Philadelphia – RI Future

July 16, 2015

RI Future to cover Pope Francis’ US visit

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Pope_Francis_in_March_2013 — **Steve Ahlquist** wants to cover **Pope Francis**

Despite having more Roman Catholics than any other state in the country, no Pope has ever visited Rhode Island. In September Pope Francis will be the fourth Pope to visit the United States in what will be the tenth papal visit to our shores.

The first Pope to visit the United States, or even the Western Hemisphere, was Paul VI in 1965. He limited his visit to New York. He met with President Lyndon Johnson, spoke before the United Nations, held a mass at Yankee Stadium and visited the New York World’s Fair, cramming a lot into a 14 hour visit.

Pope John Paul II , 14 years later, made his first of seven visits to the United States. This Pope visited Boston, New York, Philadelphia, Chicago, Washington, Des Moines, Anchorage, Fairbanks, Miami, Columbia, New Orleans, San Antonio, Phoenix, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Detroit, Denver, Newark, Brooklyn, Baltimore and St. Louis over 20 years of visits.

Benedict XVI was the last Pope to visit the United States, arriving in Washington and visiting New York in 2008.

In Rhode Island, Catholics make up about 44 percent of the population, the highest in the nation. But if Rhode Island Catholics want to catch a glimpse of their spiritual leader, they need to travel to where he is. That’s why the Roman Catholic Diocese of Providence is leading a pilgrimage of 400 faithful to Philadelphia, where the Pope is speaking before the World Meeting of Families.

Pope Francis, while being true to his predecessors on the subjects of reproductive rights and homosexuality, (he’s against both) has nonetheless upset conservative Catholics in the United States with his stance on the environment and capitalism (which he has compared to “the devil’s dung.”)

Quoted in Politico, Sam Clovis, a Catholic and political activist who’s run for US Senate and state treasurer in Iowa said, “In northwest Iowa, we are discussing this a great deal, and sometimes it’s hard for us to reconcile the pronouncements we read from the Holy Father with our conservative principles.”

Meanwhile, Republican Catholics running for president, such as Jeb Bush, Marco Rubio and Rick Santorum are all trying to differentiate between what their Catholic faith compels them to believe and what are merely the opinions of Pope Francis. The same politicians who once said to Catholics in support of LGBTQ and reproductive rights that such positions were impossible to square with true Catholicism are now facing the same criticism themselves on the issues of economic and environmental justice.

Locally, we are seeing similar reactions to Pope Francis. Conservative Catholic blogger Justin Katz wrote a piece last month for the ProJo in which he asked, “What’s the deal with Pope Francis?” Katz is examining Catholic theology as a way of navigating the difficult questions Francis poses to conservative Catholics.

Bishop Thomas Tobin of the Providence Diocese has publicly proclaimed his disappointment with Pope Francis, saying “…he hasn’t, at least that I’m aware of, said much about unborn children, about abortion, and many people have noticed that.” Tobin, who publicly switched his political party affiliation from Democrat to Republican, has received a fair amount of criticism for this and other remarks about his boss.

Even Bernard Healey, the Catholic priest who lobbies the RI General Assembly on behalf of the Providence Catholic Diocese, has dinged Pope Francis, beginning testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee on May 25th with a guilty smile, saying, “I would quote Pope Francis, who is widely quoted in the media. You probably missed this quote, they normally miss the ones that I agree with,” implying that he disagrees with much of what Pope Francis has been saying.

Pope_Francis_among_the_people_at_St._Peter's_Square_-_12_May_2013 — Pope Francis

Nationally, 54 percent of Catholics support same-sex marriage. 66 percent think abortion is at least sometimes justified. 69 percent support contraception. Given such numbers, it seems the Catholic Church is out of step with American Catholics on the political left as well as the right.

