Reasons for Hope (2021 and Beyond) January 3, 2021 Dr. Roger Ray, pastor
My mother died in 2003. When I received word that her two weeks of suffering in the hospital ICU had ended, I headed straight for the Gethsemane Monastery in Kentucky, near my family home, where I spent a couple of days remembering my mother and preparing to deliver her eulogy. I remembered visiting her childhood home in Appalachia where my grandparents still lived. The home was modernized in many ways, but you could still see the vestiges of what life had been like for my mother when she was young. They didn’t use them anymore, but the old oil lamps that once lit the house at night were still there.
My mother grew up without electricity. There was an outhouse in the back yard and a chamber pot under the bed for late night use. There was a washstand with a large porcelain bowl that was used for bathing. There was a hand pump over the cistern in the back yard where they got their water. There was a chicken coop and a small, fenced field where they kept a dairy cow and a horse, and gardens where they grew vegetables. It may sound nice, in some ways, but trust me, the advent of indoor plumbing, electric lights, gas heat, refrigeration, and electric washing machines and dryers, along with grocery stores always stocked with meat, milk, eggs, and bread were innovations not to be sneezed at.
As I considered the changes in the world from the time that my mother had been a child to the 21stcentury when she died, it seemed almost impossible that this was the span of a single lifetime.
She left Appalachia to go to Washington, DC to be a congressional secretary during WWII where she sat in a warehouse sized room with hundreds of other typists, pounding away at manual typewriters to manage the correspondence of our federal government engaged in a world war.
After the war, she married, had four children, and became the secretary of our church, retiring when the job was going to demand that she learn how to use a computer. That was one change too many. When she died, I was the pastor of a large denominational church. I had three secretaries managing my correspondence, record keeping, and bookkeeping. All tasks that, just a few years later, were managed by software programs that whittled the work down to one part time job.
Much of the innovation and change of my mother’s life were the result of a world war, the civil rights movement, and the globalization of a growing world population. We have just endured a relatively brief period of reversals as a reactionary president sought to undo necessary environmental and economic progress of preceding administrations. We have walked up to the precipice of a new dark ages that was anti-science, anti-education, anti-democratic, and decidedly favoring a reinstitution of a sharply divided class and race caste system that served only a fraction of the population at the expense of the rest of us.
Now, I believe, we are standing on the threshold of a season of progress that will rival the changes of my mother’s generation. Change is not always good and even changes for the better will come with some sense of loss. When I went to the Gethsemane monastery to think and pray when my mother died 18 years ago, it was still the largest Trappist monastery in America.
In another 10 years, it will probably be the only Trappist monastery in America and ten years later, it will probably no longer exist. The monastic life that I once admired, no longer makes sense in the emerging world of the 21st century.
We are now coming to the end of a pandemic that took most of the world by surprise. But, in much the way that WWII pushed the development of aviation and communication, the pandemic has inspired a renewed investment in medicine. Working vaccines were developed and deployed in just 10 months, a modern miracle inspired by necessity. There will be more and more deadly viruses in the future, but the medical advances made in the last year will make the next vaccine easier to produce, possibly in a matter of weeks rather than months. The ability to sequence genes and use RNA programming to create immunity in our bodies will change everything the next time around.
We talk about a lot of things that need to change but there is nothing like necessity to get the ball rolling. It is a dangerous trap to always assume that some technological or scientific breakthrough will solve all of our problems. We sometimes get very careless about our environment, our food supply, our health, and our limited resources, always assuming that there is some magical solution brewing in a university laboratory somewhere, but if you will indulge me for a moment of future speculation:
We have been talking for years about the warming earth, climate change, carbon in the atmosphere, but most of what we have done is talk about it. Where does all this carbon come from? About one fourth comes from our cars, another fourth from generating electricity by burning coal, gas, and oil.
When my mom was young, the promising means of transportation on trains and in trollies was being put out of business by the mass production of automobiles. Of course, we kept trying to make them more efficient so that we wouldn’t run out of oil or air, at least until the Trump administration rolled back those regulations. But, necessity is doing it again:
Gas powered cars are on their way out. Several manufacturers just are not making gas power cars anymore and that transition to electricity is intersecting with the technology that will also make them self-driving.
No more burning fossil fuels and the number of accidents will go down by more than 90% and will continue to get better. What’s more, most of us will no longer need to own a car. We won’t need parking garages, parking lots, or garages on our homes. We’ll hail a robotic car from an ap on our phone and we simply tell it where we want to go and it will take us, without an Uber driver telling us about their tragic life and desperate need for more money.
Imagine how many people have been forced to living in nursing homes because they could no longer function living independently. What if trips to the store, the mall, church, or the grandkids house were as simple as being chauffeured? That’s 25% of our carbon emissions taken out of the picture almost by accident.
At the same time, renewable energy has, in the last year, become less expensive than electricity generated by burning coal and gas. In a feverish public meeting with our former City Utilities director, John Twitty, I prophesied that if the city went forward with its plans to build a huge new coal burning power plant that it would be one of the last ones built anywhere in the world because burning coal was the dirtiest and soon would be the most expensive way to generate power. He told me that was just my opinion. However, as of July of last year, it turns out that I just also happened to be right.
