Welcome to the December
Mini-Newsletter from Dialogue on
Diversity,
bringing the festive season’s best greetings, our
report on the Holiday Fair, the final Dialogue program of 2008, and other news
and topics of the season.
Friends
of
Dialogue on
Diversity
Mini-Newsletter
– December 22nd, 2008
Holiday
Fair : the Happening
Hilda
Solis will Head the Labor Department
More
Honors for the Latino Community
Micro-Enterprise
and the Development Constellation
The
Season of Holidays
The first order of
business on the Newsletter agenda is to express to all our readers and to all
the friends of Dialogue on Diversity a hearty greeting for the holidays
clustered in this month, all those described in the final
section of this Newsletter, and to convey all best wishes for the challenging
New Year ahead.
The twelfth annual
Holiday Fair and
Children’s Gift Collection, held December
13th, hosted delegations of kids from a half dozen or more community
organizations in Washington’s neighborhoods, as a goodly company of friends of
Dialogue on Diversity gathered in the annual exercises of seasonal good
spirits. Each brought gifts for children of need in the
metropolitan region. Dialogue on Diversity's Holiday Fair for
2008 was hosted at the Carlos Rosario School on Harvard Street . A few
photographs afford glimpses of merriment, expectation, and satisfaction in the
proceedings of the yearly Holiday
gala.
Some sixty children
representing the participating community organizations were on hand.
Santa Claus arrived just after the lunch – an international repast of
pizza, ham sandwiches, guacamole, salsa, and apple pie.
Roscoe A. Swann, formerly a supplier diversity executive with Amtrak, was
once again the affable and articulate Master of Ceremonies for the
day. Santa, descending the steps to the hall 
with a booming ho-ho-ho, proved adept at the Spanish idiom in
conversing with his fans in the under-ten crowd. Some of his
skills in the linguistic regard may be due to his close association with Mario
Flores, a soft spoken environmental engineer from Bolivia .
No less skilled was Santa in several nicely turned dance steps, in most
of which he was joined by the joyous kids in attendance. The
toys were distributed afterwards to the children, with the annual admonition
that they are to be opened only at Christmas. The children,
advancing in a long queue, received the gaily wrapped packages from the hands of
Ms. Santa Claus and from Santa Claus himself.
If the national eco- nomic slowdown might have been expected
to cau
se a fall-off in the numbers of contributed toys,
it was not in evidence -- each guest brought a toy, and some brought two, three,
or a whole sack. All assuring us that there will be a healthy
quantity of toys to be distributed by the community organizations at Christmas
to their entire clientele of economically disadvantaged households.
Sonia Gutierrez, head of the Carlos Rosario Charter School , the 2008
Holiday Fair site, was on hand to welcome guests to her domain as founder and
inspirer of the school. Much credit goes as well to the
Buckingham Community Center in nearby Arlington , Virginia , its Director,
Constance Freeman, and its staff, for their aid in the preparations for the
Holiday Fair. Honors are due as well to the ingenious
culinary achievers whose creations graced the lunch buffet.
We are especially
concerned for this program on behalf of children and families in need in our
metropolitan area – hoping each year that it may be meaningful for the
households in our communities, and all as a real part of our larger
purpose of fostering a consciousness of common concerns for economic viability
and health among our community’s diverse ethnic and cultural constituents.
The contributions made on all hands – the simple tokens of human friendship and,
at the other pole, the support through modest corporate grants -- are all very
real ones as we extend hands of friendship and fellowship to each other and to
the economically struggling families served by our collaborating
organizations.
Gratitude is due
for the generosity of the many friends of the Dialogue in their bringing
children’s gifts for our small toy treasury, to be distributed to the children
of these economically stressed families, whose viability, especially in this
holiday season, is precarious. By general consent the 2008 Holiday Fair
was the finest yet in a series of very estimable celebrations.
