Perceptions: Where we are as who we are

My friend and neighbor Frances Cook has written a response to yesterday’s post about the Interstate/Chavez flare-up.

She raises the question of whether those who use Fourth Avenue, which is likely to get the Cesar Chavez name, will not also feel a name has been taken from them.

It’s a good question. We are about to find out the answer.

My sense is that numbered streets carry less meaning than those that have word names. Then again, 5th Avenue in New York has its own cache. Saks might have something to say about changing the street’s name.

And certainly the legend surrounding Rte 66 dictates that its name be preserved. (Here a tip of the hat is in order to Nate Cole.)

Since last night’s post I’ve found myself chewing on this question: To what extent is our identity defined by where we are?

Note that this is not limited to ownership. Where we live becomes part of our identity.

A couple of years ago in Hillsdale we felt threatened when our identity with our place and its name faced a challenge in a boundary dispute. Two neighborhoods (Hillsdale and the Southwest Hills Residential League) shared the same territory. As the neighborhoods grew in importance, we began to identify with one or the other of them. Finally, a headstrong local leader attempted to tell us to “where” we lived. We didn’t take kindly the coercion and things turned messy and litigious (conveniently for her, her husband was an attorney).

After considerable angst, we resolved the conflict by asking people literally to decide where they lived. Nine out of ten had no trouble doing so in a way that made sense, so we redrew the boundary eliminating the overlaps.

Everyone is happier and more “at one,” except the renegade leader, who resolved her own conflict by moving to another state.

It isn’t hard to see how war results from threats to our sense of oneness with our place. We defend a place because the loss of it to someone else represents the loss of our very identifies — our memories, our present lives, our hopes for the future.

Seen in this way, the effort to change the name of Interstate Avenue was no small matter.

The key to resolution of the conflict was to find a place where people were more than willing to adopt and, yes, share a new, meaningful identity. Clearly the abandonment of Interstate didn’t satisfy that requirement for the people who lived and worked on the North Portland avenue. Their identities were bound up with the name of the place.

Fourth Avenue may work as a Cesar Chavez Avenue. For me it does. The new name is a proud one that celebrates an inspirational life. Then again, as Frances suggests, it may not work if Fourth and the people who use it are one.

From the reaction so far, I think Fourth has a lot better chance than Interstate did.

I hope I’m right.

Snatching defeat from the jaws of victory

Like many others, I’ve been baffled by the angry reaction of the Latino group that failed to get Interstate Avenue named for Cesar Chavez.

In all likelihood, they will end up with a renaming of the more prominent Fourth Avenue for Chavez instead. The result will be much better than what they had fought for.

How can that be a defeat — or an affront or an insult, as they have called it?

The problem is that the group became so vested in the strategic way they had chosen to achieve their goal of honoring Chavez that the strategy's success became more important than the goal.

In the same way, many soldiers fall in love with war.

As several observers have noted, Cesar Chavez would have been the first to see the folly of his supporters’ divisive position.

Neither the Latino group, nor the Mayor who blindly and inexplicably backed them, saw the presumptuousness and effrontery of simply stepping in and replacing “Interstate” with “Chavez.” Never mind what people who lived along the avenue thought.

The Latino group and the mayor felt they had taken the higher moral ground, and, in one way, they had. The name “Interstate Avenue,” unlike “Cesar Chavez Avenue” had no moral force to it. It stood for nothing except itself and its obvious, historic commercial function.

The people who live and work along Interstate, on the other hand, could invoke their own morality. Try "Thou Shalt Not Steal."

The name of their stretch of the world was not something that could be taken from them by interest groups, ethnic or otherwise, and by politicians possibly stuck with IOUs and definitely feeling political heat.

As it turned out, the “Interstaters” could generate their own political heat.

And so the struggle became more important than the goal of honoring the memory of Cesar Chavez.

Of course, the substitution of 4th Avenue for Interstate as a compromise addressed the goal magnificently, but it also created “winners” and “losers” in the Interstate struggle.

The hope is that all the parties one day will be wiser for the experience. They may even end up congratulating each other on their shared victory.

For the City of Portland, that day can't come too soon.

Benefactors make anonymnity condition of gifts

Memo to the Portland School Board, City Commissioner for Parks Dan Salzman and his fellow City Council members, Portland Park's Director Zari Santner, City Council candidate Amanda Fritz, Latinos for renaming Interstate Avenue after Cesar Chavez, the Schnitzer Family in all its parts and anyone who trades in naming rights and "recognition opportunities" as a condition of philanthropy and politics.

We could be seeing the start of a trend to ego-free giving and participation. It resurrects the old notion that "virtue is its own reward."

Here's a story about benefactors who gave a few million to their alma mater on the condition that they wouldn't be recognized by having their names plastered on their gift. You read that right: Would NOT be named.

Imagine!

Workbook for Our Times

Today, neighbors began donating books for our Hillsdale community book sale on Dec. 9. We gathered the books, which came by the bags full, in Larry and Sally McLaughlin’s white Isuzu pick-up parked at the entrance to the farmers’ market.

Several of the books in this first batch were remarkable. Experience with three earlier sales teaches that more will follow in donations at the next three markets.

