When it comes to political candidates, most of us are pretty clear about what we believe makes a good one. There's really not much variety in those beliefs. They fall into the pot labeled "conservative" or the one labeled "liberal," with a few variants and outliers. 

From my pot, your pot doesn't make any sense at all. You can say the same about me. So we argue back and forth the same old predictable arguments and stay firmly planted wherever we were in the first place.

I'd rather hear how you came to believe what you believe. I'm not talking about books you read or philosophical arguments but the moments that seized your gut and told you "this is true, this is how things should be."

One of my deep beliefs: question everything with courtesy, curiosity, and deep skepticism until you are completely satisfied. Some people call this "negativity," and it makes them wild. I see it as looking for ways to make things better--a positive trait.

I certainly didn't get that idea at home. Mom hated controversy and wanted everything calm and nice. Dad was a dogmatic German--and I welcome you to apply the stereotype liberally in imagining him. His way was the only way, at least until he got old and was blessed with a blossoming of the heart and an opening of the mind.

It was the pastor of our church, William Downey, who set me on that path. He was a charismatic, brilliant man, and no one dared sleep during his sermons. Some resented that, believing that church was a good place to be lulled and soothed. A Lutheran, he'd been raised Catholic, and that complicated his viewpoint considerably. Even as a kid, I sat on the edge of my seat as he afflicted the comfortable in Fox Point.

But never in the front row. When he got brimstoney, you'd be showered with real spittle and metaphorical sparks if you sat there.

He had also been an army chaplain. If you collect WWII memorabilia, you may have heard his prayer for the crew just before the Enola Gay dropped Little Boy on Hiroshima.

As my father's daughter, I carry the authoritarian gene, which comes into full expression in adolescence. Church was my first experience with someone who both let you turn things upside down and held you accountable for what fell out. If you were going to dissent, you'd better be able to back up your eccentric positions, and you'd better be prepared to be called on any claims that grew from only hot air and an elastic imagination.

I'm quite sure it was not Bill Downey's intention to raise up little hard-headed liberals who refused to walk the party line. But that was the effect he had on me. I was supposed to learn the catechism. Instead I learned to love questioning, argument, and the rhetoric of shaking things up.

Like too many ministers, this one went down in a sex scandal. Like many churches, ours put considerable effort into vilifying the woman involved. Unlike most ministers, however, this one took full responsibility for his actions. He'd never backed down from truths and right actions that weren't pretty or easy. He kept his family and atoned in a smaller, distant church. I don't know what happened to the woman. We almost never do.

My spiritual meanderings have moved me far from the beautiful Federalist church in North Shore, but never far at all from believing that the Word is supposed to wake you up, not put you to sleep.

Now it's your turn. Tell me one of your core beliefs and how you got there. Please.

Yesterday daughter Liz and I spent a couple hours on the lakefront. But we weren't there to watch the kites. We were there to join an interfaith community's silent demonstration against the violence and repression in Myanmar.

Joining the Buddhist Peace Fellowship of Milwaukee were Quakers, Unitarian Universalists, the whole gamut of Protestants, Catholics, Orthodox Jews, believers in peace but not God -- and a few Tosans, too.

It was an unusual event: a couple hundred people walking silently in single file procession from the marina toward the War Memorial. Some carried signs with pictures of Gandhi, Martin Luther King Jr., Buddhist monks, Aung San Suu Kyi (Myanmar opposition leader), simple words. Many in the procession wore red, as had the Buddhist monks who protested peacefully in Burma and were met with violence by the military junta.

We were met by smiles, curious stares, ignoring. But no weapons or even rude remarks.

The wind blew warm and hard, the sky and lake were brilliant, and inline skaters kept rolling by.

You won't find any coverage of this event in the Milwaukee media. I guess it's not as newsworthy as a local women's fantasy football league.

But what's not interesting here, where we often take for granted the great freedoms we have of speech and assembly, is interesting in Myanmar/Burma. Images of the Milwaukee march are being smuggled into that country. Just knowing that people in such distant places are watching and caring might give a little strength to the people there. And a little discomfort to the junta: repression thrives where no one's watching.

We may not be as important as the UN, finally calling for the release of political prisoners, or Japan, beginning to impose economic pressure. But the power of witness is great, and political action doesn't happen without it.

Witnessing and telling what you've seen. . .sounds like a good job for a journalist. . .

 

If you Google Labor Day, you’ll find tags like “Some great value-priced wines from the south of France.” The article’s about celebration, and the writer seems oblivious to the headline irony. “Value priced” usually means someone’s working cheap somewhere. A good deal for the vintner, a good deal for those of us who stopped at Ray’s to stock up for a long weekend’s libations.

Not so good for the worker, though.

Okay: so beaujolais isn't from the south of France. It scans better, so sue me.

Labor Day, a holiday since the 1880s, was about getting fair wages and working conditions long before it was about summer’s last guzzle.

If you work a 5 day week, have vacation and sick time, and your working conditions are marginally safe and humane, you can thank trade unions for it.

Raise a glass of that cheap French wine, or a pricier Californian, to the men and women who died to improve working conditions.

Or raise a bottle or can, beer of your preference, to the generation that sent you or your parents to college on decent living wages unions helped them get.

Not many of us belong to unions these days. But that may change as “workers,” whatever color our collars, make less money with fewer benefits in a time of increasing costs – and increasing wealth for those at the very top of the heap.

There’s not much about Labor Day in the Journal Sentinel: a tribute to an African-American trade unionist, though that term is buried in the article; a guest editorial.

And a tiny blurb about Labor Fest.

Parade at 11, marching from Zeidler Park to the Summerfest Grounds, where the festival will go on from noon to 5.

Seems worth remembering that the productivity on which our economy depends is a product of not individual but collective labor. Besides, there’s a party to be had with folks who’ve earned it and who know how to play as well as to work!