The Challenge of Community

The Challenge of Community     Sept. 17, 2017

Dr. Roger Ray, pastor

“If the person you are with is nice to you but mean to the waiter the person you are with is a mean person.”  Dave Berry

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Documentary filmmaker, Michael Moore, was one of the only people to publicly predict that Donald Trump was going to win the 2016 election. He felt like he knew the blue collar, angry white voter well enough to predict a win when everyone else was saying that there was just not way that Trump could win. So, the old corpulent liberal was right while all of the Ivy League pundits were wrong… chalk one up for Michael Moore, which is good for a few talk show conversations and maybe even a Broadway play. . . and as eager as you, Erica Spyres, have been to be cast on Broadway, thank your lucky stars that you are in Carousel and not The Terms of My Surrender.

But what makes Michael Moore worthy of mention here today is the fact that he has predicted that Trump will win re-election in 2020. That is a horribly sobering thought but Moore doesn’t think he will win because he deserves it or has earned it but he is reading the tea leaves of disharmony among progressive voters. For the past ten months people have been asking, “How did Trump win?” but now we have to start asking what Will McAvoy, the main character in the fictional series, Newsroom, in his famous rant on the first episode of the sadly discontinued series but I can feel his rage when he asked this crucial question, “If liberals are so f*****g smart then why do they lose so g**d****d always?” 

I recently published an article on the DailyKos about liberal cannibalism after experiencing the melt down of the committee that planned the protest when Donald Trump came to town a couple of weeks ago. As if to prove me right, a number of liberals attacked me personally with busy forks and knives in hand. A local candidate for office wrote to me and said, “I would confront the cannibalism but I don’t want the cannibals to turn on me.” Which is, I would argue, the whole darned problem. 

Liberals have a hard time getting along with one another. We tend to be idealists and that idealism often expresses itself in perfectionism and, ironically, in rather fundamentalist-like insistence on doctrinal purity. As much as we despise the fact that Donald Trump almost never admits that he was wrong. He never apologizes for anything, no matter how obviously wrong he was. But I want to ask you to think about your own history… how long has it been since you apologized for anything? Do you ever admit that you are wrong? Do you try to make amends and keep relationships together or do you “unfriend” in real life as easily as you do on Face Book?

I came to Springfield in 1991 to take the helm of a shipwrecked church. Church politics can be pretty mean and in this case a small group of power hungry critics had quite secretly harassed the senior minister, the associate minister, the secretary, custodian, and office manager into quitting virtually all at once. The majority of the members had absolutely no idea what had gone on behind the scenes to cause such a sudden collapse but they were determined not to let it happen again.

I became the captain of a ship that was sinking fast and I had to plug a lot of holes to keep a fairly large institution from meeting a rapid demise. Most of the people responsible for the staff’s departure, once outted, were sufficiently embarrassed to move on to cause trouble in other churches but one couple was determined to deny involvement in the gossip-laden coups and to rehabilitated their reputations.

In fact, they were so determined that they greeted my arrival in town with seeming warmth and enthusiasm, showering my little family with gifts, dinners, and kindness. The chairman of the board was none-too-happy when he came to my office to warn me about being chummy with someone who had been such a problem just a few months earlier.

I was trying to suspend judgment, to be reconciling, and I imagined myself, at the ripe old age of 33, to be healing the rifts in the church. My board chairman, an experienced academic who had been through a lot of power-grabs at Drury University said something to me that day that I have never forgotten. Joe said, “A snake doesn’t have to bite you to prove that he is a snake.”

It was a hard saying and let me be very quick to say that if religion offers anything to its adherents it is the stubborn insistence that a person can change. We do not have to be defined by our past failings. There is not a person here who not, at some time, fallen prey to some kind of prejudice, who has not dismissed or disposed of someone out of unfair judgment. Most of us can even describe several changes we have made in our character through conscious choice to be better people than we have been in the past.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer expressed the belief in his rather more confessional faith that forgiveness without confession is cheap grace. That is, a person can change and forgiveness should be virtually guaranteed. People deserve to be given a chance to grow, to learn, to change but Bonhoeffer insisted that the only way that makes sense is if the person is first willing to be honest about the offense. If they simply deny their guilt and insist that everyone join them in that denial, they are not really changing at all.

