Editor's Blog
Employees at 2U, a distributor of online courses, enjoy the togetherness of office work in New York. (Melanie Stetson Freeman/Staff)
PJs or pinstripes? The tradeoffs of tele-work
Who would have thought that well into the second decade of the 21st century water-cooler seminars and hallway chitchat would be held up as the unique value proposition of an office? But thanks to Yahoo’s Marissa Mayer and other managers who have newfound qualms about telecommuting, the serendipitous conversations and informal collaborations that take place in an office – sometimes also called slacking and breeze-shooting – are being touted as the secret sauce of business.
There is something to that. Silicon Valley in California; Kendall Square in Cambridge, Mass.; and other tech incubation districts are famous for their pizza parties, foosball tables, and networking mixers. Proximity is the point. But at the same time, technology and demographics are driving telecommuting. Which trend will win?
In a Monitor cover story, Eilene Zimmerman digs into that question, paying close attention to the trade-offs: human contact versus isolation, teamwork versus concentration, the distraction of co-workers versus the distraction of the fridge. Whichever camp you are in – happily productive in your pj’s 24/7 or success-dressed and hopping from conference room to brainstorming session Monday through Friday – you know there are pros and cons. Working side by side is good for some people and some projects; concentration and quiet are good for others. And there are plenty of jobs where showing up will always be necessary. Remote plumbing, policing, and nursing will never really cut it.
Let’s imagine what work might look like a decade from now. First, set aside technological what ifs and meet the workers. As Eilene notes, Generations X and Y have a distinctly different view of the daily commute, the structured workday, and the value of water-cooler socializing than their predecessors. For them, the personal and professional blend. The office, while attractive in some regards, is not a place to rely on for job security or social gratification. In short, digital natives are predisposed to telecommuting.
By 2023, this new breed of workers will anchor the workforce, and telecommuting technology will have advanced by 10 years, bringing ever closer the possibility of seamless “telepresence” from wherever people are. Human contact will still be important, however, and smart managers will make sure that occurs. But fighting traffic and clocking in every day looks like an idea whose time is passing.
If telecommuting is still novel, even controversial, in today’s workplace, it will be normal in tomorrow’s. The real challenge is how to manage it.
John Yemma is editor of the Monitor. He can be reached at editor@csmonitor.com.
Traders at work on the floor of the New york Stock exchange last month. (Melanie Stetson Freeman/Staff )
To invest or not to invest? The eternal question
The stock market is telling us something. But we’re all getting different messages. If you are a baby boomer, you lived through the dot-com crash of 2000 and financial panic of 2008. Retirement is not far away. If the stock market is calling to you, it probably sounds a little like Count Dracula’s treacherous invitation: “Enter freely – and of your own will.”
Maybe you should enter. Maybe you should run.
If you are a member of the Millennial Generation, on the other hand, the stock market may be saying something completely different to you. You never lost money in it. There seem to be good bargains. Maybe you’ll make some money. Maybe you’ll lose some money. With time on your side, you can afford to experiment. (“Hey, Count, what’s for dinner?”)
I was there once myself. Enchanted with the new Apple Mac-intosh in 1984, I bought the first shares I ever owned: 50 of Apple at $30. Pretty smart, right? It’s now around $440. Of course, I didn’t think it would ever go that high. In fact, a few months after I bought in I had qualms and sold out – at $20. My excellent adventure in investing wasn’t profitable, but it was a life lesson. It taught me the value of buying a quality stock – or better, a balanced mutual fund via a 401(k) – and holding it. I’ve faithfully followed the price of AAPL on the NASDAQ ever since, even though I’ve never bought another share directly.
No matter how the market has been performing, your past performance is a pretty good indication of your future behavior. You can see that pattern on display in a Monitor cover story. We’re a long way from “irrational exuberance.” Even “cautious optimism” is too bubbly a term. The best phrase for current investor psychology is probably: “As opposed to what?”
