Community Christian Church
Roger Ray, pastor
Martin Luther King, Jr. - "A time comes when silence is betrayal. Even when pressed by the demands of inner truth, men do not easily assume the task of opposing their government's policy, especially in time of war. Nor does the human spirit move without great difficulty against all the apathy of conformist thought, within one's own bosom and in the surrounding world."
It was 11 years ago last month when then Vice President Dick Cheney addressed the 2003 graduating class of West Point. He told the young officers:
"If there is anyone in the world today who doubts the seriousness of the Bush Doctrine, I would urge that person to consider the fate of the Taliban in Afghanistan, and of Saddam Hussein's regime in Iraq,"OK, then, I will: Now, after 12 years of war, tens of thousands of deaths and trillions of dollars spent, the Taliban is making a resurgence in Afghanistan and the old government of Saddam Hussein, in the form of ISIS, is sweeping back into Iraq. Based on the facts of history, the Bush Doctrine was a nightmare.
In light of the religious civil war in Iraq, a nearly completely inept news media has rushed to give interviews to the very people who were abolutely wrong about everything they said, predicted and wanted to do in Iraq and Afghanistan.
I cannot imagine how the likes of Cheney, John McCain, Paul Wolfowitz, or even Mitt Romney can imagine that anyone cares what they have to say on this topic and yet the media rushed to record their completely irrational views.
Still, even someone who has sold out to right wing extremism as much as Fox News' Megen Kelly, had to pull the plug on Cheney's narcissistic ramblings to remind him that he was entirely wrong about Iraq during his time in office and no amount of revisionist history can change that.
But on both the left and the right, we have been treated to a couple of weeks of very public recriminations of Iraq's Prime Minster, Nouri al-Maliki, for not having created a coalition government that gave Sunnis, Shi'a, and Kurds a share in power.
Let me say that a little slower so it can sink in..... Republican and Democratic elected politicians in the United States have been critical of al-Maliki for not building a cooperative coalition government in Iraq where all sides can peacefully get along. Can you feel that irony?
It may be that once western powers withdraw their forces and allow the tribal and religious contests of the Middle East to run their course, that there will be a redrawing of the lines that separate many of those nations. We may see fairly monolithic Sunni and Shi'a nations emerge next to a new Kurdistan and maybe even a new Persia.
What I know with certainty, what I said about this more than a decade ago, is just this: American military intervention can only make matters worse.
And even when the civil wars are over, the Middle East is facing a huge crisis in the very near future as alternative fuel sources will destroy the market for their dwindling reserves of crude oil.
Imagine a Saudi Arabia, Iraq, Iran and Kuwait without a huge and constant influx of oil dollars.
Imagine over populated Egypt without the economic support of oil rich neighbors. If I were the Czar of the Middle East, I would immediately imitate China's "one child" program to quickly reduce the total population and then I would invest heavily in manufacturing and agriculture so that a smaller population could support themselves in the late 21st century when oil will no longer drive the global economy.
Nothing else, in my opinion, can give them a future past the next half-century. No military action, no government manipulation can solve the real problems that lie ahead of them. Maybe the Sunnis will prevail, maybe it will be the Shi'a or the Kurds, but without a radically different economy, they are all going to starve. This is the real issue and yet I have never heard this glaring fact discussed in any corporate media.
I am not an isolationist but I have come to regard these Middle Eastern challenges something like my desire to choose the man my daughter will marry. I am confident that I know more about what would give her happiness, stability, and security than she does, but I have had to realize that all I can to give my daughter to guide her into a healthy marriage is to set a good example for her.... In which case, I really need to get busy working on my own issues and allow her to find her own way, for good or for ill. And that, I believe, should describe our foreign policy towards the Middle East.
This week as we celebrate Independence Day in the United States, replete with all of the fireworks that imitate the artillery and bomb blasts of the war that gave us our independence from that foreign nation that kept sending troops here to teach us how to manage ourselves, we have a lot of serious challenges facing us.