There are times when any one of us really needs to be forgiven for something but what we usually really want is to be told that we are innocent, that we don’t need to be forgiven. I’m sure that there is someone in advertising or marketing who has persuaded Donald Trump to always throw his shoulders back, stick out his chest, and insist that whatever he said or did is exactly what he should have said or done, no matter how wrong or how heinous. We all know how silly and disgusting that behavior looks on him so do you really believe it looks any better on you?

At least in the case of this fellow at my former parish was concerned, Bonhoeffer was entirely correct. Once the embers from the fire he had initially started at the church had grown cold and the congregation was growing and becoming healthy again, he went to work doing everything he could to dishonestly and unethically undermine everything I ever tried to accomplish and had to finally be confronted in a painful way in a board meeting that I would have done anything to have avoided, for his sake if not for my own.

As I have looked at this across the decades, I realize that the failing was not entirely his. The rest of us, me included, also failed him because we never care enough, risked enough, to help him to grow out of being such a horrible person.

Formally, what we are talking about here is a kind of situational ethics. I love the way that the comedian Dave Berry sums it up, “If the person you are with is nice to you but mean to the waiter, the person you are with is a mean person.”

What I have observed about human nature during my nearly 40 years of parish ministry is that people often are not consciously aware of how they are poisoning interpersonal relationships precisely because they have never been confronted by what they have done that is mean, dishonest or toxic. Their immediate circle of family and friends, because they snake has never bitten them, will ignore those instances of being mean to the waiter, gossiping about a neighbor, or playing power games in churches, offices, or volunteer groups.

The committee that flew to Louisville, KY to recruit me to come and rebuild this church were honest with me about what had happened and they all pledged to me that they would never let it happen again. They promised that I would not have to defend myself against such power plays because they were going to remain vigilant and that they would make sure that such shenanigans would be extinguished in its infancy should it ever happen again. And they were true to their word for at least six weeks but certainly not for two months.

We are reflexively self-protective. Most of the time when we see someone being mean to the waiter we will make a mental note of it and try hard to make sure that we are never in a position to be the recipient of such treatment. We excuse ourselves by saying to ourselves, “Well, he has never done that to me.”

But what is really in the best interests of the person who is nice to you and mean to the waiter? What would help them to become a better person? Does denial actually help them or does it literally set the stage for the next offense?

When we started our little liberal outpost of a church in this red state, we said in our mission statement that it was our goal to role model what it meant to be a healthy spiritual community. Prior to our startup in 2008, every church I had ever served simply tried to cover up the emotional land mines and pretend they were not there. The seasoned members knew where the land mines were and they did an elaborate dance to avoid stepping on them rather than trying to encourage actual community.

Pastorally we often call a church a healing community. It is a place where people can come to be loved when the world or family has wounded us. We show acceptance, approval, love, and we tolerate one another’s eccentricities so that it can be a safe place to heal. But healing is about more than just binding up wounds.

When the famous psychiatrist, M. Scott Peck, turned his career in the direction of teaching community-building skills, he famously said that community is tolerant of everything but intolerance. That is, an intentional community can foster the health of anyone who wants to get healthy but the community itself cannot exist if it tolerates those who seek to destroy the community through their own brand of hostile intolerance.

Next month I’m going to spend a weekend in Clemson, SC. The invitation initially came from a struggling UCC church that meets on Sunday evenings at the local Unitarian Church. It was set up so that I would speak in the morning at the Unitarian Church, then speak at the UCC congregation in the afternoon, and then spend Monday in meeting with both groups trying to figure out how the two congregations could successfully be merged.

There theological differences were slight and both congregations defined themselves by open-mindedness. In the six months that have transpired between the initial invitation and my actual trip there, the UCC church has moved out of the Unitarian congregation’s building and though I am still speaking at the Unitarian church in the morning, my afternoon gig is a more philosophical gathering of a kind of progressive diaspora.

Now, you don’t need for me to tell you that South Carolina is a red state. If such a thing is possible, it may even be more red than Missouri. If the tiny group of progressives in Clemson can’t figure out how to tolerate one another’s company in a loving way, both congregations might fail. I feel a little sheepish about this because our tiny seated congregation here in Springfield only survives by the grace of donations from our internet listeners and there is a Unitarian church here in town that can’t afford to hire a minister and yet we have never had a serious talk about merger when absolutely nothing would be more obviously logical. And, trust, me, I’ve opened the topic with different people in their congregation several times but it seems that they would rather watch themselves slowly die off than open their minds a bit to a greater level of cooperation.