The Holiday Fair
site, moreover, was very well suited for the purposes and for the targe
t audience of the Holiday Fair. We are dedicated to
reaching out with good will and generosity to persons whose cultures and
languages mark them as newcomers, the strangers within the gates of our society,
and we, with our earnest welcome, bring them to the status of full-fledged
contributors, no longer simply newcomers, in our busy and diverse national
life. The Carlos Rosario school draws into its ambit persons from all
parts of the globe, not Latin America solely, and we, in our Holiday observance
there, underline that message. And we are grateful that we are
able, at least in a small way, to recognize the value we find in the
beautiful families that labor against hardships in their battle to make it in
the often difficult circumstances of our bustling
society.
Those who come together for the
Holiday fair will tell their grandchildren of it around the hearth.
Next year’s Holiday Fair is on December 12th, feast of the
Virgin of Guadalupe. Mark the day on your new calendar.
Rep.
Hilda Solis will Leave the Legislative branch
Hilda Solis, now
concluding a fourth term in the House as Representative for the 32nd
District of California (largely in east Los Angeles), has been chosen by the
newly elected Presidential administration as its nominee to head the Department
of Labor. Rep. Solis, in the prospective move to the Cabinet,
continues the meteoric career which began with her election as the first Latina
member of the California Senate. Rep. Solis has been a
notable friend to Dialogue on Diversity and a regular contributor to the
discussions of public policy issues in the Dialogue’s Forums.
Her driving concerns have lain in the lot of the economically
disadvantaged, the working people who struggle, in an affluent society, to pay
for their housing and to afford a modicum of medical care for their families and
a modest fund for the education of their children, and in a heartfelt burden of
duty for amelioration of the state of the migrants in our midst.
For the people vying for employment and a living income, her concerns
have aimed at a generous education, tailored especially to the mid-career needs
of the affected persons in the labor force – a fair bill of issues and aims cut
out for the leader of a federal agency given over the needs and strivings of
labor. For a legislator, however, these concerns lead to the
study of policy and the setting of directions through the design of statutes;
while the selfsame concerns confront an administrator in the executive
department of the government, but here in the mode of action,
the marshaling of resources, and the application of
policy. A task calling for the agility, persuasiveness, and
dedication of a figure of the stature of Rep. Solis.
More
Latino Community Honors
A friend of long
standing to Dialogue on Diversity and its programs was honored with the Lifetime
Achievement award by the Hispanic bar Association of the District of Columbia
. Mr. Raul Tapia was the recipient of the awards at the
organization’s annual gala on November 18 at Washington ’s Mandarin Oriental
Hotel. Mr. Tapia is a distinguished figure in the legal world
of the capital, and is now head of C2 Group, LLC. He
has appeared at several Dialogue on Diversity programs. Our congratulations are
extended to him upon his continuing vibrant and creative career (as is the case
with many estimable personages in our community, the terms “lifetime” and
“achievement” are always open-ended, with the footnote: “to be continued !”
).
Members of the
country’s Latino communities were gratified by the recent appointment of Cecilia
Muñoz, long time executive of the National Council of La Raza, to serve as
Director for Intergovernmental Affairs on the White House staff in the
Administration now formed and waiting eagerly in the wings.
The intergovernmental affairs post is in part liaison, mediating the
views of the federal administration to state and municipal officials around the
country, and at once relaying their perceptions and opinions to Washington
. The post also is at the cockpit of relations in actual
operations between the two sources of governmental power in a federal
system. A realm of policy in which this is crucial is that of
immigration. Here local officials are trumpeting the news of
budgetary strains (felt more acutely yet in a time of economic slowdown)
occasioned by momentary influxes of migrants, often threatening to become
chronic, in great part not caused by factors of local origin
but generated by trends in the life of the country as a whole -- or indeed, in a
time of globalization, from further afar yet! At the same
time local governments, often stampeded by residents startled in the unwonted
presence of migrants and the sudden conversion of their placid towns into a
multicultural bazaar, have seized upon measures calculated to discourage
settlement of the newcomers in their precincts – all a syndrome with which Ms.
