The Blizzard of 2010

This is Warren Street, the main street of Hudson, New York at the tail end of the Blizzard.

Twenty inches of snow seems to be about the total, and now the wind is howling and blowing high drifts. Dog and I are contemplating a nap.

The Kind Of Local Government I Want

After it was destroyed by an earthquake, the town of Salemi in Sicily decided to revitalize the center of the town by doing something daring. According to today's NY Times, the plan required the appointment of a new kind of government, the kind of local government I want to experience in Hudson, New York:

According to the report, an ancient town in western Sicily called Salemi had initiated an unusual renewal project. Founded around the fourth century B.C., the town achieved brief renown as the site where Giuseppe Garibaldi first planted the country’s tricolored flag in 1860 during his quest for a unified Italy.

But Salemi’s moment of glory lasted only a day before the place slipped into oblivion. A devastating earthquake in 1968 proved the final blow, and for decades, the historic center sat abandoned, the town largely forgotten.

Now, an ambitious effort was under way to reverse the damage.

The town had invited prominent artists and intellectuals to assume control of the government. An art critic and onetime anarchist named Vittorio Sgarbi was elected mayor. A prince was put in charge of town planning, and a performance artist was officially declared alderman to nothing. The provocative Italian photographer Oliviero Toscani, whose ad campaigns for Benetton included a series on AIDS patients and inmates on death row, was named alderman of creativity.

Did you see that? "Alderman of Creativity."

And, as if that wasn't enough, the Town sold buildings for 1 Euro provided the purchasers repaired them within 2 years. And, naturally, the Town became the home for the legendary video collection of Kim's on St. Marks in the East Village, the reason why the Time's covered the story in the first place. In other words, Salemi wasn't just talk. It actually embarked on its arts and revitalization project.

So my proposal: Hudson, New York needs to learn from this creative approach to local government. At the very least, we need an "Alderman of Creativity," and it wouldn't hurt to go further and invite prominent artists assume control of the city's government. This would serve twin purposes. It would dispossess Hudson's entrenched, Neanderthal politicians (thank goodness for that), and it might actually provide just the artistic lift the city was seeking when it embarked on its recent misguided, idiotic, and now hopefully forgotten project involving dog sculptures.

Is this too much to contemplate?

It's Still The Economy

On Friday the nation's recession, the big, ugly one that so many people feel directly in foreclosure of their homes, at the gas pump, in the cost of health care, in towering credit card debt, in the cost of heating their homes, in job and income insecurity, in lack of consumer confidence, in diminishing retirement funds, paid a personal, uninvited and unwanted visit to the county in the Hudson Valley of New York where I live.

The county's fourth largest employer, Kaz Incorporated, a maker of humidifiers, announced that it was moving its production facilities from Columbia County, New York to Mexico. The announcement that about 350 workers were losing their jobs came on the heals of a similar announcement from LB Furniture earlier this year, that it was closing and that 150 production workers would lose their jobs. That's 500 production jobs lost in 2008 in a small county with a population of about 62,000. That can modestly be described as an economic disaster.

Join me in Columbia County, New York.

Columbia County, New York is absolutely beautiful. And quite rural. It is about 25 miles SE of Albany and abuts the Berkshire and Taconic mountains and the Massachusetts line. About 9% of the families live below the poverty line; about 92% of the people are white. There are many second home owners who do not work here, but infuse the local economy with cash made elsewhere.

In Columbia County the six largest employers are

Columbia Memorial Hospital
Hudson, hospital
Employs 1000

Taconic Farms, Inc.
Hudson, breeder of lab rats and mice
Employs 650

Hudson City School District
Hudson, educational programs
Employs 602

Kaz Incorporated
Hudson, electric housewares and fans
Employs 400

Berkshire Farm Center & Services
Canaan, educational programs
Employs 390

COARC
Mellenville, human services
Employs 350

For a rural county that's not much of an economic base. Only two businesses in the top six made anything. Four of the top employers are supported by tax revenues or are not-for-profits.

The mayor got it right when he said:

“I know exactly where [Katzman, the owner of Kaz] is coming from. He needs to compete,” said Richard Scalera, mayor of Hudson. “But that doesn’t make it any better for those waking up this morning and not knowing what to do next.”

“That has a devastating, gut-wrenching effect on our economy,” Scalera added. “In the short-term, it’s almost impossible to replace these types of jobs.”

In the long-term, Hudson and Columbia County officials must start defining a new economic development strategy, Scalera said.

