Growing up, my views of the American Revolution were influenced by the musical 1776 and the School House Rock specials on Saturday morning. I grew to deeply respect our Founding Fathers and to see in them a heroism that is lacking in today’s leaders. As a grown up I’ve started reading a lot of history books that remind that though these Founding Fathers were great leaders, they were also human, and that the Revolution was as much the story of the ordinary merchants, farmers, slaves, native Americans, and women as it was of George Washington and Thomas Jefferson. Our historians remind us that the American Revolution was a complicated event, with mixed results many of the people who participated in the fight. I’ve especially learned from 3 of my favorite historians, Howard Zinn, Gordon Woods, and Joseph Ellis, to see the founding of our nation in new ways.

These past few months following the primaries have been a lot of fun for me, as I’ve found the Democrats running for President this year to be the most interesting in quite a long time. The candidates ran the gamut from middle of the road candidates like Hillary Clinton to traditional liberals like Joe Biden and Bill Richardson to more progressive candidates like Dennis Kucinich, and it was healthy for us to hear the spectrum of ideas within the Democratic Party. Early on I supported Joe Biden because of his experience and his plan of partitioning Iraq. When he dropped out, I briefly supported Bill Richardson but he soon dropped out. When the California primary came along, I settled on supporting Hillary, as I was impressed with her toughness. Now that the primaries are over and Obama is now the Democratic candidate, I wholeheartedly support Barack. I think this was an especially strong Democratic field of candidates, and they all would be better as President than George W. Bush and the Republican field this year. Though I didn’t vote for Barack during the primaries, I’ve always thought of him as being an intelligent and charismatic leader who brings unique gifts to the Presidency.

In the House of Representatives, there are a group of 72 Democrats that are fighting to push forward Progressive issues within the federal government. This group is called the Congressional Progressive Caucus and it was founded in the early 1990s. The co-chairwomen of the caucus are U.S. Representatives Lynn Woolsey and Barbara Lee. The group fights for “universal access to affordable, high quality healthcare,” fair trade agreements, living wage laws, the right of all workers to organize into labor unions and engage in strike actions and collective bargaining, the abolition of significant portions of the USA PATRIOT Act, the legalization of gay marriage, strict campaign finance reform laws, a complete pullout from the war in Iraq, a crackdown on free trade and corporate welfare, an increase in income tax on the wealthy, tax cuts for the poor, and an increase in social welfare spending by the federal government (I got this from Wikipedia).

Today I read in the paper about the first gay marriages to take place today after the California Supreme Court ruling making it legal in the state. The San Francisco Chronicle has had a series of articles on the history of the gay marriage debate, on the work of attorneys willing to fight for the right and on priests willing to perform the marriage services, and on the change in attitudes of the institution of marriage among the gay and lesbian community. I think the San Francisco Chronicle has done a great job of educating the public on the history of the gay marriage debate, showing both sides of the issue and giving a good reason as to why it is so important for the gay and lesbian community.

When Bobby Kennedy died forty years ago, I was barely one years old. So I can’t say that I have the same feelings of pain and anguish of the many people who had lived through that horrible time. Bobby became a hero of mine, though, early in my life, along with his brother John and Martin Luther King Jr. They all embodied to my young mind the best of American leaders, fighting the good fight against racism, poverty, and war. As I grew older, I found out they had feet of clay, and I was disappointed especially with JFK’s dalliances and his ambiguous positions on Vietnam.

The more that I read about Bobby, though, the more I grew to admire him. Though he too, had feet of clay, RFK was a lot more passionate about fighting poverty and racism than his brother, more willing to take political risks to stand up for marginalized people and eventually to stop the war in Vietnam. Bobby and Martin remain two of my greatest heroes. Our country lost something special 40 years ago when they died too soon.

