“When Philanthropy Goes Bad ”

“When Philanthropy Goes Bad ”    June 25, 2023       Dr. Roger Ray    

Click here to see the video

Chris Winters:  Good-hearted philanthropic foundations make news headlines when they funnel millions of dollars into charitable causes. Even smaller foundations make a splash when they lend their support, such as when the Landfall Foundation of Wilmington, North Carolina, stepped in early to distribute $388,000 to 82 local nonprofit organizations and schools after Hurricane Florence. But that’s not the whole story. In fact, it’s only about 5 percent of the story.

We seldom hear about the really, really big money: philanthropy’s own investments. Federal law requires that foundations give away 5 percent of their endowments each year. The other 95 percent is typically invested in Wall Street markets to sustain and increase the philanthropic pot.

According to the Foundation Center, about 86,000 charitable foundations hold more than $890 billion in assets. In 2015, they gave out a total of $62.8 billion, averaging 7 percent across the industry. What to do with the rest of that money—$827.3 billion—has presented both problems and opportunities.

https://www.yesmagazine.org/issue/good-money/2018/11/27/your-favorite-charity-has-most-of-its-money-in-wall-street

 

I have been the beneficiary of charitable philanthropic giving for my entire life. I grew up in a home where both parents worked. My father worked for the electric company and my mother was our church’s secretary, drawing her salary from donations made to our church. In college, I received scholarships from non-profit organizations, grants from charitable endowments, and my grad school was a non-profit private university.

 

Of course, as a pastor, my salary has derived entirely from donations, some of which have been gifts from charitable endowments. Even now, some of our largest donations come from the mandatory distributions of endowments. Endowments are required, by federal law, to distribute at least 5% of their holdings every year. 

You cannot donate a million dollars to a foundation and then just let it accumulate money without ever actually doing anything charitable with the money. But, of course, 5% is a fairly low bar. What is done with the other 95%? The donor of the one million dollars gets to write off 100% of their donation while as little as 5% of it will be given to a charitable cause that year. 

 

Today I am delivering the first part of a two-part sermon about philanthropy. Next week I want to talk about how much good comes from the generosity of people who make sacrificial donations but today I feel the need to talk about something you may have never heard anyone say anything about, which is the down side of capitalism and tax avoidance that masquerades as philanthropy. 

 

Of course, we all hear about the huge foundations, like the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation which does innovative work in many charitable fields all around the globe. Most of those news worthy efforts warm the cockles of my heart! Who doesn’t love it when really rich, very smart people try to take on noble objectives without using tax money to do it?

What we almost never talk about is what they are doing with the money they are not distributing to philanthropic causes? Of the $50 billion in the foundation, most of it is invested in profitable stocks, at least some of which is earned in very questionable fields. Buying Walmart stock, when most of us who are concerned about the wage gap, the distribution of slave manufactured goods, and other questionable aspects of Walmart’s corporate practices avoid even shopping there, let alone buying a couple of billion dollars worth of their stock.

 

And even more complicated, there are those on the receiving end of the foundations charity who have alleged that some of the health care products and devices promoted by the foundation actually end up enriching Bill Gates. Last summer, South African journalist, Patrick Bond, wrote that exploitation often comes to Africa disguised as charity, specifically because of Bill Gates’ “own orientation to profiting from ‘false solutions’ instead of promoting serious solutions.”

https://www.cadtm.org/Philanthrocapitalism-seen-from-South-Africa

 

Our tax system, which is intended to raise the money that it costs us to have a government and a civilization, allows for deductions for those who are wealthy enough to make large donations to charities. By doing this, they are avoiding paying taxes that pay for schools, hospitals, roads, fire departments, our military, our national parks, and everything else, because we are entrusting them to do good and needed things with that money. 

I don’t want to complicate this sermon with too many charts and economic numbers but please allow me to remind you that a third of the wealth in the USA is owned by the top 1% of our population. The lower 50% of our population only owns about 2% of our nation’s wealth. 