And that, my friends, is why Michael Moore has predicted that Trump is likely to win again in 2020. Not because he knows how to win but because progressives don’t seem to know very well how not to lose. I think that we can do better and for the sake of the progressive faith movement and for the safety of everyone everywhere in the world, I pray that we will.

“Race, Drugs, and Prisons” Sept. 10, 2017    Dr. Roger Ray, pastor

 Click here to see the video 

John Ehrlichman as quoted in Harper’s, April 2016 “The Nixon campaign in 1968, and the Nixon White House after that, had two enemies: the antiwar left and black people. You understand what I’m saying? We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities. We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did.”

Politics and religion can be a lot like retail marketing. In the retail world, advertising works to convince you that you have a problem that their product can solve. Consider the products on your bathroom counter. You have soap that you usually use to wash your body but when a guy wants to shave, he is supposed to use another kind of soap for shaving when, in fact, any soap will do the same thing. After you bathe, using soap, scented shampoo, and scented conditioner, you apply deodorant to your underarms as if you need to somehow mask the smell of soaps.

And the marketplace has persuaded us through years of advertising, after we have shampooed with one sweet smelling soap, shaved with another, washed our bodies with a different aroma of perfumed soap, then put another sweet smelling product on our underarms, then we are supposed to apply cologne or after shave because that smell will drive women wild. We brush our teeth with sweet smelling tooth paste and we’re supposed to then rinse our clean mouths with another minty product. Women potentially have several more steps to this ritual which may include shaving a lot more area than their face, but even men walk out of their homes smelling like a candy store and they do so with no real reflection and may, in fact, make an emergency run to the store to replace any of one of these unnecessary products that they are running low on.

Now, I know all of this. I have known it for years. I managed to stop buying shaving soap, choosing to just shave with soap. However, knowing that the only reason to use deodorant or cologne is if you have, for some unforgivable reason, failed to use soap, I still religiously use these unnecessary products every day of my life. I do so unthinkingly, unconsciously, not thinking of the absurdity of it all until some store clerk standing four feet away from me says, “boy, you sure do smell good.” Which clearly needs to be interpreted to mean, “Wow, you smell like a French bordello from several feet away,” but she is too nice to say that.

If you pay attention to advertising, you can spot when they are trying to add another product line to your daily habits. Fabreeze can make your trashcan smell like a rose garden…. Sure but it is garbage, and if it smells bad, shouldn’t you take it out to the garbage bin rather than spraying chemicals in your nostrils that deaden your ability to smell? Toilet paper commercials constantly seek to make you uncomfortable about your personal hygiene and there have been several attempts at adding either wet wipes for adults or a very elaborate toilet seat/car wash for your personal undercarriage so that you can feel better about yourself.

All of this in the span of a single lifetime when we used to get by on leaves and corncobs! My dad always claimed that he didn’t know what the Sears Roebuck catalogue was really for until he was 20 years old. Go back a couple of hundred years and the only one of these products you would have found in most homes is where we started this marketing saga. Just soap.

Marketing is a powerful thing. It literally changes our perceptions of reality.

We will believe things that have been consistently and successfully marketed to us regardless of all of the evidence to the contrary. Religion has gotten by on this scheme for millennia. We tell people about heaven and hell from the cradle to the grave, though there is not an ounce of evidence for either one, and while we spin these yarns of fear and greed, we assure the people that we, the church, the priesthood, the clergy, are the only ones who can sell you eternal fire insurance or a golden ticket for the train ride to heavenly bliss…. It is like a spiritual deodorant stick… keeps you from smelling bad while making you smell good when, in fact, soap should have already done the trick.

Governments use marketing. Specifically, politicians use marketing to get elected and then to remain in power. After spending time in prison for his involvement in Watergate, John Ehrlichman now supports himself by writing quasi-pornographic novels. He was captured in a moment of unguarded honesty last year by a reporter who asked him about the Nixon administration’s anti-drug policy. He said, very matter of factly:

Nixon had two main political enemies: the black leaders of the civil rights movement and the increasingly middle class white protest against the war in Vietnam. He knowingly lied to the American public to associate war protestors with marijuana and civil rights leaders with heroin, he then criminalized both drugs in wildly exaggerated ways and used that to raid homes, seize property, break up meetings, and send leaders to prison.

Ehrlichman concludes the interview saying, “Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did.”

