“On Being Woke”

“On Being Woke”      Feb. 25, 2018    Dr. Roger Ray, pastor    

Click here to see the video

Andrew Greeley (Chicago Sun-Times, February 18, 2001):  "It should be no surprise that when rich men take control of the government, they pass laws that are favorable to themselves. The surprise is that those who are not rich vote for such people, even though they should know from bitter experience that the rich will continue to rip off the rest of us. Perhaps the reason is that rich men are very clever at covering up what they do."

Conservative Washington Post columnist, Max Boot, wrote this week:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/trump-is-ignoring-the-worst-attack-on-america-since-911/2018/02/18/5ad888f2-14f3-11e8-8b08-027a6ccb38eb_story.html?utm_term=.c9322723d68b

Imagine if, after 9/11, the president had said that the World Trade Center and Pentagon could have been attacked by “China” or “lots of other people.” Imagine if he had dismissed claims of al-Qaeda’s responsibility as a “hoax” and said that he “really” believed Osama bin Laden’s denials. Imagine if he saw the attack primarily as a political embarrassment to be minimized rather than as a national security threat to be combated. Imagine if he threatened to fire the investigators trying to find out what happened. 

Imagine, moreover, if the president refused to appoint a commission to study how to safeguard America. Imagine if, as a result, we did not harden cockpit doors. If we did not create a Transportation Security Administration and a Department of Homeland Security. If we did not lower barriers between law enforcement and intelligence. If we did not pass a USA Patriot Act to enhance surveillance. And if we did not take myriad other steps to prevent another 9/11. 

That’s roughly where we stand after the second-worst foreign attack on America in the past two decades. The Russian subversion of the 2016 election did not, to be sure, kill nearly 3,000 people. But its longer-term impact may be even more corrosive by undermining faith in our democracy.

Now, as I said, Max Boot is a conservative columnist and there is a lot about what he said here that I would take exception to regarding what he is applauding as appropriate steps following 9-11, but the larger theme of what he is saying is that the Russian interference with our 2016 presidential election is the most serious foreign attack on the United States since 9-11 but because it was done through the internet, it has been possible to pretend that it didn’t happen, or dilute its significance, or even try to divert blame.

American intelligence agencies have made it clear that Russia successfully used disinformation campaigns through Twitter and FaceBook to influence both print and broadcast media during the election. They usually feel compelled to add either that this activity did not change the outcome of the election or, more subtly, that it cannot be proven that it affected the outcome, but what they are clearly doing is sidestepping the apparent fact that they did affect the outcome but to tell the truth about that would create a constitutional crisis that would be disruptive to the stability of the whole world.

You could not, months later, say that Trump won only due to Russian influence and go back and make Clinton president or call for a new election without creating absolute chaos, so they take the safe route of offering an all too convenient lie, which is that the Russians did not affect the outcome of the election when they quite obviously did. And this is why trusting the government becomes increasingly difficult these days.

In some cases, such as these, I can see why it may be convenient to tell the public a lie but every obvious lie you tell erodes your credibility and makes it less likely that we will believe you the next time, and, as Max Boot detailed, it undermines our faith in Democracy.

I want to avoid dwelling too much on the indictments handed down by Special Prosecutor, Bob Mueller, against Russian agents and businesses involved in this hacking of our elections. And, while there is a great deal to be said about the social obligation of such vehicles as FaceBook and Twitter not to be seduced by profit to such a degree that they become passive tools for foreign meddling in elections, I’m going to say that is not really pulpit material. It is interesting and, as Americans, it is relevant, but we are in church and I am preaching and I want to focus on church business and the business of preaching, which has more to do with morality than it does with such political and judicial concerns.

As citizens we are rightly disturbed by the fact that Russia has tried to upset the process of voting, not just here but in many other nations as well, but as a pastor, I am disturbed by how they went about it.  They didn’t try to hack into voting machines and change who was voted for, or alter the numbers.

Instead, they came at voters with misinformation. They exploited the algorithms of social media on the internet to distribute rumors, slander, to plant conspiracy theories. In short, they played us like a violin, only, in this case, one string was prejudice, another was partisanship, a third was paranoia, and the fourth was ignorance.