Muñoz has grown well acquainted in a career on the front lines in these
skirmishes. Her experienced-hardened skills in the premises
will be a fresh and urgently needed element in the governmental response to the
immigration phenomenon.
While the new
administration carefully eschews any schema of specific quotas, its quest for
the most able, innovative, and intellectually creative persons on the national
scene tends necessarily to yield a battery of appointees fairly reflecting the
makeup of the larger society by ethnicity, religious persuasion, region, and
other demographic indices.
Micro-Enterprise:
the Development Constellation
Not only are the
virtues of microenterprise coming to be well known, but this close-to-the-earth
brand of entrepreneurship appears to bask in the sunlight of near universal
approval. The notion has grown, over a broad front in world
opinion, that in ordinary people, those residing in the third and fourth worlds,
much as in the first and second, the seed of entrepreneurial spirit and the
fomes of managerial drive and an aptitude for the necessary faculties of
planning, management, and craftsmanship -- all is present, if only a boost, and
a very modest one at that, is imparted,
bringing the seed to sprout and the fires of economic achievement to
spring into flame. The availability of a beginning
boost – characteristically a small loan (from an NGO specialized to this
function, or a commercial entity, a highly specialized banking firm( destined
for the acquisition of equipment or of a stock of materials
to be worked up into a product -- this is the beginning of a
vital and sustainable node of economic activity, which, combined with a myriad
of other such micro-enterprises, can be part of the texture
of a now prospering and busy society. All agreed, that is,
except for the caution uttered by a writer in this week’s Financial
Times, Prof. Milford Bateman, teaching at a university in
Croatia and regarding the micro-entrepreneurial landscape from up close as it
has developed in the Balkans. Prof. Bateman looks with a
certain disdain at the proliferation of small farms, kiosks peddling any of a
vast variety of wares, summer-kitchen eateries, and much more of the flat but
variegated expanse of these mini firms. His argument is on
the one hand that such a world of economic small holders is destined to be a
dead end, with little chance of progress beyond the only so
profitable businesses and only so affluent communities.
Second, the larger and larger bulk of these mini-firms in the state gives
rise to a largely “informal” economy. The informality lies in
the under-the-radar faculties of the players which permits them to be impervious
to attempts at business regulation, and at once facilitates their innocence of
such incidents of modern societies as paying sales and income taxes.
The disorderly
aspects of a micro-enterprise economy that is on display in the Balkans and
elsewhere may well be due to a generalized state of legal and political
under-development. It could be contrasted with the more
sophisticated design and salutary outcomes of the American “enterprise zones”,
which came into being a decade or more ago in cities around the country -- a
régime of reduced-form regulation and of strategically chosen tax immunities for
firms in economically “underdeveloped” neighborhoods. This is
a notion that had been pioneered and “sold” to an often recalcitrant political
order by – among others -- Stuart Butler of the Heritage Foundation, who, we may
note, was a featured speaker at Dialogue on Diversity’s 2008 Health Care
Symposium.
The other objection
directed against the micro-enterprise society is that an economically
significant sector of large-scale businesses (inclusive of “small and midsized”
firms as well as large industrial companies – we refer here to this not entirely
homogeneous category for convenience as “industrial”), ready to exploit the
natural economies of scale offered by size, and injecting themselves as valid
players in the international import-export system, is next to totally
absent. It is this large-scale, more capital-intensive sector
of economic activity, if it argued, that has propelled the “Asian Tigers” (the
popular moniker for the states of Taiwan, Singapore, almost Vietnam, a special
case with a healthy dose of micro-enterprise, South Korea, the giants China and
Japan, and others) to levels of prosperity leaving the rest of the third world
in the dust and taking on a real semblance, in the life of popular consumption,
to the affluence heretofore found only in Western Europe and the
English-speaking parts of North America and Austro-Asia.
The question then
becomes why – is there a necessary repugnance between an extensive flourishing
of micro-enterprise and a near industrialized sector? It
might be that there is more money to be made by individuals in micro-enterprise
than as employees in early-stage industrialization. If the
path of industrialization leads, however, to higher wage levels in a medium long
run, then if the micro-enterprise engagement of nearly the entire population
would block the path to a much more affluent future for the country.
