The Talk Revisited

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The Talk Revisited        April 26, 2020    Dr. Roger Ray, pastor

New York Times June 5, 2019

 His genius embraced the first visions of modern computing and produced seminal insights into what became known as “artificial intelligence.” As one of the most influential code breakers of World War II, his cryptology yielded intelligence believed to have hastened the Allied victory.

But, at his death several years later, much of his secretive wartime accomplishments remained classified, far from public view in a nation seized by the security concerns of the Cold War. Instead, by the narrow standards of his day, his reputation was sullied.

On June 7, 1954, Alan Turing, a British mathematician who has since been acknowledged as one the most innovative and powerful thinkers of the 20th century — sometimes called the progenitor of modern computing — died as a criminal, having been convicted under Victorian laws as a homosexual and forced to endure chemical castration. Britain didn’t take its first steps toward decriminalizing homosexuality until 1967.

Only in 2009 did the government apologize for his treatment.

If you have heard me preach very often, you will have likely heard me say that “prejudice becomes its own logic.” Forty years ago, when reporters finally got the nerve to raise the issue with the Regan administration that a great deal of what he said in his public speeches was comprised primarily of balloon juice, his administration coined the too precious response that the president had simply “mis-spoke.” Which boiled down to, “tell any lie you want in public and in private some aid will wave it off as some kind of oratory stumble.”

Forty years later, we have Trump aid, Kellyanne Conway with a new phrase. When confronted with Trump’s outrageous lies, she says that he is offering “alternative facts.”

Now, admittedly, that phrase was so insulting to the media that it was only used once but you know that it is an assumption that lives on in the minds of many Americans. It falls under the heading of, “My uninformed opinion is just as good as your well researched conclusions formed through critical thinking.”

It is not a uniquely American problem, as I will get to in a few minutes, nor is it a novel modern issue. For instance, the white European settlers who came to the Americas, quickly concluded that the natives who had saved them from starvation and introduced them to indigenous crops, were savages whose lives could be dispatched at whim. However, no one less than our brilliant founding father, Ben Franklin noted that while many white folks decided to go live with the Indians, it was rare for an Indian to decide to live around white folks.

Benjamin Franklin wrote, “When an Indian child has been brought up among us, taught our language and habituated to our customs, yet if he goes to see his relations and make one Indian ramble with them, there is no persuading him ever to return.” You might think that a factual observation like that might have begun to challenge the prejudice that settlers had towards Native Americans, but open warfare continued for another century and prejudice around native reservations remains to this day. All of which makes me wonder, “who are the savages?”

Of course, we have talked a lot about the early American practice of enslaving Africans, but it should be noted, that while it was a common practice there were those, even in the earliest days, who objected to slavery on moral grounds. Ben Franklin was a slave owner himself, but he brought the young and impoverished journalist, Thomas Paine, to America and shortly thereafter, Paine published an anonymous article condemning slavery, before the Revolutionary War began. This is longish but worth hearing. He said:

Our Traders in MEN (an unnatural commodity!) must know the wickedness of the SLAVE-TRADE, if they attend to reasoning, or the dictates of their own hearts: and such as shun and stiffle all these, wilfully sacrifice Conscience, and the character of integrity to that golden idol.

The Managers the Trade themselves, and others testify, that many of these African nations inhabit fertile countries, are industrious farmers, enjoy plenty, and lived quietly, averse to war, before the Europeans debauched them with liquors, and bribing them against one another; and that these inoffensive people are brought into slavery, by stealing them, tempting Kings to sell subjects, which they can have no right to do, and hiring one tribe to war against another, in order to catch prisoners. By such wicked and inhuman ways the English are said to enslave towards one hundred thousand yearly; of which thirty thousand are supposed to die by barbarous treatment in the first year; besides all that are slain in the unnatural ways excited to take them. So much innocent blood have the managers and supporters of this inhuman trade to answer for to the common Lord of all!

The logic of the moral nightmare that was African slavery was known, published, and broadly discussed before our nation was founded, and yet, our first president, George Washington had more than 300 slaves at Mt. Vernon, and Thomas Jefferson had more than 600 at Monticello.

In fact, a dozen of our first presidents were slave owners, including Ulysses Grant who led the Union armies during the Civil War. Washington, Jefferson, Madison, Monroe, Jackson, Van Buren, Harrison, Polk, Tyler, Johnson, and Grant were all, at least at one time, slave owners.

If you are seeing a nauseatingly redundant theme in that set of photographs, spoiler alert, there are no surprises in the next hundred years of photos.

Abolitionist ideology was more than available to all of these great, intelligent, and powerful people, all of whom committed what you have heard me call, “application bias.” That is, “it may be generally true, but it doesn’t apply to me.” Or, “well, you have your opinion and I have mine.” Prejudice, as I have said, has its own logic.

Most western countries ended slavery at the ballot box through civil reparations and moral decision making. The USA did it at the point of a bayonet with the deadliest, per capita, war of our history. It was obvious to anyone who cared to think about it that slavery was wrong, but it took a bloody civil war to make the change.

What has been talked about less often was that as the African slave trade was dying off, the old slave ships simply went east and became what were known as “Coolie” ships, bringing captured Asian labor to the new world. As we were being forced to awaken to the cruel and morally intolerable enslavement of Africans, Asians were introduced as a new racial group who didn’t speak English and could be treated like farm animals. In fact, the term “Shanghaied” came into being as these ship captains often told people in poor rural areas that they had lucrative jobs waiting for them in Shanghai, only to find themselves years later in slave camps in America building our railroad system.

Though Lincoln officially outlawed the coolie trade at about the same time as African slaves were liberated, still, history shows that 9 out of 10 laborers who built our trans-continental railroad system were Asians.