Russia didn’t attack America’s democracy through the hardware of voting machines or even the technology of media so much as they just sucker punched us in our weak spot… which turns out to be our weak intellect and morality.

Yes, shame on the Russian government for acting to muddy the elections of foreign nations, but shame on us for being so easy to manipulate through propaganda that appeals to our partisan hatred, our fear of immigrants, our paranoia about people whose religion, skin color, or language is different from our own.

Russians are not looking for Russian sympathizers or trying to spread propaganda to seduce people into being pro-Russian… they were looking for people who hated Hillary Clinton to feed them outrageous lies so that they would hate her more and try to get their friends to hate her too. And they appealed to the poor, the unemployed, the fearful, in more or less the same ways that Hitler appealed to economically disadvantaged Germans, to get them to blame Jews for their woes.

But folks, it wasn’t just the low-information voters on the right they were appealing to. When they released DNC emails from the Clinton campaign, revealing dirty tricks and unfair practices in the primaries, they were ginning up liberals who were Bernie and Jill Stein supporters.

Let me give you a more personal example:  those of you who spend any time on social media are likely to have seen the meme that declares that Australia and New Zealand have outlawed Fox News because those governments have accurately labeled Fox News as being propaganda. And, honestly, it is propaganda. As one saying goes, I don’t listen to Fox News for the same reason that I don’t drink out of the toilet.

I have also noticed that several of my favorite journalists on MSNBC have started calling Fox News “Trump TV.” So, folks, when I saw the claim that Australia and New Zealand had banned Fox News, I believed it. I believed it because it fits within my prejudice. I believed it because I want Fox News to get every black eye the world can give to them. The problem is that it just ain’t so. No country, not Canada, not Australia, not New Zealand, and not even the fictitious home of the Black Panther, Wakanda, has banned Fox News . . . even if all of us should, no one has.

But this is how prejudice works. We stop listening for news. We stop trying to gain new information. We allow ourselves to be seduced by confirmation of bias. We seek only to read, hear, and see things that confirm what we already believe to be true. That’s not being informed, that’s just narcissism. And in that, there is nothing more to be proud of in being an educated liberal than there is in being a low-information conservative because both have just staked out a position and are unwilling to consider new insights. The truth is neither liberal nor conservative. Facts do not belong to either Republicans or Democrats.

A genuinely spiritual person is interested in honesty, integrity, depth of character, radical compassion, and reality. And, it needs to be confessed, that churches have often tried to foster good character in people by telling them lies about fiery punishments, or glorious eternal rewards, packaged in mythological stories and incomprehensible scriptures. The traditional role of religion has been to get people to believe in the absurd while manipulating them into civil conduct and compliant productivity. That is just as dishonest as deceptive news media and manipulative government disinformation.

The church needs to speak with a clear prophetic voice that can be counted on to always tell the truth while calling upon the people of the world to strive to be more compassionate, loving, and caring people. If we won’t tell the truth, can we really expect our government or our media to be honest on our behalf?

Look, I really want to lose weight, but asking all of you to eat more salads wouldn’t really do much for me, now would it? The dedication to truth has to be personal. You have to be suspicious of your own predilictions.

The Americanized version of the Buddhist sutra is a bit tortured but without going into the weeds too much on the Sanskrit names for divine beings, the Buddha was asked if he was a god, or a spirit, or a demi-god and each time he rejected such inflated and exaggerated titles and in the end he asked only to be thought of as being awakened.

As much as it may upset some of my peers to hear me say it, I am convinced, with good evidence, that the historical Jesus didn’t think of himself as being divine. Jesus was a wisdom teacher. I suspect that he was a wisdom teacher with some sharp criticisms of the ruling authorities, both in the palace and the temple, but I don’t think that Jesus spent a moment thinking that he was a son of God who had to die for the redemption of our sins. That’s the kind of yarn that religious people spin but I do not take Jesus for having been a fool.

I think that the real goal of the spiritual life is to, in the Buddhist sense, attain to enlightenment. But being enlightened does not mean to gain secret wisdom about other worldly existence. Enlightenment means having the blinders of false thoughts removed from us, to wake up from the slumber of dreams and magical thinking.