This is not Stalin’s Russia, this is not Mao’s China, this is our America…sweet land of liberty, the home of the free and the brave, the greatest Democracy since ancient Greece. I hope that you know that I take no pleasure in either revealing or rehearsing these facts. Here is the naked, unavoidable, and painful truth: the government of the United States, in successive administrations, has lied to the population to gain their acquiescence to policies that result in the oppression and imprisoning of minorities and dissidents. They do this in many ways but one of the most insidious and dishonest is the use of drug charges.

Now, let’s be very honest about this. Heroin is a scourge. It is a highly addictive yet relatively cheap and available drug that is killing tens of thousands of people. If making it illegal and criminally charging those who manufacture, distribute, and use it would wipe it off the face of the earth, I would feel differently. But what we know for a fact is that 50 years of a war on drugs has failed entirely and our policies have ruined the lives of millions, cost us billions in tax dollars, and has, almost single handedly, broken up minority families and kept the sons and daughters of 19^th century slaves locked in chaos and poverty.

I know that not all of you agree with me and I know that just saying it out loud in church would have guaranteed a rush to the exits in most of the churches I have served before but I adamantly favor the nationwide legalization of pot and I do so knowing that it can be addictive, it can turn productive people into basement dwelling couch potatoes, and it increases traffic accidents. I favor the legalization of pot because, all things considered, it appears to be less harmful and addictive than America’s drug of choice, alcohol, and because, in the states where marijuana use has been made legal, it appears to reduce the rate of addiction and the frequency of death due to drug overdoses from harder drugs like heroin, cocaine, crack, and fentanyl.

I could go on to talk about taxing and regulating the product and its medical benefits but this is not my pro-pot sermon. This is my sermon about how the government of these United States, for nearly 50 years, has used totally trumped up drug laws to incarcerate black people, to keep lots of unruly government critics on parole and felon lists, and to trick the rest of us into accepting this monstrously unethical situation.

The idea has been marketed to you that addiction is a crime… perhaps, more deeply, it has been marketed to us as being a sin. Drug use is something bad people do. No one makes them do it. They choose to do it. Most of us believe, in fact, that they could stop if they just wanted to, or if they can’t now, they surely could have before they ate away their brains with drugs.

What we know, and we know this based on math, hard data, research, is that the USA is the most strict about the criminalization of drug use; we have both the largest percentage of our population in prison and the highest drug use in the world.    For example, Americans are four times more likely to use cocaine than the next closest country, which is New Zealand (16% vs. 4%).

There are four European countries that have essentially decriminalized drug use and while that doesn’t “fix” the problem, each of those countries has seen a reduction in drug addiction and a huge drop in the spread of HIV and an even more impressive drop in the numbers of drug related deaths. In the Netherlands, which has more liberal drug policies than the U.S., only about 2% of their population has ever tried cocaine whereas in the USA, eight times as many people have. So, it isn’t about money, it isn’t about race, but it is apparently related, at least in large part, to incredibly stupid, indefensible, and cruel federal laws, and a prison system for which a lot of people would one day go to hell if there were such a thing…. Though the numbers of senselessly incarcerated people may make me reconsider my theology.

Conservatives try to market the idea to the public that drug use is a crime that deserves the most severe of punishment. Bleeding heart liberals generally try to say that it is an issue of physiology. People get hooked on the drugs and they can’t help themselves.

I’m not going to say that there is nothing to support either of those positions. Anecdotal evidence abounds when the problem affects tens of millions of people. Everybody knows someone who was an addict that got clean in one way or another but here is the laboratory evidence:

In the 1960’s scientists conducted experiments on rats. They would put a rat in a cage with two water bottles. One bottle had water; the other bottle had water with either cocaine or heroin in it. In virtually every case, the rat would keep going back to the drug laced water bottle and die of an overdose. So, the evidence is in: drugs are addictive. Drugs are bad. Drugs will kill you.

It wasn’t until recently that some clever researcher wondered if it might not be the drugs. He wondered if it might be the cage. He repeated the experiment but this time it wasn’t one rat in a small cage, he created what he called “rat park” - A cage with lots of good things to eat, lots of other rats, plenty of sex, and colored balls to play with. In rat park there were two water bottles: one with water and one with drugged water. The rats tried both but given the choice between good food, sex, playful friends, none of the rats became addicted or overdosed. They, in fact, didn’t like the drugged water.

In fact the same researchers pointed out that we had a human version of the experiment for many years in Vietnam.

