Get Used to It: Ep. 147, "Spirituality and Life"

(typewriter clacking) (cheerful music) - Hi, welcome to "Get Used To It". I'm Sheila Kuehl, I host your way through whatever guests we're having of the day. And I'm very excited about our program today. In its first run, and I don't know when you're watching it, but it's sort of end of 2008, beginning of 2009. And I wanted to do a show that was both spiritual and also really about how we manifest ourselves in the world. And that's about all I know about what we're gonna talk about. But I have two wonderful guests. First, Jay Kohorn who is a Constitutional lawyer and the assistant director of the California Appellate Project. Welcome Jay. - That's correct. Thank you very much. It's always fun to be here with you. - Thank you, I'm really glad you could make it. My second guest is Judy Baca, who is a professor at the Cesar Chavez Center at UCLA and also artistic director at SPARC which she's been for many years. - Many years. - SPARC is Social and Public Art Resources Center. Is that right? - That's right. You got it right. - Thank you, Judy. I'm really glad you're here as well. - Thank you Sheila, it's great to be here. - So Jay, let's start with you. I had thought up this sort of idea that for the kind of bridging the end of the year, beginning of the year, we've been talking a lot in our community and other communities about hope, but also despair. About sort of manifesting our beliefs in what we do, but also feeling a kind of anger and ennui. I mean, the economic situation, everything seeming to kind of come down on us. And the two of you struck me as people who have a deeply, deeply spiritual nature. Now this is what it looks like to me. (Jay and Judy laughing) - That's very nice of you. - A deeply spiritual nature that really has manifested itself in your work over the years, as long as I've known you. So Jay, maybe first of all, will you tell our audience a little bit about your work? - Ah. California Appellate Project was created at the suggestion of the chief justice, actually Chief Justice Rose Bird because she was not happy with the quality of representation for the guys on death row. And she felt that we could do better. Since then it expanded to cover any cases where an indigent person has a right to appointed counsel in the appellate courts, in the Court Of Appeal or the Supreme Court, when they need the rights vindicated or discussed or argued on the appellate level, they have a right to appointed counsel and we actually match the case with a good attorney, handle some of the cases ourselves, and shepherd the case through, training the attorneys, making sure that two things, number one, that the defendants or the parties, the indigents get Constitutionally mandated competent counsel. And the second thing is that the court get useful briefing. Because so often the court has to waste money starting from scratch, 'cause the attorney's work isn't good enough. So that's basically what we've done. And I've been doing that for over 20 years now. - I think looking from the outside, people might say that sounds like very difficult work, especially the death penalty work. Some might say, you know, we don't like those guys. How can you do that? - They always ask that. - Always, I'm sure. And some might also say, isn't it very difficult because you might have a relationship with your client, you know, representing them and understanding them and feeling for them. Can you tell us without any violating any confidences, what one or two of the most difficult cases or a little bit about them that you've handled over those years? - Gosh, one particular case, I'm actually gonna mention a different case 'cause it has to do with criminal defense. I handled a case with an appellate attorney named Tom Coleman. You might remember Tom. And we actually won the case. And years later, the client came to me and said that he cursed the day that he ever brought the appeal because it had such an emotional effect on him, that notwithstanding the fact that he won, he wasn't able to get out of the mode that the whole process had ruined his life. So there's emotions enough to go around. That wasn't even a death penalty case. In death penalty cases-- - And have you found it in any way personally difficult to do the work? - No I haven't. - Why is that? - We were talking about spirituality and spirituality brings up religion. In a very real sense, the Good Book of the United States is the Constitution. And the good book of the state of California is the California Constitution. And it needs people to be its champion because if we don't ensure that those rights are there for the people who look guilty, it won't be there for us when we need it. So basically we're the guardians, the appellate defense lawyers are the guardians of the Constitution and safety and law for all of us. And so, I find no conflict there with a client who is guilty. If a client is guilty and you know, one never knows for sure if a client is guilty because well, for a lot of reasons. But if a client is truly guilty and we're successful, it's not like we're releasing somebody onto into the street to kill somebody again. The person goes back to a trial that is fair this time. Because if trials are not fundamentally fair, then the credibility of the evidence is in question and bad things can happen. So we're really protecting the rights of everybody, not just the criminal. I know that that's not a popular way of thinking about it. - Well, but it's interesting to me because I don't know that people really think about the law very much at all. And if they do think about it, they may think, well there's bad guys and good guys and the law is supposed to take care of the bad guys and leave the good guys alone. But I have always thought there's a spiritual nature to the notion of the law itself and doing the law. Because the whole underpinning of law is fairness. I mean, in the United States, it's supposed to be fairness, right? And that it goes all the way from you get accused of something that