Prejudice is, as I have said, its own logic. It defies reason, evidence, education, and information. We pass from the 19^th century into the 20^th and encounter the explosion of anti-Semitic prejudice, not just in Germany but throughout Russia, Europe, and to no small degree in America.

While the Holocaust is the macro “big” picture of that era, I want to bring this conversation down to just one person who was a major player in the war that brought the holocaust to an end. We began with a wisdom lesson taken from a New York Times article that was published last year about Alan Turing, a British mathematician and one of the originators of the earliest computers, who was portrayed brilliantly by Benedict Cumberbatch in the 2014 movie, The Imitation Game . . . which is germane to nothing other than the fact that I like to talk about Benedict Cumberbatch.

If the world were a more just place, on anyone’s short list of those who were crucial to winning World War II, Turing would be listed with Einstein and Oppenheimer, but even though he was the one who broke the German enigma code and set up the necessary math and engineering for the invention of the computer, Turing was ignored in most historical accounts because he was a homosexual.

And, in fact, in 1952, he was put on trial in Great Britain under the charge of being a homosexual. It may well be that we would not have won World War II without his genius. Hitler may have succeeded in global domination. However, this brilliant hero was put on trial by our British cousins for being gay and he was given a choice, either go to prison or accept chemical castration through medication. What he chose instead was suicide.

This was not ancient Athens condemning Socrates to death. This was not even 18^th century France sending Voltaire into exile. This is mid 20^th Century England, within the memory of many of you, condemning one of history’s greatest geniuses for the crime of being gay. It took the United Kingdom just over 55 years to apologize for that miscarriage of justice in 2009. . . . waiting until everyone involved was dead.

Still, right up into recent history, we have only gradually granted legal marriage status to same sex marriages, starting in 2000 in the Netherlands, 2003 in Belgium, 2005 in Canada and Spain, South Africa in 2006, Norway, Sweden, and Iceland in 2008, 2009 and 2010, England in 2013 and the USA finally arrived at sanity in 2015.

Prejudice dies slowly. It resists reason and ethical debate.  Which is why some people still listen to blow-hards like Rush Limbaugh complaining that gay marriage might undermine the spiritual sanctity of any one of his four marriages. That is some hard core, undiluted hypocrisy right there. Taking moral advice from Rush Limbaugh is like taking medical advice from Donald Trump . . . three known fatalities this week. . . and that was before he suggested injecting disinfectants!

And though we have made progress, we should not confuse progress with success. We would say that the genocide against Native Americans is buried in history but let me tell you sometime about my visit to the Standing Rock Sioux reservation in North Dakota where, it doesn’t look like that prejudice has died. And yes, we ended slavery, integrated schools, and even elected a black president  but don’t kid yourself, racial prejudice against black and brown people in America is anything but over, and, in fact, I fear that our prison population may ethically rival 19^th century slavery for its injustice and cruelty.

Anti-Semitism is better but certainly not over. Gay rights have come a long way but the prejudice has not ended or we wouldn’t have so many people in prominent pulpits and elected officials who are still pretending to be straight, Mike Pence, but who am I to speculate about that?

Prejudice often lives side by side with burgeoning acceptance and change. My

daughter’s peer group never missed an installment of RuPaul’s drag race but at the same time, of the nearly thirty transgender Americans who were murdered last year, most were black trans women.

The Human Rights Commission lists six more killed in the first three months of this year, mostly during our coronavirus lockdown.

Prejudice survives on two things: the fear of people who are different from us, as if any one of us gets to define normal and insist that everyone be like us…and ignorance, the refusal to learn, grow, and understand that being Native American, Black, Latinx, Jewish, Gay or Trans is not a reason for fear or hatred or, for that matter, any of your business.

I’m kind of waiting for the day when I can buy a rubber stamp that just says, “none-ya-business” and when I see a form that asks for my race, I just stamp it

And when it asks for my gender, once again, I can say,

 

It not that my race or gender is difficult to spot. It is not that I am hiding something or keeping a secret, it isn’t even that I have anything to apologize for in my race and gender other than the outrageous moral blindness found in my peer group which includes the first 43 presidents of the United States. . . don’t think about that too long.

We had an old joke when I was a philosophy major in college. A philosopher and his wife go to the hospital to have their first child. After the wife gives birth, she looks up at her husband and asks, “Is it a boy or a girl?” And the philosopher answers “Yes.”  Which was hilarious to us in the 1970’s when gender was a binary universe so far as our prejudices go, now, the philosopher would need to update that response to , “Yes, or no, or maybe, of some of both, or it depends.” But in many such matters, what you need to accept is, just keep calm and remember that it is none of your business.

Hating trans people for being trans makes no more sense that hating blacks for being black, Asians for being Asian, Jews for being Jewish, or hating gay people for being gay.

And remember, no matter how far we have come, no matter how much prejudice we have defeated, expelled, erased, or put to bed, we all still have some work to do, as this sign outside of a snow-covered Swedish coffee shop illustrates:

Because they welcome all colors, all sexes, all orientations, all religions, all cultures, all abilities, all ages, all sizes, except the Danish.

So, we have our work cut out for us.

Reparations

Dr. Kyler Sherwin-Wilkins

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When I approach topics related to race and race relations, I like to begin by giving credit to sociologist W.E.B. DuBois 

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DuBois is quite the inspiration to me. He was the first African American to receive a PhD, from Harvard, no less. And is considered one of the founding fathers of sociology. I would be remiss if I did not point out that DuBois’ position as a founding father of sociology was something that had to be fought for because of, well racism. I digress. DuBois is credited with saying that “the problem of the twentieth century is the problem of the color line.” I am sure that if DuBois were alive today, he would certainly acknowledge that the problem of the color line extends well into the present day twenty-first century. 