Interest rates are so low that there’s little incentive to be in fixed income. Gold and other precious metals – hedges against financial catastrophe – have been sagging as the economy slowly improves. Home prices are rising, but other than in unique markets like New York and San Francisco the era of house flipping is unlikely to return soon. Which leaves equities.
Older investors are edging back in, though in many cases they can’t shake the fears they felt five years ago (see Jonathan Harsch’s article). Younger investors are willing to experiment, to put money into the market and see what happens (see Schuyler Velasco’s article). This is not unusual.
Laurent Belsie, who has been writing about financial markets since the 1980s, recalls how in 1981, during what was then the greatest recession since 1929, market pundits worried that the stock market would never recover and that the financial system itself might be broken. And yet a year later the greatest bull market in history began. His life lesson: “If I were Larry David’s evil twin, I’d say the message of the market is ‘Curb Your Enthusiasm and Curb Your Gloom.’ ”
And so, after the latest worst financial crisis since 1929, despite economic shakiness, and amid 10,000 caveats, the stock market may in fact have a message for all of us: We’re getting back to normal. Which doesn’t mean predictable, universally profitable, or even especially stable. The market will go up and down. Some stocks will appreciate, others will tank. But five years after the bottom fell out, we can stop wondering if the system itself is broken. We can resume seeing the stock market as a place to make some money, lose some money, and learn a few life lessons.
John Yemma is editor of the Monitor. He can be reached at editor@csmonitor.com.
Progress report: How the Monitor is doing
To our readers:
May 1, the start of a new fiscal year for the Monitor, finds us in the healthiest financial situation since 1961 (that’s on an inflation-adjusted basis; unadjusted, it’s the best since 1978). Over the past four years, we have decreased the subsidy we have been receiving from The First Church of Christ, Scientist, by 50 percent. Our goal as a non-profit is financial self-sufficiency. With your help we are making steady progress toward that.
Monitor journalism reaches more people today than ever. About 12 million individuals a month read Monitor articles. We've heard from many of you and know that you range from political leaders in Washington to colleagues in the media, college students to civic-minded retirees, entrepreneurs to executives. What you all have in common is a need for thoughtful, no-nonsense news that helps you engage with your community -- whether that community is as close as your neighborhood or as varied as the planet. A few recent examples of that sort of news:
- Our May 6 Monitor Weekly cover story "Facing Terror: How free and open societies are adapting to a more insecure world."
- Our April 15 cover "The Dealmakers: How work gets done in the new politics of Congress."
- Our intimate March 11 report on how a church community in Newtown, Conn., is working through the aftermath of the Sandy Hook Elementary School tragedy.
Every day, meanwhile, our website, CSMonitor.com, stays atop the news -- from the Syrian civil war to the upcoming elections in Pakistan; the stock market to Europe's struggle with debt and austerity; the Obama presidency to the aftermath of the Boston Marathon bombings.
And for an efficient summary of the stories that matter each morning, we offer the Monday-through-Friday Monitor Daily News Briefing.
Because technology, business, and reader habits are constantly changing, we are constantly working to keep the Monitor up to date and useful. This summer, we’ll be rolling out an improved digital edition of the Monitor Weekly. We’ll also be updating CSMonitor.com. We are also developing new channels to deliver specialized Monitor journalism to global thinkers.
Like many news organizations, the Monitor is navigating a challenging path to financial sustainability. Your support -- via subscriptions to the Monitor Weekly and the Daily News Briefing and by visiting CSMonitor.com -- makes possible the continuation of 105 years of journalism that helps readers understand the world’s problems, seeks out the world’s problem-solvers, and reports progress when it occurs.
John Yemma is editor of the Monitor. He can be reached at editor@csmonitor.com.
Tight quarters, and a skyward view, at a residential complex in Xiangyang, China. (Reuters)
After the Marathon bombings: a new resolve
Ecology describes the balance of living things and their habitat – a colony of birch trees, an anthill, a city, a civilization. When the balance is broken by overpopulation, disease, resource depletion, migration, technology, or the wildfire of fads and fears, conflicts can occur. So can something else. Ideas combine and recombine when they come into contact. Food, fashion, business, and art fuse. Old cultures evolve. New ones are born.