somebody can prove that you did. All the burden is on the prosecution to convince people beyond a reasonable doubt that you did something, they have to bring the evidence. There has to be good evidence. But sort of beyond that, the fact that there's fairness actually helps Americans, I think obey the law. - Oh, no doubt. And one of the fundamental foundations of that sense of fairness is a sense of empathy, which to me, is the human characteristic that I prize most. I think it's what gives us our humanness more than anything else. And that comes out in art, which we'll talk about in a little while. But I learned two things from my mom that were really critical to me. Number one, when I was a little boy, somebody gave me a book of Bible stories and I was very interested in them. And my mom immediately sat me down and put on an old recording of Porgy and Bess and played "It Ain't Necessarily So". (Sheila and Judy laughing) - The things that you're liable to hear in the Bible aren't necessarily-- - Yes, yes, right. And her purpose was, it's not important to believe literally, at least not for her and not for me to believe literally that the stories are true. That's the booby prize. The thing that's important is what lesson can you learn about how to coexist with other people? What lesson can you learn about how to interact, how to be an ethical and moral person? It's always the lesson that's important. And the second thing was she was very involved emotionally in Martin Luther King Jr's work. She had, I remember as a child, seeing her scrapbook of all the articles about Martin Luther King. And that was the vehicle through which she taught me the importance of empathy. So you combine those two things and you have a budding musician. (laughs) - I get the Porgy and Bess part, but Martin Luther King and music, that-- - Well, no, it's the empathy. It's being able to put yourself in someone else's shoes to not just do things mechanically, but to do them with thought and context of other people, emotions, feelings. - So you're a musician too? - I started out, my undergraduate degree for law school was in music with an emphasis on opera conducting. - That must have made you a great candidate for law school. (Judy laughs) Oh, here's one, he conducts opera! - You're just like the law school, that was the same question they asked me. I was headed there. And when Robert Kennedy was assassinated, for a moment in time, which lasted probably two years, I thought it was irresponsible and self indulgent to be a musician. So I went to law school so I could have more of an effect. - Now, were you raised in a faith? I hear that you believe in the Constitution. (Jay laughs) I hear that your mother introduced you to Bible stories by telling you they might not be actually true. - Okay, here's the third thing that my parents did, which was really interesting. I'm Jewish. My grandparents were Jewish. I had a great grandfather that was a rabbi. My parents were not observant at all. I went to religious school because I wanted to, and my friends were there, not because they wanted me to go. Certainly my dad would rather not have not paid the fees for the temple, you know? So after my bar mitzvah, my mom said, pulled me aside and said, instead of being born into a religion, why don't you do it consciously? try some other stuff and then see if you want to come back. So I actually quit the temple and joined a congregational Christian Church and became the pianist, they didn't have an organ, I became the pianist for the church for about five years actually. And the thing that brought me back to Judaism was really interesting. Judaism is built on holy books, like the Constitution, and those books are debates. They don't tell you what to believe. They tell, you you have to struggle with ideas. And the books are often debates among rabbis and learned people about the meaning. What does this story mean? How does it relate to how you should act? What does it mean in regard to ethics? Never coming to a concrete conclusion, always in the exploration stages. And so that was, it's sort of like, you know, interpreting music. There's an aesthetic to the whole thing that I really liked. So that's my religious background. - Well, it's a good segue from music to art it seems to me. Judy, maybe you could tell the folks a little bit about SPARC since you've been there for, I mean, founder and been there for quite a while. And a real vision that I also believe was deeply spiritual work. - Yes, the Social and Public Art Resource Center we founded in 1976. It was three unlikely women working together to, one, a filmmaker who made the wonderful film "Desert Of The Hearts" and another, the daughter of the wonderful art historian, Arthur Schlesinger. And the three of us at that particular moment in time, me a sort of Chicana activist, we came together at a particular moment to see if there was a way that art could be relevant in a very similar experience in the sense that I came out of art school as a minimalist painter and had learned very much the formal aspects of painting. And I had seen, I was in Catholic high school, a Catholic high school primarily because where I grew up, the only schools that didn't have like, total riots were the Catholic high schools. And my mother really thought I would never make it through, unless I actually had some discipline. And I was brought out of Pacoima Junior High School into Bishop Alemany. And there, I had the good teaching of really good teachers, the sisters of St. Joseph Carondelet, who were liberation theology women and feminists in a sense. They were actually challenging the church at the time, that people were beginning to take off their habits and they were beginning to say, we have to behave in ways that have meaning in the social atmosphere in which we are doing our Catholicism. So it was all in that climate that we began to question, could art actually be relevant as a change agent? Is it separate and apart of formalist dialogue of intellectuals, or could I somehow create artwork that