DuBois is an appropriate departure point for our conversation today on reparations. Namely, because DuBois fundamentally understood the psychological, social, and structural determinants of the racial disparities that exist in America today.  In his work, The Souls of Black Folk DuBois brilliantly lays out the history of Reconstruction, and the creation of the Freedmen’s Bureau. One line that resonates with me from this work is the following: “the granting of the ballot to the black man was a necessity, the very least a guilty nation could grant a wronged race… Thus Negro suffrage ended a civil war by beginning a race feud.” And in the spirit of this feud, white Southerners were committed to keeping their power. From this race feud, we got Jim Crow up until 1965, which was then replaced by Mass Incarceration in the 70s and 80s. Even reforms such as the GI Bill and Social Security benefits were not fully reaped by blacks.

It is important to define what is meant by reparations. I find the Merriam-Webster dictionary definition to suffice. Reparations, here are defined as “the act of making amends, offering expiation, or giving satisfaction for a wrong or injury.” In this context, the U.S. government owes the descendants of slaves amends for the injury of slavery. To say that this is a controversial issue in the United States requires no stretch of the imagination. We are, after all, a country that is plagued with ahistoric thinking and the idea that the past has no bearing on the future. Which is why you often get individuals who invoke the familiar line: “the past is in the past.” 

Oftentimes, you will hear of the legacy of slavery. Now I will admit, I am frustrated by this term because it takes some explaining, and sad to say, President Ronald Reagan was right: “If you’re explaining, you’re losing.” People are quick to say that slavery ended 150 years ago, and that we should just move on. People who complain about persistent racial injustice are stuck in the past. Well, my friends, I want to reveal something revolutionary: a grave injury or experience of trauma impacts you not just in the moment of injury, but it lingers. Complications continue to extend from it. There are individuals who suffer a grave injury in childhood and must live with it for the rest of their lives. The trauma and injuries sustained by an entire group of people by the institution of slavery, which socialized Americans into thinking that blacks were inferior are not healed by the drying of ink on a piece of parchment, or the apology for slavery issued by the House in 2008 and the Senate in  2009. It lingers. 

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We often hear about the wealth gap. Here is a chart which displays the gap. The median wealth is broken down by age range, to control for confounding factors associated with age. We know, after all, that age is correlated with wealth, and that the median age for whites is about 6 years higher than for blacks. Indeed across every age range, the wealth gap exists, getting bigger over time. Life course sociologists refer to this as cumulative disadvantage. Or the rich get richer, the poor get poorer. As if it is not bad enough, this wealth gap, it is important to note that even the wealthy blacks are not experiencing wealth the same as the wealthy whites. The experience of being a black man or woman in America is not erased by their social class. President Johnson so famously noted that “Negro poverty is not white poverty.” I will add that black wealth is not white wealth. 

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Now I want to turn to an outcome that is nearer and dearer to my heart. I am a life course sociologist and health demographer, and I am very much interested in the patterns of health across the life span. These data show clear disparities between whites and people of color regarding the prevalence of cognitive impairment, a robust predictor of Alzheimer’s dementia. Across all age ranges, blacks and Hispanics are in poorer cognitive health than their white counterparts. 

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Since COVID-19 is on everyone’s minds these days, it is worth mentioning that the virus is not hitting our population the same across racial groups. Despite making up about 30% of the population of Chicago, blacks constitute 39% of confirmed positive cases and 68% of deaths. We see similar disparities in Michigan, Pennsylvania, and some evidence in St. Louis. These disparities exist, not because of biological differences between the races. Race, after all, is a social construct. Nor do these disparities exist because blacks have failed to take responsibility for their actions. Rather, disparities exist because of policies that have long concentrated blacks into impoverished neighborhoods (redlining and housing discrimination) as well as the extensive bias that exists in our medical institutions. For an excellent discussion of this bias, I recommend the books the Color of Law, by Richard Rothstein and Just Medicine, by Dayna Matthew. 

Perhaps I am preaching to the choir, as it were. Many of you listening likely know of the racial disparities that exist. I reckon many of you also are committed to a more racially just world. The question is how do we get there? 

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Since 1989, the late Rep. John Conyers of MI introduced H.R. 40, a bill that would form a commission to study the issue of reparations. The ultimate goal was to put together a set of recommendations on how to proceed with reparations. Namely, are reparations needed? Who is entitled to them, and what form do said reparations take? 

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            Conyers passed in 2017, after pushing for H.R. 40 and introducing it into every Congressional session since 1989. In 2019, Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee introduced the bill. To this date, it has not been taken up in the house. So much for a do-nothing Congress. 

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            It would not be correct to say that Congress has done nothing. On June 19^th, 2019, aka Juneteenth, Congress hosted a panel to discuss reparations. Though not the same as commissioning a study, at least a conversation was being had. In many ways, this panel served as a follow-up to a 2007 conversation on the same topic. 

            As is custom, the Democrats and Republicans were allowed to invite panelists to testify and answer questions. Among the Democrats’ invites were economist Julianne Malveaux (who received her PhD from MIT), esteemed public intellectual and MacArthur Genius Grant recipient Ta-Nehisi Coates, and actor and civil rights activist Danny Glover. And for the Republicans? 

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            An undergraduate philosophy major, Coleman Hughes and a former football player, Burgess Owens. It is not very difficult to imagine that support for reparations, specifically cash payments to blacks, largely falls across party lines, with Democrats more favorable than Republicans. Though, Democrats are roughly 50%/50%, evenly split. What is striking, is that nearly 3/4 or 75% of blacks believe in cash payments. Perhaps blacks see something that whites do not. 

