Ringing in the new year with Black Eyed Peas

This is a year of fire for me (ask me about the past Beltaine sometime).  After ringing in the New Year with a bonfire down by the Detroit River I decided to make a spicy black eyed pea dish for my first dinner of the year.  Black Eyed Peas are a traditional new years dish for southern African Americans, though it actually dates back to ancient Jewish New Year (Rosh Hashana) celebrations.  In this country they are usually cooked with ham hocks, but this recipe is vegan.

Fire-y Black Eyed Peas for New Year
A couple cups of black eyed peas, soaked over night
Vegetable broth (optional)
Onion, chopped
Leek, sliced
Celery, chopped
Carrot, chopped
Clove of garlic, chopped fine
Olive Oil
Spices and herbs (suggestions: cayenne pepper, basil, oregano, black pepper, rosemary, coriander)
2 cups canned tomatoes
1/4 cup pepper vinegar (optional)

Start cooking black eyed peas (bring to boil then turn down to a simmer).

In another heavy pan saute the onion, garlic and leek in a little olive oil.  Add the dry spices (wait to add herbs) and cook a little longer.  Add carrots and cook and stir until covered with oil and spices.  Add the beans and enough vegetable broth (or water) so that beans and veggies are just covered.  Add herbs.  Cook without lid over low simmer until beans are done cooking.  Add tomatoes and pepper vinegar (if you don't have pepper vinegar you might want to add more cayenne or some other source of capsicum spiciness).

Serve hot with sweet potatoes, greens and cornbread.

Snapshot of a Saturday Detroit

So this snapshot actually begins on Friday night.  My bike's bottom bracket, which had been making funny noises for a couple days, finally gives out.  What this means is that the pedals all but stop turning.  I'm most of the way home from a great book and clothing exchange in Woodbridge, I'm in Corktown, almost back to Mexicantown where I live.  It is a bummer, but not a desperate situation.  I walk my bike up the pedestrian overpass and then ride it down.  Eventually my bike finally slows and it makes more sense to walk than coast.

Then suddenly DOGS ATTACK!  Or not really attack, but three roaming street dogs start barking at me in a way that makes me really unhappy.  This sort of thing occasionally happens while I'm on my bike, but it is way less scary when you can get your vehicle up to 20 mph, rather than having it weigh you down.  I figure if all else fails I can throw my steel behemoth at them, but first try what my coworkers have told me to do at Romanowski which is to say "NO" in a loud deep voice, and what do ya know, it works.

The next day I leave my house around 10 to take my disabled bike to the Hub Bike Shop.  As I may have mentioned before, they are an awesome bike collective that does lots of bike programming with kids.  They also are the nearest bike shop that I know of to my house.  As I walked over I got "Good Morning" and "How do you do" several times.  I passed a really trashy empty lot on MLK Blvd where a street ministry group was passing out food and clothing and blasting praise movement out of some speakers. 

Shortly after that a city bus pulled up beside me and the driver shouted out that I should throw my bike on the front and get a ride.  I pointed out to him that my extra long frame wouldn't fit on the rack.  Very shortly after that a white guy in a winter coast riding a Schwinn rode up beside me and tried to diagnose the problem with my bike, which of course I already had.  He was very friendly though and was the first of three people today to point out the value of having a back up bike.

Finally I arrive at the Hub.  Darrin recognizes me from both the Progressive Dinner ride and the fact that we often cross paths on our ways to work.  He quickly agrees with me that my bottom bracket is totally dead, and unsurprisingly doesn't stock the fancy pants one that I use (that while fancy pants actually holds up decently to the amount of abuse I put it through).  He orders one though and makes sure that I have a bike to ride.  I just want to point out how amazing this is.  I loved/love the guys at Allegro Cyclery in Walla Walla, but they never seemed very sensitive to the fact that my bike was the ONLY way I had to get around.  They never offered to rent me a bike for a week and often seemed pretty casual about delaying getting my bike back to me by a day or more.  I have no doubt that if I had told Darrin I was bike-less while my bike was out of commission he would have given me one of the refurbished bikes for sale in the shop to use for the week, no questions asked.  That is awesome.