Because I am one of the sale’s principal organizers, I get to sort through the books first. One jumped out at me today. It was a workbook from a class on non-violence taught by the Pace e Bene Franciscan Nonviolence Center, which happens to be in Las Vegas. Whoever donated the large white handbook, titled "From Violence to Wholeness," clearly took the class because the text is marked with handwritten notations.

So much of the book’s content echoed my last Red Electric entry about renaming streets for heroes (specifically Interstate Avenue for Cesar Chavez) that it was eerie.

The workbook contains Cesar Chavez’s “Letter from Delano,” written in 1969 to his union’s adversary, E.L. Barr, Jr. the president of the California Grape and Tree Fruit League.

The words capture Chavez’s humility, determination and willingness to fast and die for the cause of his people. The labor leader ends by saying, “This letter does not express all that is in my heart, Mr. Barr. But if it says nothing else, it says that we do not hate you or rejoice to see your industry destroyed; we hate the agribusiness that seeks to keep us enslaved and we shall overcome and change it not by retaliation or bloodshed but by a determined nonviolent struggle carried on by those masses of farm workers who intend to be free and human.”

In another section of this remarkable workbook is a prayer Chavez wrote. Invoking God, it reads in part:

Give me courage to serve others;
For in service there is true life.
Give me honesty and patience;
So that the Spirit will be alive among us.
Let the Spirit flourish and grow;
So that we will never tire of the struggle.
Let us remember those who have died for justice;
For they have given us life.
Help us love even those who hate us;
So we can change the world.
Amen

As I wrote yesterday, those who seek to honor Chavez, should honor his ideals and methods, which are so movingly conveyed here. They should honor him first by learning what he taught and did, and second living those words and deeds.

Naming streets after Chavez, does little or nothing to advance his cause. Indeed the symbolic gesture offers a false sense of accomplishment, sapping energy from the on-going struggle for economic and social justice. If you want to name a street, name it for the struggle and its purpose.

Tomorrow, I will share some of the section of the workbook that addresses consensus. Astonishingly, that was the other topic I wrote about yesterday as I looked at the utter failure of the City Council to address the issues underlying the street-naming fiasco.

An avenue named “Justice,” a road named “Freedom”

I got a phone call the other day from one of the proponents of renaming Interstate Avenue for Cesar Chavez.

Apparently defeated in North Portland, the renamers were looking at Beaverton-Hillsdale Highway as a thoroughfare to honor Chavez.

I was cool to the idea.

First — but, as you will see, not foremost — is that “Beaverton-Hillsdale Highway” has been a modest plus in Hillsdale’s effort to establish its identity. Ungainly yes. Misleading, yes (little Hillsdale is hardly a counterbalance to bulked-up Beaverton). But the name literally puts Hillsdale on many maps.

Next — and this is far more significant — history does strange things to the names of our heroes. We celebrate Martin Luther King Jr.’s birthday as a national holiday, but the King we celebrate each year is a caricature of the King so many of us remember. In the holiday tributes, I, for instance, see only a glimmer of the King who inspired me to go to Mississippi in the spring of 1964 to work on voter registration.

King has become some kind of gauzy, harmless dreamer, thanks to one indelible speech. The King I knew was passionate about justice and change. He was a masterful agent of change who should be remembered for the urgency of our rallying cry, “Freedom Now!”

Today we have Martin Luther King Boulevard, but who associates the name with King’s tenacity, with his moral outrage, with his commitment to non-violence, his struggles for justice, with “Freedom Now!”?

No, we are left with a street of a dreamer.

Chavez is a less well defined figure in American history, partly because his speeches haven’t become part of American lore. He was the champion of the poor and the horribly exploited, specifically those who harvested our food. In November 1960, Edward R. Murrow made a searing documentary called “The Harvest of Shame” about the plight of the farm workers. It should be viewed before each Thanksgiving meal.

Chavez bravely sought to expunge the shame of those harvests. Despite his efforts, we still consume harvests shame. Those Chavez struggled for are now everywhere, still vulnerable to exploitation.

Why shouldn’t we honor Chavez and King — and Gandhi and Mandela, and Susan Anthony and Henry David Thoreau by naming streets and bridges and schools and even entire cities and states after them?

Because their actions and ideals are their legacy. If we truly want to honor them, we should celebrate and perpetuate those deeds and ideals. Unless we can be assured that King and Chavez will be known accurately and well to future generations those street names will become hollow vessels.

Who today knows the Barbur* of Barbur Boulevard? Who knows about the Macadam* of Macadam Avenue? And who 50 years from now will know the Naito of Naito Boulevard?

Yes, there are far better names for Interstate Avenue and Beaverton-Hillsdale Highway. If we change those names, let’s name them for what King and Chavez stood for.

Is that not what they would want?

Honor them and inspire us by changing Union, Interstate, Beaverton-Hillsdale and Macadam to Justice, Dignity, Freedom and Peace.

* Anthony L. Barbur (1861-1941) served 10 years as Portland city auditor and then as commissioner of Public Works for 16 years. (The Oregon History Project)
* Macadam is the name of the mixture of sand, gravel and tar used to pave roads. Macadam Avenue was the first in the city to be surfaced with the mixture.