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            There are several legitimate questions pertaining to reparations. What form do they take? Do blacks receive a check? If so, will every descendant of slaves receive it? I will admit that perhaps I do not need a check. I am doing well. I was not born into privilege, but I am doing okay for myself. I have a PhD, a secure job as a tenure-track professor. That said, I face discrimination. Reparations could take the form of free tuition for blacks, grants to help with the procurement of a home, grants to spark black business, investments to revitalize black communities. I will admit that I don’t have the answers, and there are debates even among those who believe reparations should be made. But to let a lack of consensus should not mean a lack of action. 

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            What is the future of H.R. 40? It remains in limbo, but perhaps there is promise. The primary this year was historic for a number of reasons. The Democratic primary saw a record number of women running, a record number of people of color, and the first openly gay man win the Iowa caucuses. Allegedly. It is also historic because it featured a number of leading candidates openly supporting reparations, or at least the study of reparations. Joe Biden, the presumptive nominee has not openly supported H.R. 40, but there is reason to believe that he will be pushed to take on the issue, especially if he should select Sen. Kamala Harris or Stacey Abrams as a running-mate. 

            2020 represents a vote for the soul of our nation. It’s not just about the courts. It’s not just about ending the presidency of a narcissus, it’s about moving toward a conversation on what is owed me and the rest of African American brothers and sisters. The members of Congress and the occupant of the White House, who are sitting in the halls erected on the blood and sweat of my ancestors owe it to all of Americans to study this topic seriously. H.R. 40 must be taken up and passed into law.

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            I want to end by providing a shoutout to my grandmother, who we call Duchess, and my mother, Kappy. They are truly my inspiration and I owe them both so much for where I am today. I also think it is important to know that when I called my grandmother yesterday and asked her what she thinks of reparations, a woman whose great-grandmother was born into slavery. A woman who has seen the horror of the racist south, who traveled north with here family while but a youth to seek out a better life during the Great Migration. A woman who has lived through Jim Crow and recognizes the New Jim Crow of Mass incarceration. She said: “I’m all for it.” I think we owe it to her, and millions others to have the conversation. 

“Resurrection of the Earth”

“Resurrection of the Earth”  April 12, 2020  Easter    Dr. Roger Ray, pastor

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Responding to the Trump administration’s relaxing of EPA regulations, Brett Hartl, government affairs director at the Center for Biological Diversity, said in a statement: "This sickening gift to polluters will allow wetlands, streams and rivers across a vast stretch of America to be obliterated with pollution,…" "People and wildlife need clean water to thrive. Destroying half of our nation's streams and wetlands will be one of Trump's ugliest legacies."

The craft of a stage magician is primarily distraction. The performer gets you to “look over here” so that you don’t see what he is doing over there. Our current president is very nearly a master magician in how he manipulates the media and uses Twitter to keep up a constant distraction so that the news media never has a moment to notice the more substantive things that he is doing to accomplish his economic oligarchic goals. Let me spell this out: if Donald Trump has a core belief, it is just this – that the very wealthy should be allowed to soak up an every larger amount of the wealth of the nation and it doesn’t matter if you have to destroy the environment or bankrupt schools or take away health care from tens of millions of people in order to do that.

For most of the past three years, Trump has created insane diversion through his own antics, but the arrival of the coronavirus has been a smokescreen that exceeds anything that he could have manufactured on his own. I would point out to you that once we had to close businesses and churches because of the administration’s failure to offer wide spread virus testing in early February, the congress quickly passed a $2 trillion aid package which includes $1200 per adult subsidy, but the majority of that $2 trillion will go to large corporations.

And, true to form for our Clementine Caligula, he immediately fired the official who had been selected to provide oversite for these funds, Glenn Fine, because it was his job to make certain that these funds were used properly and that none of them were just funneled into Trump’s own businesses and the businesses of his political donors. I would remind you that when Obama proposed a stimulus package in response to the 2008 economic crisis, a package that was less than half this amount, it was passed without a single Republican vote. This $2 trillion package was passed with bipartisan support but now we will be left to wonder where all of the money goes. I never would have dreamed that the United States would come to this point, a point where we are somehow tolerating this level of criminal theft from the Oval office, but folks, we have the equivalent of a third world country. 

Even before the Coronavirus lockdown, the Trump administration had rolled back over 100 EPA regulations regarding clean air, water, and waste, especially waste from coal and other mining industries. As dangerous as this pandemic is, and this is no exaggeration, these environmental regulation roll backs, these regulations that have protected us from pollution, this will kill more people than Covid-19. And Trump is doing this on purpose, for profit. 

This kind of economic domestic terrorism is not unique to Trump. We saw this in the buildup to the invasion of Iraq. The paranoid conspiracy theorists were trying to insist that the Bush administration had somehow planned the 9-11 attacks in order to justify invading Iraq. That was obviously false because there was no one in the Bush administration who was clever enough by half to come up with a plan as complicated as that. However, they had been trying to cook up an excuse for invading Iraq before 9-11 and when that fateful day arrived, they used it as a too convenient excuse. 

Just as the coronavirus wasn’t cooked up in some military lab to use as a chemical weapon, nor was it sent by God to punish people for watching the Tiger King series or anything else that might appeal to your mind as deserving punishment. It was an event of nature, as pandemics always are . . . it is just that Trump and the Tiger King make it seem worse. 

Today is Easter and the virtual Easter sermons filling up the internet today mostly take the gospel stories quite literally, promising eternal life because Jesus was bodily raised from the dead. As you know, I take those accounts to be entirely metaphorical, almost like the ending of V is for Vendetta in which V reminds the tyrannical government officials who are about to kill him that they cannot kill an idea . . . the Roman government killed the historical Jesus but they could not crucify his message . . . it took Evangelical Christians to do that!

