Oral History with Staughton and Alice Lynd, January 12th, 2017, Part One

Okay, it's January 12th we're-second day doing oral history interviews with Alice and Staughton Lynd. This is Dan Kerr and Catherine Murphy, and we're in Alice and Staughton Lynd's home.

And the year is 2017.

And the year is 2017. So, what would I like to do this morning? And this session is really think through really some of the-the big ideas that have shaped your life's work and maybe if we could just leave it very open-ended and-and you guys can take it from there and-and, I think that will kind of give the larger picture. Perhaps in the afternoon, we can go into some of the kind of details and follow-up questions.

Well, it might be helpful to block out the major concerns we pursued in different periods of time. Starting in roughly 1960, I would say that for the next five years until 1965 the focus was on civil rights. In the south, I was Freedom School coordinator in the summer of 1964, and attended the tragic Waveland Conference of SNCC in November. And early the next year, I have been asked by SNCC to come to Selma and I was on the way home and I can remember holding the New York Times and reading about- I think the first occasion when the North Vietnamese army or the Viet Cong or some combination of the two had attacked an American base with significant casualties. I remember saying to myself, ah, ha so that's perhaps what I'm supposed to be working on, and I did. For the next several years, that is to say, I worked on opposition to the Vietnam War in a variety of ways. And then we moved to Chicago in 1967 and there gradually crystallized on a-a focus on what. at the time, seemed an emerging rank-and-file labor movement. And that emphasis continued until our retirement from legal services in the mid-1990s, and in the period since then we've dealt primarily with, lthough not exclusively, with the problems presented by high-security prisons, such as the Ohio super max security prison built in Youngstown, Ohio and opening in 1998. Now-

And the death penalty beginning in 1996, that is some of that prison work and some of our feelings about the death penalty went way back, but since 1996 we've worked on one or more death penalty cases.