At one point, upwards of ten percent of American soldiers stationed in a miserable jungle where they didn’t want to be and where they might be killed at any moment were using heroin.

It was feared that when these soldiers came home that they would be roaming the streets as heroin addicts, which, quite evidently, did not happen. When they came home to family, jobs, school, they were no longer interested in heroin. They were not criminals. They were not physically addicted. They just changed their cages. 

I did my masters thesis on addiction treatment and I spent a lot of time with recovery groups where we talked about the progressive disease of addiction in which addicts would lose their job, lose their family, and lose their health if they didn’t change their ways. What we were less able to see that a lot of people didn’t have a drug problem, they had a drug solution. They had already lost their family, their job, or their health and the drugs or alcohol was the solution to the pain that they were in.

A lot of how we have reacted to drug use in America has depended upon race and class. We all know that Billie Holiday died from heroin addiction but did you know that at the same time that Billie Holiday was hooked on heroin that Judy Garland was too? Judy Garland’s doctor told her to take longer vacations and spend more time with family and friends. Billie Holiday was put in jail and handcuffed to a bed.

Look, James Taylor was a heroin addict… do you think of him as a criminal? Sweet Baby James? Is it a weak minded person who sang “I’ve Seen Fire and I’ve Seen Rain?” If  James Taylor were black, they would probably be dead now and that is the issue about race and drugs in America.

Now, I know that a lot of you have heard a lot of this before. Some of you have heard me talk about it more than once. But, you know what, I have known for ten years that you only need to use deodorant and cologne if you don’t bathe regularly and I still get out of the shower and use deodorant and cologne. I’m a fairly clever guy and the marketing world still makes me feel like I have to do something that I know good and well that I do not need to do.

So, you know that addiction is not a crime but you live comfortably in a county with a million people in cages for using drugs. What do I have to say to create the discomfort necessary for us to change our prejudices about this? This nation’s attorney general, Jefferson Beauregard Sessions, has directed prosecutors to reverse the more lenient approach to drug charges under the Obama administration and to seek maximum sentences for drug offenses.

This has nothing to do with reducing drug use, addiction, or death from overdoses. This has everything to do with increasing the prison population … it has to do with his racist hatred of brown and black people. He isn’t stupid.

He knows this doesn’t work to help with the drug problem. He is just prejudiced and mean enough to put poor white people, black people and brown people in prison so that there are more jobs for government employees, lawyers, judges, and more construction and service contracts for federal prisons and for profit prisons and if that doesn’t make you angry then there must be a cold hard place where your heart was supposed to be.

Forty-five years ago, when Nixon turned Johnson’s war on poverty into a war on the poor by jacking up laws to criminalize drug use this nation was sold a lie. And you have it straight from the mouth of a Nixon administration advisor, John Ehrlichman, who said, “Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did.”

If you didn’t know the truth about this before, you do now. So, now, what are you going to do?

Labor Day Message   Sept 3, 2017   Community Christian Church
click here to see the video

Roger Ray, pastor     “Meaningful Work AND Meaningful Salaries!”     

Naomi Klein, (No is Not Enough, p. 127)

The crucial lesson of Brexit and of Trump’s victory, is that leaders who are seen as representing the failed neoliberal status quo are no match for the demagogues and neo-fascists. Only a bold and genuinely redistributive progressive agenda can offer real answers to the inequality and the crises in democracy, while directing popular rage where it belongs: at those who have benefited so extravagantly from the auctioning off of public wealth; the polluting of land, air, and water; and the deregulation of the financial sphere.

It is not my goal to be partisan.  When we first started this church, just three months before the history making 2008 election, we actually had several of the leaders of the Greene Co. Democratic Party in our church.  I celebrated the election of our nation’s first black president with as much enthusiasm as anyone else at the watch party.  I was a huge fan of our Democratic senator, Claire McCaskill.

Prior to that time I had been regularly contacted by officials in the Democratic Party trying to recruit me to run for various elected offices because, for a generation, I had been writing opinion columns in the Springfield News-Leader that took our elected officials to task for illegal wars, cuts to education and poverty programs, environmental degradation, and for misogynistic and homophobic policies.

However, when we had prominent Democrats in the White House and the Senate and I was critical of them for illegal wars, undermining education and poverty programs, failing to defend the environment, and for tacitly supporting misogynistic and homophobic policies, I stopped hearing from the local and state Democratic Party. 