The story of the late 20th and early 21st centuries is how globalization has massively upset the ecological order. Pockets of humanity that once seemed remote are now connected – for better most of the time, but sometimes for worse.
The Monitor office is located at 42° North, 71° West in a pleasant North American neighborhood peopled by everyone from seniors to transients, multi-pierced music students to pinstriped lawyers. An easy lunchtime stroll away is Boylston Street, where on April 15 a cruel act of terrorism disrupted a happy holiday gathering at the end of an egalitarian footrace.
The older of the brothers charged with carrying out the attacks – Chechen by way of Kyrgyzstan and Dagestan but largely raised in the Boston area, married to an American, and so, really, almost quintessentially a product of the American melting pot – is said to have nursed grievances about the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, though he had no personal or family ties to those conflicts. Why he thought killing and maiming the innocent on a Boston street would redress those grievances will never be understandable.
The pain inflicted and the tears shed will not soon be forgotten. But consider what we discovered about ourselves. Instead of anger or fear something different broke out: resolve. This is the world we live in, millions of people seemed to decide all at once. We won’t accept evil, nor will we fear it. And we won’t diminish the good. In fact, we’ll amplify it through support and charity, through cooperation with one another, and by holding firm.
If there ever was a time of splendid isolation – and that may be more rose-colored hindsight than reality – that is not today. A plane ticket or the click of a mouse puts us in contact with almost anyone anywhere on the planet. Ideas and arguments, friendships and disputes, flow freely. Millions of eyes now see what just a few in the mainstream media used to see. That brings with it stereotype-breaking possibilities and the power of millions of thinkers in solving problems. It brings abundant intelligence but also mischief – and sometimes hatred.
The ecological order is always being upset. In another age, when the Roman world was in turmoil, Augustine of Hippo argued that we live in both the City of Man and the City of God. One is constantly in flux. The other is a spiritual constant.
In 2013, the unstoppable ideas of universal freedom and human dignity – embodied by, but not limited to, the American experience – have gone global. That thrills millions and upsets some, which makes the City of Man interesting and dangerous, liberating and threatening. Living in it requires the resolve we’ve seen in Boston, London, Madrid, Jerusalem, Mumbai, Bali, New York, and every other place attacked by freedom’s discontents.
To paraphrase Boston Red Sox slugger David Ortiz the night after Boston’s ordeal ended: This is our city. This is our world.
John Yemma is editor of the Monitor. He can be reached at editor@csmonitor.com.
Visitors with a guide look up at the US Capitol dome from inside the rotunda in Washington DC. (Melanie Stetson Freeman/Staff)
Why we're hard-wired for best practices
Let’s talk “best practices.” That’s the term for emulating success, following the leader, wanting to be like Mike (Jordan) or any other superstar at basketball, nuclear physics, ballroom dancing, summiting Everest. Best practices drive progress. Scientists, even before Isaac Newton pointed it out, have always stood on the shoulders of predecessors. Painters assimilate the best techniques of earlier masters. So do jazz musicians. Good software gets better when it is added to.
In a Monitor cover story, we look at the best practices of Washington dealmakers. It is commonplace today to pine for a golden age of centrism and moderation, a time when compromisers didn’t face fierce primary challenges if they deviated from orthodoxy. Maybe those times once existed; maybe not (see page 31). In any case, business gets done in 2013 Washington because a handful of dealmakers act as interlocutors between often hostile ideological camps.
Dealmakers may hail from a tea party conservative base or be backed by netroots liberals. One may be a Tidewater Republican, another a Brooklyn Democrat. Regardless of political coloration, dealmakers, as you’ll see in the profiles by David Grant and Gail Russell Chaddock, know how to navigate among standing firm, compromising, and capitulating. That makes them rare birds worth studying.