would address my families and my culture and the experience I had in the communities of Los Angeles? I was born in Watts at 85th and Central and grew up in a mixed community, then African American and Latino. In Pacoima I was in a place where there was eternal conflict between ethnic groups. And it was just part of the regular daily life. There was African American Latino conflict. There was, in this place, which actually ended up being the intersection of four landing fields where Lockheed aircraft workers would work. And my father worked in Lockheed aircraft industry. It was a site designated as a segregated community, essentially African American and Latino. So I grew up in these places and I was somehow, I don't know how I became this person, desiring to be an artist. It might have been all the musicians in my family. I kind of think of my uncle as a jazz saxophonist from South Central and playing on Central Avenue and me crawling in and out of drums and basses and all of that in the house, in our little tiny house in Watts. And, but somehow I wanted to be a painter. And I saw Sister Corita Kent. And she was talking against the war in Vietnam and she was showing these beautiful field colors of study, of light and color. And I said, why, I was a 17 year old, I said, why does she make art that doesn't look like what she's saying? Right, beautiful, but why doesn't it say no war or why isn't it telling me when I look at it not to be involved with war? So I sort of vowed, along with the experience of talking to my grandmother, who was an indigenous woman, very powerful (speaking Spanish) who healed us with her herbs and stuff. I vowed that I would figure out how to make the paintings speak so that when you looked at 'em, they would be exactly what I wanted to say. And that's why these three women founded this organization to see if we could challenge those ideas and make art that did that. - But art is often a solitary endeavor, at least for the artist. Many writers and artists that I know are solitary in their work. You have gone the other direction, you are very social in your work. Collaborative not in a way that means you sacrifice your own voice in it. But say a little bit about the murals project that came out of this. - Out of SPARC, actually many things came. And for 32 years, we have been programming steadily and putting art in the most unlikely places. How does art live and thrive in poor communities? And without the beautiful, pristine white walls, where does it get placed? And we kept coming to the conclusion that art should be in the places that live and work. And that it should be, for example, in one of our major signature works, which began in 1976, we were founded in '74 as the friends of the first citywide mural project. And I actually developed that under the auspices of the city of Los Angeles. The answer to Francisca, my grandmother's question, which is what is this for, mija? It's like, lovely, but what is it for? And all of a sudden I saw through her eyes these beautiful color fields that I had been trained to do. And I realized I hadn't answered the question of what it was for, you know? And my mother is saying to me, go be a lawyer. You're gonna be the first of us educated (Jay and Sheila laughing) because at least you can sue somebody. She said, change comes through the courts, right? And I thought, no, change can come through the street. And that's how we began the mural program. And SPARC actually was the vehicle for the creation of the half mile long mural, which is the history of immigrants of America, basically focusing on California, that painted 2,740 feet. with over 400 young people, a life's work for me, over 30 years of connection to these kids. I can't get rid of them. And now they have kids and their kids have kids, imagine that some of the kids from the first great wall productions are over 40, starting at 14. And we are in the midst right now of preparing the restoration of the first sections that are 30 years old, extending the great wall, adding more segments on new history. Interpreting the time we're living in, helping young people do the interpretation of the time they live in and saying what is important about it, and what contributions their families and their histories are to the building of a country. And also creating the connection between the river bottom that we painted in, which was a concreted channel in the flood control districts of Los Angeles, which we called the Scar Where The River Once Ran. And looking at the healing of that scar and also the healing of ourselves by recovering our own stories, by knowing what contributions we had made as a group of people. And many groups, some of it was African American, Latino, women. What uniquely was Native American contributions? What uniquely were Jewish contributions? What uniquely were the contributions of all these various people that make up the diversity that's the magnificence of the city of LA? - Well, it's interesting that you just said the healing. I mean, I, again, thinking about sort of the spiritual aspect of a person's life, one of the things that I notice as I go along in life is so many of my friends, and I myself feel sort of a compilation almost of wounds, you know? Bad stuff happens. And I don't wanna say the worst stuff has happened to me. It hasn't. But to see it happen to other people or to have the world be unfair in some ways, difficult to heal from that. But you see in, just let me say too personally, in your work, do you feel this comes back to you as well? Not just the people in the room. - Oh, I can't. I'm really, I just feel like I was one of the kids on the great wall. Well, I might have been the initiator of it. I said something moving that then I became a participant in. And so the process of like recovering our stories, and this is how I like to think about it. It's sort of a simple idea. And my answer to Francisca, if she was still living, I think now at this point in my life, I could answer it. What is it for? What is this art for? Well, the space