Many of those Democratic loyalist members of the church left and left so angry that I can sometimes clear out several tables in the coffee shops where liberals hang out just by walking in the room. That is possibly even more true today than ever before. As you know, I tried to be a helpful part of the small committee planning our city’s protest of Donald Trump’s visit to the Queen City of the Ozarks. I am always eager to network with other progressives, especially the sort who are willing to make signs and march on sidewalks.

We did a lot of things well in this protest but there were some of what I would regard to be glaring failures of logic and planning. I wrote an article in which I tried to discuss what I regarded to be important points. I even used a good deal of self-deprecating humor. But the reaction has been, to use a word we are not supposed to use anymore, insane.

I don’t get to use my philosophy degree very often but I would like to take a moment to give just a quick lesson in logic. There is a fallacy called ad hominem. It means, literally, “against the man.” We say that an argument is an ad hominem fallacy when, in response to a stated position, rather than addressing the issue, the respondent attacks the character or person of the messenger.  In common parlance, we say, “don’t shoot the messenger.”

Social media, however, seems to encourage, even to reward ad hominem, bringing out the monsters that hide even within academics and community leaders. I dare say that almost nothing of my helpful and reasonable points about how we might be better at protesting were heard but there has been a riot of what I like to call “liberal cannibalism” in which people we might otherwise think of as progressive allies have been busy chewing the flesh off of my bones. I couldn’t care less about being the victim of internet gossip but I am really worried about progressives’ ability to think, plan, network, and be successful.

Missouri’s favorite son, President Harry Truman, was often called “Give-em Hell Harry” but Truman objected, saying, “I never really gave em hell, I just told the truth and they thought it was hell.” Then, as now, Truman’s message was often lost in the absurd attacks he suffered on his character and his family.

But what I find the most interesting and simultaneously the most disappointing is how the issues that Harry Truman was so adamant about nearly 70 years ago as he ran for re-election are so very current as to make one despair about our ability to make progress.

This is a longer quote than I typically use in the pulpit but indulge me for a moment to share a piece of one of Truman’s campaign speeches and where he uses the words “Republican Party” try to translate that as “elected officials” because there is not much of merit on either side of the political fence.  He said:

Well, I have been studying the Republican Party (let’s just say “politicians”)  for over 12 years at close hand in the Capital of the United States. And by this time, I have discovered where the Republicans stand on most of the major issues.

Since they won't tell you themselves, I am going to tell you.

They approve of the American farmer-but they are willing to help him go broke.

They stand four-square for the American home--but not for housing.

They are strong for labor--but they are stronger for restricting labor's rights.

They favor a minimum wage--the smaller the minimum the better.

They indorse educational opportunity for all--but they won't spend money for teachers or for schools.

They think modern medical care and hospitals are fine--for people who can afford them.

They approve of social security benefits-so much so that they took them away from almost a million people.

They believe in international trade--so much so that they crippled our reciprocal trade program, and killed our International Wheat Agreement.

They favor the admission of displaced persons--but only within shameful racial and religious limitations.

They consider electric power a great blessing-but only when the private power companies get their rake-off.

They say TVA is wonderful--but we ought never to try it again.

They condemn "cruelly high prices"--but fight to the death every effort to bring them down.

They think the American standard of living is a fine thing--so long as it doesn't spread to all the people.

And they admire the Government of the United States so much that they would like to buy it.

If the president of the United States could state the hypocritical nature of the economic divide so clearly, and he could state it in a democracy where the masses who are the victims of this economic inequality can vote, how is it that nothing seems to have changed?

John Maynard Keynes succinctly describes the problem this way, he said: Capitalism is the astounding belief that the most wickedest of men will do the most wickedest of things for the greatest good of everyone. Capitalism didn’t invent three day weekends, a 40 hour work week, paid vacations, sick leave, or retirement programs…. That was organized labor. 

It is difficult to motivate productive work, innovation, invention, or denial of any immediate personal fulfillment in the absence of a promise of some personal reward.  Capitalism holds out the promise that if you will work hard, delay gratification, and save that you will reap a wonderful reward of economic security if not wealth, and comfort if not luxury. 

The problem is that when the American Dream becomes American Wishful Thinking, when hard work, delaying gratification, and saving doesn’t allow you to retire with dignity, have access to health care or to ever own a home, then the promise of capitalism becomes a lie. 