* * *
Here’s another category of best practices that might interest you. Barbara Mills, an archaeologist at the University of Arizona, studies pottery in the American Southwest, which has been studied by her predecessors and peers for more than a century. Millions of pre-Columbian artifacts are warehoused at universities and museums. For a recent project, Professor Mills and her colleagues compiled a database of 4.3 million artifacts from more than 700 sites, noting each item's the stylistic pattern, location, and other details. Then they ran their computer programs.
What they found is an interesting example of the human quest for best practices. Across daunting distance (more than 200 miles in some instances in a culture that traveled only by foot), pottery patterns were virtually identical. Even small changes year to year were reflected in these isolated communities.
This was more than evidence of trade. Geographi-cally separate people were tuning into each other. They cared about the latest iteration of pottery style – perhaps for religious reasons, perhaps simply to belong to something bigger than their own community. They wanted to be like-minded. They were, in essence, participating in slow-motion social networks.
“People in these cultures do it over and over again,” says Mills. “It’s not just something you see in one rare item. There’s evidence of continuous interaction.”
What she and her colleagues saw through their Big Data crunch was in some senses not surprising: Parisian fashion,
Renaissance perspective, American realism, South Korean “Gangnam style” – catchy ideas get transmitted across vast distances in any age. Sure, instantaneous communications speed the process. But people are so eager to adopt best practices and align their thinking with others that they make it a priority.
When a good idea catches on, standards rise everywhere.
John Yemma is editor of the Monitor.
A worker labors in lettuce fields near San Luis, Arizona. ( Eric Thayer/Reuters/File)
What does amnesty accomplish?
“Amnesty” has the same root as “amnesia.” The idea is to forget if not forgive. Amnesty moves people outside the law inside it – while usually staying silent on whether it was right or wrong to break the law in the first place. The first recorded amnesty, granted by the Greek general Thrasybulus in the 5th century BC, aimed to erase the memory of Spartan rule and allow Athenian democracy to flourish.
Amnesties are more about practicality than principle. They are used to get beyond a divisive issue, recognizing that onetime foes must live together in the future – the Great Rebellion in Britain in 1660, the American Civil War. Vietnam draft resisters were granted amnesty by President Carter in 1977. The war was over. The draft had been abolished. It was time to move on.
Erin Siegal’s Monitor cover story examines President Reagan’s 1986 amnesty of illegal immigrants, looking for successes, failures, and precedents as Congress considers a new amnesty. The law provided a pathway to citizenship for nearly 3 million people over the past quarter century. In Erin’s report, you’ll meet some of them.
The amnesty of ’86 came and went without a change in the conditions that contributed to illegal immigration. The 2,000-mile-long US-Mexican border remained easily breached; economic opportunity in the United States remained much better than in Latin America; and US employers faced few repercussions if they hired undocumented workers.
Since the turn of the century, however, border security has tightened significantly and employment verification has increased through programs like E-Verify. More important, economic doldrums in the US and brightening prospects in Latin America have changed the psychology of border crossers (see Sara Miller Llana’s April 9, 2012, Monitor Weekly cover story). Illegal entries today are one-fifth what they were in 2000.
Still, 11 million people are living and working in the US in violation of the law. Their ability to move beyond entry-level jobs is constrained. They are unable to tap into programs they help fund, including Social Security and Medicare. They are part of the economy, part of society, but confined to the shadows.
By every measurement – economic activity, wage competition with American workers, criminal-justice cases, cost to taxpayers – the impact of illegal immigration is neutral or close to neutral. It has benefits and costs. Nor is there conclusive evidence that illegal immigrants are more likely than the general population to commit crimes, according to the Center for Immigration Studies, a group that supports a crackdown on illegal immigration. Studies by researchers at Northeastern University and the University of California, Irvine, in fact, indicate that border communities in the US actually have lower crime rates than the national average.
So the debate about amnesty usually comes down to the principle of the thing. Those entering the country illegally broke the law and jumped the line. Should that be rewarded? Does amnesty create the expectation of future amnesty? Economic trends can always reverse, after all, and motivated people can always defeat borders, especially if they know the country whose laws they broke will eventually look the other way.
