Today I mistakenly typed the phrase Unitarian Society of Cleveland into google instead of Unitarian Universalist Society of Cleveland. I got a strange result. Via googlebooks I found a sentence reference to the congregation in The COINTELPRO Papers By Ward Churchill, Jim Vander Wall. It reads "Thus, the FBI targeted the entire Unitarian Society of Cleveland in 1964 because the minister and some members circulated a petition calling for the abolition of HUAC and because the church gave office space to a group the FBI did not like." 

HUAC stands for the House on UnAmerican Activities Committee. The committee was fond of calling supposed supporters of the Communist Party in front of it and accusing them of being un-American. Wikipedia has an article on HUAC if you’d like to learn more.

I have never heard of this piece of congregational history and I know nothing about it other than the one sentence in Churchill’s book. Hard to know what, if anything, Churchill’s sentence actually refers to without doing a lot more research. 

George Lakoff, linguist and favorite of many Unitarian Universalists, has published an essay about The Obama Code over on my friend Nate Silver’s web-site fivethirtyeight. He argues that

For supporters of the President, it is crucial to understand the Code in order to talk overtly about the old values our new president is communicating. It is necessary because tens of millions of Americans—both conservatives and progressives—don’t yet perceive the vital sea change that Obama is bringing about.

If you’re going to watch the President’s faux-State of the Union speech tonight it might be worthwhile to read Lakoff’s essay first.

Last week the blog of the Twin Cities Starbucks Workers Union discussed the "Starbucks Problem." The problem came to light during the now somewhat infamous secret conference call hosted by Bank of America executives to discuss the Employee Free Choice Act. The act, if passed, will allow for card check recognition. That means that a company will have to enter in negotiations with any union that can get 50%+1 of its employees to sign union cards. The participants on the phone call were terrified that if the act passed employees would simply start forming their own unions without waiting for the existing labor unions to initiate organizing drives. This possibility is what the executives have termed the Starbucks Problem. As someone who knows the founders of the Starbucks Workers Union and has done a little organizing for them from time-to-time I have to say I’m proud that a small group of workers can scare such powerful business executives.

The Starbucks Workers Union was founded in New York City by a handful of workers and slowly spread across the country. Their membership is only around 300 but they have won a variety of small and large gains for workers in the last few years. And now powerful executives from Bank of America and Home Depot and right-wing activists from the Center for Union Facts are nervous that other workers may follow their example. The whole thing reminds me of Margaret Mead’s dictum: "Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed people can change the world. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has." I hope that others will indeed follow the example of the SWU. In doing so the world might yet be changed.