In the Buddhist sense, it does involve transcending ego to see the truth that we are all connected. In the Judeo-Christian sense, it means rising above our greed and self-serving prejudices and appetites to engage one another more compassionately.

You cannot “get woke” if you insist upon living in the dream world of fake news, magical religious beliefs, and self serving prejudices. A prophetic church is a church that is so devoted to both ethics and the absolute truth that they are necessarily thought leaders in a world that is sadly bereft of believable leadership. So we if we can’t give the world a prophetic voice then we have no reason to exist. Besides, the world always needs another office building doesn’t it?

“Internment in the Land of the Free”

“Internment in the Land of the Free”    Feb. 18, 2018    Dr. Roger Ray, pastor

 click here to view the video  

We have no one to go to for help. Not even a church. Anything goes, now that our President Roosevelt signed the order to get rid of us. How can he do this to his own citizens? No lawyer has the courage to defend us. Caucasian friends stay away for fear of being labeled "Jap lovers." There's not a more lonely feeling than to be banished by my own country. There's no place to go.”
― Kiyo Sato, Kiyo's Story: A Japanese-American Family's Quest for the American Dream

For those of us at the tail end of the Baby Boom, a happy childhood was, at least in part, thanks to the advent of the first serious attempt at a science fiction TV series. Gene Rodenberry’s “Star Trek” which, by today’s standards had not only pretty bad acting but also a lot of really bad science, was, none-the-less, visionary for its time and they can legitimately claim to have envisioned several technological innovations which did eventually come into existence.

  George Takei played “Sulu,” the helmsman of the U.S.S. Enterprise. He did go on to star in other shows and he made a bit of news when he revealed that he is gay. He has translated his public notoriety into a meaningful gay rights advocacy role.

In recent years he has become well known for his snarky presence in social media. I loved him when he was Sulu during my childhood and I can tell you that I think that I love him even more for his sardonic posts about conservative politicians.

      Takei was born a United States citizen in California. Takei’s mother was also born a citizen in California. His father was an immigrant who had become a citizen before Takei was born.

But when he was just five years old, two months after the bombing of Pearl Harbor, his family was rounded up with 120,000 other people of Asian descent who lived on the west coast of America and was imprisoned in an internment camp for three years. Americans of Japanese descent were suddenly cast as being potential enemies of the state and they were taken away from their jobs, homes, businesses, farms, and property and put behind barbed wire in miserable camps where they were surrounded by armed guards and watched over from menacing guard towers.

When WWII was ended, they were released from their camps and were each given a bus ticket and $20 to help them start a new life in the land of the free that had just robbed them of everything they owned, took three years of their lives, all in an unconstitutional, knee-jerk reaction of racism and fear.

As bad as the internment of Japanese Americans in the 1940’s was, it obviously was not nearly as bad as America’s two original sins of the 18^th and 19^th centuries in the practice of African slavery

and the genocide of Native Americans followed by the forced removal to reservations where many Native Americans remain to this day. And maybe that’s why it is not often mentioned.

But this was not a sin of frontier America. This is not a product of a pre-modern mentality that had not learned from the sins of past generations. This was in the middle of the 20^th century when my parents were adults. This was when the world was shocked by cruelty of the Nazi’s who were forcing Jews into barbed wire concentration camps. We were decrying the abuses of the Japanese against the Koreans and the Chinese.

The architects of this move to ignore judicial process, the constitution and everything our country stands for was none other than President Franklin Delano Roosevelt and the then California Attorney General, soon to be the nation’s famous liberal Supreme Court Chief Justice, Earl Warren.

Franklin was broadly feared to be a socialist because he was so liberal in so many ways. He brought the Great Depression to an end through his New Deal measures, he built the coalition that won World War II, he created Social Security and established a Minimum Wage and did a great deal to end employment discrimination based on race. But this famous liberal also signed Executive Order 9066 that indefinitely incarcerated Japanese Americans in internment camps.