We can do better with leaving carbon in the ground by changing some of agricultural methods and we can do more to capture carbon from our beef operations…. Of course, we could also get smart and eat less beef, but I believe that carbon emissions in the United States will be cut in half in the next 10 years. Not because we are good people or because preaching is finally reaching its intended audience, but because renewable energy and electric cars are cheaper than burning fossil fuels. Leave it to us to do the right thing when it saves us money. As Winston Churchill famously said, “You can always count on Americans to do the right thing after they have tried everything else.”
While we have just survived four years of a reactionary government that tried its best to drag us back into the 1950’s, Japan has been forging ahead towards a cleaner and more technology embracing future. Prime Minister Suga, in a policy speech in October, pledged to achieve net zero carbon emissions in 30 years. He has insisted on a goal of having all gas burning cars off of the streets in 10 to 15 years but, not stopping there, they plan to even tame the carbon emissions of industry and agriculture, largely through use of hydrogen as an energy source.
We could have switched to electric cars and renewable energy 10 years ago, but we lacked the political and moral will to do it. But now the technology is better and cheaper.
I got to take a ride in a fully electric Tesla a few months ago which already has a partially self-driving feature in it which will be upgraded as AI, artificial intelligence, has a few more months of learning and refinement.
Of course, the growth of AI will bring both life-enhancing changes and many economic and social changes that will require massive flexibility and adjustment. It is already hard to recruit drivers in the trucking industry because trucks will be self-driving in the next three or four years.
For all of his noise about restoring coal mining jobs, Trump was either lying or totally unaware that: a) we’re not going to keep burning coal, and b) mining of all sorts involves fewer and fewer people and more and more robots. The same is true in almost all of manufacturing. It will be unnerving to fly in commercial aircraft without pilots, but they are all but useless already.
Most mundane and repetitive jobs will be replaced by mechanization soon. Already even more technical jobs, such as architecture, are being accomplished by computer programs. Just as my mother worked in a warehouse sized typing pool in 1943, there were hotel and retail businesses that had an ocean of architects on their payroll and that staff has been paired down to the point that they can meet in a conference room.
From farming to even a lot of medical surgery, AI and robotics will reduce the need for human labor all of the way from picking oranges to delivering babies. If it is done correctly, this will be make our lives much better, freeing us up to become poets and sculptors, authors and musicians.
But if we do it with a kind of Darwinian capitalism, it will create an ocean of poverty, unemployment, and it could turn democracies into feudal states with a few lords and hordes of peasants.
Now is the time when our moral decision making needs to get ahead of our technological advances. Just as the switch from gas burning to electric vehicles has become environmentally and economically necessary, it will become absolutely necessary to implement a Universal Basic income to avoid the economic collapse of democracy and capitalism.
While our senate is now busy debating whether Americans should be given a $600 stimulus check or a $2000 stimulus check, what they really must face is how much of a check will every adult American need to receive every month from now on. Very soon, those who cannot make ends meet will not be able to pick up a few shifts as an Uber driver because Ubers will drive themselves. They won’t be able to get a second job at McDonalds because those jobs will be done by robots.
This transition will not be easy, and it won’t be accomplished overnight. But we have to get compassion back into government and the economy. Right now the fight is in the Senate. A year ago we had more than 20 people running for the Democratic nomination for president and of that huge field, 6 of them are currently in the Senate where this fight for compassion and reason is being fought.
Six allies, fighting for social justice, forward looking leaders who understand what is at stake. How many of these six have you heard speaking up for a $2000 stimulus check for working Americans?
Maybe I just missed it, but I have not heard a word out of Amy Klobuchar, not Kirsten Gillibrand, or even Cory Booker. I have not even heard Kamala Harris weigh in on the topic. For goodness sakes, I have not even heard from Elizabeth Warren.
I’m not trying to relitigate a primary that has been over for months and I obviously know that Bernie Sanders will never be a candidate again. But look who is standing alone among those Senators who were candidates, who is carrying our flag onto the Senate floor. This battle for economic justice for the poor and the working class has already been lost but I am glad that this old, crazy, Jewish, socialist from Vermont is willing to stand up and say what needs to be said because, men and women, over the next 20 years, this battle is going to be fought over and over and over again. The charge will be led by people whose names we do not even know right now. And it is a battle that must be won because it has to be won, otherwise we all lose.
Science and technology can deliver us to a new world of effective vaccines, self-driving cars, and robotic farming, cooking, cleaning, and construction. But whether this world that AI will bring us will be heaven or hell, well, that’s up to us. We will find that we have sufficient natural resources for the technological transformation to renewable energy, as well as housing and food for the world. The only resource we are currently without sufficient supply is moral courage.
Left up to our current body of congress and senators, capitalism will turn our mechanized future into wealth for a few and crushing poverty for the vast majority.
Sorry folks, there is not an ap for that. Creating a great society requires moral vision and courageous leaders. Hundreds of people will hear this message during the first week of 2021. Thousands and maybe tens of thousands will hear it by the end of 2021. But I am talking to you. The world is waiting for you to bear the standard of justice and compassion into a new world that is already loaded into the back of a self-driving Amazon truck headed our way. You have to make the future a blessing and not a curse. I’m going to keep preaching as long as I have an audience, but you already know what I am going to say. I’m just going to find different ways to tell you what I have just told you. Get off your ass and lead.