And as one reaches the end of the road, on this terrestrial sphere, there is a kind of a summing up process, I think, that, inserts itself, makes its demands, and in my case, I would say that I've imagine myself climbing a mountain with three paths all leading to the same summit. And the first of those, begins with what we used to call organizing, and I find very distinct traces of organizing, first in the labor movement, then in Saul Alinsky's community organization movement, then in the movement of SNCC and SDS, in other words, almost all the organizations of the 60s would have said with a clenched fist that they were organizing. And I've come to think that that was a superficial and disastrous mistake because organizing, as I say, in the first paragraph of a book called Accompanying, organizing is the idea that I know what you should be doing and what you should be thinking, and I'm going to do my best to arrange the circumstances of your life so that you come to those activities and conclusions that I've already decided you should come too. I think it doesn't work and it's hateful that ii betrays values that are very important to us all. And in its place, Alice and I, it's very curious because I'm not sure we can identify a moment when this transition occurred, but it certainly had to do with our trips to Latin America, to Nicaragua, Guatemala, Mexico. And it is an idea that I believe Archbishop Oscar Romero of El Salvador was the first to call accompanying. And accompanying is journeying with another person, not in a relationship of guidance or superiority, but with the sense that each of the travelers brings a different kind of expertise to bear, and that they learn from each other and from the circumstances that they encounter together. And an important corollary is the idea that you don't try to make yourself over into something that you are not, that you take part in this journey, this pilgrimage, if you're a Roman Catholic priest, you continue to wear the crucifix around your neck. If you're Staughton Lynd, you-are continue to wear flaming red t-shirts that proclaim the virtues of solidarity and so forth and so on. That's one of the three ways up the mountain. Now a second is non-violence and Alice and I, at the invitation of Orbis Books, published, in the mid-1990s, a second edition of a book entitled, Non-Violence in America, a Documentary History. The first edition appeared in the 1960s, I wrote it and Alice, while I was in Mississippi, not only checked the footnotes, but the text, which meant going to the Yale library, and laboriously holding in one hand the printed source and then the other hand the manuscript of our-of my book. But in the mid-1990s, it was a joint edition, we had all sorts of new material. And, I can say this much that the introduction and the last few pages to that second edition, explicitly returned or referred to accompanying, so at least for the last 20 years, that accompanying mantra has been our guiding set of words. The subject of non-violence, though, is very curious because there's an unfortunate identification with middle-class Quakers, who include the two of us, and with a kind of brittle and in a certain way cold definition of non-violence. Non-violence is about just how far I'll go in resisting evil until that point for I open my hands and receive whatever life chooses to bring. I don't think that's what non-violence is about. I think non-violence is a beating heart, not at a border but at a center. And that beating heart is one that feels empathy with all human beings. I think I'm the only person in the movement who protested when the Black Panthers began to call police officers pigs. I protested in print, I don't know anyone else who did that. And more recently I've had occasion to protest when a rejuvenated movement, among African-American males, said various derogatory things about correctional officers. My problem is that many correctional officers at the Ohio supermax are former clients of mine. They are persons who, when the Mills closed, lost their jobs, either in making steel or in performing an ancillary service, such as trucking. And even though they now wear a fancy uniform, it's still the same Joe or Jim or John, that I knew very well and very respectfully 10 or 15 years ago, and I have no reason to regard them as somehow expelled from humanity at the present time. So, practically speaking, what am I saying about non-violence that it includes everybody and it includes not just hitting them with the-refraining from hitting them with a baseball bat but reaching out to them as a fellow human being in trying to understand why they're coming from where they're coming from. And then the third path up the same mountain is that of Oral History, alternatively called history from the bottom up or history from below, and it's a mystery to me why people are concerned to identify when this began, it was always there and perhaps the most dramatic moment in the English-speaking world was when Edward Thompson picked it up and wrote his History of the English Working-Class, which appeared let it be known in approximately 1960. And at least since that time, there's been a coterie of persons, of who I was one, who tried to go at history in that way, in this country. And all sorts of things are connected with history from below, like Paulo Freire's pedagogy in Brazil. And so, what I want to comment on now is the hit-the-the oral history path up the mountain but with the understanding that I'm not writing within the narrow confines of a particular historiographical heresy, I'm talking about something that is much broader, much more varied. Something that people use terms like horizontalism to describe, something with a strong anarchist infusion but I hope to God not only am anarchist infusion. And let me begin at the very end of my own path by sharing with you something, a few excerpts from something, I recently read. I subscribe to three periodicals. One of them is the news magazine, In These Times. When it originated, James Weinstein, who was the editor said that he would like several of us to write an issue of contributions and in return we would get a free subscription, and I have managed to maintain that free subscription over the years from my very occasional contributions. That's one. The second is the New York Review of Books, and it is, in some ways, a very pretentious, very one-sided periodical. They pick out, for example, their favorite American historian and that person reviews everything that comes out in American history, and in my own field of the American Revolution it was Edmund Morgan of Yale, the man who recruited me to teach there and with whom I violently disagree about a series of things. And since Brother Ed's death, there is a new stable of conservative commentators. Just to give an example, Marcus Redeker and Peter Linebaugh published a very provocative book and I'm not handing out blanket endorsements, that-I had criticisms of of their work, but it was an attempt to describe rank-and-file movements in the whole circumference of the Atlantic during what Marx called the period of primitive accumulation from the early 1600s to, let's say, the year 1800, and it's brilliant. And the reigning reviewer at Yale University called them communist. I mean, it was a piece of just out-out and out slander. But in any event, the New York Review of