The real message of resurrection, the real point of it so far as I am concerned, is still the powerful awareness that you can kill a messenger, but you cannot kill a message. The EPA, which had been busy since the Nixon administration in trying to balance the interests of business, profit, employment, and manufacturing with the need to protect our environment from lethal levels of pollution, has been, effectively, crucified under the Trump administration. 

But there are those who are praying for a resurrection. Just as Neil DeGrasse Tyson is not the world’s leading astrophysicist but he is the world’s best known spokesperson for astrophysics, the world’s best known environmental activist is not a scientist at all, she isn’t even old enough to go to college yet and she has been missing a whole lot of high school for the past four years. 

In some ways, it is an act, when the snarling, angry, teenaged climate activist, Greta Thunberg, addresses public gatherings. In real life, she seems to be a very sweet, charming, and astonishingly bright high school student. But she has become quite media savvy during her short career as a consciousness raising public spokesperson for the earth. She understands what it takes to make a splash in the media is a perfect soundbite, but her real plan is not just to become famous and to see these soundbites show up in a single day’s news cycle. She is trying to get the adults in the room to pay attention to the science. 

We all saw clips of her “How dare you?” speech at the United Nations last September where she virtually spit out the words: This is all wrong. I shouldn't be up here. I should be back in school, on the other side of the ocean. Yet you all come to us young people for hope. How dare you! You have stolen my dreams and my childhood with your empty words. And yet I'm one of the lucky ones. People are suffering. People are dying. Entire ecosystems are collapsing. We are in the beginning of a mass extinction, and all you can talk about is money, and fairy tales of eternal economic growth. How dare you!

I was moved by this brief clip, and unless you have a cold, hard place where your heart is supposed to be, your were too. But, it was a bit of an act to get people to hear some of the hard data in the rest of her speech, much needed information that almost never made it into broadcast media.

Without the added effect of her Swedish accent or even her long braided hair . . . not yet at least, though if barber shops don’t open again soon, I suppose it could happen, I would like to share a bit of the rest of her speech, it is longer than a normal quote in a sermon but it is important to hear:

For more than 30 years the science has been crystal clear. How dare you continue to look away, and come here saying that you're doing enough when the politics and solutions needed are still nowhere in sight.

You say you hear us and that you understand the urgency. But no matter how sad and angry I am, I do not want to believe that. Because if you really understood the situation and still kept on failing to act, then you would be evil. And that I refuse to believe.

The popular idea of cutting our emissions in half in 10 years only gives us a 50% chance of staying below 1.5 degrees (Celsius) and the risk of setting off irreversible chain reactions beyond human control.

Fifty percent may be acceptable to you. But those numbers do not include tipping points, most feedback loops, additional warming hidden by toxic air pollution or the aspects of equity and climate justice. They also rely on my generation sucking hundreds of billions of tons of your CO2 out of the air with technologies that barely exist. So, a 50% risk is simply not acceptable to us – we who have to live with the consequences.

To have a 67% chance of staying below a 1.5 degrees global temperature rise – the best odds given by the (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) – the world had 420 gigatons of CO2 left to emit back on Jan. 1, 2018. Today that figure is already down to less than 350 gigatons. 

How dare you pretend that this can be solved with just "business as usual" and some technical solutions? With today's emissions levels, that remaining CO2 budget will be entirely gone within less than eight and a half years.

There will not be any solutions or plans presented in line with these figures here today, because these numbers are too uncomfortable and you are still not mature enough to tell it like it is.

You are failing us. But the young people are starting to understand your betrayal. The eyes of all future generations are upon you. And if you choose to fail us, I say: We will never forgive you. 

We will not let you get away with this. Right here, right now is where we draw the line. The world is waking up. And change is coming, whether you like it or not. 

I realize that was a lot of numbers and that’s why such important information doesn’t make it into TV news soundbites, but my favorite transplant to America who manages to clearly tell us who we are in plain language, John Oliver, boils our environmental situation down for us: One in four Americans is skeptical about climate change, who cares? That doesn’t matter. You don’t need people’s opinions on a fact. You might as well have a poll asking which number is bigger, 5 or 15? Or do owls exist? Or are there hats?

Human activity is making the earth uninhabitable to humans and if we don’t want to die, then we have to wake up to the facts and change.

So, yes, Greta, change is coming, though the change we have seen in recent years has been all change in the wrong direction. You may recall that I spoke out against the Paris Climate accords years ago, not because, like Trump, I was opposed to its meager goals. I was opposed to it because it did not go nearly far enough to save the planet and anything that falls short of saving the planet is not worth discussing.

So, Greta, I do believe that change is coming but it may come when people like you are elected members of government, a time when Donald Trump and Joe Biden, as well as Elizabeth Warren, Bernie Sanders and probably Roger Ray are all decomposing in some iteration of Memorial Gardens somewhere, but change is coming. We can be sure of that because change must come, or humanity will poison itself out of existence. And remember, those gospel Easter stories are metaphors. We have got to get this right.

The Indian writer and environmental activist, Arundhati Roy, has pointed out that

Historically, pandemics have forced humans to break with the past and imagine their world anew. This one is no different. It is a portal, a gateway between one world and the next.  We can choose to walk through it, dragging the carcasses of our prejudice and hatred, our dead rivers and smoky skies behind us. Or we can walk through lightly, with little luggage, ready to imagine another world. And ready to fight for it.

Trump is using this pandemic as a smokescreen behind which he is hiding moves to degrade the earth while plundering the public purse. I am reaching a point where I am accepting this insane and criminal conduct in much the same way that I accept that it is the nature of a scorpion to sting and you can hardly expect it to do anything else. 

But the pandemic, which has put up a red stop light all around the world, shutting down most travel, tourism, and retail business, is allowing the earth to take a deep breath. For the first time in a century, you can see the fish in the canals of Venice. And Los Angeles, that has been infamous for air pollution, right now, this weekend, has some of the cleanest air of any major city in the world. 

