The last few days my main earworm has been a song I used when I led nonviolence workshops. I usually played it for one of our last sessions, after we’d learned about the inner work of nonviolence, then moved onto the interpersonal, then the community level, and ending with the global — all inextricably intertwined. The song is so illuminating to me because it makes clear peaceful change can’t help but benefit more than the intended group.

“Bread & Roses” was first a poem written in 1911 by James Oppenheim, who was himself inspired by a speech by factory inspector and women’s suffrage campaigner Helen Todd. During a speech Todd called out “bread for all, and roses too!” Her 1910 speech said, in part,  

“…woman is the mothering element in the world and her vote will go toward helping forward the time when life’s Bread, which is home, shelter and security, and the Roses of life, music, education, nature and books, shall be the heritage of every child that is born in the country, in the government of which she has a voice.”

The phrase became a rallying cry during the 1912 women’s millworker strike in Lawrence, Massachusetts. Women were fighting for fair wages, child labor laws, overtime pay, and fair working conditions. Part of their strike proclamation read:

“We, the 20,000 textile workers of Lawrence, are out on strike for the right to live free from slavery and starvation; free from overwork and underpay; free from a state of affairs that had become so unbearable and beyond our control, that we were compelled to march out of the slave pens of Lawrence in united resistance against the wrongs and injustice of years and years of wage slavery.”

As the Zinn Education Project notes, 

The 1912 Bread and Roses Strike in Lawrence, Mass., was one of the most significant struggles in U.S. labor history due to its level of organization and collaboration across ethnic and gender lines. Thousands of largely female workers engaged in a lengthy, well-organized, and successful walkout, standing firm against an entrenched group of mill owners and their hundreds of militia and police. Workers maintained soup kitchens and nurseries for children. Meetings were simultaneously translated into nearly 30 languages. Representatives from every nationality formed a 50-person strike leadership group.

The song “Bread & Roses” speaks of the deep human desire, not merely for the necessities of life, but for the creation of, and participation in a community cognizant of beauty.    

I’m sure this song has set up camp in my head because of my deepening despair over recent Supreme Court rulings, so many of which trample precedent while tearing down some of democracy’s foundation stones.

• Only a few weeks after the tragic and preventable slaughter of schoolchildren and teachers in Uvalde, the court ruled against the long-established rights of states to place their own restrictions on guns.
• In a two-strike blow against separation of church and state, the court ruled that religious schools must receive state tuition money and that public teachers/coaches have the right to pray with students. 
• In a damaging blow against the First Amendment, the court ruled the government was not required to disclose information about a Guantanamo Bay detainee’s torture.   
• The court overturned Roe v Wade, with serious consequences not only for health, privacy, self-determination, and equality — it also opens the way for draconian “bounty” laws setting Americans against one another for profit like those already enacted in Texas.
• Just weeks after the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change released a report saying we’re in a state of “code red for humanity,” the court ruled against the EPA’s ability to regulate emissions across the energy sector (the sector primarily responsible for escalating climate damage).

• Next week the court is set to rule on Moore v Harper, an appeal advocating for extreme interpretation of the Constitution that could make it easier for state legislatures to suppress the vote, draw unfair election districts, and enable partisan interference in ballot counting.

I tremble for our democracy. My greatest hope rests in what Helen Todd showed us. We create peace by advocating for all of us. And doing so peaceably is the most powerful way forward. History shows nonviolent protests are twice as likely to succeed as armed conflicts, and can’t help to succeed once such protests have engaged 3.5% of the population.

Lets get out there and sing.

BREAD & ROSES 

As we go marching, marching
In the beauty of the day
A million darkened kitchens
A thousand mill lofts gray

Are touched with all the radiance
That a sudden sun discloses
For the people hear us singing
Bread and roses, bread and roses

As we go marching, marching
We battle too for men
For they are women’s children
And we mother them again

Our lives shall not be sweated
From birth until life closes
Hearts starve as well as bodies
Give us bread, but give us roses

As we go marching, marching
Unnumbered women dead
Go crying through our singing
Their ancient call for bread

Small art and love and beauty
Their drudging spirits knew
Yes, it is bread we fight for
But we fight for roses too

As we go marching, marching
We bring the greater days
For the rising of the women
Means the rising of the race

No more the drudge and idler
Ten toil where one reposes
But the sharing of life’s glories
Bread and roses, bread and roses

Our lives shall not be sweated
From birth until life closes
Hearts starve as well as bodies
Bread and roses, bread and roses