between dreaming and imagining and making real is not that far. So the first part of it is the actual, you know, becoming a mural painter and putting into a public site the dreams of a people, let's say a community, a neighborhood that says we've had too much violence. We've had too much fear. We have not done well with our work across cultures or ethnicities, or we've had struggles with the police department, or we have huge drug problems. Space between dreaming and making real can be bridged by the visualization of that idea. And that's what we do. We take out of their hearts the visualization of the ideas and aspirations and hopes, and we make 'em physical and we bring 'em into the public consciousness and they live there, and daily. And now I've lived long enough to have the experience of have of having university students come into my classrooms and public monuments or in graduate courses and say to me, the only art I ever saw were the murals in my housing project. And I am an art historian now, and I am studying art because of this. And I understand the power of art because how it made me feel about who I am. The first brown face I ever saw in a public setting was the mural on 4th and Soto, right? So in other words, those things became real in the people's lives. And so I think I paint dreams. I make them real and tangible. And then I hope that they go into your spirit and your heart when you see them. - Well, I was thinking when you were talking about TS Elliot's, the line from his poem where he says, "Between the idea and the action falls the shadow." - Oh yes, that's great. - And I see that in politics. And I heard you just say that, you know, connecting the idea to the manifestation of it, the dream to the reality of it is a way of cutting through the shadow. And I think when you were talking Jay, about the work that you do, it's also, this notion of justice is a very kind of large and somewhat vague notion. And yet it sounded to me like you were sort of connecting to it. And I know you wanted to do that every so often. - There's an, I'm so fascinated with the art, you know, (Sheila laughs) I mean, I said that for a moment, I felt it was socially irresponsible to be an artist and that's why I went to law school. Well, there's the anecdote-- - She felt it was irresponsible to go to law school and became an artist! (laughs) - I know, that's fabulous. - And I actually think I work on justice. I think actually my whole desire was to be a social justice painter. In other words-- - Which is what you do. - That's what I do. I'm interested in justice in the largest sense. I mean, first of all it has to become internalized, it has to be something that all of us agree to. This is a common agreement, a covenant among us that justice should live, that we should, we all have a commitment to it. - But there's an aesthetic that makes it work. And that aesthetic, with a talented artist, the aesthetic can be there in the art. I just have to, we just went on a cruise, Zeke and I. And one of the guest speakers gave a series of lectures on terrorism. To make matters worse, the feed, because of the clouds and everything, the feed from the satellites on the television on the cruise ship, the feeds weren't good. So the only station we got was Fox News. (Sheila laughs) - No offense Fox, I didn't mean to laugh. - No, no, no, no. But you could see the darkness coming over the people. Because they were being frightened, they were being bombarded. And the only thing that sort of brightened them up was the art, the music, I mean, you talked about healing. That provides a balance to the human spirit that is critical if the human spirit's going to move forward. You can get, one can get mired in the dangers and the evils of the macrocosm. But really in your own microcosm and in your own relationships, there can be so much beauty that you don't even see. And music sort of quiets the senses, art quiets the senses and allows one to experience that aesthetic at the same time. Does that make sense? - I think people are talking-- - Yeah, that makes sense. - Was gonna say, talking right now about this notion that actually, because we are majority, we're actually made of water. And the notion that crystals of water actually are transformed by what you say to them. If you say fear and you cause them to, you say hate, the crystals transform and they change so that they're, at some point, the physicality in the physical world of what we are talking about that is a spiritual thing will be manifested. People will discover it. - Well it's, as I see in a different way, what you both do, there's sort of a transformative nature to it. I can see it more with art, but I was thinking about the people who are represented, for instance, must feel very hopeless a lot about what's happened to them. I mean, they've been convicted of a very serious crime and now they wanna appeal. And I guess the notion is, well, you gotta appeal, that's how you get there. But what do you see happen in them? - Somewhere deep inside of them, if a person is guilty of a terrible crime, somewhere deep inside of them, they sort of know that they may not get out of prison, you know, or it may be the end for them, that may be their destination. Then what it becomes is human interaction, somebody caring and somebody listening. I mean, those are human needs that aren't suddenly turned off if one is separated from society. So there, I mean, and as we've spoken about before, too many people are in prison. I mean, there probably needs to be a major look at how we keep people in prison, who we put in prison. And whether on the other side, when they get out, if the time in prison is a catalyst for change so that they can be in society, or is it a catalyst for recidivism? And what we've discovered now in many states through an evidence based analysis, is that a lot of people who are in prison become greater recidivists because of it. And there need to be alternatives to-- - Well, and also when you come out, there's not much waiting for you, that nobody gives you