Every Barking Dog

Every Barking Dog      June 7, 2020    Dr. Roger Ray, pastor   

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Winston Churchill, “You will never reach your destination if you stop and throw stones at every dog that barks.”

In a game of Monopoly, the goal of the game is to acquire so much property and money that you succeed in running all of the other players into bankruptcy. When everyone else is broke, then you are the winner. That is the exact opposite of an intelligent form of capitalism. In the kind of capitalism that actually works, you want to foster an environment where everyone is making money whether through acquisition of property or in production. That way, everyone wins. The only way for capitalism to work, is for nearly everyone to win, or to win to the degree that they have the economic power to go into the market and buy a house, a car, food, clothing, vacations, and maybe get a dog or even start collecting those stupid Precious Moments statues. . . look, it keeps grandma out of the bingo halls.

From the time when the ancient Phoenicians invented money, we have been trying to find the right kind of economy in which we encourage and reward productivity while fairly distributing wealth among the population. We were doing a pretty good job of it after the economic reforms of the New Deal but since the Reagan revolution, there has been a growing wealth gap that has allowed for the creation of super wealthy people while impoverishing the middle class. This fuels the social ills of crushing poverty, racial strife and competition, and rampant crime. Countries that have figured this out, taxing the wealthiest at a greater rate than lower income classes and distributing wealth through social safety nets, do not have the crime rate, murder rate, or racial violence that we have. Inequality, predictably, creates anger and if you save up enough anger, you get anarchy. This is not complicated. We have seen it before and now we are seeing it again. 

There is an ancient Turkish proverb that says, “A hungry man is an angry man.” The press seems to be shocked and amazed by the riots and looting in cities all across America, while I certainly don’t endorse it, I have to tell you, what surprises me is that it didn’t happen a long time ago. Black people have never been fairly brought into the mainstream of the economy. They have forever been invited into the Monopoly game just to provide labor and to temporarily be consumers, but they are always slated to lose. Police violence against blacks is a huge issue but it is not the only issue. An economy constructed to keep blacks in menial labor and constant poverty is another part of it, and expecting them to collectively respect police authority and the sanctity of retail property is totally absurd. 

While I believe that the centralization of wealth in the hands of the few is a disastrous social ill, a truly evil form of economics, still, the super wealthy are not all the same. The Walton family that owns Walmart, and Jeff Bezos who owns Amazon, have amassed their wealth both through business expansion and by paying their army sized workforce so little that they are being subsidized by state and federal poverty programs:  food stamps, public housing, Medicaid, and other welfare programs. Please don’t let this slip past your awareness: Some of the richest families in the world are also the largest recipients of public welfare because they have shifted their labor costs onto the public. I really want for you to remember this.

In fact, let me write this on the blackboard and get you to repeat it with me, all you folks on line too, repeat this and remember this fact:

 

This is an obscenity that shouldn’t even be legal, but corruption has been difficult to weed out in a country largely built on exploitation and theft. Why are people looting stores in their own neighborhoods? Income disparity. An unequal distribution of goods. So unequal, in fact, that some of the richest families in the world are also the largest recipients of public welfare.

 

But then there are super wealthy people like Warren Buffet and Bill Gates who try to use the power that comes to them through wealth in order to do good things. Now, mind you, just because you are inclined towards being a good person does not justify a system that allows for the accumulation of wealth by creating poverty for millions of others but, this is one of those times that it makes sense to hate the game, not the player.

You might wish that people like Gates and Buffet would turn most of their wealth over to a democratically governed trust, but they are a tad too enamored of their own genius to let their resources pass from their own control. 

Still, imagine being Bill Gates, after giving more than $50 billion to humanitarian causes, vaccinating 40 million kids against polio along with many other very laudable causes, and then you go on the internet and find that millions of scientifically illiterate people are accusing you of using vaccines to inject people with GPS tracking devices and, even worse, accusing you of being the master mind of a plot to kill off hundreds of millions of people to lower the human population of the world. That could almost turn you into a Mark Zuckerberg who allows Russian bots to manipulate our presidential elections through misinformation on Face Book . . . because, they pay in Rubles. 