The rich and the poor pay the same percentage in sales tax and most usage taxes, which is why any proposed federal “flat tax” is the most regressive form of taxation possible. So, when you talk about who shoulders the nation’s tax burden, you can’t just talk about income tax, you have to look at sales tax, property tax, and all of the other fees that are hidden in the gasoline and tires we buy, and the subsidies given to certain industries that unequally serve the public’s interests. 

 

The majority of income tax revenue does come from the wealthy but looked at as a whole, the poor are still carrying a disproportionate share of the load, in part, because the wealthy can avoid paying taxes by making charitable donations. The tax dollars they do not pay then gets shifted to the lower end of the income spectrum for people who don’t make enough to deduct donations.

 

I’m not wanting to tar all such foundations with the same brush and I don’t even want to imply that the Gates foundation is more harmful than good; I suspect that they are probably a lot more good than they are bad but you can see the weaknesses in the tax system that tremendously benefits the rich at the cost of the poor and middle class. 

 

Warren Buffett, one the richest people in the world who also does a lot of philanthropic work, donates billions to the Gates’ Foundation but it deserves to be said that he has a condition on his gifts that stipulates that whatever he gives to the foundation must be distributed in the year that it is donated. Buffett doesn’t want his money becoming a part of the 95% that is invested by the foundation and that, I believe, should be informative to the rest of us. 

 

If our tax system allows you to deduct 100% of your gift, then the gift should go to good causes and not be primarily invested in corporations that benefit stock holders because too often that becomes a form of exploitation masquerading as a charity.

 

I served on the board of our local Community Foundation which now manages more than $400 million. I resigned from the board when it became evident to me that the stated goal of the foundation, of providing grants to worthy non-profit causes in our area, had become secondary to growing the holdings of the foundation. When a former member of the church I served at the time, left the foundation $2 million dollars for the general welfare of the community, rather than putting that money into the undesignated funds which allowed us to help start up and struggling non-profits, they used that $2 million dollars as match funds to draw more donations to the designated funds whose grants were directed to the personal interests of those named funds. What they did was legal but, running the risk of over stating my case, everything that Hitler did during the Holocaust was legal but that doesn’t make it right. 

 

I voiced my objections to this use of the $2 million dollars and yet, when we voted, I was the only one who voted to keep it for what it was donated for, the benefit of the poor, while everyone else voted to use it as matching money to draw more money into the foundation’s holdings…. Which allowed them to pay more in salaries and build a larger headquarters building. They said nice things about me as I left, you know, the way they do with preachers, they applauded my convictions while entirely ignoring the point.

 

And, again, let me emphasize my heart-felt belief that our Community Foundation does a lot of good, not as much as they could but I would not say that their decision in this case that led to my resignation from the board was evil but if you said it was “evil adjacent” I couldn’t really disagree with you. 

 

Still, I should qualify that by saying that over the past 30 years I have resigned from most of the non-profit boards in town except for the ones they would never allow me to be on, and, yes, I am talking about our two regional hospitals.

 

I have always found it to be entertaining when people advocate for taxing churches, but they never seem to mention the non-profit status of our hospitals which are busy buying up the most expensive real estate in the area, removing said properties from the tax role, to build more and more buildings, and paying their executives larger and larger salaries…. Which is, now that I think of it, why I was never invited to serve as a hospital trustee. There are some pretty big churches around here but compared to the hospitals, their tax scam hardly deserves a mention. 

However, religion has its own inside secrets. If you don’t recognize it, this is the Museum of the Bible in Washington, D.C. It is situated near the Smithsonian campus to give the impression that it is the same sort and quality of collection as the internationally respected Smithsonian. It is, however, not what it pretends to be. It is the brainchild of the very wealthy Greene family, the owners of Hobby Lobby and other retail businesses. The very right wing religious fanatics came up with this project and have leveraged it to gain notoriety in the religious world and even an audience with the pope…. Pope Benedict, not the current pope who models himself after St. Francis. Benedict modeled himself after Christians who own private jets, but I’ll leave that alone for now. 

 

The scholar the Greenes hired to curate their acquisitions for their museum was a friend of mine. A top scholar who was uniquely equipped to be able to tell their difference between forgeries and actual ancient manuscripts that the museum wanted to acquire. To avoid possible litigation, I want to say very clearly that I don’t know that what I am about to describe actually happened. I am just saying that our tax laws are so screwed up that it could have happened.