With the right rules in place, capitalism and its rewards inspired invention, innovation, hard work and it produced the strongest middle class in the history of the world.

But when we vilify teachers and police and auto-workers, all labor unions, for insisting on a living wage and a pension that let’s a person buy Bermuda shorts, black knee socks and sandals that they can wear around the retirement home in Florida where they can criticize the government full-time, then capitalism is no longer a gift, it is a lie and a curse.

The late Jewish Croatian economist, Branko Horvat stated: ... it is now well known that capitalist development leads to the concentration of capital, employment and power. It is somewhat less known that it leads to the almost complete destruction of economic freedom.

  

Everyone who has ever played the old board game, Monopoly, has a basic understanding of unbridled capitalism. If you keep rolling the dice and moving through life in a capitalist system, eventually one person ends up with all of the land and money and everyone else is out of the game. 

You can change the rules so that all of the players have a chance to get back into the game, rules that keep one player from quickly acquiring all of the land, utilities and infrastructure.  In truth, our nation has been up and down that rollercoaster a few times in our 240 year history.

In our earliest days, Thomas Jefferson, one of the primary architects of the nation, said "I hope we shall crush ... in its birth the aristocracy of our moneyed corporations, which dare already to challenge our government to a trial of strength and bid defiance to the laws of our country".

The most wicked of men will not, of their own accord do what is right for the poor, the laborers.  It was not natural market forces that brought slavery to an end.  It was not the invisible hand of the market that ended child labor.  It was not the competition of the marketplace that made the workplaces more safe, that gave us the modern invention of the weekend, the 40 hour work week, paid vacations or sick leave. 

It was organized labor working in conjunction with spiritual leaders and visionary politicians.  When things go a little too well for a little too long, the unions become weak, the church becomes irrelevant and politicians are sold to the highest bidder.

Franklin Roosevelt, who had to rally America to respond to Facism, Nazism, Communism, and nationalism, also found the time and energy to warn the Congress of the United States that their constant caving into corporate power threatened to bring America as a free nation to an end.  He said, on April 29, 1938:

 [T]he liberty of a democracy is not safe if the people tolerate the growth of private power to a point where it becomes stronger than their democratic state itself. That, in its essence, is fascism — ownership of government by an individual, by a group, or by any other controlling private power.

It is not as easy to see as it was in the days of Jefferson or even of Roosevelt and Truman, but there is a continual erosion of democracy in our country and a certain evolution toward corporate control of our government and its agencies. Weakening organized labor has been crucial to this slow death of democracy and the rise of what I used to call oligarchy but which is increasingly looking like fascism.

While I decry the partisan divide as much as anyone, I maintain that the solution to this debilitating divide is not to give in. Peace in the absence of justice is just surrender. We don’t need to surrender. We need to get better at building coalitions among progressives. We need to get better at telling our story. We need to educate, to fill the media and the internet with logical, informed, progressive views.

This is no time to give up. To give our native son voice once more, Truman said:

“Given the choice between a Republican and someone who acts like a Republican, people will vote for the real Republican all the time”. It is not up to us to abandon our values and to do our best impersonation of a moderate in order to make other people feel more comfortable.  

We are the prophets now.  We are Isaiah, Moses, Jeremiah, and Amos.  We are the ones who will demand that workers be given a living wage.  We are the ones that will insist that laborers who build houses get to live in one that they own.  We are the ones who will defend the immigrant farmer, the child growing up in urban blight in underfunded schools. 

We are the ones who will prevent our economically disadvantaged young men and women from being recruited to go die in a war for oil and military spending.

How can we defend justice against the combined power of corporations and government.  Ah, my friends, you defend justice the same way you defend a lion….. you let it out of the cage.  You talk about it, you don’t give up, you shout amen until you are hoarse. 

It is not teacher and police pensions that are threatening this nation’s economy.  There are no teachers with off shore accounts and apartments in Paris.  Business owners may cry out against the minimum wage being raised so something slightly better than slavery but look, if everybody went to an Ivy League college and got a Phd somebody would still have to nail shingles to roofs, make pizzas and milk cows….. at some point we have to acknowledge that the people who make life possible are people who deserve to have their lives made possible. 

What I know for sure is that the corporations and the government will never get this right until you tell them and tell them often enough and loudly enough that they can’t pretend that they don’t hear you.

Even when you feel like you don’t have a voice, at least you can still say “amen” when you know that it is true.