 

We can only hope that those who have benefited from a clearly ineffective form of capitalism will have the strength of ego to not be negatively affected by the barking dogs on the internet. It wasn’t really Warren Buffett who said it, but it has the ring of someone with resources, in any event, it is good counsel:  You will continue to suffer if you have an emotional reaction to everything that is said to you. True power is in sitting back and observing things with logic. True power is restraint. If words control you that means everyone else can control you. Breathe and allow things to pass. 

 

I had a column in the Springfield News-Leader last week in which I rather passionately pleaded with our neighbors to take the Covid-19 pandemic seriously and to maintain the disciplines of wearing a mask in public and maintaining social distancing, something that fewer than 10% of our peers in grocery and hardware stores are currently practicing. 

The column was picked up and reposted by people in the St Louis area and I noticed that one person in our “big sister” city said, “Well, I admire his leadership, but he must be very lonely down there.” 

While I immediately bristle whenever people in Kansas City or St. Louis make dismissive remarks about those of us who live in the Queen of the Ozarks, still, I have to admit that it is not uncommon for me to refer to our local community as being Darwin’s Waiting Room. And while St. Louis is hardly the MENSA Club capital of the world, it is true enough that it is often quite lonely being a liberal opinion writer in one of the most stridently conservative parts of America. But I replied to this woman, “Life got a lot better for me in the Ozarks when I gave up the desire to be popular.

I don’t like getting hate mail. I don’t enjoy public derision. And though I refuse to be frightened by the occasional death threat, no one can say that they ignore those moments with casual disregard. When I first started writing for the News-Leader twenty-five years ago, I had a particularly loathsome editor . . . I have rarely gotten along with editors very well for lots of obvious reasons, but this guy was the worst, but he gave me the best piece of advice that I have ever gotten in journalism. He said: public criticism is the price you pay for airing your views in public. It is just true. If you are going to say something significant, it is only significant because everyone doesn’t already agree. You will note that most opinion writers get down to writing pieces that say, “Apple pie is good,” or, “I remember the good ol days fondly.” 

I have regularly been called into the News-Leader office for a “come to Jesus” meeting with the editor and publisher and they would try to scold me for my controversial columns but I always pointed out to them that I was an unpaid voluntary columnist and that my columns consistently had as many as a hundred times as many readers as their full-time writers. That one never ceased to create a room full of red-faced newspaper executives. Truth is treason in an empire of lies.

Journalism is writing something that someone doesn’t want you to say. Everything else is advertising. Why deliver a sermon that just feeds people back what they already believe? Why write a book that only offers confirmation of bias? But when it comes to a newspaper opinion column, if it doesn’t make someone mad, you are wasting your time. 

Back when I was married, my wife would get furious about my newspaper columns, telling me quite forcefully, “You are wasting your life. No one who reads your stuff ever changes their minds, no one pays attention to sermons.” And, there were times when I agreed with her. But, as James Baldwin has said, “Not everything that is faced can be changed but nothing can be changed until it is faced.” The barking dogs of the world want to keep progressives quiet. They want us to avoid controversy, criticism, conflict, and as long as they can keep us guarding our privacy and our reputation, then they have already won. 

I’m not encouraging you to be arrogant or condescending about this, but if we are going to leave breadcrumbs of a trail for people to escape the mental prisons of credal religion or conservative politics, you have to accept that there will be a lot of  “blah, blah, blah” criticism. I just hear it like the bleating of sheep, and you know, lions don’t lose a lot of sleep worrying about the opinions of sheep.

Almost all of us who are now progressives did not start out being open-minded and aware. Most of us can trace how we escaped the mental prison of conservative religion, right-wing politics, southern racism, and American exceptionalism. And because we know that we managed to change, we cannot give up believing that other people can change too, that other people can stop hating, stop hoarding, stop living in fear of science and facts. Someone confronted our comfortable prejudice and conservative isolation . . . the only way to show appropriate gratitude to those brave people is to be similarly brave ourselves. 

I have mentioned the Dunning-Kruger research before in which they demonstrated why and how those with the least information and who are the most intellectually challenged are often the most self-confident and the most likely to insist on telling others what to believe.