 

I don’t know that they did it, but as a hypothetical, the Greene family might have located an purchased an ancient scroll from some obscure Middle Eastern monastery for, let’s say, $100,000. And then they had the scroll appraised at a place like Christie’s Auction House for $10 million dollars. Now, in this entirely hypothetical scenario, when the Greenes donated this scroll to their Bible Museum, do they get a $100,000 tax deduction, what they actually paid for the scroll, or do they get a $10 million dollar deduction? If such a horrible thing had happened, the super-rich family could avoid paying over $3 million in taxes, leaving the dirty task of paying taxes to, well, you.

 

I’m not sayin’ it happened, I’m just sayin’. Under the guise of evangelical Christianity, under the guise of open-handed philanthropic generosity, the wealthy can avoid paying millions of dollars in taxes but then, who does pay for the roads, the schools, the Veterans’ benefits, Medicaid, and park rangers? 

 

I’ve taken you into the weeds today to tell you about an injustice that affects you in your wallet, an injustice that I suspect most of you never knew about. And it is arguably unfair if not unkind to even tell you about something that you can’t do anything about except for the fact that you get to vote for the people who write the tax laws and if you vote for people or parties that consistently write the tax code in a way that provides loop holes for the rich who shift their tax bill onto you and your children and your grandchildren then, dear friends, you have no one to blame but yourselves. It is not new news that the rich can be greedy and that they will likely exploit every opportunity legally given to them to avoid paying the freight for running the democracy that has allowed them to become obscenely wealthy.

 

I’m not saying that we should eat the rich, but I am saying that we should fight against an unjust economy that famous Catholic workers advocate, Dorothy Day described, saying: Our problems stem from our acceptance of this filthy, rotten system. So, dear friends, stop accepting this kind of exploitation as being inevitable. To quote my favorite musician, Bruce Cogburn, “We have to keep kicking at the darkness until it bleeds daylight.” 

 

Don’t vote for fascists and please, don’t shop at Hobby Lobby. 

“Thinking About Accidentally Getting Old”

“Thinking About Accidentally Getting Old”       June 18, 2023      Dr. Roger Ray

Click here to see the video

“How to Grow Old,” 

Bertrand Russell

Make your interests gradually wider and more impersonal, until bit by bit the walls of the ego recede, and your life becomes increasingly merged in the universal life. An individual human existence should be like a river — small at first, narrowly contained within its banks, and rushing passionately past rocks and over waterfalls. Gradually the river grows wider, the banks recede, the waters flow more quietl

y, and in the end, without any visible break, they become merged in the sea, and painlessly lose their individual being.

 

My daughter is living with me this summer, working remotely, while she makes a move from Denver to Chicago for her work. Towing a small UHaul behind my little SUV to get her here proved to be too much for my transmission. Thankfully, we made it here before it went out entirely and had to be rebuilt.

 

The shop kept my car for a couple of weeks and when I got it back, along with the bill for a few thousand dollars, I discovered that I had been the victim of a very bazaar crime. Someone had taken everything from inside the car. Nothing of great value, but, seriously they got everything, the owner’s manual, insurance cards, an umbrella, an ice scrapper, some copies of books that I wrote which have not been horribly popular to my audience, let alone to petty thieves, but the oddest thing they took was one of the headrests from the backseat. 

 

My daughter felt terrible about my expensive repair, caused by her move, but the theft was just one injustice too much for her. She demanded that the transmission shop owner reimburse me for the loss of my things from the car while it was in his care. I kept trying to assure her that it was no big deal.

I never used the headrest in the back seat anyway and the owner’s manual is available online. But she refused to leave it alone. She was going to get justice if she had to turn into Bruce Willis in a Die-Hard movie. 

 

 I tried not to hear as she explained in an ever louder voice to the shop owner why he absolutely must replace my stolen items and when he repeatedly objected, my lovely 34 year old princess said to him, “This is elder abuse! My dad is a senior citizen and he doesn’t deserve this kind of treatment!”

