PHILADELPHIA -- The Republican convention is a performance on three stages: the official events at the First Union Center; the streets of Center City, where 350 noisy protesters were arrested Tuesday; and the University of Pennsylvania campus, where a Shadow Convention is providing a counterpoint to the first and the intellectual capital for the second.
The scruffy, disjointed bands of activists opposing everything from the death penalty to welfare reform to genetically modified foods skirmished with police in front of the posh hotels where the Republican delegates are staying. The Shadow Convention, featuring academics, community workers, and faith-based organizations, could translate the protesters' scrambled message if anyone would listen.
''When we have unprecedented growth in this country but one in five kids is poor, something is wrong,'' said Jim Wallis, director of Call to Renewal, a national federation of churches working on issues of race and poverty.
''We live in an America where the two biggest growth industries are residential gated communities and prison construction,'' said Chuck Collins, co-founder of the group United for a Fair Economy.
This is what the drum-beating, puppet-parading marchers are against: 44 million people in America without health insurance. Wealth concentrated so densely that the top 1 percent of the country owns more assets than the bottom 95 percent. A minimum wage that keeps a full-time worker below the poverty line. A two-tiered education system that Jonathon Kozol said will perpetuate the divisions deep into the next generation.
If these issues were to come up at all, the official convention response would probably point to a generous America that provides for the poor through churches, civic centers, and soup kitchens. But Wallis is one churchman who thinks the problem is too entrenched to submit to voluntary solutions. ''This is not about some people helping other people,'' he said. ''This is about all of us healing as a nation.''
Charity, in other words, is no substitute for justice.
