I was sitting in a small desk, and Mrs. Graham was at the front of Room 3 in Overbrook School in Charleston, West Virginia, the day that John F. Kennedy was shot. Randall Hainey’s mom came running in the side door with a transistor radio to tell us.

Handing out lined paper, Mrs. Graham said solemnly, “You will remember this day always. Write down exactly what happened, because you’ll want to tell your grandchildren about it. You are part of history.”

I remember sitting there in disbelief. Someone could shoot the President? I was part of history? Mrs. Hainey and her transistor radio would matter to my grandchildren? I might have grandchildren? Mrs. Graham believed in us, not just as children, but as life itself, as part of the living movement of history. (She remains my favorite teacher ever, all these years later.)

For me, just two days into my eighth year on the planet, it was all a jumble. I could see that my parents, the only Kennedy supporters in our Republican neighborhood, were unraveled.

JFK was the last president who I saw simply and completely through the loving eyes of a kid, a President with kids of his own about the ages of me and my younger brother, whose wife wore clothes that my own mother admired. I’m too young to have had the kind of adoration that my older siblings did—adoration fused in knowledge of any issues or policies that Kennedy might have supported or opposed. I knew The President as The Most Important Man in the World, whose very existence was in some way undifferentiated in my mind from that of Superman or Julius Caesar or Santa Claus.

In the hours and days following his assassination, I remember watching my mother, sitting quietly on the floor, playing with my dolls but riveted by her emotion, while she ironed and watched our black and white TV incessantly. I remember her telling the story, over and over, as if trying to believe it herself, the story of seeing Lee Harvey Oswald get shot on live TV.

My mother, a West Virginia activist, had been quite involved in the JFK campaign. Hubert Humphrey’s  brother  had been slated to speak at our small Unitarian fellowship in early 1960. He was sick, his brother Hubert was in town, so Hubert covered for him. My mother then leveraged this to call the Kennedy campaign and say, “Humphrey came, so you should, too.” Readers who follow history will recall that West Virginia was critical in this election. So, lo and behold, Kennedy came, and my mother was central in his coming—though he spoke in a much larger venue than our tiny congregational building. (I’m too young to remember any of this. My mother told it to me years later, and my older brother got to shake his hand!)

What’s the point of this blog? I guess, as we spend the week inundated with stories of what happened and what might have been, stories of JFK as larger than life as either Sinner or Saint, what is most interesting to me is the small stories. The stories of how his life and his death woke up people of all ages to our own place in history. If there is anything I want to learn at this fiftieth anniversary, it’s not more details about Jackie’s blood spattered dress. It’s about how ordinary people can claim our lives and our power as being the stuff of life itself. It’s all the tiny ways in which a stunned nation moved forward together, grieved and recovered and made sense of the insensible, whether at elementary school desks, in corridors of power, or over ironing boards. Those lessons—of stepping up, living through, making sense and caring for one another, matter every day.

Mrs. Graham’s words, “You are part of history,” woke me up. They rang like a bell. They were heard by some tiny, incredulous part of me that said, Really? I am a part of all this? I will exist beyond recesses and piano recitals, I will remember this as I create my own adult life? And so it has been. From teachers such as Mrs. Graham, and my mother, and yes, from watching a dignified widow and her children standing in a strange cemetery, I came to understand myself as having a role to play, a role that could matter. Whether we were born in 1963 or not, may this anniversary wake us up to that fact.

“We think that honesty and living in truth are better ways to live than propaganda and denial and comforting stories.” –Tom Schade, “Religious Community is Not Enough: Unitarian Universalism’s purpose is much bigger than gathering with like-minded people for mutual support,” UU World Winter 2013.

Earlier this year the Board members of the Center for Ethical Living and Social Justice Renewal voted unanimously to attend an Undoing Racism training offered by the People’s Institute for Survival and Beyond. While most of the members of the Board consider themselves anti-racist, we are stretching into what it would take to intentionally shape the Center to be an anti-racist institution. A primarily interpersonal understanding of racism limits our collective ability to address institutional, internalized, and ideological racism. With support from the Unitarian Universalist Veatch Program at Shelter Rock, the entire Board registered for the November Regional Training in New Orleans.

