Death of the Liberal Class book Excerpt

Excerpt from Death of the Liberal Class by Chris Hedges

          “The best opportunities for social change exist among the poor, the homeless, the working class and the destitute.  As the numbers of disenfranchised dramatically increase, our only hope is to connect ourselves with the daily injustices visited upon the weak and the outcast.  Out of this contract we can resurrect, from the ground up, a social ethic, a new movement.  We must hand out bowls of soup.  Coax the homeless into a shower.  Make sure those who are mentally ill, cruelly abandoned on city sidewalks, take their medication.  We must go back into America’s segregated schools and prisons.  We must protest, learn to live simply and begin, in an age of material and imperial decline, to speak with a new humility.  It is in the tangible, mundane, and difficult work of forming groups and communities to care for others that we kindle the outrage and the moral vision to fight back, that we will articulate an alternative.

          Dorothy Day, who died in 1980, founded the Catholic Worker movement with Peter Maurin in the midst of the Great Depression.  The two Catholic anarchists published the first issue of The Catholic Worker newspaper in1933.  They handed out twenty-five hundred copies in Union Square for a penny a copy.  The price remains unchanged.  Two Catholic Worker houses of hospitality in the Lower East Side soon followed.  Day and Maurin preached a radical ethic that included an unwavering pacifism.  They condemned private and state capitalism for its unfair distribution of wealth.  They branded the profit motive as immoral.  They were fervent supporters of the labor movement, the civil-rights movement, and all antiwar movements.  They called on followers to take up lives of voluntary poverty.  And when the old Communist Party came under fierce attack in the 1950s during the anticommunist purges, Day, although not a communist, was one of the only activists to denounce the repression and attend communist demonstrations.

          The Catholic Worker refused to identify itself as a not-for-profit organization.  It never accepted grants.  It did not pay taxes.  It operated its soup kitchen in New York without a city permit.  The food it still provides to the homeless is donated by people in the neighborhood.  There are some 150 Catholic Worker houses around the country and abroad, although there is no central authority.  Some houses are run by Buddhists, others by Presbyterians.  Religious and denominational lines are irrelevant.  Day cautioned that none of these radical stances, which she said came out of the Gospels, ensured temporal success.  They were not practical.  She wrote that sacrifice and suffering were expected parts of the religious life.  Success, as the world judges it, should never be the final criterion for the religious and moral life, or for the life of resistance.  Spirituality, she said, was rooted in the constant struggle to fight for justice and be compassionate, especially to those in need.  And that commitment was hard enough without worrying about its ultimate effect.  One was saved in the end by faith, faith that acts of compassion and justice had an intrinsic worth, even if these acts had no discernible practical effect.