Granting amnesty is not an easy decision. It may not be a permanent fix. It hinges on whether a nation of immigrants should forget how 11 million new immigrants entered the country – in the interests of letting them, and the nation, move on.
John Yemma is editor of the Monitor.
Students line up outside their classroom at a Chicago school. (Melanie Stetson Freeman/Staff/File)
A balance worth tipping
Sometime around Day 1 in our lives, we begin wondering what’s fair and what’s unfair. Are Mom and Dad playing favorites with the ice cream? How can that kid cut in line? C’mon, Mr. SUV, let me into the traffic.
We’re constantly weighing fairness, campaigning for it, and judging it. The perception of unfairness may start as mild annoyance, but it can make or break empires. Get it right and you’re Solomon. Get it wrong and you’re Marie Antoinette.
So basic is the desire for fairness and the revulsion at unfairness that scientists are increasingly convinced that it is innate. A 2008 study by researchers at the California Institute of Technology indicates that the drive for fairness is tied to people’s emotion and that, instead of learning to be fair, humans are born that way. Experiments show that people feel worse when they perceive inequity and better when justice is done. Humanity, in effect, is always putting the universe on trial.
In a Monitor cover story, Stacy Teicher Khadaroo examines the problem of fairness in the meting out of school discipline. School is crucial in transferring civilization from one generation to another. It is where young people determine whether social rules are worth supporting, whether society is going to give them a fair shake, whether centuries-old wisdom really is wise – whether, in short, they should contribute to the culture they were born into or walk away from it.
A teacher’s interest, an inspiring class, supportive fellow students – these slowly encourage adolescents to opt in. A clash with authority can derail that process, especially if a perception of unfairness takes hold. This is where the statistics are troubling.
There are significantly higher rates of suspensions and expulsions for African-Americans, Hispanics, and those with disabilities than for white students in American schools. Meanwhile, discipline has shifted in recent years from after-class detention and stern warnings to “zero tolerance” of bad behavior. The unintended consequence is that rising numbers of young people don’t get the kind of do-overs that were once common in school. They get bounced. They’re on the streets, heading toward the criminal-justice system, and convinced that life is unfair.
As you’ll see in Stacy’s accompanying article, however, that innate human drive to see justice done is actively trying to counteract that problem. Conflict-prevention programs in Oakland, Calif., and elsewhere aim to shift the view of students, to encourage them that there is something to live for, that life isn’t unfair, and that school is worth their time and attention.
Fair treatment gives rise to hope. But for many people – especially those traumatized by broken homes, violent neighborhoods, or run-ins with the police – hope can’t simply be switched on. It has to be earned through one-on-one encounters and trust-building in programs such as the “restorative justice” initiative in Oakland’s public schools.
If we come into this world wired for fairness, evidence of it convinces us that we aren’t mistaken. That, in turn, builds a defense against the inevitable moment that unfairness asserts itself. A kid will cut in line. A driver will be rude. Injustice will occur. But if an enemy forgives, a judge shows mercy, a teacher takes interest, the balance tips back. In a civilization worth supporting, fair outweighs unfair.
John Yemma is editor of the Monitor.
An Interchange offers drivers options near Minneapolis. (Jeff Wheeler/Star Tribune/AP/File)
Trees, meet forest
Turn-by-turn navigation is a marvel. Enter an address into a map application by Google, Yahoo, Apple, Garmin, or half a dozen other providers. You get the exact route to an exact address on the other side of the country. You are politely reminded of the turns to take. You can zoom in and out, see topography in 3-D, overlay satellite images, and mouse along at street level.
But as with anything involving digital search, the temptation is to go right to specifics without getting the big picture. I recently used turn-by-turn navigation in an unfamiliar city in the American Midwest. In the days before the Internet, I would have bought a map. Just the process of unfolding it would have provided an overview of the geography. Filmmakers call that an establishing shot. I didn’t need that with digital navigation. The nice computer lady talked me through the city. But I had no idea where I was – or what I was traveling past – until I got there.