Books usually has one article that-that makes you really happy to have read it, and the third and possibly most influential periodical I read is a Nicaraguan publication called Envio, it's put out by Jesuits at the National University and the editor-in-chief is a woman named Maria Lopez Vigil. And Maria Lopez Vigil endears herself to me because when Archbishop Romero was murdered, she went to El Salvador and collected, what I think in its published form is called a Portrait in Mosaics, it is a collection of oral histories, remembrances about the most significant proponent of non-violence in all our lives, namely Oscar Romero, and it's a way of keeping, in some sort of context, contact with what's going on in Nicaragua, which Alice and I used our annual two or three week vacations to visit five times between 1985 and 1990, but it's also a way to-to get a taste of another continent and another movement in pursuing the same similar intellectual objectives to that which people who call themselves radicals in the United States are interested in. And in the most recent issue there appears an article by someone named Boaventura de Sousa Santos. If any-any one person has ever heard his name before, I would be interested. I had not. And it's a critique of-of the social sciences, as they exist at the present time, entitled, We Lack the Imagination to Think of Alternatives. And this is Envio for volume 35, number 424-25, November-December 2016. And he says, in effect, we have to be willing to think epistemologically, and what he means by that is that the whole structure of knowledge, as it appears to Latin Americans influenced by liberation theology, is actually quite-quite different from that that we're accustomed to thinking of as self-evident, necessary academic methodology, and I will volunteer to photocopy this article for anyone interested, but I'd like to read just a few sentences. "What do the epistemologies of the south say to us?" Now by the south he means the whole colonial and neo-colonial world. What do Latin America, Africa and Southeast Asia say to Europe and the United States? Every one of these sentences just kind of makes you sit back and reach for your-your pencil. "What do the epistemologies is of the South say to us, that knowledge is found in struggles and not in scientific studies. That many different understandings are circulating in the world. Traditional, vernacular, grassroots, knowledge of women, men, indigenous people, peasants. Different kinds of knowledge are forged and circulate in these struggles. However, we got used to thinking that our scientific thought is the only valid one." And, you know, I can't, in the space of a few sentences, summarize all that's in here but his conclusion kind of adds to the flavor of it. "Journalists, academics, businesspeople, diplomats, and others world-" Wait a minute, sorry. Wrong article conclusion. "We have to democratize society. Decolonize, demarketize, depatriarchalize it. And we have to do the same with our social sciences, but that demands that we do a lot of work on ourselves." This is the kind of article where you hear a sentence and you just stop reading because-oh we have to do a lot of work on ourselves. "There was a time when we formed rebels in our universities, while at many times incompetent ones. Today, we're increasingly forming more conformist be they competent or not. The time has come to form competent rebels." And so in that spirit, I-I would like to say some things about what has come to be called oral history, and many of them are said in the article that those who interviewed me have written and published because I think they established that the existing schematic historiography of oral histories, is just nonsense. To begin with the idea that it stops-starts with Allan Nevins at Columbia University's oral history collection. I don't mean to speak contemptuously at the collection, my mother is in it, but everyone who knows anything about it knows that the thrust of that collection is to present the-the-the remembrances of what Jesse Lamish called great white men. That's what it's mainly about. And, therefore the-the incredibly rich and wonderful collection of the memories of former slaves that was conducted by the Works Progress Administration during the 1930s is somehow regarded as pre-oral history, prefigurative experience, an inkling of the real oral history which was to come. Now that is patrician bubblegum. It's just nonsense. And, in the article I referenced that pointed out and the following very important distinction made, this I think is the key to the whole article. Yes, of the Ed Morgans of this world took note that be-wigged gentleman in what do you call them? Knickers. We're not the only human beings in the United States of America at the time of the American Revolution, there were also the Native Americans who were in process of being exterminated, because they couldn't be made somehow into reliable slave workers, and the African Americans. The hundreds of thousands of African-Americans, who were being imported as slaves. The importation of which was discontinued during the years of the war for independence for wholly pragmatic reasons, and immediately resumed once the war was over, and that history of patrician males, obviously needed some correction, some fig leaf of sensitivity to the 99%, and so you have a kind of oral history, and this is the great contribution of the article, which amounted to recording narratives by slaves, Indians, women, dependent categories of persons of all kinds, and adding them to the university archive. The obvious next step being to ask those same persons, if only as a concluding moment of the interview, and what do you think, how do you understand, why do you think? Which very very rarely happens. Or happened, also suggested in the article, outside its boundaries, what was that? Although that was Staughton Lynd and his friends presenting their mindless and uncritical set of sob stories about the poor. And, I want to suggest that there's yet another stage of critique. And at the moment, since I just thought of it in the last few days, I can only say it in the most abstract and generalized way, which doesn't mean that there isn't a more finely tuned version incipient among those present. And it's simply that oral history isn't the decorative edition to history, the-the-the personal narrative which gives a flavor of of humaneness to a dry catalog of battles and, you know, Jefferson-I visited Monticello, I've been there twice. And the first time was when my history teacher in high school thought that maybe I-my mind was drifting a little too much toward the Soviet Union and European social democracy and I don't know what, and I needed to recognize that there was an American radical tradition. And I remember one thing from that visit to Monticello. Now, when I went to second time with one of our grandchildren, I noticed the most amazing thing, which was, it was like a long board walk underneath the earth, a secret passageway leading up to the main set of buildings and you know what that is? That is where the slaves went to cook meals for Mr. Jefferson and his visitor. So that in the stove, immediately underneath the dining room, there was a, what do you call it? Something that raises things up Alice. Not a lazy Susan, which I'm going to come to at the moment, but a vertical.