a lot of help. You know, we've been trying to get more money kind of out of prison and into transitional programs. And it's interesting about art in the prisons. I was sitting next to a woman on a plane not very long ago, whose work is writing projects in prisons. And not necessarily death row, but you know, and somewhat in the youth incarceration areas as well. Because it's kind of what you were saying, Judy, about telling your story. When you say they're shut away from the world, or I was thinking about your boat, you know, kind of beleaguered and easily fearful, in a way I think our communities, not just in LA are like that. Why it was so important for these kids to feel their stories, which aren't really, even that they know it's their story, you know, to be told. - In other, even in our own communities, even in more affluent communities, people are bombarded by negativity. And especially at this time of history, someone said, we've been here before, we'll get through this. Well, in my lifetime, we've never been quite here before. And this is a little scarier than I've experienced in my lifetime before. - Or they're bombarded, don't you think they're bombarded also by this, you know, pressure to buy and to consume and to-- - There's no question. - And this is really not, I think this is overwhelming at the moment. - It is. And whether it's the capitalistic imperative in the extreme or the fear of what what's happening around us in the world, think about it. When you're at home, you have, my neighborhood is so wonderful. The woman on my right is a single mom with a kid in college. To her right were three generations from India, Hindu, who chant every, we could hear the chants. To the left is a family from the Philippines. To the left of them is a family from Japan. Across the street are Syrians and Palestinians who were the first to bring the Jewish gay guys across the street when they moved in a big plate of baklava. (Sheila laughs) And there's no reason for us to have a negative view of society just because of the bombardment from outside. We have to balance what we, balance listening to the news, for example, with music and art. There has to be a balance. And there's no forced balance so we have to take, in a disciplined way, we have to achieve that balance. But just telling the truth about how wonderful things can be around us with our friends at any particular point of time is important to do, I think. - Well, I think a lot of what we've been talking about too, is kind of a way of either removing barriers or just saying no to them. I mean, one of the interesting things that I've learned out of this economic downturn is a lot more information about how dependent our economy is on everybody buying stuff. That it is the it of it, you know? That people make things and they sell things. And they're involved in making things and they're involved in selling things. And if they're not selling things, then there's no jobs. People are losing their jobs, primarily this year in the financial sector. But that's still making and selling things, even though it was, you know, financial packages or mortgages or whatever. Cutting back on buying has its own, I mean, it seems to me has its own sort of challenges. Because everybody's doing it. And now that I'm, my brand new job is to serve on the California Integrated Waste Management Board. Now I would say I was a trash queen. - Sounds sexy to me. - But everyone would think, you know, that's something else. But one of the interesting things to me was that we all put out paper to be recycled, right? We separate it out, we have newspaper and paper and all this stuff. And we figure it's hauled away and people use it. Well, it was all taken to China, we actually paid them to take it. And China would redo it as packaging materials. But they're not doing it now because people are not buying as much and therefore you don't need packaging materials. So all of a sudden the whole recycling market, and that's not the only example, is kind of like just dwindling. So it's difficult to imagine our society, in a way if we're not kind of buying things. - And we perpetuate that by defining ourselves by what we have. I mean, one of the nice things about what you do and what I do as well, because I'm a public interest lawyer, I'll never get wealthy. But one of the nice things about both of us and I feel privileged, you probably do too, is that the money it takes to live, whatever we get, is a byproduct of our work, not the focus of our work. Do you feel that? - Mhm. Well, I also, I think, you know, it's interesting that you bring up this sort of notion of the waste management and recycling, 'cause that's of course one of the big challenges that we have to deal with right now. But I think that kind of the moment that we are in is, in a sense, the crisis of ingenuity, a crisis of an opportunity. I mean the greatest recyclers I know are artists, right? There are these beautiful notions in pre-Hispanic glyphs that talk about recycling as the, as one of the central elements of a figure, of a pre-Hispanic glyph is a recycler. Takes what is deteriorating and turns it into something else. And I'm thinking about the Haitian artists that I just recently saw in my classroom on public art. And these artists were living in trash heaps of a completely destroyed society. And they were creating images and sculptures of these forms out of pieces of auto parts and skulls that actually came out of the graveyards because they had to recycle skulls. What I'm saying is imagine that we actually change our value system some, that we shift what we care about and what we value, not about the acquisition. The greatest Hidesh chiefs, for example, in the northwest are measured by how much they redistribute the wealth, not about what they acquire. So the measure of the greatness is how much he gives back to his people. Every year he gathers them, and in the potlatch, which was a historicized and actual event annually, they redistributed the wealth. And I'm just thinking that we need to learn