We're OK Now But

We’re OK now.

(The Adcocks have power and light again.)

But we know that collectively we have to change. How?

[See below for an invitation.]

Bitter truth about our world:

The people who make the Big Decisions mostly live and work and travel in air-conditioned environments, with salaries, pensions and health care enough to cushion them from any disasters that arise.

They don’t have a personal stake in making the decisions necessary to stop climate change and extreme weather, to help us all survive life’s catastrophes.

So what can we do?

(That’s not an ironic rhetorical question. It’s sincere.)

Some real action steps:

1. When a disaster like this hits, open the church for members and friends who want sanctuary—who’d like to face it together, sleeping overnight, singing, cooking meals together—modeling community together.

2. Restore our Pastoral Care Guild or Ministry on Community (or whatever we should call it) to help educate and coordinate us all in helping our members and friends cope with challenges ranging from illness and disability to unemployment, loneliness, grief, trees crashing your car, etcetera.

3. Start interfaith and neighborhood actions to collectively and directly address the challenges of, say, climate change. For example (cf. Eugene Robinson in the 7/3 Washington Post), developing a project to install low-cost solar panels on homes that otherwise would go dark and boiling hot or freezing cold when extreme weather knocks out power.

4. Do all this in ways that will build beloved community within and beyond our walls, making larger friendship and self-help networks, modeling equality in this brutally unequal world.

And now that invitation:

Email me and say you’re interested in one or more of these action steps. With a few other folks (mostly old ladies), I commit to calling a gathering at our church to talk together about what we might do. It might save our lives.

With love,

Cynthia Adcock

Tags: change, climate, community, disaster, inequality

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Comment by Laura Dely on July 4, 2012 at 12:32pm: Thank you, Cynthia. I have thought about what I see is a paradox of our community: that we are stuck in regard to the wider community in a few organizaed exceptions: Meals on Wheels, AFAC bagging (which AFAC just elminated), cereal wall donations, PAG support, VOICE actions. These are all wonderful, but I wish we could work together on one big project that would have meassureable impact that would benefit the local community in a specific way. Can we do something together on the scale of Culpepper Garden ever again? I also wish we would look at the reasons we need to have a Food Bank in Arlington County where many of the clients work but don't earn enough to cover basic expenses.

An example of how difficult is may be for people to respond to changes in need: this summer AFAC needs fresh produce donations, and has opened on Sunday to accomodate the faith community - 2 churches (not UUCA) has responded to a call to collect fresh produce once a month through September. UUCA members travel so much it difficult to find even one person to drive the box of green, etc, to AFAC in Shirlington after Sunday Service once a month through September -- one Sunday in July, one Sunday in Aug, and one Sunday in Sept. And AFAC really needs this.

I would love to talk with you and others about how we might develop a church wide effort to address local climate change and economic justice. It might take us toward a UUs for a just Economic Justice's new program to engage congregations to study economic justice, so we could spread our local efforts to a national audience if we can find something to do.

Ah! I recently met one of the ministers at Macedonia Baptist Church. I should follow up with her to see how the Nauck Community dealt with power outtrages if they had them, and what the community needs to successfully ride through the next storm. Maybe a solar power neighborhood could result, and maybe new civil engineers could be inspired. I need to call her anyway about the AFAC produce effort, so it would be easy to fit it in.