Yet here in Rhode Island the Catholic Church exerts formidable political power. The governor, speaker of the House and Senate president are all at least nominally Catholic, as are many members of the General Assembly. Tobin has his own part time lobbyist working our part time legislature. Politically speaking, the Roman Catholic Church is a power player here in Rhode Island and that means that in order to understand our state, we have to understand the dynamics of political Catholicism.

And to do that, you have to understand the Pope.

Since Pope Francis isn’t coming to Rhode Island, RI Future is going to the Pope. To do that, we’re running a GoFundMe campaign to secure the $1000 I’ll need to cover train travel, food, lodging and other expenses. Over the course of five days, from September 23-27, I’ll be in Washington DC, New York City and Philadelphia, covering the Pope’s visit in my unique way.

This will be very different coverage. Readers of this blog know that I am an outspoken atheist, progressive and democratic socialist. I won’t just be covering the Pope, I’ll be covering the people I meet. There will be protesters, critics and supporters. I’ve never done anything like this before, so I expect my coverage to be unlike anything I’ve done before as well.

Consider donating, and let’s see what I can pull off.

April 7, 2014April 7, 2014

In service to the service road

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There was a fun online graphic survey at the New York Times a while ago which asked a series of questions and then placed participants on a map, showing the exact city or cities whence they came (my partner Rachel’s friend from college, for instance, had grown up in Texas and moved to North Jersey in elementary school, and the survey was able to pinpoint both that he was a New Yorker and that he had grown up in the Lone Star State based on different aspects of his speech. Rachel was placed appropriately between Wuhstahh and Prahhvidince as a native of Central Mass with a dad from Central Falls, while my Philly patois must have come through to the NY Times, because it placed me there).

Transportation figures heavily into our dialects. For instance, I grew up saying “traffic circle” but people around the country call those things rotaries, traffic circuses, roundabouts, and all manner of other things. My favorite transportation-related question from the survey was the one that asked you what you call the stretch of road that’s next to a highway, for the purpose of entering the highway. While New England calls these things “service roads”, Philadelphia doesn’t have a term at all. It’s not that we don’t have them, it’s just that they’re not named.

As you may know, RIDOT is planning an expansion of I-95 to help motorists bypass directly to 146 past the traffic that collects around the mall. The whole project, which stretches only a mile, will cost a projected $46 Million, which in context is more than the whole repaving bond amounted to for Providence. There are a whole lot of reasons why this project doesn’t make sense, and I’m in the process of writing more on that question. Right now I want to back off of the project itself and focus on a bigger-picture question, which is how the idea of a “service road” influences our chances of fighting for a more livable Providence.

The Vine Street Expressway in Philadelphia strikes me as a good example to visit for contrast.

For much of its eastern length since the Rizzo days, Vine Street is essentially the “service road” on either side of its expressway namesake. It’s not a great place to walk or bike, and the expressway creates a rough boundary between Center City and North Philly which especially around Chinatown has resulted in dilapidation and squalor. If you asked a Philadelphian what they would call this part of Vine Street though, my tongue-in-cheek guess is they’d say “It’s the part of Vine Street that Frank Rizzo fucked up” rather than having a term like “Service Road 8” for it.

What does Vine Street have that differs it from a service road?

Note here:

Sidewalks
Parking Lanes (you can’t see them here, but go on google and scroll around, you’ll see there are parked cars). This brings Vine Street to an unusually wide two lanes of traffic in each direction–rather expansive in Center City Philadelphia terms, but modest compared to the three lanes of speedway next to the West Side and Downcity Providence.
A bicyclist (way in the back)
Of course someone from South Philly has wandered away from Broad Street to park their car on the sidewalk
Trees (and even some large ones, which would perhaps be seen as immobile hazards for cars by some highly-trained traffic engineer). And the trees are on both sides, creating a sound buffer to the highway
Murals that don’t look like they were commissioned to fifth graders
There are traffic signals at every block, and as far as my visual investigation of the Google Streetview and my memory of living in Philly can tell, there are no “beg buttons” on the walk signals.
There are even trolley tracks (unused, but with a bus route that might go back to trolley someday) at the next intersection.
The lanes do not appear to me to be 12′ wide, as on Service Road 7, suggesting that perhaps cars are expected to act like they’re in a neighborhood until after they get on the highway.