to be creative people, to, you know, eat locally, to actually transform our society into an environmentally, a better society. That creates enormous ingenuity. And I think we should be putting artists to work at plumber's wages again. I think we should be looking at the historic cedar programs and using those programs to build the infrastructure of America again. Not into getting us better Gucci bags, but in fact, to creating sculptures in the gardens so that even if you're in a blighted area, that you can walk through this records of tremendous ingenuity and dreams and hopes. And all that will transform the way we feel about ourselves. We need everybody's story told. We need thousands of storytellers. We need them in the schools. We need them, I mean, you see what I'm saying? Just the hope that we could actually transform the value system and therefore transform our products. - Well, I think we've hung a lot of our dreams on the new president. I mean, everybody is saying, well, he said there's gonna be public works. And they're all thinking FDR. Which included artists. Now, so far, I haven't heard about including artists, but. - Did you like his response when he was accused of wanting to redistribute the wealth? And he was accused of being a socialist. Do you remember his response? - What was his response? - His response was, well, I did like to share my toys in kindergarten. (Sheila laughs) Which I thought was-- - They're gonna call me a communist because I like to share my toys. - Right, exactly. - But the redistribution of the wealth is not a terrible word. Where in the world did we get this idea that that is communism? - Well, the right wing has really captured the message over the past 30 years. And now it's really, we're wrestling it back from them, words like socialism, which is like, I like socialized, oh, fire suppressions. I like socialized police force. I like socialized schools, that's all that means, everybody gets to go. - I like to drive on the streets. I like to drive on the streets. - Streets are socialized asphalt. It's, you know, take the word back. - Just take it back. And you know, even think of those things, like a spark can start a prairie fire, right? (Sheila laughs) I mean, that's where we founded, that term came from, the Christina Schlesinger knowing, being a good student of history because of her father said, you know, let's use this. This is like a radical statement. And I think it was the Weather Underground statement at the time, you know, a spark can start prairie fire. Because essentially if we look at Obama, Obama's just an opportunity in a sense. He said very clearly what he energized was a national movement of people actually wanting this change. And if that can stay energized and there are talk about, you know, new programs that would be like the Cedar program. There are people poised to say, we need a secretary of the arts. You know, we actually need to transform the importance of arts within a society. And I think in a society that is having to change in the way we have to change profoundly, we need every creative person. - Well, it's an interesting moment for our community too, I think, or our communities. Because after the passage of Prop 8 in California and other laws in other states and more, you know, other draconian laws in other states, people have been angry. I mean, there was such a high for so many people that were supporting Barack when he was elected. And then we see that the people still, you know, don't like us. A lot of people hit the streets and marched. Some were angry, but strangely enough, some were energized in a different way from anger. - [Jay] Almost in a philosophical way. - Yeah, the feeling of the unity of it, the feeling of moving towards something, though, you know, it's a balance moment in a way for the community, because not quite sure where to go with that. Sort of hope and anger have always somehow been two sides of something for, you know, for every community. - Well, three days ago, I got a copy of the address on the internet where I could watch the Iowa Supreme Court argument. And because they're considering gay marriage also just as the California Supreme Court did. And it was a brilliant argument, it was just brilliant. They, I mean, all of the education that's taking place now that, it would've been nice if it had all taken place before the election, but all the education that's taking place now and all of the interaction that's taking place now is still educating the world. I mean, it's an amazing transformation that's taking place now that, even if people who voted against us who are being stripped of the myths and the stereotypes and the untruths about what it all means and how it affects them. - [Judy] Because it's an opportunity. - It is an opportunity. Actually, just as when you make a mistake, Sheila, it's a personal opportunity. I consider myself a sum total of my mistakes. Without my mistakes I wouldn't be half the creature I am, right? And it's the same with this. This is a wonderful opportunity to escalate the education. And I almost feel that if we had won too easily, there wouldn't have been the opportunity to educate as much. - Fine. I would've rather won easily. I'm sorry. (laughs) - Well, I understand. (laughs) - It wouldn't have been easy, you saw milk, you know, it's been a lot of years that we've been sort of trying to do this. Not to correct you. - But I think-- - What really is interesting though, I think is that I've never seen my students who, both straight and gay, all be so energized. I mean, it's an issue of their time. And they're standing up across, whether they're, they see that it's their issue, even if they're straight. - [Jay] But they didn't see that before the election, they see that after the election. - Because they took fairness for granted. It was like, well, look, the court did this. Everything's fine. 8,000 people got married, look, it's gonna be fine. And then it's like-- - It takes a village. - I'm sure that for them, and I've heard some of the very young people