It is difficult to see, however, why there would not be a significant
portion of the population -- rural poor, for example, or, more generally, the
less entrepreneurially inclined -- who would willingly gravitate to an
industrialized sector (even one offering only very low wages), so that this very
promising sector, veritably a nascent Asian Tiger, might grow and perhaps
might even ultimately absorb most of the micro-enterprise
sector. Another explanation might be that restrictions
on foreign investment preclude the influx of otherwise ready and willing sources
of funding for an industrialized foothold in the country. The
barrier to such investment might well be either a xenophobic governmental policy
or a state of political and social turbulence that would render any substantial
investment too risky to attract many takers. A further
consideration is that the existence of a vital and widespread entrepreneurial
(that is to say, “micro”) ethos is likely to build up a social capital of
business savvy and practical management skills that would find useful and
remunerative employment in an industrialized sector once the latter were
established.
Prof. Bateman’s
op-ed further suggests that the concentration by the banking industries of the
micro-enterprise economies on the nearly exclusive cultivation of
micro-enterprise itself, tends to choke off investment in other types of
activity, mainly that which here has been called, as a rough and ready
designation, “industrial”. It is this mechanism that cries out for
explanation. It might, on the on the hand, mean that in fact
the returns in micro-enterprise are indeed greater than those to be had for the
other, “industrial” type, in both long and short runs. But it
may also well mean, as suggested above, that the returns from industrial
activities may only be longer in coming and that banks have so discounted those
future returns as to make the present value of the projected investment
relatively undesirable. In any case, foreign companies and
financial institutions ought to be on the lookout for industrial and other
investment opportunities internationally: their search should
disclose opportunities from profit, long or short run, in countries wherever
situated, and whether an existing subsistence agriculture, widespread
micro-enterprise, or other economic panoramas present themselves.
Whether there may
be a synergy between the rough and ready entrepreneurial spirit of the new
popular economies, those of the micro-enterprise model, and the large scale,
scientifically managed companies that power new, tiger-like economies to
world-class status, or whether these two forms of activity are indeed, in the
ultimate long run, mutually repelling -- this is a matter to be the subject of
serious investigation over the next decade as development economics hurries to
adapt itself to the rapidly evolving features of global economic life
A
Season of Holidays
The Dialogue’s
Holiday Fair, each year, as it is described above, sets out to make the
obligatory observance of the holidays clustering at the close of the year,
coming in one or another order in the final weeks before and beyond the entry to
the new year. The celebration of Christmas, in both its
religious and pop-secular aspects, is the surely dominant cultural artifact of
contemporary U.S. and European society. It begins with the
solemnities of Advent, the feasts of St. Nicholas himself on December
6th, continuing with the feast of Our Lady of Guadalupe and St. Lucy
on the 12th and 13th, the Nativity on the 25th, St.
Stephen’s Day on the 26th, the Holy Innocents on the 28th,
and finally the Epiphany, the Feast of the Three Kings, or popularly called
Twelfth Night and the Twelfth Day of Christmastide. The
eastern churches of Christendom, inveterately conservative in their practice,
set the feasts by the Old Style calendar, in a lag after our modern western
practice, so that the whole series is enjoyed in rerun some ten days
later. The pop-culture Christmas season overlaps with all
this – beginning just after Hallowe’en (in many districts just after Columbus
Day) and ending at noon on the 25th of December -- not a note of
Christmas music, having been dinned into one’s head for a good two months
previous, is thereafter heard.
All along, in a
holy counterpoint, are two other celebrations -- lately augmented by the season
of Kwanzaa, this year starting on December 26th! -- those of other
traditions flourishing in America . One is the feast of
Hanukkah, an observance fixed by the months of the ancient Jewish calendar and
thus peripatetic with respect to our conventional calendar.