Beloveds, it is not enough to send off one or two of a congregation’s more social justice-y members to a training and consider the work of anti-racism done. It isn’t even enough to go through a congregation-wide training – once. This system of inequity, so deeply in the bones of our country’s constitution that you can take white people out of leadership and have the system continue to provide a preferential option for whites, requires a diligent commitment to undo.

One white member of the Center’s Board was attending this training for the “umpteenth time” since beginning to attend in the 1980’s and was clear that she would keep coming back. What has been done to us as a nation is a powerful, hypnotic thing. It lets me think, as a white woman, “I worked hard for what I have” and not even begin to reflect on how hard my neighbors of color have worked to have not even half as much.

It is hard to express my gratitude to the members of the Center’s Board for showing up for the training, day after day, for an exercise in living in truth, unpacking and confronting propaganda and denial. And doing it together. While I have attended multiple-trainings as an individual, this is the first one I have attended as an intentional member of a collective – and I experienced this training profoundly differently than the ones before. Instead of getting stuck on my own abilities (and lack thereof), I was able to think about the resources and structures of the organization I was a part of – and this has sent me back into the world with energy and hope.

The strongly individualistic (white) values of this nation will not serve us in the task of undoing the structures of oppression. Dismantling systems of oppression is collective work, friends. Find your collective. It is not enough to be a lone crusader in the work of undoing racism. This position only enforces the structure of isolation, designed to prevent collective organizing. If this is your position, look around. You are not alone. All of our lives are diminished by the structures of racism.

Organize, beloveds. The work will not be done perfectly, but together, we can begin to heal that which is profoundly broken.

We all make a decision every day, consciously or unconsciously: Am I going to cooperate today? Perhaps the question is cooperation with a partner. Or the kids. Or a neighbor. Or the people at school or work. Are we going to “go along to get along,” as the old saying goes? How much of ourselves are we going to give away? Because it feels like that sometimes, doesn’t it?  That cooperation is giving parts of yourself away?

Dr. Joshua D. Greene is a cognitive neuroscientist and philosopher and director of Harvard’s Moral Cognition Laboratory. Greene has been doing some fascinating work that he describes on the website The Edge.com and he has just published a book, Moral Tribes: Emotion, Reason, and the Gap Between Us and Them.

I think that Greene succinctly sums up a central aspect of what morality means. Greene says,   “Morality is fundamentally about the problem of cooperation.”

I think Professor Greene is onto something here. This idea clarifies a lot of things that get muddied up when we start reading books on morality and ethics: “Morality is fundamentally about the problem of cooperation.” The thesis of his new book is that there are two types of human interactions that we do: “me versus us” and “us versus them.”

My examples about getting up in the morning and deciding to cooperate with others (or not) focuses on the individual cooperating with a group. But groups cooperate or not as well, and in those cases, too, I think the formula holds: morality is about cooperation.

We saw a failure to cooperate recently in the Washington budget brouhaha. We see it in Egypt. We see it in Syria. We see it in spying on foreign leaders. We see it in drone strikes. Figuring out what’s moral and what’s not moral is not difficult: “Morality is fundamentally about the problem of cooperation.”

Except . . .  Professor Greene does insert that little word “problem.” Greene puts it this way:

Each moral tribe has its own sense of what’s right or wrong—a sense of how people ought to get along with each other and treat each other—but the common senses of the different tribes are different. That’s the fundamental moral problem. http://wisdomresearch.org/Arete/Greene.aspx

It’s hard to cooperate with a group that sees things differently. For example, I don’t like a group that would cut funding for food stamps. I don’t like a group that would spy on foreign allies. I don’t like a group that sees “god” differently from the way I do. The list of groups I don’t like goes on and on! (And it may well be that THEY don’t like me either! Maybe they even want to hurt me!) And the perimeters of the groups expand and contract and shift constantly. I don’t think I want to cooperate at all!

Here’s a novel idea: let’s kill everybody we don’t agree with! Well . . . that’s a problem, isn’t it? That’s not such a novel idea, unfortunately.

Greene likens our moral thinking to a camera with two modes: a point-and-shoot, auto-focus mode and a manual mode, in which all the settings have to be consciously manipulated (you know, focus, f-stops).

“Bomb everybody different from us” is the auto-focus, point-and-shoot mode. It’s automatic. It’s gut. And, it’s immoral. It’s a failure to cooperate. The more remote the other group is from us, the more likely we are to react in the point-and-shoot mode.