 

Suddenly the headrest and the umbrella took on a different dimension. Her rage was not simply because my venial loss was unjust, it was because I, as a vulnerable senior citizen, was being abused. What is slightly even more painful is that this argument worked on the shop owner who couldn’t be much younger than I am. 

 

I sometimes take advantage of a senior discount at a movie theater or a store but that’s just a number and I don’t think about it much, but realizing the larger truth, which is more factual than I care to acknowledge, is that I have accidentally gotten old. I didn’t mean to. It happened gradually, so gradually that unless I happen to be looking into a mirror, I still think of myself as that 35-year-old lion of the pulpit, ready to take on presidents and kings in pursuit of social justice, climate legislation, and a more just economy. But, in truth, it has been years since I was a runner and now, I don’t even walk very fast. I have arthritis in my thumbs that makes me hand a stubborn jar to my daughter for her to open. I often get dizzy when I stand up and even my racquetball partners often stop the game to ask, “Are you OK?” as if the “big one” might be right around the corner.

 

I have been semi-retired for a couple of years and at the end of this year I will retire entirely, and I will likely move near the ocean somewhere in Florida where I can sit among my peers and criticize the government full-time. 

I hope that I will occasionally get an invitation to preach or to add a new video to our YouTube channel. I can’t imagine the anxiety most of you must feel at the thought of being permanently deprived of knowing my opinion about absolutely everything. Before there was a FaceBook or Twitter, I understood that the whole world has a right to my opinion. I will strive to not disappoint you.

 

But we live in a culture that worships youth. I was just a kid when I first read the quote from the former head of Revlon where he said, “In the factory we manufacture cosmetics but in the store we sell hope.” When I was little, my mom was still in her 40’s, she and most of the ladies at church, died their hair, wore, not just makeup but also wigs and girdles, to make themselves look younger. Now, science has cursed women with myriad expensive and dangerous ways to deny the reality of aging, and now Botox injections are also being marketed to men and it is no longer just Johnny Depp who wears eye makeup all of the time. There is a none-too-sublet message in culture that your value as a person goes down with each successive birthday.

 

But factually, I know a whole lot more than I knew when I was 35. In fact, a few years ago I destroyed everything I had ever written before I was 50 because I didn’t want anyone to ever see it. I am well aware that employers, even churches, want to hire people in their 30’s, in spite of their ignorance and pompous self-confidence. We are a culture that prefers image over substance, and we are not alone in that. I have traveled a lot over the past few years, and I can tell you that plastic surgery is apparently more common in places like Thailand and Brazil than it is here in the USA. 

 

And as sad and pathetic as the desperation expressed in such measures can be, religion can be even worse. 

How many funerals have you been to where the preacher make promises about an imaginary world in which the deceased gets new eyes and ears, new legs and feet, no more disability, no more infirmity or disease. 

I’m still waiting to hear them promise that in heaven, cheesecake isn’t fattening. 

 

I realize that my stark realism is sometimes painful to hear, but dear friends, mortality is a one-way ticket. Every cradle swings over a grave and there is no surgery, there are no cosmetics, and there is no religion that can change the inevitable truth that life is short and for those of us who are fortunate to have a longer rather than a shorter life, we will live through loss of vitality even if modern science can help us to keep our teeth and renew our knees we are still falling apart on our way to our final resting place. 

 

What I want to say today is that age isn’t just an irrational robbery that takes things like good looks and athletic prowess away from us. Old age also has gifts to give to us if we are willing to receive them. There are things that you can only learn through experience. In fact, there are things that you can only learn through repeated failure. There is wisdom that can be mined from 20,000 days of living that you can’t learn at Harvard or Yale. 

When he was 81 years old, the British philosopher, Bertrand Russell, wrote an essay entitled “How to Grow Old.” He pointed out that getting older allowed us to transition into a time when we could increasingly let go of our ego. It wasn’t until I had read Russell’s essay that I was able to see how much competition had played a role in my entire career. There are none-too-subtle ego battles that take place in ministry. We often call it “steeple envy.” 