Yeah, a-a dumbwaiter.

A dumbwaiter.

Yes.

Device by Thomas Jefferson, that would bring the-the mail up to the dining room, and then a lazy Susan, designed by Thomas Jefferson so the guests around the table could be fed, why all of this superfluous labor? So that the guests would never see a black face. I mean that's an inference, but you tell me your theory if you think it was something different. That's what I saw with my 50, 60, 70 year old eyes, but when I was 15, what I saw was the machine that Jefferson constructed so that, as he wrote all his letters, a copy would be made simultaneously. I mean, he-he was right up there with Allan Nevins in wanting to preserve the records of a great white man like himself. And what I think we now ought to begin to see, and I realize I'm stating it crudely, is that history began with oral history. Began with Troubadours who went from one Royal Court to the next and sang their songs and told their stories about the lives of past men and women that Homer-if a single person named Homer existed-initiated or was part of an oral tradition that told, for example, of Greeks, going to Asia Minor, what is now the coast of Turkey, and besieging a city named Troy. And of course, academic historians say, well, that was one of their myths, they were crude, ignorant, people until an amateur archaeologist, I think his name was Schliemann devoted his entire adult life to trying to find this city of Troy because he thought it really existed, and by golly, he found it. Which means that oral history is not necessarily the collection of fairy tales that traditional historiography likes to imagine it. It may be in that crude and primitive time before we had what we have now, means of photocopying and so forth and so on, this was the way they remembered history for most of the existence of human beings on this Earth. Which means that we're not a supplement to history based on census data and Thomas Jefferson's letters. They are an appendix to the history that ordinary people remember and tell each other and-and keep alive. And that's why one of the guests at the occasion, where I'm speaking hasrecently been visiting, a man named Curtis Hayes who now lives in New Orleans. Last time I heard about Curtis, he had given up in the spare on the United States and was taking off for Latin America, but a lot of Latin America too has run into a few road bumps so Curtis is now back in New Orleans and, I think, that-that the history of-of what we did in the 60s, that needs remembering is in the minds, between the ears of a few dozen people like Curtis Hayes, and it-it's very frustrating and very challenging because that generation is passing. Tom Hayden died recently. Howard Zinn is gone. David Montgomery is gone. Al Young is gone. Jesse Lamich may be gone soon. Ella Baker, the list, Myles Horton, it- there are only a few of us left. We are the survivors. And I think we have an obligation, a responsibility, to-to tell the assembled Lords and Ladies about some of the folk by the roadside that we encountered on our way to the castle. And-and I think we should do it, this is the critical thing, with the feeling that we know what's important. Reminds me of a movie of the French, St. Vincent de Paul, and it comes to the period of his death and he's surrounded by fussy plenipotentiaries and a little girl or a young woman, who's thinking of making a lifetime commitment to be a nun comes to the building and asks to see him. And the assemble, the caretakers, ridicule her and condemn-can't you see child that something very important is going on, and somehow this reaches the ears of the dying man. And he says, stop it. Believe me at this moment, I know what's important. Let me talk to her the rest of you leave. And he says, child-I'm to some extent making this up but this is the spirit of it, I'm not going to try to advise you as to whether to make this very, very serious, lifetime commitment, but if you make it remember at every moment that, within yourself, if not in the words you speak, you must apologize to the poor that they are poor and in a situation of needing help and you are helping them. Apologize to them. Don't wear it as a badge of honor, apologize to them that such a world could exist. So, anyway I've completely lost track of where I was but that's my message. I think there is another paper, book chapter to be written, which presents not oral history, not as this kind of add on to real history. This thing that gives the-a little flavor and color as we go from one set of census data to the next. These are the clues as to what, let's say, the history of the United States from 1960 to whenever really means. So, that's the speech I wanted to be sure to make. I think we are in midstream. And that we've only begun to make our case for the limitations of, I mean, you just wonder how many historical dissertations are written within the walls of libraries, and I'll volunteer as Numero Uno. We spend the first part of our graduate existence trying to pinpoint a topic nobody else has written on, and the second part of our graduate existence we spend in the library, scrounging up the sources for our Masters and PhDs. I-I'm-I'm-I'm done.