We have only been in economic “stay at home” orders for a month and the earth is already showing us that a miraculous resurrection is possible if we would just learn to behave ourselves. 

As our young friend, Greta, has observed, the “Coronavirus pandemic only shows that the world can act fast in a crisis.” And folks, I hope you know, so far as the earth is concerned, we are in a crisis, a crisis that calls for a real resurrection.

Meditation

The fields we once plowed for planting 

         are often now gouged for oil, gas, metals, and minerals. 

The seas that once fed us, 

         are now often polluted and over fished. 

Even the air we breathe carries the heavy metals and toxins 

         of our industry as the byproduct of runaway greed. 

Let us choose now to reverence the earth,  

         with sacrificial concern for the generations who may follow us, 

                  and respect for the needs of one another,  

         that we may live in harmony with the planet and the whole of humanity.   

1) God bless the grass - Malvina Reynolds 

Wisdom Lesson

Responding to the Trump administration’s relaxing of EPA regulations, Brett Hartl, government affairs director at the Center for Biological Diversity, said in a statement: "This sickening gift to polluters will allow wetlands, streams and rivers across a vast stretch of America to be obliterated with pollution,…" "People and wildlife need clean water to thrive. Destroying half of our nation's streams and wetlands will be one of Trump's ugliest legacies."

2) Mercy Mercy Me (The Ecology) - Marvin Gaye 

Sermon: “Resurrection of the Earth”  

3) (It Ain’t) What We Don’t Know - Paul Thomlinson

Benediction

“Everything You Thought You Knew About Addiction is Wrong”

“Everything You Thought You Knew About Addiction is Wrong”   April 5, 2020 Dr. Roger Ray, pastor

click here to see the video

Bruce Alexander:  “Global society is drowning in addiction to drug use and a thousand other habits. This is because people around the world, rich and poor alike, are being torn from the close ties to family, culture, and traditional spirituality that constituted the normal fabric of life in pre-modern times. This kind of global society subjects people to unrelenting pressures towards individualism and competition, dislocating them from social life.

People adapt to this dislocation by concocting the best substitutes that they can for a sustaining social, cultural and spiritual wholeness, and addiction provides this substitute for more and more of us.”

My mother, who was the travel agent for guilt trips, could write a pretty mean letter when she was in the mood to do it. The worst one I ever received came after they had visited me in the church where I worked in Louisville, KY. Several of us went out to church after the service and I bought my dad a beer to go with our tacos. My mother, I’m certain, came to America on the Mayflower in the company of some hard-assed Puritans. For her, drinking a beer was the same as trying to drink all of the beer in the world. There was no line between occasional or moderate alcohol use and full-blown alcoholism.

In fact, a year or so after my mother had died, my dad told me that he bought a six pack of beer and put it in his refrigerator but, he said, every time he opened the refrigerator door and saw it, he could swear that he heard Helen crying behind him, so he eventually just threw it away. Needless to say, I grew up in a home that was so dry it was a fire hazard. 

My first encounter with an alcoholic was in my student church in Russellville, KY. My attempts to help that man led me to attending AA meetings with him and eventually doing my master’s thesis in the treatment of alcoholism. During my doctoral work, I took my Clinical Pastoral Education working as a chaplain in the Veterans’ Hospital’s addiction treatment center in Nashville, TN. I became a huge fan of the 12-Step recovery program which, almost like my mother had written the literature, taught that the cure for addiction was to embrace a life of absolute abstinence. 

In that understanding of addiction, there were people who were not addicts, who could drink or not drink, and there were alcoholics, whom we protected from even using after shave or mouth wash that contained alcohol. And I still don’t want to throw any shade on the AA program. It has worked for more people than any other treatment program in its century of admirable work. 

But over my years of work with both drug and alcohol addiction, I have realized that this binary view of addiction is totally nuts. There are people who drink to the point of intoxication every day, but they never have blackouts, hangovers, and they never miss work but to say that they are not alcoholics misses the point. They are still emotionally unavailable parents and partners and they are chemically dependent. 

I want to talk about substance use and abuse today, in large part because the whole world is being confined to their homes, faced with domestic tension and boredom, complicated with feelings of anxiety and depression . . . a powder keg for potential addiction and abuse issues. Bruce Alexander has written about the fact that historically speaking, cultures can go for generations with fairly low levels of substance abuse, and then circumstances change, and it becomes nearly universal. Honestly, I worry about that now during our months of quarantine.

Especially since, right now, AA meetings are not happening in person, so many people who have depended on daily or regular meetings to maintain their sobriety are having to rely on phone calls and video conferencing and, as we all know by now, even from our virtual church, it is not the same.

Moderate drinkers can become alcohol abusers, and those who use Xanax and other panic and anxiety medications can begin to abuse their prescription drugs, and, under our current circumstances, I worry about those who take Adderall the most. I’m going to leave some of the more clinical, researched based part of this to my friend, Dr. Paul Thomlinson, but I want to speak about this personally.

After leaving my parents’ home, alcohol became a part of my life. In college, it was typically a matter of occasional pizza and beer. In grad school, I fell into the habit of having either wine or beer before bed to help me go to sleep for the three or four hours a night that I got to sleep. 

After graduation, it became a part of social life. You got a beer with your friends after a run, a tennis match, or a white-water rafting event. As I got older, especially when I had an “empty nest,” I started going out to hear live music with friends, which almost always happens in a bar where, lo and behold, they serve alcohol. 

I never drank alcoholically. I never had a blackout, never had a DUI, never had a hangover or a headache, but my doctor, responding to my frustration about not losing weight, especially as I have been threatened with high cholesterol and type-2 diabetes, has suggested cutting alcohol out of my diet. To placate him, I would cut back but never stop until about six weeks ago. 