I’ve always admired the Quakers. Over the years, I’ve read about how this group is always in the forefront of social issues in the last 200 years of American history: they were in the forefront of the abolitionist movement, the right of women to vote, the antiwar movement. I attended 2 Quaker services about 3 years ago and was impressed with the spirituality and quietness of their service. The American Friends Service Committee is a group that tries to put Quaker values into action, in our country and around the world. In the area of global poverty, I looked up their website and found them very involved in economic justice issues, especially in the area of debt relief for nations in Africa. In their website here the AFSC explains why they focus on this area in the effort to combat global poverty:

“According to analysts, Sub-Saharan Africa, economically the world’s poorest region, but carries US$201 billion in debt and pays $14 billion annually in debt service.

Paying billions of dollars a year in debt service takes away from Africa’s already scarce resources to invest in economic development, job creation, education, and health care. With some 300 million people living on less than $1 a day in Africa, approximately 38 million are facing a hunger crisis. Adding to this, with only 10% of the world’s population, approximately 60% of the world’s HIV/AIDS cases (25.8 million) are found in Sub-Saharan Africa.

A few weeks ago I received the 75th anniversary issue of the Catholic Worker. The Catholic Worker is a progressive Catholic newspaper that was started by Dorothy Day and Peter Maurin to apply Catholic Social Teaching to the issues of poverty in American society. I’ve always been a fan of Dorothy Day from biographies that I’ve read and from hearing of people who really admire her. I bought a used copy of her book By Little and By Little: The Selected Writings of Dorothy Day 5 or 6 years ago, but only started reading through the whole book last year. Inspired by the book, I subscribed to the Catholic Worker in December through Amazon and received my first issue in January. Since then, I’ve looked forward to looking in my mail and finding a new issue to read.

Dorothy Day kept the company of socialists, anarchists and communists in Greenwich Village when she was young, and she shared their radical views on politics and life. Her abiding passion was to help the poor, and she converted to Roman Catholicism when she found the same love of the poor in Catholic Social Teaching that she found in the radical politics of her friends. She did not forsake her radical political convictions, but melded it with a spirituality that nourished her inner self as she worked to help the outer world.

During the 1980s, I thought it was funny, and sadly appropriate, for the head of the Catholic Church in the Philippines to be a man called Cardinal Sin.

Certainly, the crimes committed against the Filipino people at that time was a sin. Ferdinand and Imelda Marcos had been ruling the Philippines for 20 years, and they greedily plundered the economy and lived lavishly while much of the economy was mired in poverty. I remember reading news about the Philippines at that time with a certain sense of dread. Benigno Aquino got shot and killed. The Marcos government was cracking down and seemed to have friends in the Reagan administration that would let them get away with murder. The opposition turned to Aquino’s widow, a housewife with no political experience and no desire to lead a country. And the church stood by for 20 years as Marcos terrorized the country. I didn’t have high hopes for the Philippines as Marcos called snap elections in 1986. I didn’t see how things could wind up as anything except tragic.

A few years ago I first saw the documentary, Maya Lin: A Strong Clear Vision. It was made in 1995 by Freida Lee Mock, and it documents the career of Mara Lin, the architect who designed the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington D.C., the Civil Rights Memorial in Montgomery, Alabama, the Yale Women’s Table and many other wonderful buildings. Her most famous buildings have political and well as aesthetic motivations, that elicit strong emotions in people based on how they encapsulate their age. Maya unexpectedly won the design competition for the Vietnam Veterans Memorial while a Yale student, and it threw her into a huge storm of controversy. The controversy over Maya Lin’s design showed the raw emotional wounds that still had not healed when it erupted in 1980, and Maya Lin’s finished memorial showed the power of art to affect people and touch upon important issues of society.

One could say that my life has been a series of debates. This is not to say that I’m argumentative. I’ve just been lucky in my life to have had friends with whom I could talk about issues and debate politics and religion. Although I’m fairly liberal in my politics, I’ve had in my life a fair amount of conservative Republican friends with whom I used to be able to debate on points of disagreement and while still maintaining a sense of respect for each other. Somehow, though, those type of talks have become less frequent in the past couple of years. I’m not sure if people in the past few years have just become more polarized along certain positions and are no longer tolerant of differing opinions. It’s become rare to meet that kind of friend, that friendship of opposites, and I miss those type of conversations.