Thank you. Wow. Well, maybe we should pause a bit before I go straight into any questions, just to let that sink in for a moment. That was very powerful.

I could pause the pause the camera if you'd like, for a moment, but not necessary.

We can keep it going.

Okay.

I'm assuming that you would have some follow-up questions with Staughton and-

I think we should-

Yeah, continue. Yes.

Okay, I have my first follow-up question. Each of these paths, as you laid out, are a path up the same mountain. And I'm wondering if you could talk about the interrelationship between those three paths. And how do they work together? And why do they go to the same place?

Well, I can't enumerate all of the-the-the bipartite or tripartite connections, but to begin with, if we're walking side-by-side are we exchanging memos or are we talking to each other? I think most of the time human beings are talking to each other. Which means, oh, so it isn't all in a library already. There are people who might be willing to share those conversations. I may, just to give an example, the patron saint of the Civil Rights Movement, or at least of the SNCC part thereof. Is a man named Bob Moses. Bob was here in this house two weeks ago for the first time under our roof, Alice's and my roof. I think the reason he was here was that he and I had similar bypass operations, he wanted to check on how I was doing, but-and some of our conversation frankly neither of us would want to publish. It was-it was gossip. You remember what so-and-so said, can you believe that, ecetera? But-but it just refreshed my notion that accompaniment requires conversation. And then you come to non-violence of course and wow, that person your acccompanying may just have clobbered a prisoner like-last week. Sorry, the instruction is the same, tell me about it. What were you feeling? What did he seem to be feeling? Did anyone give you instructions after it happened? Did you have any second thoughts and so on? I just think the connections are pretty obvious.

Do you-can you describe to us what the mountain is?

Well, who knows? Obviously, Sisyphus had his mountain. Camus referred to it in his book about Sisyphus, suggesting that it was the same mountain from Roman and Greek times to post-WWII Europe, and I suppose it's the mountain of, that Alice and I referred to in our Christmas greeting, as wanting the world to be a band of brothers and sisters standing in the circle of love. I don't think Ellis and I made that up, I think Thomas Moore, for one was thinking of something similar, in the book that came to be called Utopia. When I was a teenager, I assumed that by the time I was 30, the United States would be a socialist society. At 87, I'm beginning to think there may be some delay. Mountain hasn't changed, though. I'm as much a socialist now, as I was when I was 15. And it's so ridiculous to feel that you can discard a dream so momentous on the basis of a single century's experience. Think of how long it took feudalism, to become whatever we choose this to call the society in which we now live, it was hundreds of years, many false starts. And I assume it will be the same with this particular Mountain.

Do you have any questions?

I mean, a thousand, I have a thousand questions.

Well, why don't you try the first couple of hundred?

I'll throw one out as soon as they formulate.

Good.

I'm actually sitting here so glad that we're recording this.

I do think that that particular discussion, I feel has a very, very strong likelihood of-of being the core of what's presented at the conference, really ending right after you describe the mountain. With that said, some of these other questions seem a little bit more pedantic for me and not as big and-and I think the mountain question's hard to follow up on.