This, friends, is a street. Not a great street–I’d like to reemphasize that this is a rough area with a lot wrong with it, and not someplace that you’d want to replicate by any means. But this is a street nonetheless.

The service road, on the other hand, will sometimes attain the name of some obscure local municipal or sports figure as a means of trying to tidy itself up, but will mostly be known by a number. And truly, the number tells you what it is much more honestly than the name of the celebrity could. When I first encountered Service Road 7, I assumed it was kind of like Vine Street–not a great place to bike, for sure, not a great place to be a pedestrian, but a street of sorts that someone like me–a person in the 1% of cyclists who are willing to bike in most any conditions–could use. Whoa! Was I wrong! Service Road 7 is a stroad (video explaining term).

The term “service road” is not destiny. We are not required to think in the way the word suggests we think. But having a word like service road does oblige us to think of certain distinctions that might remain unstated and below the surface in a place without the term. This is kind of how a German, with the feminine word for bridge, eine Brücke, will often use a feminine voice when asked by a researcher to anthropomorphize the feature, while a Spanish-speaker, saying el puente–masculine–will use a male voice to personify the crossing (does this affect how Germans or Spaniards build bridges? Researchers still don’t know, but that’s a crazy thought, isn’t it?). It’s not that these speakers can’t understand that bridges are in fact objects without set gender identities. But the first thing they think of when they use the word is the gender they’ve been taught to assign to these objects.

Mayor Rizzo (video), who helped push through the Vine Street Expressway, was an old school boss mayor (video) like Richard Daley of Chicago, having come up as the chief of police in a repressive city in spasms of racism and injustice. Rizzo would make Buddy Cianci look like a paper tiger. The Toronto Sun recently cited Rizzo in order to give a favorable comparison to their coke-addled leader,Rob Ford, saying:

Then there was Frank Rizzo, mayor of Philadelphia in the 1970s, an autocratic leader accused by the city’s blacks of discriminating against them, who, in his 1975 re-election campaign infamously told a reporter: ‘Just wait, after November you’ll have a front row seat, because I’m going to make Attila the Hun look like a faggot.’

So let’s not make Ford a bigger deal than he is — a failed, largely powerless mayor who deserves to be soundly defeated in next year’s election.

Ah, I feel proud. There’s someone more embarrassing than Rob Ford.

The shadow of Rizzo’s time in office lays over Philadelphia in ways that are much deeper than this highway. Yet Rizzo got push back by the community around the Vine Street Expressway that helped shape the project. One major community success was that Vine Street got an expressway and South Street did not, saving things like the Magic Garden, which otherwise would have gotten the bulldozer. The Wikipedia article on the Vine Street Expressway notes several other changes due to environmental, historic, and neighborhood concerns which required changing the route, reducing the scope of the project, and adding transit improvements alongside it. Though we all talk about hating the service roads in Providence, somehow I can’t see a successful campaign by a community to change the nature of a service road in the same way that I can see a campaign to push back about a street, because the term service road says that its purpose is only to move cars quickly, and nothing else. Can you see a successful campaign to put bike lanes on Service Road 7?