in high school talk about this, it was the same as the moment that I watched the firehoses in Birmingham, Alabama in 1963 against all of the African American people who were just being, you know, blown against a wall. And it hurts, you could see that it hurt. I felt the blood drain out of my head. And I think the reason was, I don't know, I felt like I was four years old and it was, that's not fair. And that was a transformative moment for me, not 'cause I made a decision to work for social justice, but you can't get it outta your heart after that, you know? And it's been a great pleasure to work for justice. A lot of people say, oh, I'm so glad you're there. Thank you so much for doing this work. And I wanna say to them, though it would be rude, you don't have to thank me. It's just, it's so fulfilling, you know, to just say, you know what I'd like to do today? I'd like to do something I think is right. And then just be able to go ahead and do it. I think that's what we've kind of been talking about. - When you said you don't didn't wanna be rude to them, what I thought you were gonna say is, and what have you done today? (Sheila laughs) - Oh, that rude I couldn't be, but it'd be a good question. - It would be a good question. - Though, many people I think are. I mean, one of the things in our areas is it kind of brings us in contact with people doing this stuff, you know? - I feel very lucky. Very, very blessed. - One of the things though I wanted to ask you too was, it's not easy, and I don't mean just personally difficult. I mean there are depressing days. But there are challenges, external challenges. And I wonder if you might share just for a minute in your arenas, sort of what are the pushbacks, where are the places where you really have to use your equanimity and your spirituality to kind of stay on and keep going? 'Cause I know there must be, I mean. - You can't assume that because you have a good idea and it's right Constitutionally and it's right in every way that all the judges of the court are gonna agree with you. (Sheila laughs) You know, I mean, it's an education process. And when those judges retire, it's a reeducation process of new judges. And the cost of liberty, as Ben Franklin, I think is often attributed to have said, the cost of liberty is eternal vigilance. It never stops. And there are lots of frustrating moments. I remember a judge who once told me, who once said to a colleague of mine that his client, having been convicted, could not associate with any known gay people. And because it was part of the standard form of probations. It was a checkoff box in California. If you got convicted of, for example, lewd conduct or those kinds of crimes, one of the checkoff boxes was you may not associate with any known gay people. And the attorney had the courage to say to the court, in a crowded court with lots of people watching, that would effectively preclude my client from visiting his own attorney. Years later, I saw that judge at a gay fundraiser. Not because he was gay, but because he was supportive. What he had said at that time was, that's your trouble, that's your problem, counsel. And it wasn't until several years later when we had an appeal at the Supreme Court that the Supreme Court said, no, that's not a proper condition of probation. - Well, I think that's why we talk so much about coming out. And it's difficult in any community how important it is to say, you probably didn't know this, but I'm your third grade teacher and I'm gay, you know? And you think, oh my God, I already love my third grade teacher. Now I have to revisit my notion about that. But that kind of education is, but it was a barrier. I mean, you know, it was a barrier at the time and it's still in many ways a barrier. - And it's still a barrier because education is an endless thing. And religious extremism, we've made such progress that, you know, for every action there's a reaction. The reaction that we're experiencing is religious extremism. I went to the cleaners this morning and the owner of the cleaners and I were chatting. He's a Hindu. And he's a wonderful man. And we were talking about religion because the problems of the world seem to be a product of religious fervor of some sort. And I said, do you think that religion is good for the world or not good for the world? Has it done more harm or more good? And without skipping a beat, he said, oh, much more good. He said, the harm is from a few people with big soapboxes and unfortunately big technology these days, which is what makes it frightening. But religion really has the basis for helping us be better people and be better to each other. That was his answer. - Well sort of like a moral and ethical code versus hierarchy. You know, if it's, or as Ursula K. Leguin when she wrote the "Left Hand Of Darkness". She said same and different are nurturing words, are learning words, are loving words, you know, the killing words are better and worse. And I'm sure I didn't say it as eloquently as she did, but that's good that notion of like, your neighborhood or your kids, you know, who are very different from each other and probably didn't know they were gonna get along. You may not have known they were gonna get along. Maybe they didn't get along. But those barriers they sort of overcame. Are there more barriers in your sort of, your own getting to where you wanna be these days? - Oh, I think there's always the barriers. I think there's like the notion of scarcity, I think, is always something that we're struggling with. And you know, like the, how that becomes internalized. Like, I think it's generosity is always something that we're hard pressed to, you know, incorporate into our daily lives. And I think the arts live in the realm of generosity. They live in the place where people share their deepest and most spiritual ideas and they take risks. They inch out on the ice, as it were, you know, waiting for it to crack open and see whether they can actually survive it. And I think actually that's perhaps the most important thing about