No, no that's the experience of coming down the mountain and you realize how tired you are and you begin to think about what you'll have to drink when you get to the bottom and that's part of-part of the experience.

I wonder if you might be able to illustrate, and you've done that a little bit when you talked about your work with prisoners, but perhaps illustrate how you've drawn on these three really foundational ideals in your-in your life's work and-and-

Well, at the breakfast, I tried to describe what I think is the most significant thing I uncovered about the American Revolution, which is not that farm tenants and artisans were motivated by the same desire for economic survival that laid off steel workers are today because actually that was fairly obvious once you got into the primary sources. But rather, to realize the depths to which this country sank at the very moment of its creation. And when I read about Newt Gingrich, and many academic historians especially those at Harvard and Yale, talk about the United States as exemplary, I feel so distant from that perception that I am at a loss for words and-and something that reassures me and makes me feel I'm not completely wandering blinded and-and feeble in the bog, is that whenever I had any opportunity to say so to a person who talked about the United States being exemplary, I said, yeah-you're-you're crazy, you're off your rocker. We should be on our knees asking forgiveness. Now, I didn't know anybody else who was saying that, that's what I felt. And that was the result of my effort to go to the period of the American Revolution for inspiration. And then to experience, as we all recently did, a group of army veterans going to a location where Indians were trying to preserve a portion of their, a small portion, a tiny portion, off the country that was once theirs in its entirety, and what happened there? This son of an American General, a white man, got on his knees and asked forgiveness from Sioux elder and its things like that make you feel you're not completely superannuated, you know. There's some reason for still being here and being part of the chorus. That as in Greek tragedy comments on what's going on between the protagonists at the center of the stage.

I wonder if you could-one term that I've seen over and over again in your work is the concept of horizontalism. And I wonder if you could tell us how that-what that term means to you, as well as how that might fit within this larger, these larger big ideas.

Well, I think we've all experienced in our lives a good deal of verticalism, of the people who decide whether we're eligible for academic tenure, oftentimes tragically our parents. In the military, as I had occasion to experience. I only lasted for six months in the military, but the two extremes. were on the one hand, the lecturer in basic training who said that if we were, as Medics, I was training to be a medic, if we confronted a lightly wounded soldier and a seriously wounded soldier, who should we help first? And incredibly, unbelievably, the answer was the lightly wounded soldier because he could get back inro combat, more readily. That on the one hand, and on the other hand, the black cook who supervised me as I washed huge pots while my colleagues were taking weapons training. He used to let me go a little early. His favorite expression was, there you go Jitterbug, and it was just a world of human beings responding to each other as human beings. Now the connection with horizontalism there again is what is the basic human way of making decisions in a group? You stand or sit in a circle and you make it together. That's not an aberration. That's not a departure from acceptable practice. That's the way it used to be done. Before hunters and gatherers became agriculturalists and produced a surplus that could be used to create bureaucracies and armies and all the rest of it. So, I-horizontalism is the way a husband and wife ideally speak to one. Horizontalism is the way workers who stand side-by-side for their unpaid overtime decide to do something about it. It's just-it's the obvious way for things to happen. And anyone who wants to justify non-horizontalism has, I think a formidable task.

Do-in your life's work, if we look from, well and I'll just start from the 60s because obviously your life's work goes much longer than that. But, if we start from your work with the civil rights movement on through the work with draft resisters, through the rank-and-file work you've done and with prisons and Palestine and Nicaragua, in each case, I think one could make an arg-I mean it feels to me at least, that you've dedicated towards working with communities that are marginalized, oppressed, that are-that are-that are impoverished, etc. that are exploited. How-I think it was your granddaughter who asked, what about studying up or why do we, why do we situate our work with-with those groups of people?

Can I answer it in a way that you promise not to make part of the transcript?