A key finding in the research done at the Moral Cognition Laboratory is that we have no specific area of the brain that controls moral decision making. When people are asked moral questions, at least three areas of the brain light up. And they are the same three areas that light up when we are asked questions about buying things. Economic decisions.

Several systems work together, evaluating the probability of success and the diminishing returns we are likely to reap. So it appears that our moral reasoning has something to do with our acquisition of food back in our hunter and gather days.

Imagine you are hiding in a tree. Naked. No weapons. And there’s a dead rabbit right over there and you’re hungry—do you hop down out of the protective environment and take a chance?

One of the basic calculations concerning food for a hunter gatherer is, How dangerous is this to me? What’s the profit and what’s the loss?

(We have to be very careful when we get into explanations based on evolution. Neuroscientists can clearly see brain functions in these experiments, but the “why” is much more difficult to discover.)

We all know that watching someone die in our arms feels different than hearing about a death on the telephone. Or reading about it in the newspaper. Or seeing it on television.

Distant things—and distant groups—are much more difficult to care about. We always knew this; now we know it’s in our wiring. How to get around this flaw in a shrinking world is the challenge humanity will or will not solve. Religions and philosophies have been working on it for a while now . . . like, oh, seven thousand years, at least.

Still, it’s all about hopping down out of that tree and saying, “Hello.”

by Pablo Neruda

(translation by David Breeden)

Now, let’s all count to twelve,
then keep still.

For once on this earth,
let’s speak in no language.
For once let’s stop
and not move our arms so much.

That would be a fragrant moment,
without hurry,
without movement;
we would all be together
in an instantaneous . . . disquiet.

The fisherman in the cold sea
would not hurt the whales,
and the worker in the salt
would look at his broken hands.

Those who prepare garish wars–
wars of gas, wars of fire,
victories without survivors–
would don clean clothes
and walk around
with their brothers
in the shadows

doing nothing.

Don’t confuse what I want
with true inaction:
life is only what you do–

I don’t want anything to do
with death.

If we can’t be unanimous
as we move our lives so much,
maybe do nothing for once,

so that maybe a great silence could
interrupt this sadness–
this never ever understanding each other,
and threatening each other with death–

maybe then the earth
can teach us

now
when everything seems dead,

then
everything was seen as alive.

I’m counting to twelve,
and you, become
silent!

I’m leaving now.

The other day I got a subscription offer from a magazine called Free Inquiry, a publication of  the Council for Secular Humanism. I’d been thinking about ordering the magazine. Well, here was my chance:  a “special introductory offer for blasphemers only.”

Got to love the marketing department. That’s no magazine for me.

Though I am “godless”–in the sense that I doubt the existence of anything that human beings would wish to call “god” and I don’t think a religion is a place any decent god would be caught dead in–I’m neither “blasphemous” nor “sacrilegious.”

If I don’t believe in “god,” how could I be? Those are words with meaning only in God Land. See, I’m a “humanist.” But a “religious” one, not a “secular” one. (What the heck does that mean?)

Oh, that labeling thing! Why do we have to be an “ist” this or an “ist” that? I don’t want to be an “ist.” Being an “ist” is about being a follower. I don’t have any interest in that.

Sure, I get it: some religious people don’t like what I believe. Some even insist upon forcing their isty god on me. I get it. But to somehow think that I’m blaspheming about it makes me a reflection in their mirror. I don’t want to live in that musty old antique shop. There’s just too much out under the blue sky to enjoy.

Which makes me a Transcendtal-ist! Except when I’m in a Logical Positiv-ist frame of mind. And then there’s always . . .

You get the idea.  The Twentieth Century was the Age of Labels. Perhaps in the mobile societies created by industrialization labels made some sense, with so many people displaced and wandering the earth to find work. Just in the art world there were Futurists, Fauvists, Voticists, Imagists, and Capitalists. Labels don’t make sense anymore. Isn’t everyone displaced now?

Seriously, folks: why does anyone need to be an “ist” at all?

There’s just too much fun stuff to think. Therefore, pietists and sacrilegists, listen up! Lose the labels and get a life.

If I’ve got to be something, I’ll take “everythingist.”