Paper maps are clunky, easily torn, and often out of date. Travel used to entail missed exits and guesses about direction, which meant that gas station attendants were endowed with sagelike knowledge of streets and roadside attractions. There was a serendipitous aspect to that kind of trip taking – not unlike the way flipping the pages of a newspaper or wandering the shelves of a library can turn into a magical mystery tour. Poring over a state map, you’d stumble upon a Civil War battlefield near the barbecue joint that the Texaco guy recommended.
The same thing is there digitally, of course, along with Yelp reviews and 1,700 articles about the battlefield. So don’t worry, this isn’t a paean to the good old days. It’s just that search technology too easily takes us to the very specific. We get exactly where we are going without knowing how we got there. If you’ll forgive the metaphorical leap, that’s not unlike what is happening with news – astounding access to trees but less and less attention to forests.
The Monitor tries to provide both views. We want you to understand the world in its close-up detail and in stand-back patterns. Take a recent edition of our weekly newsmagazine: Our cover story examined two landmark cases before US Supreme Court: the Defense of Marriage Act and California’s Proposition 8. The former was a 1996 attempt to set a national standard for marriage, the latter a 2008 attempt to do the same at the state level. The eventual ruling will affect individuals, families, businesses, government programs, and society as a whole.
In our Focus stories, we tightened the lens somewhat, looking at the dangers and opportunities in the Middle East as President Obama visited the region and also at the future of humans in space. An even closer-up view could be found in the articles of One Week, where we briefed you on everything from the new pope to Washington budget battles to the fishing industry in India. Serendipity might have taken you to our photo essay of Ukrainian seniors dancing. Would you have thought to search for that?
There’s much more in each issue. You could say that we publish a weekly map of the world along with a turn-by-turn guide to its rich, difficult, and often triumphant variety. If the Monitor Weekly nav works for you, we’re happy to be of service. If you think it would work for others who appreciate both trees and forests, we’d be grateful if you pointed them in our direction.
John Yemma is editor of the Monitor.
Volunteers work in a community garden in Racine, Wis. (Mark Hertzberg/Journal Times/AP/File )
The hottest global trend is local
When was it that “local” – a word that rhymes with yokel and has long been a synonym for small-time and provincial – became hot? When did a gnarly heirloom tomato replace a spotless Calgene Flavr Savr as the “it” produce? What has prompted people to enthuse over artisanal cheeses, dirt-caked root vegetables, micro-batch beverages, and sketchy-looking salsas in Mason jars?
Bright lights and big cities are undeniably fun and productive, especially Monday through Friday. But town squares and farmers’ markets – even in big cities – are where the action is most weekends in most neighborhoods.
Let’s go back to where it all began. (Well, since most things start locally, perhaps not quite that far.) In recent history, the back-to-the-land 1960s begat communes and a small-is-beautiful movement. Most of those experiments fizzled as idealism crashed into practicality. But something was stirring. In the ensuing decades, urban pioneering, organic farming, slow food, and a “think global, act local” ethos gathered pace. By the ’70s, preservation movements were stopping the wrecking balls of urban renewal and forcing the rethinking of neighborhood-crushing superhighway projects such as Interstate 95 in Boston and the Westway in Manhattan.
I’d argue, however, that the tipping point for localism didn’t occur in one epic battle. Localism prevailed in ten thousand places where residents began to care about the community around them instead of just launching away on their morning commutes and reentering their neighborhoods at night. The shop around the corner may not have more stuff or better deals than Wal-Mart, but it contributes to the fabric of life and is worth patronizing.
Most local business get nowhere near the Fortune 500, though a few occasionally make it big. Wal-Mart started locally in Bentonville, Ark.; McDonald’s was once a lone burger joint in San Bernardino, Calif. But their small time was a long time ago.
In a Monitor cover story, Yvonne Zipp has good news about a quintessential local enterprise, the independent bookstore. For decades these were under threat, first by chains like B. Dalton and then category-killers like Borders and Barnes & Noble. The 1998 romantic comedy “You’ve Got Mail” tells the tale of a friendly little bookstore driven out of business by a B&N-type giant (which, in the end, turns out to be a friendly enough place – and, surprise, onetime rivals, played by Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan, fall in love).