Earl Warren was California’s Attorney General, but he was running for Governor at the time. We remember him for his culture changing decision that racially integrated America’s schools in Brown vs the Board of Education and in his restrictions on police aggressive arrests in the famous Miranda v Arizona case that gave us the institution of Miranda rights. But he ran for governor in 1942 under the slogan, “Get rid of the Japs,” and he facilitated the Secretary of War’s rounding up of all of the Japanese Americans in California, putting them on cargo trains at gun point to be shipped off to internment camps.

Warren was seen as being so liberal on the Supreme Court that there was a massive “Impeach Earl Warren” movement in America but in February of 1942, this man who would become one of our most famous liberals, did one of the most racist and unconscionable acts of the 20^th century.

These are two of the most important books in my library. I consult these two books whenever I am talking about something that touches on American history, especially when I talk about issues that Americans have tried to either forget or to gloss over with propaganda. Loewen and Zinn, in these 1100 pages, compile remarkable evidence of the truth about American history. However, when it comes to the internment of 120,000 Japanese Americans, many of whom were both children and legal citizens of the United States, Loewen doesn’t even mention it and in Howard Zinn’s encyclopedic work there are two short paragraphs on page 416 that mentions the internment.

Can you even imagine federal troops coming and rounding up everyone in Springfield, Willard, Nixa, and Ozark, forcing us at gunpoint onto box cars and shipping us off to spend three years in an internment camp? How could this happen? How could it have been carried out by leaders who are largely remembered as heroes? And how can it be so benignly forgotten?

In a nation that cherishes freedom, independence, even the ownership of private property and the liberty to live lives of self-determination, how did this happen? In a word, it happened because generally good people were scared. Which is how the most educated population in the world, the German people, were led to blame the Jews for their economic woes. Good people, quickly and easily persuaded to do horrible things, because they were afraid… well, and because they were greedy, racist and rather irresponsible but let’s, just for the moment, focus on good people who were scared.

In 1992, Mike Huckabee, the father of our current White House Press Secretary, Sarah Huckabee, was running for the Senate in Alabama. In that campaign he suggested that AIDS patients be detained in internment camps to stem the spread of the HIV virus. That was a suggestion made in fear, perhaps even hysteria at the time, but 15 years later when he was the frontrunner in the Republican presidential primary, he refused to walk that statement back. Huckabee wants to be thought of being a sort of super Christian, but he thinks that the civil rights of gay people are a small price to pay for limiting the spread of AIDS.

Frankly, so far as the sentiment of the gay community goes, our current Vice-President, Mike Pence, is not too far off. In 2000, when he was governor of Indiana, he advocated using the funds the state had allocated for the care of AIDS patients to be diverted to Evangelical Christian organizations that conducted what is called “conversion therapy” aimed at turning gay people straight.

Neither Huckabee nor Pence seem to be aware of the fact that a fourth of AIDS patients in America are not gay but why confuse prejudice with facts?

All of which pales in comparison to the very public discussion in the final month before the 2016 Presidential election when Trump surrogates were citing the 1940’s Japanese internment camps as a precedent for rounding up Muslims living in the United States.

I believe that you guys trust me not to make this stuff up, but I want to give you a few seconds of this clip from a Fox News interview:

I would like to believe that this non-sense is part of what made Megyn Kelly decide to rescue some scraps of her dignity and to make a pricy exit from Fox News. Carl Higbie thought it was safe to bring up internment camps for Muslims in 2016 on Fox News and that should be sobering enough for us.

Our current president seems to be unwilling to apologize for anything but 45 years after the internment it was no one less than President Ronald Regan who formally apologized for this dark chapter in American history and promised a reparation of $20,000 to each of the surviving Americans interred in those camps though Congress has been sufficiently slow in dispensing the money so that most survivors have died long before ever cashing a check.

Still, they did get an apology.

What I am suggesting to you today is that we go one step further by resolving never to do anything like that again so that no future apology and reparation will be similarly necessary.

Fear seems to break down religious convictions and cross all conservative and liberal political lines to turn us into moral pigmies. My suggestion to you today is, long before the next incident happens that will have some hero or moron calling for barbed wire and watch towers, that we are not going to make decisions out of fear.

Faith, after all, does not so much mean “blind belief” as it means to have the courage of your convictions. Because we are people of faith, I just think that we should stop being afraid.