Realizing that my health demanded some serious action, I just stopped drinking . . . before Covid-19 was a big deal. I immediately started to lose weight faster than ever before. And, ironically, I also found that I went to sleep easily at the end of the day and slept through the night without any issues. And when the world was still going out to bars to hear bands, I found that I could drink water or tea and though no one around me pressured me to drink, I noticed how alcohol was affecting the people I hang out with and I didn’t like what I saw. In fact, I fear that I have lost a close friend simply from being sober while he was plastered. 

And about a month later, I donated blood and saw from the lab test that for the first time in 20 years my cholesterol was normal, my blood sugar is down, and my jeans are three sizes smaller. I have not sworn off all alcohol forever, I would have a drink if I wanted to, but, realizing what my instincts would have led me to do when I am trapped alone in my home for days at a time with a liquor cabinet full of tasty anesthesia, I don’t want to drink. 

I have known for years that alcohol can be dangerous because of alcoholism, but cirrhosis of the liver or drunk driving are not the only ways that alcohol can kill you. There is also diabetes, heart disease, obesity, and, what I might call, episodic insanity. 

I have always loved the famous Ben Franklin quote: Beer is proof that God loves us and wants us to be happy.” But like so many popular Ben Franklin quotes, he never said it and evidently didn’t much care for beer. However, rather more poetically, he did make a similar sentiment known in a letter to a friend about wine. He wrote:

“Behold the rain which descends from heaven upon our vineyards, and which incorporates itself with the grapes to be changed into wine; a constant proof that God loves us, and loves to see us happy!” But, as Franklin, during his years as the American diplomat in France, became known for giving up state secrets to a prostitute with a bottle of wine, spirits can gladden the heart and lubricate some social settings but drinking doesn’t make you smart and it reduces your inhibitions, probably below the level of your normal informed self-control. 

Again, I am not saying that I have taken up my mother’s mantle. I will have a drink from time to time. But not very often, and probably not at all during the Covid-19 quarantine because it is just too easy to fall into the habit of coping through self-medication . . . and that goes double for Xanax and Adderall. Just because you have a prescription doesn’t mean that you should take too much. 

Allow me to remind you, I am a doctor, maybe not the kind you might wish, but, I have the sheepskin to prove it: I prescribe long walks in the sunshine, meditation, reading, hot baths, conversation, and exposure to art and nature. We’re going to get through this. I just want all of you to emerge from quarantine more healthy than you were when Covid-19 showed up in this neck of the woods.

Everything You Thought You Knew About Addiction is Wrong

Paul Thomlinson, Ph.D.

April 5, 2020

(Slide 1) Everything you know or thought you knew about addiction is wrong? Well, that may be a tad bit hyperbolic, so let’s say, maybe not everything, and for everyone—and maybe not so much wrong, as incomplete. In using that title, similar to Johann Hari’s TED talk (Slide 2) we recognize and affirm the lived experience of those who have struggled with addictions like alcoholism, and we recognize that the lived experience of some may differ or be contradictory to what we are sharing today. We do not seek to condescend to anyone in our remarks. But I can pretty much guarantee that what we are saying today, the perspectives and evidence, differs greatly from what most people in our culture have been taught, and what they have believed or “known.” By the way, alcoholism is sort of our tracer condition for these talks today—but everything we are saying pretty much applies to all substances of choice with addictive properties. 

I also want to begin with a the assertion that I believe we need to be clear eyed and unafraid of the truth about human beings and our seemingly universal impulse to alter our state of consciousness. You want evidence of this? The historical and anthropological record is clear—humans have always consumed substances for the express purpose of altering consciousness, and have found value in doing so. There seems to be a drive in us to experiment with ways of changing how we feel. (Slide 3) Witness every child ever, spinning in circles until they are dizzy as evidence of this drive, and how much we seem to enjoy it…and witness those same children falling on the concrete patio and breaking out a tooth as evidence of the harmful consequences that can ensue from altering our headspace too much. 

This brings me to another important point…our ambivalence toward substances like alcohol. Most of us feel at least two ways about it at the very same time. I earned my Ph.D. at Southern Miss, in their APA accredited psychology program, where I took my first graduate course in addictions…that’s where I heard my favorite and best illustration of this ambivalence. I lost it for years, but I finally found it for this talk. (Slide 4) Judge Noah “Soggy” Sweat, gave his so-called whiskey speech as a state representative on the floor of the Mississippi state legislature in 1952, when prohibition of alcoholic liquor was still in effect in that state. And it goes a little something like this:

“… I want you to know that I do not shun controversy. On the contrary, I will take a stand on any issue at any time, regardless of how fraught with controversy it might be. You have asked me how I feel about whiskey. All right, this is how I feel about whiskey:

If when you say whiskey you mean the devil's brew, the poison scourge, the bloody monster, that defiles innocence, dethrones reason, destroys the home, creates misery and poverty, yea, literally takes the bread from the mouths of little children; if you mean the evil drink that topples the Christian man and woman from the pinnacle of righteous, gracious living into the bottomless pit of degradation, and despair, and shame and helplessness, and hopelessness, then certainly I am against it.

But, if when you say whiskey you mean the oil of conversation, the philosophic wine, the ale that is consumed when good fellows get together, that puts a song in their hearts and laughter on their lips, and the warm glow of contentment in their eyes; if you mean Christmas cheer; if you mean the stimulating drink that puts the spring in the old gentleman's step on a frosty, crispy morning; if you mean the drink which enables a man to magnify his joy, and his happiness, and to forget, if only for a little while, life's great tragedies, and heartaches, and sorrows; if you mean that drink, the sale of which pours into our treasuries untold millions of dollars, which are used to provide tender care for our little crippled children, our blind, our deaf, our dumb, our pitiful aged and infirm; to build highways and hospitals and schools, then certainly I am for it.

