bothering her with one thing at a time. Trying to come up with an exhaustive list of questions that you have for the future is sort of like trying to collect all of the oil in the Gulf with an eyedropper- you know it's important work, but you just don't really feel like you're ever going to get anywhere near finished. I guess if you're doing things right, you might never be finished. Asking questions about the future, that is.

As I'm putting together the list of questions, I find myself often wondering what that list says about me as a person, and how the JV answering my questions will judge me based on the questions I do and don't ask. I imagine you could learn a lot about someone based on their list of questions about the future. Specifically, here I'm thinking about ones that can actually be answered, like in my situation, not things like "When will I die?" (although that list would probably be very telling as well). So I'm trying to start using the questions I'm coming up with to decide what I really value. It seems sort of counter-intuitive- wouldn't it be a lot more productive to decide what you valued and then make sure you ask all the questions that address those things? Ideally, yes. But I'm not convinced that very many of us really know what we value. At best, I think we know what we feel like we should value, or that we wish we valued. But how close is that list to the list of things that we really do value? It would probably be very depressing to look at the list of the things that you actually seem to value and compare it to the list of things that you wish you valued.

For illustrative purposes, I've found that my list has way more questions about gyms and tennis courts than it does about churches/parishes and volunteer organizations. I guess, upon reflection, that isn't all that surprising to me. But before this epiphany, I would have definitely ranked faith higher than exercise in terms of my values. I also didn't have any questions about relationships, friend or otherwise, or how they met people in the area. I don't know if that's because I just assume it will happen for me, or if it's not something I value, but that certainly shows that it's not something I've been concerned with so far in my preparation.

I guess there's not a whole lot substantive to take out of this post, so I'll try to enumerate the things that might have been worth saying:

1. I'm still relatively new to introspection, and quite bad at it.
2. I'm excited about NOLA and trying to get all my thoughts together and ask the right questions so that I'm prepared for the next year.
3. We might not really value what we think we value, or at least as much as we'd like to.
4. You can learn from questions without answering them.

I'm going to start concluding all of my posts with quotes that are related to something. Maybe the post, maybe NOLA, maybe God, maybe the world. Here's the first: "You can tell whether a man is clever by his answers. You can tell whether a man is wise by his questions" - Naquib Mahfouz n

Getting Started

Surprisingly enough, "getting started" in JVC happens long before you actually arrive for the first day of work. I guess before I get too bogged down into details, we'll start with a useful key that will help explain some basic acronyms, and from there we'll go to more general information.

• JVC- Jesuit Volunteer Corps. This is the organization that I'll be working with for the next 1-2 years.
• JV- Jesuit Volunteer. That's what I am, and that's what everyone else working with JVC is called.
• NOLA- New Orleans, LA. That's where I'll be living for the next 1-2 years while I'm working with JVC. I will be living in a house with like 5 other JVs, and rumor has it that the house I'm staying in in NOLA is a duplex used by JVC, so I'll actually be living with like 11 other JVs. I'm taking a slow transition from being an RA.
• OPD- Orleans Public Defenders. That's the office I'll be working at in NOLA.

So, here's the basic deal: way back in January I applied to join JVC, which is a national volunteer placement agency affiliated with the Society of Jesus (read: Jesuits). Once I got accepted into the domestic program, I started looking at possible placement organizations that are partners with JVC. After sending JVC my preferences, they gave me interviews with some of the organizations, and that process continued until we found a placement that the JVC, the host organization, and I all thought would be a good match. For me, that happened in mid-May and it happened to be in the Orleans Public Defenders office in NOLA. I will now spend the next year working there and living with other JVs in a house in NOLA, and if I like it I can apply to do it again.

My first day of official work is August 18th. By August 10th, however, I have to be in Houston to do orientation for JVC. Even though I'm working at OPD, I'm still a JV and I still do a lot of retreats, orientation, and training with JVC. It's more than just a year working at an office- the year is an experience designed to focus on social justice, community, simple living, and spirituality. Which is cool, because right now I think that those are all things that I value, and I expect that increased exposure to them will only increase my ability to appreciate them.

So, I'm basically free until August 10th to do pretty much whatever I want. My only responsibilities to the organization until then are to figure out what I'm going to bring (simple living, remember, so probably not all that much) and do some fundraising before I get there. I have to raise at least $500 to help cover the costs of recruitment, screening, etc. before orientation begins. So, if anyone has a cool idea of something that might make a good fundraiser that doesn't rhyme with "shma-bake sale," I'd love tips. Right now my fundraising page with JVC is https://atl.etapestry.com/fundraiser/JesuitVolunteerCorps/CelebrateLA/individual.do?participationRef=2315.0.120310468, so if you could donate (or know other people who might be interested), any help would be greatly appreciated.

I haven't yet decided if I'll have my cell phone or my laptop while I'm doing JVC, which doesn't really affect you except that if I don't, I won't be able to text or Facebook chat or anything to keep up with you. My house will have a phone, so if you need to get a hold of me that option will still be available. I'll have internet access at work if nothing else, so you can email me at nathan.fennell@gmail.com and be sure to get a response within at least a few days. But the best way to keep up with what I'm doing and what JVC is doing in NOLA is probably going to be this blog. So check it out from time to time. And if I'm not updating it, send me an email and guilt me into keeping it up better. This will -not- be a vanity blog about my personal daily exploits, so don't worry about having to read pages of pointless musings and internal debates about what tie I should wear. This will just be about calm living, unconditional loving, and Cajun food. You know...the Bayou State of Mind.