While the Middle East is seeing the future of the oil market collapsing, we are riding a tidal wave of new resources of natural gas, a renewed oil market and, I believe, we are standing on the brink of economically feasible wind and solar power. The economic and political face of the world is going to change and it is likely to change very dramatically.
No great social change is good for everyone. Massive transfers of power or wealth necessarily means that there will be winners and losers.
The only thing about which we can be certain is that the status quo, in America, the Middle East, Africa, and Asia will not remain the same. Good outcomes are not guaranteed on any of these continents. People may become more free or governments may become more authoritarian. Wealth may be distributed more equitably but all of the trends right now seem to be pointing towards a growing gap between the poor and the super rich.
4th of July Celebrations are usually marked by fireworks, baseball games, loud music, picnics and political speeches about how great our nation is. Most of the applause seems to go to military veterans and the chest-thumping politicians who want to send another generation of young women and men to war.
I want to take a few minutes in the midst of this holiday week, to talk about American greatness, not about what made America great when we emerged from among the nations as a global military and economic power but rather I want to talk about what can make America great in the future.
I want to talk about American exceptionalism, not from a partisan Democrat or Republican perspective but from the perspective of a parish pastor.
Our progressive faith is rooted in the teachings of Jesus of Nazareth about radical compassion. We are invested in a social justice ethic that seeks the greatest good for the largest number of people. Because of that approach to ethics, more often than not, we will sound more like Democrats than we will Republicans though, when it comes down to actually living out our values, I don't think that we owe any loyalty to either party.
Let me just list some things that I think Republicans, Democrats and Independents should work on together to make America the greatest nation in the world.... Please hear this as religious values and not political views:
1) We should stop all military interventions in foreign countries except when a broad international coalition is taking action to stop genocide. We can use our superior military hardware, intelligence and ability to stop horrible social crimes but we should stop using these gifts to commit horrible social crimes.
2) We should dramatically downsize our military presence in foreign countries, closing military bases that have not been needed since the end of WWII and the Cold War. We should, I believe, reduce our military budget so that we have a military that can reasonably defend our borders but not try to enforce empire authority around the world.
3) Our federal budget should be dramatically redesigned, away from military spending and towards priorities in scientific and medical research, education, alternative energy, mass transit and infrastructure. Let me offer some specifics:
a. Education is key to success in the 21st century. As such, we should stop debating the interest rates to be charged on student loans and actually subsidize education so that students who are earning degrees relevant to our nation's future should not have to take out loans. That is, there is currently little or no connection between high education and the marketplace.
We have to recognize that there are fields of study that are crucial to our nation and others that are distinctly less so. I'm not saying that we should underwrite an unlimited number of communication, marketing, and humanities degrees.
We need more students educated in engineering, math, science, physics, chemistry, and biology.
Yes, the world needs musicians, poets and maybe a couple of preachers and politicians but our education system has gotten totally out of sync with reality. Why graduate a hundred young people with degrees in marketing to sell the invention of only one person who graduated in engineering?
b. Much of what has made America great in the past was our superiority in the sciences. For a century, most of the significant and life changing inventions in the world have come from the United States. We are innovative, creative, imaginative people though we have lately put way too many of our smartest people into the military industrial complex and into Wall Street banking. We need to get those people back into the business of inventing and designing for the civil market.
We invented automobiles, airplanes, radio, television, space ships, computers, cell phones, the internet, and hot pockets.... No one is right all of the time.
We have led the world in medical research, agricultural sciences, transportation and communication but we have allowed the rest of the world to do a much better job distributing, manufacturing and improving our inventions than we have.
High tech inventions come out of our Silicon Valley but all of the jobs they create end up in Asia and too much of the profits end up in secretive, tax sheltered, off shore accounts. We need to get our greatest minds back in the fields of research and development and we need to structure our economy so that our American genius translates into good paying jobs in manufacturing and sales.