This year Hanukkah, an eight-day feast, with gifts, and candlelightings
and its own repertory of songs, begins on December 22nd, and thus nicely
coincides with the Christmas celebration. It commemorates the
storied plenitude of oil in the lamps of the faithful people, which wonderfully
lasted eight days – a testimony to the divine largesse, an abundance supplied in
a time of need.
The other is the
feast in the world of Islam succeeding the annual Hajj, or pilgrimage of the
faithful of Islam to the holy sites of Makka al-Mukarramat (Mecca the honored
one) and the nearby sites frequented by the Prophet and other figures, some from
the most ancient pages of the sacred history – the native locale from which the
Prophet fled to found the community of faith that was to be multiplied
spectacularly over the next century. At the culmination
of the rituals of the Hajj is the ‘Aidu ’l-Adha, the Feast of the
Sacrifice. This feast is observed by the faithful over the
whole world; it is deemed the most meaningful in the yearly cycle of sacred
observances. This and the other holy days of Islam being set
according to the lunar calendar of the ancient Arabs, the ‘Aidu ’l-Adha is also
peripatetic with respect to the secular calendar. It is celebrated following the
conclusion of the Hajj, or pilgrimage to Makka, beginning on the tenth of the
month called Dhu ‘l Hijjat (that is, time proper to the Hajj) and continuing for
three days. It was celebrated this year on a set of three
days early in December (8th to the 11th).
The theme of the feast is taken from the commemorated event, one common
to the salvation history of the three larger religions of the Book, and indeed a
pivotal event in each tradition. It is the story of Abraham’s
faith, as he prepared to follow the divine injunction even to the point of
offering his own son as a sacrifice. In the Hebrew scripture
the son is Isaac, lately and miraculously born, and the sacrifice of Isaac is
averted by Abraham’s suddenly spying a ram entangled in thorns.
The ram comes to be the substitute sacrifice. Isaac
lives to be the great patriarch, the father of Jacob. In the
Islamic tradition, on the other hand, according to the
generally received belief in our time, it is the other, older son, Isma‘il, or
Ishmael, who is brought to the sacrifice, and Abraham’s knife falls miraculously
on a lamb, while the son is spared. Isma‘il is thought to be the ancestor of the
northern Arab races, and it is thus the line of Isma‘il that is canonically
sacred in the faith of Islam. (While the lines of Isaac and Isma‘il subsequently
wander, they themselves, united in amity, returned to bury Abraham their father
– a thread of the texture of sacred history that should be deeply meaningful to
Jews, Christians, and Muslims alike). It is from the line of
Isma‘il that the Prophet is believed to be descended. The
meaning of the narrative, at all events, expands into the fundamental notion of
the faith. Our friend Zainab al-Suwaij, Director of the
American Islamic Congress (and a frequent speaker at Dialogue on Diversity
programs) writes in a recent holiday message to her diverse circle of readers,
drawn from all three of the religions of the Book -- and others -- that the
thrust of the scriptural account is to be seen in the proposition that the act
of killing, even if the actor believes himself to be the instrument of a divine
command, is not to be carried out, but that God averts the
dire act by an act of his own, miraculous if need be, substituting an act of
mercy or of worship (in the story, the sacrifice of the ram/lamb). The
commentaries of each of the religious traditions on the nearly identical story,
thus resonate one upon the other, each enriching the others.
It is the special
insight of the Islamic commentary that the divine purpose is to suspend, or
thwart, the intent to harm, however one has rationalized that intent, or
received the intent from respected sources in society or even from within a
theological tradition, and thus the faithful believer will find the impulse to
harm averted in his course of life through conversion of the intent to harm into
acts of charity. This is a remarkably far-reaching and powerful
insight. It is a true holiday gift granted in the pursuit, in
due humility, of that interaction of our diverse religious traditions, in which
the voices of each, not like thunder, but as the whisper quietly attended to,
point to that instructive encounter that persons of good will in each tradition
are coming more and more to hope for.
We wish
for each of you, our readers, friends, and members,
all
good times and the pleasures of our affluent, technologically advanced society,
and at once the joy of the holidays we celebrate in these days near the winter
solstice.