“We know we can’t hang our hats on manufacturing jobs anymore, because those are too fragile,” he said. “We have to change our economic ways here.”

Meanwhile, as you'd expect, the closing has an utterly devastating affect on the low wage employees who worked in these production jobs, including many in the county's vibrant immigrant population:

The workforce at Kaz includes people from the local African American, Bangladeshi and Latin American communities. The loss of employment will force many of these employees to move elsewhere for work, disrupting these communities.
County Supervisor Billy Hughes (D-4th Ward) says many of these employees don't have a high school diploma or limited ability to speak English, so opportunities for employment in a worsening economy may prove few and far between.

The result will be displacement of these workers from their homes to other places in a search for work.

There is, of course, no local solution for those who will now lose their jobs. And this is the latest event in a trend in our community:

Mohammed Rony, a student at Columbia Greene Community College, and has lived in Hudson most of his life. Mr. Rony says that this is not the first time his community has faced a major employer closing, but this one could be the worst. "Bangladeshis began immigrating to Hudson because they were able to find work at the Emsig button factory in the early '90s. Until 1998 there was 100 people, 20 families," says Mr. Rony.
"When the button factory closed in 2001 about 80-to-90% of the employees were Bengali. It shook us up, but most people found jobs at LB furniture, Kaz and other factories in the area," he says. "Recently there has been a huge increase in migration. I'd say 50% of the Bengalis in Hudson now have moved in the past five years. They went to work at LB and Kaz. With the closing of LB and now Kaz, people won't be able to stay in Hudson. There aren't any manufacturing jobs in the city anymore, which for many of them is the only work they can do. Many of these people barely speak English, and though some have master's degrees from Bangladesh, those degrees mean nothing here."
Alderman Abdus Miah (D-2nd Ward) says that lack of jobs is the primary problem facing all Columbia County communities, not just the Hudson Bangladeshis. "We need jobs to keep all our communities in place; its bad that people will be moving," he says.

The only current "hope" for the laid off workers seems to be extensive unemployment benefits:

Some short-term help is on the way. Officials from the state Workforce Investment Office met with Kaz officials Wednesday to coordinate assistance for those soon to be out of work.
M.A. Wilse, director of the local office, said the Kaz plant will host a Career Resource Room, where employees can go for help in conducting job searches.
And Kaz is applying for coverage under the Trade Adjustment Act, a federal program that provides tuition assistance and extended unemployment benefits for workers whose jobs are moved out of the country under the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA).
All laid-off workers at Kaz are eligible for 26 weeks of unemployment benefits from New York, plus another 13 weeks from the federal government. Those in certified training programs can receive up to two more years under the Trade Adjustment Act.

This is bleak news. The problem is the economy. The pain from the economy, as you'd expect, is most acute to those who have the lowest wages and the least assets. They lose their jobs, their homes, their communities first. But the losses aren't confined to those people. The losses spread eventually in waves to everyone.

In a rational, undistracted, attentive, focused nation, the connections between our government's economic policies of the past 8 years and the present recession they have created, and the obvious and pervasive pain these policies have caused, should be if not the main issue, an extremely important issue in the coming election.

A continuation of the present policies means that factory closings and losses of jobs like the ones that have struck my home county are going to continue to spread across the nation. Will the present administration be held responsible for its policies? Will voters require the candidates to propose policies that will end the present trend? Or will we continue to distract and entertain ourselves while everything falls apart around us? Will people actually vote for a continuation of the pernicious policies?

For Dr. King

I'm thinking about times almost forty years ago when I sang, "We Shall Overcome." I'm remembering how I felt when I sang it, holding hands, swaying, anticipation in the air. I loved the idea of walking hand in hand, black and white together, and at the same time there was always a tension, a tightness in my jaw and in the pit of my stomach, the presence of fear. The song's purpose was to get ready to do what had to be done. I'm committed to nonviolence, I recall thinking, but there are those who are not. They shot James Meredith, and lynched Emmitt Till, and burned Greyhound buses, and unlike me, they don't want me to be safe. Uncertainty about what will happen tightens my jaw, while my heart commits me to the cause.

Remembering these fears rekindles my old thoughts. I remember the policemen in the church parking lot writing down the license plate numbers as if it were the Apalachin Crime Convention. My mind flashes from people sitting in a restaurant who stop eating to stare and sneer, to the incomprehensible Mississippi Sovereignty Commission, to the repeated, threatening phone calls, to kids on a school bus yelling hate names through the windows, to the Klan and the police, and wondering how they were different. I think about the person who ran over my dog.