I would be happy, yes

Okay, my granddaughter has chosen a PhD topic, and I don't want to accuse her of, you know, searching for something that no one else had written about, but her PhD topic is the interaction between Soviet specialists, who were concentrating on South Africa, and members of the South African Liberation movement, who were experiencing freedom. And the thesis is that they interacted with each other in giving up their ideals. That is just- she claims, and I'm sure she can prove it, next to Lee Hasford, she's right up there in the brightest people I've ever known. She says that the Soviet Union in its final stages was actually beginning to side with the apartheid government of South Africa with-rather than with the African National Congress. That is to say, Russian experts were pointing out the-the many interactions and ways that the existing South African government and the existing Russian government could help each other. And a little bit like the-the state of Israel, which sends military equipment to reactionary countries all over the world. And contrary wise, and this is the real heartbreak, the African National Congress, which it seems to me all things considered maybe the most hopeful and inspiring National Liberation movement of the last century, had within much less than a decade of-of freedom given up the idea of nationalizing the mines, in effect abandoned socialism, because of all the voices were saying, well you're going to need international loans, and let's see, they'll come from such and such an entity, and you have to understand that the United States all the top officers and that entity and etc, etc. And there were even our accounts that Nelson Mandela on his flight, to his first Experience of Davos, struck nationalization from mines off the speech he was going to make when he got there. And, so that's Hillary's thesis. Let's assume she proves it, I'll bet she does. Who the hell cares? I mean, that-that's the worst dragging down the next worst. So, I didn't write any of this but to be truthful, that's what I thought when I-Hilary you ought to be asking yourself why you picked this topic not asking me how we can use oral history to illuminate it.

And that will be completely left out.

We-We'll leave that out of the transcripts (*Dan: transcripts, and*), absolutely, and-but-and-and so are we now-we're now at a point where we can continue-

Well you decide, you decide

Yeah let-I mean, we can talk about it more but I think its-

So I wonder if-and I-that's helpful for my own understanding, but I wonder if we might be able to parse out that particular commentary, which is obviously very personal, related to your granddaughter, who-and there's no reason to include it, but I wonder if you might still be able to answer, like to the larger kind of broader public who has no idea who your granddaughter is, the-the larger question of why did you choose to have this, what I might use the term-alright let me start off the question here-Why did you choose to have, and maybe I'm mistaken, but what I might see in-in your own writings as this preferential option for the poor.

Well, first of all, let me say something. We need a class analysis of the term preferential option for the poor because I think when you stop to think about it, almost by definition, it is language that people who are not poor use to say to each other, you know we really should be trying harder to simplify our lives, to live in poor neighborhoods blah blah blah blah blah. And one of Archbishop Romero's great strengths was that he was born among the poor, and his mother hastened her death because she had to move around in the house in order to accommodate borders and often had to wash the family laundry in the rain. So, I think preferential option for the poor, you know, it's a little like Jesus saying to the rich young man, well, you've done everything you need to except what? and that's give all your wealth to the poor. And even if it happens you kind of wonder is this really going to be such a hot situation, and for my money I guess I prefer the-the Good Samaritan. He was a merchant. But there's somehow a different flavor in his-stopping his trip to Jericho, crossing to the other side of the road, and you know, pouring wine on the wounds of the beat-up individual whom he helped, taking him to the next inn, instructing the innkeeper that he'd be back in a few days and take care of this man until then. And that, of course, poses a problem for those of us, like myself, who are not poor. And I've had-I'm thinking, Alice, of Eric O'Neill saying to me, you know Staughton you do all this talking to middle-class people who need to change their life-what about me? I am more of a working class person. I too believe in accompanying. And, that's, I think, part of why Archbishop Romero is so extraordinary that he began as a poor person and got lost in the mysteries of the international Catholic hierarchy and found his way back. And the-the Jesuit Superior in Central America asked him as they were walking together in Rome, well, you've really changed. And-and Romero said, yeah, you're right, I really have. Alice, a white car has just appeared. Oh, that's-

Wayne

Pardon?

Wayne

Wayne. Yes, please.

Staughton, (*many people speaking at once*) you stay there, you're wired.

Let's unhook you from the mike, we'll unhook you from the mike. I've paused the camera. We'll unhook you from the mike and we will agree to your friend and collaborator. (*Staughton: Let me just signal one thing to you.*)