When I was a pastor of a moderately sized church in Louisville, KY, I had lots of friends in the clergy. We often took family vacations together. \

 

There was a group of ministers I met with every Tuesday as we worked out our sermon outlines together. We supported one another and helped one another when we could. But the pastors of the largest churches in our denomination in the area never attended those meetings, and so, it seemed natural that they often were the subject of our gossip.

 

In 1991, I was hired by the largest church of my denomination in the region when I was only 34. I suddenly had no friends among the clergy, and I realized that I had become the topic of cruel conversation in clergy gatherings. There was a solution to that though. Our denomination organized an annual meeting for the 50 pastors of the largest congregations in the country. I went to a few of those testosterone driven meetings of almost exclusively tall white men, all eyeing the prospects of their next promotion. The Christian religion had become something that was a far cry from the poor carpenter who died on a Roman cross that it claimed to follow long before I realized that I was no longer a part of it.

 

From the time that I was a student minister in a little rural church in Kentucky until I was even called to be the senior pastor of our denomination’s national cathedral, the question we were confronted with every day was whether our attendance was going up or down. I am certain that this is not a disease known only to pastors. 

 

Whether you are a pastor of a cathedral or the manager of a Starbucks, the question of growth is where you are trained to derive your self-esteem. If sales are less this month than they were last month, if average church attendance is less this year than it was last year, you have sleepless nights, anti-depressants, antacids, and anxiety in your future. It is almost impossible to be happy for a peer whose latest book is selling more copies than your last book. The actor has not yet been born who had the strength to not read the critics’ reviews of their last play or most recent movie. 

 

But age, especially in retirement, can give the gift of letting go of all of that. You don’t have to beat anyone. You don’t have to impress anyone. You don’t have to be better than your rivals. 

 

And even if you are, you don’t have to be more sexy than your younger competitors. Bertrand Russell says that when you can let your ego diminish, you can allow the universe of your interests to expand. I don’t have to be the one who can tell the difference between something that Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, or Plato actually said and what some internet meme says that they said. 

 

I can read a fiction novel just because I enjoy it, not because reading it will make me better informed, more culturally aware, or loaded with powerful quotes for my next sermon. You can go to your 50^th high school reunion regardless of how much more of you there is under your belt or how little coverage you still have on top of your head. You should have been able to go to your 20^th high school reunion without worrying about such things but at least, as a senior citizen, you should be able to let go of such concerns and simply be happy that you are one of the lucky ones who is still alive. 

 

When I, as a puppy preacher, came to town to be the senior pastor of a flagship church, I inherited a congregation with a lot of retired ministers in it. Most of them were kind and supportive but a couple of them were so insanely jealous that they were always sniping at me whenever they could, being publicly critical and offering their unsolicited advice about what I should be doing. One especially ego deficit fellow sat in the balcony every week, just shaking his head during each sermon and at the end of the service he would slowly make his way to the front of the church and loudly enough for everyone to hear, he would flatter the organist, then the soloist that day, and then he would turn and explain to me why I was an idiot and why that everything I had said was wrong. 

Honestly, sometimes his criticisms were spot on, and he was naming things that I really did need to reconsider, study, and think about more deeply. However, he delivered his predictable barbs in a way that never made me want to actually change and honestly made me just hate him a little bit more each week. He was the one the guys Mark Twain had in mind when he said that he had never actually wanted to kill anyone but he had read certain obituaries with uncommon satisfaction.

 

But advanced age can gift a person with wisdom, and if it does, it sure is nice when they learn how to pass it along in a way that can be digested. I was lucky enough to have a couple of those as well . . . people who would say things like, “Your message reminded me of this certain book, I have a copy of it if you would like to read it.” Or I would open a letter and find a copy of an article or a poem that some wise mentor was suggesting might be something I would appreciate…. And those articles and poems always became sermons later, as much for the kind way in which they were shared as for the quality of the content of the piece. 

 

There is literally no telling how much good you can do if you can get your own ego out of the way enough to teach without being condescending, to mix your correction with compliments, and to actually help someone else rather than stroking your own reputation. 

 

Next year, I will much more often be the retired pastor in the pew than I will be the preacher in the pulpit, and I am writing this message today as a reminder to myself of what kind of retired pastor I want to be, and I hope that you can apply my observations to your own situation in life. 

