The Universal Unitarians are perhaps the most worth while religious organization in this country.
From UU World: http://www.uuworld.org/ideas/articles/190118.shtml
The Occupy protests have much in common with political movements of the 1840s, 1890s, and 1930s—including a spiritual dimension.
11.14.11
Almost two hundred years ago, shoemakers, tailors, and other “working men” gathered at Philadelphia’s First Universalist Church to protest the increasing inequality of their society. Wealth was becoming more concentrated, workshops were growing into factories, and artisans could no longer hope to rise from apprentice to journeyman to master craftsman. “When we look around us, my fellow workmen,” declared leader William Heighton, “we behold men on every side, enjoying wealth in all its luxuriant profusion . . . while we, comparatively, receive nothing but the crumbs which fall from their tables.” The situation betrayed the revolutionary promise that all people are created equal, and Heighton proposed a revolutionary solution. He called on workers to educate themselves, to join a federation of unions, and to vote only for other workers. The resulting “Working Men’s Party” was the first of its kind in the world, and it prodded the major parties to expand voting rights and create the public school system.
Heighton would fit right in at the “Occupy” demonstrations in cities across the United States. Once again, Americans are standing up to declare that economic inequality is a grave threat to democracy. Once again, people who have been disempowered by economic changes are finding new power by coming together, sharing their stories, and promising to work together. And once again, they are claiming a new identity that underscores their common cause: the “Working Men” have become the “Ninety-Nine Percent.”
Heighton’s Working Men and today’s Occupiers stand in a continuous tradition of struggle for economic justice. The tradition includes the Knights of Labor, the Industrial Workers of the World, and the Congress of Industrial Organizations, labor movements that challenged the traditional division of workers into specific “crafts.” It includes the Populist movement of the late nineteenth century, the Socialist party of Eugene Debs, and the Popular Front of the Great Depression, political movements that challenged the major parties’ dependence on corporate wealth. It includes “Coxey’s Army” of unemployed workers who marched from Ohio to Washington, D.C., in 1894, and the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s “Poor People’s Campaign” of 1968, in which poor people of all races established a tent city in the nation’s capital. Remembering this history is one way to deepen our commitment to justice struggles today.
Continue reading at: http://www.uuworld.org/ideas/articles/190118.shtml
Posts
No comments:
Post a Comment