Van Jones earned his law degree from Yale. As an African American he would have been heavily recruited by many major law firms with offers of large salaries, but instead chose to go work with the minority communities in California. He was asked to speak at the first conference for the Network of Spiritual Progressives. I have a tape of it, and his speech was one of the highlights of the event. Van Jones wrote a nice commentary praising the NSP that appeared in the Huffington Post in 2005. More recently he has become very active in the environmental movement, and combined it with his earlier social work by promoting green job programs for poor minority communities. In 2008 the Unitarian Universalists asked him to be the key note speaker at their annual General Assembly conference. I had the privilege of listening to him give that speech in person, and remember it as one of the most thought provoking and inspiring speeches that I have ever heard. I wrote a brief summary of his talk here. I was thrilled almost beyond words when Obama asked him to serve in the White House Council on Environmental Quality. He was one of the few people I looked towards as a hero. I was heart broken at what happened in the past few days though. As you may have heard, Van Jones was the subject of a series of vicious attacks by the right wing press who claimed that he was a communist. Since Van Jones is one of the public fugures most strongly identified as a spokesman for the “eco-capitalism” movement, this entire smear campaign against him was laughable to me. However, the growing anger and fear in certain segments of our society have claimed another victim, and Van Jones recently resigned his government position. I don’t know to what extent he was pressured, or if it was entirely his decision, but it was a sad day for the progressive community, and a sad day for America. I can only hope that something bigger will come of this. Perhaps the minority community that he has been serving will turn further against the anger and hatred promoted by certain elements of the media. Perhaps this will be a rallying point for the environmental movement. Perhaps the younger generation, to whom the charges of being a communist or socialist are hollow and irrelevant, will decide to increasingly despise such political mud slinging and the people who promote it. Perhaps it will motivate more people in the media to speak out against the tactics of exploiting anger, fear, and lies in such personal smear campaigns. Part of me wants to react with anger at his episode, but the rest of me knows that decisions motivated by anger tend to be very bad decisions. While this episode brings some satisfaction to a small segment of the population, I can only hope that somehow this will serve as a rallying cry for the larger portion of the population and move society in a positive direction in the end. This weekend I find myself searching for ways to help make that happen.