This is my stand. I will not retreat from it. I will not compromise.”

Are you convinced that we, as a culture, are still at least as ambivalent about whiskey, and a host of other mind and mood altering substances today, nearly 70 years later? I am. As Roger shared, a binary view of alcoholism has never been widely accepted scientifically speaking, but yet, it has prevailed in the treatment world, and in popular culture for generations. So, what have we learned that’s worth sharing? What is worth knowing about some of the new ways thinking about addiction? 

We all know that there has been a concerted effort, going back to at least the 1930’s to assert that substance use is a crime that deserves the most severe of punishment, an idea rooted in a very limited view of addiction and one that makes it primarily about stigmatizing those with addictions as morally flawed and weak. If you’ve ever really known someone struggling mightily against addiction, you have to know they are neither. But that prevailing view made it’s way to the so-called public health campaigns of the 80’s and 90’s: (Slide 5) just say no, this is your brain on drugs, etc. The underlying assumption here is that there are “chemical hooks” in substances of abuse and if you have the moral failing of trying it once, you will be hooked and well, you deserve everything that this brings upon you. 

But if the “chemical hooks” hypothesis is correct, (Slide 6) then shouldn’t everyone who’s had nicotine patches or Nicorette gum be able to quit smoking cigarettes as a delivery system for nicotine? We know that these marvelous products can easily maintain the levels of nicotine in the bloodstream at the same levels as produced by heavy smoking…and yet, the quit rates for smoking even with these nicotine replacements are abysmal. So, there must be other explanations for why people continue to consume substances that are dangerous and even deadly.  

Well, those war on drugs propaganda messages in the 1980’s included one PSA, based on studies from the 1960’s, showing rats in a cage dying from consuming heroin. (Slide 7) You see, in those studies scientists put rats in cages with two water bottles. One bottle had water; the other bottle had water laced with either cocaine or heroin. In virtually every case, in this free choice situation, the rats would keep going back to the drug-laced water bottle and fairly quickly die of an overdose. The conclusions are clear, right? Drugs are addictive and will kill you.

Kind of ironically, those messages and the underlying studies became an inspiration for a psychology researcher named Dr. Bruce Alexander at Simon Fraser University. This clever psychologist wondered, what else is going on here, and maybe it’s not really the drugs themselves that explain what’s happening. He wondered if it might be the cage, the environment in which these rats were placed—a bleak and solitary existence in which they only thing there was to do was…drink water or take drugs. So, Alexander repeated the experiments, but rather than putting one rat in a small cage, he created what he called “rat park.” (Slide 8) Famously now, this cage was filled with lots of good things to eat, other rats for socialization and plenty of sex, and toys and colored balls for recreation. Rat park also had two water bottles: one with water, and one with drugged water. The rats tried both, but given the choice between good food, sex, and playful friends, none of the rats became addicted or overdosed. Not a single death by overdose. They, in fact, didn’t like the drugged water. 

Does this study have any relevance to humans? Of course it does. Pesky research ethics prevent us from putting humans in cages for extended periods of time with ad libitum drug consumption…but as Johann Hari beautifully describes in his book Chasing the Scream, in the Vietnam War and it’s aftermath, we have something of a natural human experiment that illustrates the principles very well. At one point, a huge number, 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, we would have hoards of vacant-eyed heroin addicts roaming our streets—but that’s not what happened, thankfully. When they were removed from their virtual rat cages in the jungles of Vietnam, and were able to come home to the embrace of family, the meaningful activities of employment and school, most were no longer interested in heroin and simply quit. They were not criminal nor physically addicted. They just changed their cages. 

(Slide 9) As the great Hungarian born, Canadian physician Dr. Gabor Mate has put it, “All substances of abuse will either treat pain or distract from pain. So the question is not, why the addiction, but why the pain?” This question is a haunting one…it is what we must answer if we are to make long-term, sustainable recovery possible for our brothers and sisters who are addicted. The sources of the pain that humans treat with whiskey and Oxycontin, with cocaine and benzodiazapines, are many—chronic physical pain from injuries and illnesses, for sure. But I’m convinced it is much more likely to include psychic pain from trauma (either in childhood or later), from interpersonal alienation from primary relationships, from family disconnection and conflict, from shame and guilt heaped upon us by heavy handed religion, from abject loneliness, from having not found a guiding passion or a meaningful purpose for one’s life. These are the real sources of pain that lead so many to find connection with alcohol or other drugs. These are the sources of pain that lead to self-medication. These are the sources of pain we can and must find ways and means of treating. 

I’ll conclude with an all-too-obvious application of all this to our current circumstances, the COVID-19 crisis. (Slide 10) Under quarantine, we may all begin to feel like rats in cages, right? What if our cage is feeling pretty desolate, and we have two bottles from which to choose? We might begin to choose the whiskey bottle, or the bottle of pills, rather than the healthier water bottle if we don’t take care to enrich our environment. Rat park was an enriched environment that included, not insignificantly, other rats with whom to play, socialize, have sex…be close to. So we need to enrich our environments by bringing our offline supports online through regular phone calls, FaceTime, Zoom, syncing up Netflix accounts. Getting and/or staying connected with others is really the most important thing we can do for ourselves right now. We need to enrich our environments by refusing to drink from the firehose and restricting the flow of bad news and misinformation—make sure we are getting good information, and balance it with stories of human kindness and resilience. We need to enrich our environments by developing and demonstrating mastery—learn something new or practice something old. To be most helpful and hopeful, make sure it is something that provides meaning and purpose to life—some way of adding beauty to your own life or those of others, some way of contributing joy to someone who may desperately need your light. Let’s all enrich these cages we are living in, together.