4) To become the greatest nation in the world, we have to come to grips with the fact that not only are we not in Kansas anymore, there is no longer and likely never way a Mayberry. While I am deeply concerned about the social and health impacts of drug abuse, our "War on Drugs" has proven to be an abysmal failure. During this war on drugs, we have move our incarceration up over these past 40 years by 800%.... now reaching more than 2 million citizens in jails and prisons... which is robbing our nation of the resources needed to fund schools while ruining millions of families.
We should begin immediately to release every single person who is currently in jail for marijuana possession. We should wipe out any related criminal history from their records that has kept them from getting decent jobs, educations or being able to start a business or buy a home.
Marijuana should be legal, taxed, and regulated. Proceeds should be used to fund addiction treatment programs and substance abuse counseling.
Unlike a lot of popular jargon on the topic, I do believe that there are people who do have a serious problem with marijuana but not nearly as many as have a problem with alcohol and we have managed to make it legal, regulated and taxed.
5) America has two great sources of shame. The first is our treatment of the Native American Indians and the second was our violent and abusive practice of slavery. Our Band-Aid approaches to these past grievous sins only makes matters worse, destroying the dignity and family integrity of both Indians and African Americans. Reparations are in order but, in my opinion, not in the form of a financial hand out to the people with Indian and African ancestry but in an all-out education and jobs creation program.
Ours is one of the only nations in the world where school funding is based on the property values of the neighborhood. We have allowed the poor districts to have the most impoverished schools while wealthy districts, where the children already have every advantage in the world, have the best funded schools.
That needs to be reversed. The most money should go to the schools that need resources the most and it doesn't take long to see why life on Indian reservations or in inner-city broken down schools are not leading to the radical compassion we say is at the heart of our faith and it sure doesn't make America the greatest nation on earth.
We cannot realistically give North America back to the dozens of Indian Nations forced off this land nor could we give former Africans back their pre-slavery lives but we can make them real owners of property and careers in modern America and that can be done through serious education and job creation.
6) Gasoline powered private automobiles brought modern life into existence in the middle of the 20th century but that approach to life is not sustainable. It is killing the environment, using up natural resources while killing 40,000 people in traffic accidents every year. We need to rebuild our nation's transportation system around fuel-efficient mass transit powered increasingly by alternative energy sources. Unfortunately, all of the lobbyists work for the automobile, oil and highway construction companies. We have allowed them to keep our nation deeply invested in the last century while Western Europe and China is pulling far ahead of us into the 21st century. We can either resolve to catch up or we will have to accept a growing third world status in service to the nations that had the good sense to invest in the future rather than investing in the past.
7) Finally, it comes down to job creation that is good for our nation and good for our personal health and the health of our environment. But it is not just jobs. As Jim Hightower has pointed out, slaves had jobs. The issue is not just jobs, it is jobs with good wages.
We have cheap food and cheap clothing and cheap manufactured goods because we have lowered our standards to the point where we don't even notice if our clothes are manufactured by children living in slavery or if our food is harvested by virtual slaves. And we have been willing to live in a world filled with disposable goods and imitation foods.
We need to stop shipping tomatoes two thousand miles from a vine in Central America to a store in the Ozarks. We need to dramatically shift our food supply away from foreign sources.
We need to stop genetically modifying our foods, stop injecting the animals in our food chain with anti-biotic, and we need to stop drenching our vegetables in poisons. We will pay more for our food.
There will be spots on our apples and strawberries will be closer to the size of our thumbs than to our fists but we will restore agriculture as a decent, honest, well-paying profession in America.
Our shoes will cost three or four times as much if you pay someone a living wage to make them and we'll just have to get by with a dozen pairs of shoes instead of five dozen. If a dozen children in Malaysia, South Korea and China have to live as slaves so that we have to have huge walk in closets filled with clothes and shoes then unless you have a cold hard place where your heart was supposed to be, then we need to change this situation.
America has the genius to be great again. But we have to want it. It will not happen by our taking the path of least resistance. Greatness is in our genes, it is in our spirits but it is not in our shuttered factories, coal mines and army bases. It is, however, in our hearts if only we can get it out of our imagination and into our government, economy and into our churches.