what we can do with art that we can't do in other places. We can dream things and then we can make them real. But if we can't dream them at all, we have no opportunity to actually think beyond these ideas that are sort of narrow notions that come, I mean, law is one thing. Law has its prescribed ideas. Academia has its prescribed sets of values in which we're transferring content and knowledge. But there's another realm which is really the spiritual realm and it's separate from religion. And I really actually, I feel really grateful for having been raised by a woman who was a (speaking Spanish) on some level, who was an indigenous woman who knew many things that she taught me. I had no idea that the amuleta around her neck was not a Catholic manifestation, but that in fact was some other object that she used to keep her power. And I had no idea that for example, hanging St. Anthony upside down in the closet to find something that was lost was not Catholic. (Sheila laughs) And he would hang with a rope, you know, he'd be hung with a rope until her brother would be returned from the revolution, right? I mean, so there were aspects of what is really ancient practice and spiritual practice that are incorporated in the arts. And we live in that realm. But in every case, it's really about tolerance isn't it? It's really about understanding that we come in all these different manifestations, that we're really different people. And that each of these cultures, particularly in Los Angeles, you described your neighborhood. And my experience of putting the murals in Los Angeles, hundreds and hundreds of works, which actually need repair right now, they need to be saved. But each of those pieces became like moments in time of the visualization, who lived there, what they valued, what they cared about. And that's why they're important, why it's really important for us to save these kinds of manifestations. And also to understand that there's power beyond simply the courts, there's power beyond simply enforcement of police. That we need to touch that power, the creation of an image that lives in our eyes every day. I mean, I've had so many young people over the years come back and say to me, you know, the murals that you put in the city? I passed this mural every day and here's what it meant to me. And to hear them interpret it so many years later and how it affected their lives, I don't think one can ever underestimate the power of bringing something out of your own spirit and then manifesting it in a physical way in the world and sharing it. - And history is also a way to connect to something. It's kind of like reading, you know, where you read and suddenly you've connected to somebody else's world without leaving your own house or whatever. But you really connect. That's also an aspect, of course, of art. - And their metaphor, their metaphor, which is the larger idea. Not just simply the physical world, but the metaphor that tells you, in my grandmother's metaphoric world, you know, that we are connected both to the present and to the ancient and to the future. So in other words, we have to have these places where we live in the spiritual, it isn't simply religious right. I mean, what I feel really worried about is that in some ways we're willing to allow the spirit to be captured and controlled by a religious right that has a very narrow notion of how we will live in the spiritual world. And I think clearly the work that we are doing is spiritual. - Well in the, we only have a few minutes remaining, 'cause the hour always goes by so fast when you're, you know, I'm enjoying it, I hope you're enjoying it too. So if you were to, I don't know whether I would say give some advice, but in terms of people watching and they think, gee, I don't know if I'm spiritual or whatever. And you know, I'm a retail clerk and that's the only job I can get. How will I get through to this? I mean-- - Well, you know, as you were speaking, generosity of spirit is part of the whole picture. And I think not all lawyers do that. I'd like to think public interest lawyers do it. But I think that we have a tendency to separate the mundane, the everyday, and the spiritual. And I'd like to see more people working toward having the spiritual be everything in their lives. And not having a conversation that doesn't take into account the spiritual. - [Sheila] Judy? I actually really think that, you know, that the spiritual is part of the daily life. And that, you know, for example, our murals on the streets are a manifestation of a spiritual understanding or life and interpretation. And that's why they're important to maintain. In other words, are we diminished as a people if a mural disappears? Yes. If a piece of art doesn't live in the public space, that's not a good thing for us, it's not good for us. I mean, it's part of our health. I think that we have to be in, we have to really accept the human being as a whole amazing creature, a spiritual creature, a creature that lives in the world, that we need to feed ourselves, we need to actually have a decent environment and good air to breathe, but we also need beautiful music and we need to see beautiful things. We need to feed our eyes. And we need to make ways to manifest the world in our dreams for the people that are going to live in it. And we need to basically create those spaces for that kind of idea. And recognize it's just as important as a police force. - You know, I love having you on the show. I'm so grateful that you were here. It's a wonderful way to kind of wrap up our year and get into the next one. And I was thinking also about the feeling of being awake, of being awake to your own connection to people, of being awake to your own manifestation in the world and how, you know, the impact. And what you call empathy, feeling for others. I hope that you've gotten as much out of the show as I have. I love doing this show just for this very reason. And I want you to think of yourself as this connected, complete, unique individual and get used to it. (cheerful music)