 

Bertrand Russell said that when you are young you are focused by your ego on your own accomplishments but as we age, we should increasingly see ourselves as being more a part of the whole of humanity. We have a lifetime of learning to share if we can just learn how to do it effectively.

 

I’ll close today with a confession: for the past several years, when I have been forced to take my car to the dealership, I have most often been shocked by both the incompetence and indifference of the staff and, as a writer, I have employed my very best skills and vocabulary in writing reviews that described their incompetence and indifference in the most forceful way possible. They send out those customer survey forms, so they must want to know the truth? However, what is most notable over these past six years is that their customer service has only gotten worse.

 

I have lately decided to take a different tact with them, I watch for the employee who seems to sincerely try to be helpful and I write to the management to compliment that employee, and if they really go out of their way to be helpful, I take a fruit basket or a box of chocolates in to thank them and allow them to share my praise with their peers. Anger and gratitude are both rooted in the same insights about the shop’s work, but gratitude makes me happier than anger does, and it appears to make the employees happier as well. I’m sorry that I had to be this many years old to realize this, but I hope that my sharing this may save you some time. 

 

Folks: growing older is unavoidable. Growing wiser is a choice left up to you.

 

“As Wide as the World”: Cultivating Wisdom and Compassion

“As Wide as the World”:

Cultivating Wisdom and Compassion

in the face of Violence and Coercion

David Ketchum June 11, 2023

Watch the video HERE

        When we lived in Cambodia, one of our favorite places to visit was  the Phnom Tamao Zoological Park and Wildlife Rescue Center. And although people sometimes called it the zoo, its mission focuses on addressing the illegal hunting and wildlife trade in Southeast Asia. Phnom Tamao is something more like a hospital and rehabilitation center, caring for injured, orphaned, or ill wild animals that were often rescued from wildlife trafficking. (As you might guess, many of these animals are critically endangered, endangered and vulnerable species.) Animals that can be fully rehabilitated are released back into their natural habitat (more than 8,000 animals were released from 2013 to 2018). Those that are no longer able to survive in the wild and need continued care remain at the Rescue Center.  We had the good luck to know one of the folks who coordinated the Free the Bears program there, a program that not only works to rescue and care for endangered sun bears, but also to transform cultural attitudes about sun bears, giving the bears, and their ecosystems, the best chance to thrive.

This reflection isn’t about this important work (work that was put at risk last year by the deforestation and planned development around the Rescue Center that was halted after public outcry). But it was during one of our visits to the Rescue Center when I had an experience I cannot forget. Looking for a break from the sunshine and heat, we wandered into a small gift shop. The woman working inside struck up a conversation and was delighted to know we could speak some Khmer. The conversation quickly shifted away from caring for animals, though, when she asked what we were doing in Cambodia. We explained our work, which fell into three broad categories: 1) understanding and healing family conflict and violence; 2) offering mediation, conflict coaching, and other peacebuilding services to English-speakers; and 3) supporting human rights and community development workers to integrate peace and conflict tools into their organizations and activities. She asked us some more questions, and then hugged us tightly, tears streaming down her face. 

We talked for quite a while, hearing her stories of surviving the Khmer Rouge, the civil war, and years of often violent chaos as Cambodia began to recover from decades of both systemic and random violence. She described how the violence had become just a way of life, a way to survive, and it was just habit for many people. It was, for me, a powerful reminder of how violence can become part of us – a possibility, an exception, a habit, a culture. That possibility exists within us, and we must deal honestly with that potential if we don’t want to be ruled by it. And that can be difficult, but the flipside is that healing and compassion can also become a part of us. Healing, compassion, and joy remain a possibility, even in the most desperate situations. When we act on that possibility, that choice may be exceptional at first, but, choosing it again and again, it can become a habit. And, when chosen together, as a community, it can become a culture. 