Afterwards I walked the rest of the way to Eastern Market.  Picked up milk, oats, stew beef, flour, granola, onions, apple cider, and probably some other things that I forgot.  Found out my cow is giving out plenty of milk and looked at a lot of wreaths.  I think I could make better ones, definitely going to try next year, will just need to find a source of boughs.

On my walk back from Eastern Market I ran into the friendly bus driver again.  This time I was all too happy to grab a ride.  He insisted that I didn't need to pay fare (I'm not sure DDOT would be that happy about that).  He then asked me about my bike and then whether I went to church.  "Well...sometimes." "What's the name of your God?" "er...depends on the day of the week" "Well I'm a minister and Jesus is my God...." and then he went on to tell me about how if I accepted Jesus as my Saviour and was washed in the baptismal waters all my sins would be washed away and I would speak in tongues.  Minister Greg the kindly bus driver, who would have known.  He wasn't giving any sort of hard sell, just wanted to let me know about Jesus.  Then we talked about trees and gardens.

Finally I got let off at the corner of Grand and MLK Blvd and walked the rest of the way home.

Charity vs Sharing

Today I went and helped out at the BBQ for the Homeless/Forgotten Workers that is put on by the Wobbly Kitchen and some other informal groups on the 2nd and 4th Sunday of every month.    It made me think a lot about what the difference between sharing and charity is.

One of the things I like about this BBQ is that it is out in the park and set up as more of a party.  Those cooking and serving food interact quite a bit with those coming to eat and all of the people serving take a break and get some of the food as well.  To me it seems a lot more like a "sharing" of food and other resources, but I couldn't put my finger on what exactly the difference between charity and sharing is.  So of course, I asked Facebook.


My friend Nick said "Sharing in my mind is more of a two-way street than charity."  To me that didn't seem quite right.  I feel like if I share something and expect something else in return it is more of a trade or transaction than real sharing.  There is some aspect of mutuality though.  And I think Margaret's comment: "Charity entails a power differential - the "haves" beneficiently bestowing upon the "have nots." Similar distinction between Serving and Helping."   I think she hit it just right that there is a feeling of equality between people who are sharing as opposed to folks that are engaged in offering charity.  Even with that I felt like there was still something I couldn't quite put my finger on. 


To me part of what sharing is about is not feeling diminished afterwards.  You can share an umbrella with something and never give anything up.  When people engage in charity even if they have a lot of money at the end of giving there is a feeling that they have less than they did before.  Realizing this made me feel like I was getting to something but I still feel that you can "share" food, where you might by definition have less food at the end than you did at the beginning, but you don't feel like you "gave" food, you can feel that it was shared.


The key I think is contained in my good friend El Barto Grande's comment: "Charity is something the [C]hristians do. Sharing is something [S]ocialists do."  Perhaps it is because I was sharing all this food at the BBQ for the Forgotten Worker with the Wobblies, but that really rang true for me.  And I don't think it is just a matter of syntax.  


Handing someone a bowl of soup can only feel like charity if you recognize that soup as yours and that now you have given it away to someone else and now you have less soup and now are poorer.  If you recognize that the riches of society were built by many hands before you and with you and that without the richness of the whole we would all have nothing, then the soup is no more yours than it is mine than it belongs to the guy on the corner than it belongs to the President.  The richness of our country (of our world) is a result of the work of so many hands that to claim any of it as our own and therefore ours to give in charity to someone else is preposterous.

To bring it to another example, many feel that welfare benefits, such as cash assistance, rent assistance, food stamps, etc are charity to the poor, others feel that they are unearned wealth.  Who truly creates that wealth though?  And what person creates that wealth on their own.  Even if we accept that someone like Steve Jobs earned all of his wealth, what of the teachers who taught him the basics?  What of the roads he traveled on to get his goods to market?  What of all the people who grew the food that nourished him?  What of the police that protected the places he lived and worked and created?  Are not all these public goods part of the wealth creation machine?  Without a society that includes all of these goods there could be no millionaire, there could be no wealth and there could be no soup.  And there could be no society with out all of the individual people within it, so we can never give the money, or soup, as charity, we can only share it.