I'm remembering singing "our song" in Port Gibson during the boycott trial and fearfully contemplating the long, dark ride home to Jackson on the Natchez Trace, an unlit, two-lane road that avoids all towns.

I'm remembering the Woolworth's lunch counter and the bus station in Jackson, notorious before my arrival, at which friends were seriously injured. I'm remembering the two unequal, racially labeled water fountains at the Courthouse in Laurel, and the three bathroom doors upstairs at the Mayflower Restaurant. I'm remembering a black man pumping the gasoline, that his boss won't let him touch the $5 I try to hand him.

I'm remembering a Mississippi judge hissing that he doesn't have to put up with Communists-- he's talking about me-- in his Court. I'm remembering the Neshoba County Fair and what it must have been like on the night Goodman, Chaney and Schwerner were all killed, how everyone there must have known about it.

Awash in this flood of distant memories, my remembrance of my own feelings is more opaque. I was learning to be a good lawyer, and I was an optimist, believing that eventually, we would confront and overcome racism and poverty and oppression and violence. But I was also numb while my unworkable marriage was sliding slowly, unconsciously and miserably to ultimate dissolution by another southern Court.

Then, in 1973, I started to represent inmates of the sprawling Mississippi State Hospital because Barry Powell, an excellent lawyer and mentor, "discovered" it and convinced himself and me that the issues should be litigated. Most of the people warehoused there, it turned out, were safe to release, but the staff was too small to have any idea who was safe and who might be risky. For obvious cases, like the four older women who played remarkably skilled bridge using sign language to bid and hadn't seen a doctor in 7 years, release was accomplished simply, by my inquiry if they could go home and my veiled threat of a judicial proceeding if they couldn't.

The harder cases were like Mr. O'Reilly (not his real name), who also wanted to be released. Doctors thought Mr. O'Reilly might be mentally ill because he still believed that ten years before somebody, a relative most likely, stole a million dollars worth of gold coins from his trailer in rural Oktibehha County and he was mad about it. According to the doctor, Mr. O'Reilly didn't have any insight into his delusional system and his obvious anger made him dangerous.

Mr. O'Reilly was tall and sunburnt from years of taking major tranquilizers and being outside, and he walked with his back arched, elbows back, hands on the small of his back, another side effect of the drugs. I explained the situation to Mr. O'Reilly. I told him that the doctor didn't believe the million dollar story, and that frankly, I didn't either. In fact, I doubted there were ever $50 worth of gold coins in his entire county, and that when he acted angry about the situation, he was scaring the doctor. He laughed, "So is that what all the fuss's about? How come nobody told me this before?" I shrugged. He said, "Well, I guess I'll be going home then," and he shambled off, doing the phenothiazine walk.

At the time the Hospital Staff decided who would be released by individually interviewing all the inmates who requested release. When asked, Mr. O'Reilly said he came in complaining about the theft of a million dollars worth of gold coins, that he didn't blame anybody for not believing him, and that he doubted the story made sense. Was he mad about it? No, he said, just sad that he didn't understand the problem earlier. Could he go home?

After Mr. O'Reilly was released, the Mississippi Mental Health Commissioner, Reginald White, told me that he thought I was doing "litigation therapy" and that he was surprised that people who were so obviously disoriented when they arrived were now going home. Did I think it was because of the intensive attention I was giving them? Or was it just time, the drugs, spontaneous change, and "millieu therapy"? At the time I didn't have any idea. I just wanted inmates who wanted to go home to be released.

And this past January, almost forty years later, with my wife of almost 30 years and two of my three children, I attended an Interfaith Service commemorating Dr. King's Holiday in Hudson, New York. After wonderful gospel music by the Shiloh Baptist Church choir, a sermon, singing the Battle Hymn of the Republic, prayer and scripture, the time came at last to sing "our song." It had been a long time. My eyes grew wet. I could feel an aching in my throat and in my heart my continuous, decades long love of justice, fairness, and equality. And there was no fear. Instead, there was only my unbounded joy that now, at last, my kids would learn and experience the magic of "our song." It was their turn to inherit the possibility of accomplishing the unthinkable, and it was their opportunity to forge a deep, personal heart connection with the community and movement for human dignity and justice.

"We Shall Overcome" has never been sweeter to me. I can feel how very far I have traveled. Although there remains an enormous journey to complete, the holiday celebration brought me the gift of seeing for the first time that my kids will soon be able, by themselves, to carry the movement on. Forty years ago I never could have guessed how special, how complete and wonderful that would feel.