Interestingly, 1998 was just about the high-water mark of big bookstores. Amazon was already stalking them with a cheaper and more plentiful inventory, and the Internet was disrupting reading habits and information availability. As Yvonne shows, however, independent bookstores had two secret weapons: They were small. And they were loved.
I’ll let Yvonne explain the clever and heartwarming ways these paper-and-ink (and now e-book and often also coffee and greeting cards) survivors have made their businesses work in a digital age. The main thing to understand is that because they were part of a community, locals have embraced them. A bookstore is a safe, pleasant place to frequent. And, of course, their merchandise is hardly small-time and provincial. The volumes sitting on their shelves have the power to expand thinking across the globe, out into the universe, and deep into the realm of soul.
Local, you see, isn’t about geography. It’s a state of mind.
John Yemma is editor of the Monitor. He can be reached at editor@csmonitor.com.
Volunteer Stephanie Porzio reads a condolence letter sent to Newtown, Conn.; she is helping to create an archive. (Jessica Hill/AP)
After Newtown: a time for solace
Time is a blanket. It settles over the wars, disasters, and violence of today, softening the contours of the raw and immediate, turning them first into memory, then history, and eventually half-remembered legend. Time itself doesn’t heal wounds. That takes a higher order of thought. But almost without effort, time gentles the present and helps us move on.
The world is overflowing with places and dates we vow never to forget: Auschwitz, Hiroshima, Gettysburg. At first, we lay wreaths and feel the rush of memory. Then time’s blanket descends. We mark a month, a year, a decade, but new generations cannot feel the same way we do. Dates that will live in infamy once again become Sundays in early December. Hallowed ground in one era is a pleasant park in another.
Less than three months have passed since that terrible Friday morning at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Conn. G. Jeffrey MacDonald has listened and watched as the pastor and parishioners of the Newtown United Methodist Church comfort one another and lean on a church family that was always there but has now become an even more essential part of their lives. (You can read Jeff's report here.)
The church sits at the entrance to the Sandy Hook village and has a large parking lot. Media from around the world swarmed in after the shooting. From the outset, the Rev. Mel Kawakami and members of the church kept reporters at bay, determined to maintain a community sanctuary. Still, there was a story to tell.
An official of the national United Methodist Church reached out to Jeff, who has written about religion for many years (see his Dec. 24, 2012, cover story, “The new face of faith”), knowing he would be respectful and trustworthy. His report – and Melanie Stetson Freeman’s sensitive photographs inside the church – is an intimate look at a faith community working through pain, sorrow, and questions engendered by crisis.
One of the church members told Jeff that Newtown had always seemed like Sesame Street to her – safe, diverse, kind, intelligent, happy. That was turned upside down on Dec. 14. But the essential qualities of the community haven’t disappeared. They are manifest in the kindness of a customer paying for everyone’s coffee at Dunkin’ Donuts, the simple act of looking in on a neighbor, the care and discretion people exercise in deciding whether this is or is not the moment to speak up on the issue of gun violence.
We often see news reports of packed churches the Sunday after a tragedy, Jeff notes. And that’s usually where the story ends. News moves on. “But there’s so much more to it,” he says. “Church is a safe space for people to confess, to cry, to feel the presence of sanctuary, to reinterpret the meaning of powerful symbols, to find deeper meaning in hymns and sacraments.” Some of this can be done alone; more needs to be worked out in community, which is what a church is when it is at its best.
Valentine’s Day, Feb. 14, was especially hard in Newtown. Lent, which is approaching its midway point, is a hard season by definition and has been made harder by a cold, snowy winter. Ahead are anniversaries and birthdays and more tears. Good Friday will be 15 weeks to the day. Only 3-1/2 months will have passed by Easter Sunday. Spring and summer will come. But the gentling blanket of time takes time.
“America is a ‘move on’ society,” Jeff notes. “We don’t like to sit with things. We need to sit with things.”
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