I blame a lot of that on Fox News which seems to offer most of their content in condescending intonations as if that attitude somehow turned their ignorant lies into news. Well informed people should expose themselves to both sides of any issue but watching Fox has nothing to do with balancing your exposure to news. As the saying goes, “I don’t watch Fox for exactly the same reason that I do not drink out of the toilet.” 

Honestly, we got more reliable information from our Magic 8-ball when we were kids. Will Donald Trump win re-election in November? I hope it is right this time!

The issue that has white America all in a twitter is their rather pious sounding response to news of vandalism and looting in response to the police killing of George Floyd. In fact, if you just listen to the news over the past two weeks, people breaking out store windows and sealing Lulu Lemon yoga pants and athletic shoes was much more important than the fact that 4 Minneapolis policemen held George Floyd’s face in the pavement and choked him to death for 9 minutes while paramedics and private citizens pleaded with them to let him breathe. 

I’m not saying that endorse looting or that I agree with it. I’m just saying that I understand. And while white folk are busy shaking their heads with their “tisk-tisk-tisk” face on, you know that Colin Kaepernick kneeling was considered to be offensive. Bre Newsome taking down the Confederate flag or rioters pulling down racist statues were all considered to be inappropriate. You just have to wonder, in what way do white racists want black people to protest?

But here is a fact: these four former cops have been arrested and charged with murder specifically because of those protestors   Along with the rioters and looters. 

Passive protest has allowed almost all cops to get off without being sentenced, or charged, or even losing their jobs way too often. 

The riots have been sparked by, among other things, excessive use of force by police and in an ultimate example of just how tone-deaf police forces can be, they have stepped up their abusive practices. They have used a National Guard helicopter to hover over peaceful demonstrations the way they use military helicopters on the battlefield in Iraq and Afghanistan.

The president actually had flash-bang grenades and tear gas used on peaceful demonstrators near the White House. And in Asheville, NC some medics set up a first aid tent for a demonstration and these guys in riot gear showed up, took their supplies and destroyed them. They were not wearing badges, no ID, no way to know if they were local cops or federal cops or if they were cops at all. But what you can know, is that they were acting illegally, like an occupation force that considered American citizens to be then enemy. 

Last week, I was talking about the fact that when you put a bunch of white guys together on a police force that their out of control machismo often takes over, but when you militarize the police, put them in heavy armor, helmets, and face shields, then they start to act like an occupying army. You probably saw the video of police officers in Buffalo, NY, knocking down this 75 year old man whom they then left unconscious in a pool of blood on the sidewalk. 

If you have a kid or a grandchild in law enforcement, this might be a really good time to suggest that they find another job. When they lose perspective this badly, and treat citizens this way, then broken windows and stolen tennis shoes is not where this is going to end. If the police keep acting like the citizens are their enemy, then they can expect citizens to return the favor. 

Police brutality has to end. As I was saying last week, no one can stop it faster than the cops themselves. If good cops stop the abusive behavior of bad cops, this conversation could find a peaceful and logical end. But if they keep upholding that thin blue line, as represented in the American flag with a blue stripe in it, like the one that flies over the police headquarters here in town, then, folks, this is going to end very very badly. 

Dr. Kyler Sherman-Wilkins, one of our members who is a professor of sociology, will be speaking here next week, and a couple of weeks later, our other pastor, David Katya Ketchum will be speaking. I hope that they will also be illuminating the concept of the disbanding of police forces altogether.

Before white Europeans brought the concepts of police and jails to this continent, 90 million native Americans lived here without any police or jails. People in New Zealand are also calling for a disbanding of the police for the same reason: the Mari Indians lived there for centuries without police or jails. 

Police and jails came into existence to keep slaves in slavery and to protect the wealth of the rich from the masses of the poor that they kept in poverty through low wages. When there is not a huge income disparity, when everyone has the basics then need in life, there is little reason to have police at all. 

Riots and looting are not the problems. They are symptoms of a problem that we need to fix. Now is either a very frightening time in America or now is a very hopeful time in America. How we behave now will make the difference.