Dorthy Day—Real Change

Tonight was, for me, non-stop reality TV entertainment. First it was the entertainment of the baseball game, which our home team the Milwaukee Brewers unfortunately lost. Then it was the reality TV show called the ‘Vice Presidential Debate’. This debate was a much bigger entertainment event than the baseball game, but I doubt if it made any more difference than the outcome of the baseball game.

But the day was not full of reality TV entertainment. This afternoon I heard Robert Ellsberg, editor of the “The Duty of Delight, The Diaries of Dorothy Day” speak at Marquette University. As readers of the www.nonviolentworm.org know, Dorothy Day is one of my role models for living the Way of Jesus. Dorothy Day never voted in an election, yet was a person who led a movement that radically changed the lives of many persons, including Mr. Ellsberg and myself. She did not live in a world of entertainment reality TV shows, like the debates, but in world where the poor mattered and where the way to peace was peace, not violence. She saw the world of popular politics as it is: entertainment. She knew the way to really change the world was, in the words of Gandhi, “To be the change you want to see.”

If I had to answer to Dorothy Day for my day today, I believe she would be more understanding of my time watching the baseball game than of the reality TV show of the debate (plus all the endless commentaries). However, she would have been most proud of me this morning, when I drove a friend to a hospital to get the two bags of medicines she and her husband need each month. She would have approved of my presence at a prayer vigil for two homicide victims this morning and my small work on the AIR insulation project for the needy in our parish neighborhood. Hearing Robert Ellsberg would have been okay, but she might have had a harsh word or two for me about my time wasted (not in a Growing Power sense) watching reality entertainment TV, which is just a distraction from the real issues that matter. Also, she might have been on my case for other computer stuff and for not working on the Garden of Resistance today. Fortunately Dorothy Day, like Jesus, was bigger on mercy than judgment.

Dorothy in her day did not like being called a ‘saint, for, as Ellsberg explained, calling her that was a way of dismissing and marginalizing her. Well, I have not been called a saint, but I have been ignored and marginalized. Maybe that counts in diminishing the impact of my reality TV watching on this day.

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