Twice today rain prevented work in the garden. The first time was the rain in early afternoon after I got home and the second time was a hard rain later after I was working raking the rain garden. I guess rain is better for gardening than the snow other parts of the Midwest.
I finally got the tomato plants started in the unheated sun room but had to put the heater on at night when temperatures drop into the 40’s. Some say that the very early spring in March last year was not normal but I say the very late and cold spring in May is not normal. With man-made climate change the normal of nature will never return.
I still find myself addicted to news on TV when I know that most of it is just entertainment and does not really tell the story of what happened. Like the weather I have been manipulated to believe that news is normal and real, not fake and censored. There is also the web and a site you can trust and has good gatekeepers to get the news, but it is not as entertaining. Naturally the news we do not want to hear, like all the children in the world being killed by USA, is news we do not hear on the news.
A few years ago the local newspaper had some stories on the crisis intervention program police officers were taking how to handle persons with mental illnesses. After three recent reports of police shootings of persons with mental illnesses that were lightly reported in the news I callwd to the agency who was doing the training and wrote to the reporter who wrote the articles asking what was the story on these homicides. I have not heard back yet.
I have been criticized and marginalized by leaders in my own Catholic Church for requesting a dialog about using the 1.1 million the church received from closing churches to do the corporal works of mercy in the same area where the money came, North Central Milwaukee. A friend told me today not to bring it up any longer at our church since I have been associated with this issue and it gives those who marginalized me a chance to ignore the message more by dismissing the messenger.
Marquette University, by banning me for the message that Marquette be faithful to the Gospel and no longer teach war and killing on campus. By denying me rights to use the library they are taking away the one thing Marquette had a value to me, the right to do research in the Catholic Worker archives.
What to do? My research on the life and journey of Dorothy Day, co-founder of the Catholic Worker, gives me a hint of what to do—keep struggling to do the works of mercy and resist war and violence in a nonviolent way. This means no violence of words or actions and a willingness to suffer insult and perhaps injury and acting on one’s conscience. When Dorothy Day took a strong stand against World War II a number of Catholic Worker house of hospitality disbanded, including the original one here in Milwaukee because they could not agree with her. She did not react but keep on doing the works of mercy and works of resistance and now there are more Catholic Worker houses in the world than ever and she, dismissed by many in the Catholic Church is now being considered for sainthood. Dorothy Day did not look to the hierarchy of Catholic Church or institutions like Marquette University for guidance. Instead she looked to the lives of the Saints. I have my own group of saints that I look too: Dorothy Day, , Gandhi, Martin Luther King Jr., St. Ignatius of Loyola, Frederick Ozaman, founder of the Society of St. Vincent De Paul, Blessed Franz Jagerstatter and my friend Lorenzo Rosbaugh. You will notice that I have quotes or web pages for eight of the nine of them on this web page www.nonviolentcow.org.
I do not need to know more or attend more talks and events to know “What they do”. I have enough wisdom and grace from these ‘saints’ and from my own life to last me forever if I can only hear the message and see these persons in my own life. All I need to know is in the lives of these saints.
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