The service roads are a piece of Providence’s landscape that more than any others diminish it. We need to start to recognize them for what they are: temporary mistakes to be corrected, rather than natural features of the landscape to be built upon and expanded. The city I grew up around, I think I’ve adequately explained, was no place of soaring progressive vision. But sometimes, I suspect, our words affect the way that we envision even the worst of ideas. If the people of Philadelphia, Providence, or any city were approached with a discussion about expanding a piece of infrastructure that was part of a highway, they would naturally consider that proposal differently than if they were asked to bring a highway onto their front street. In a way, I suspect that having these service roads as a cognitive frame disarms us from objecting to their role in the landscape: they may suck for anyone not barreling out of the city in a car, but c’mon, that’s what they’re for. As much as I dislike Vine Street and the legacy of the mayor who messed it up, I have to recognize that there are some major things that are different about it than our New England service roads.

~~~~

January 16, 2012January 17, 2012

Philadelphia Freedom: Is This The New Swing Vote?

A coalition of seventeen organizations have recently embarked on a revolutionary voter registration drive, and what better place to be revolutionary than Philadelphia? The Returning Citizens Voter Movement is directed towards formerly incarcerated people, engaging many more people with felony records who never went to prison, and far more people without records who have a family member in the criminal justice system. Is this an effort that will be replicated around the nation in 2012?

The goal of 10,000 new registrations may seem overly ambitious, but consider that at any given time, Philadelphia has between 200,000 – 400,000 residents who previously served time in prison. These are people who have the right to vote, and surely some do, but have collectively never been engaged in the political dialogue of their community. As Maelissa Gamble, founder of The Time Is Now to Make a Change puts it, “People are tired. They’re saying, ‘somebody should have done this already.’ And they are not seeing the re-entry resources that get talked about all the time.”

Gamble and other community leaders have been tangling not only with getting people assistance in restructuring their lives, but also in successfully tearing down the barriers that keep people from following their good intentions. Last year Philadelphia “Banned the Box” and eliminated “Have you ever been convicted from a felony?” from job applications in the city. It is ironic that the same government allocating funds for rehabilitation/re-entry also has laws that create ever-higher hurdles for people trying to build a life in the community.

With the Pennsylvania Republican Primary on April 24th (the same day as New York, Rhode Island, and Delaware) it will be interesting to see how this specific criminal justice-based civic outreach can be bolstered by the media. Former Pennsylvania Senator Rick Santorum has a history in Philadelphia, and his views on issues may be well known. Meanwhile, Texas Senator Ron Paul has been an outspoken critic of the Drug War and the massive use of incarceration in America. With the Texas and Wisconsin primaries on April 3rd, it is possible that Paul’s campaign will have a bounce that reverberates through three weeks of focus on Pennsylvania (a perennial “swing state”).

All but three of the coalition organizations in the voter registration and awareness campaign are led by formerly incarcerated people. This is part of a concerted effort by the Formerly Incarcerated and Convicted People’s Movement to register one million people across the country, and Philadelphia is leading the way. One historical dilemma with a broad movement is the creation of factions and the challenge of coalition-building. Gamble, formerly incarcerated herself, now finds herself in the middle of a group including the Human Rights Coalition, Proyecto Sol Filadelfia, ACLU, Reconstruction Inc., Educational Advocates Reaching Today’s Hardworking Students (EARTHS), and more.

It is often noted that over four million people are disenfranchised due to criminal records, however it should be also noted that there are tens of millions of people who are eligible to vote- people who have been (or still are) impacted by the criminal justice system. This is an issue-based group, with no party loyalties. The group is urban and rural, of all skin tones. And the voices are beginning to be heard.

Politicians will be knocking on doors of “Likely voters” registered to their parties or as “Independents.” If one is not registered and exercising their vote, there will be no knock, no pandering, no listening. The coalition will be setting up registration stations all over the city, from grocery stores to community forums, probation offices to social services locations, they will even be registering people currently awaiting trial in the jails. When thousands of voters demand candidates who will call a cease fire in the Drug War, who will re-direct that money into education, to books rather than bars, the pandering will begin. It is not likely that the GOP will hold an inner city debate with ordinary residents in the audience (these are made-for-TV controlled events); and it is not likely that Rick Santorum, Ron Paul, or Mitt Romney will come looking to do a “Town Hall” session with urban voters… but wait until 2016. Rebuild it, and they will come.

Maelissa Gamble can be contacted at (215) 834-5165 and mgamblethetimeisnowtomakeachange@yahoo.com