These experiences and lessons were very fresh on my mind when, near the end of our time in Cambodia, in 2010,  a study by researchers at the University of Valencia investigated which brain structures were at work during experiences of empathy and violence. They found that the neural pathways associated with empathy had a substantial “overlap ‘in a surprising way’ with those that regulate aggression and violence”. The lead author of the study, Dr. Luis Moya Albiol, explained: 

"We all know that encouraging empathy has an inhibiting effect on violence, but this may not only be a social question but also a biological one -- stimulation of these neuronal circuits in one direction reduces their activity in the other, … . Educating people to be empathetic could be an education for peace, bringing about a reduction in conflict and belligerent acts”. 

        This immediately made sense to me. At least, from my experience with both meditation practices (e.g., mindfulness and metta) and empathetic practices (e.g., transformative mediation and nonviolent communication), I have found myself encountering the scared, angry, and aggressive aspects within and finding them settling down, released in the embrace of compassionate awareness. But the study said something more than this, potentially helping us answer that nagging question, "How can we humans be so wonderful and horrible at the same time? So generous and compassionate on the one hand and so cruel and violent on the other?" It could even be that the possibility of violence is part of the price we pay for the beautiful opportunity to connect with each other with compassion, care, empathy and respect.

A further example comes from a 2016 “comprehensive review of the neurobiology of empathy” in comparison “with the neurobiology of psychopathic predatory violence by Doriana Chialant, Judith Edersheim, and Bruce H. Price (“The Dialectic Between Empathy and Violence: An Opportunity for Intervention?”). Although we typically think of violence in connection with self-defense and self-preservation, the authors point out that our capacity for empathy evolved “in the service of attachment for self-preservation.” If you think of the most foundational of mammalian social bonds, that of mother and infant, this makes sense. Empathy and a healthy bond are the most important protections for a newborn against predators and other dangers. These same capacities support all our social relationships. Empathy and healthy social bonds reduce personal distress and reduce avoidance behaviors. Healthy attachment supports healthy emotional regulation, which, in turn, supports our ability to experience and express empathy for others. 

At the chemical level, the authors point out that oxytocin is “released in the context of supportive relationships.” This is part of our brain’s reward systems. For example, hormonal shifts during pregnancy “predispose the brain reward system to form mother-infant bonds at birth,” and interactions between a securely attached mother and child “increase the production of oxytocin, activating the brain reward regions.” This modulates the HPA (hypothalamus-pituitary-adrenal) axis, “enabling greater trust, attachment, and empathy.” They also noted: 

  “Both secure attachment and higher degrees of empathic capacity hormonally activate the brain reward system, which, in turn, sustains attachment and nurturance. Because empathy and attachment are linked to the same hormonal events, they are both behaviorally and physiologically interdependent. … Even when empathic behaviors are extended to nonkin, these behaviors activate the reward system, inducing feelings of well-being. Thus, empathic behaviors are physiologically rewarding, if not addictive.”

The reverse is also true. The literature demonstrates that violent traits and psychopathic behaviors (including predatory and callous-unemotional violence) “are tightly linked to these same structures” activated during empathic processing. A “functional imbalance” of these pathways “leads to the cognitive and interpersonal/affective aspects of psychopathy.” However and hopefully, “A corollary of this,” the authors wrote, “is that strengthening empathy, which enhances bonding, might result in diminished P[redatory]V[iolence].”

        Our understanding of the human brain continues to deepen, and this topic is still one where we have a lot to learn. However, research like this points to something very hopeful. Namely, cultivating empathy and compassion, a wonderful practice for so many reasons, may also help heal and protect us (though not make us immune) from the potential for violence that has devastated so much of human history. It is another piece of evidence that may help us understand what practices and values (be they direct, structural and/or cultural) support a peaceful, just and happy place to live.

 

This is not an absolute decision; humans and human society are more complicated than that. But it is a question about the overall shape of our lives and our society. Will they be characterized by violence, relying on our capacities for coercion and aggression? Or will they be characterized by healthy social bonds, relying on our capacities for wisdom and compassion? Which action will be exceptional, violence or empathy? Which action will be normal, violence or empathy? We can understand both paths as strategies to protect ourselves, and recognize that both possibilities live within us. But the research also points out that these are diverging paths. We nourish one path at the expense of the other. As Dr. Albiol put it, “stimulation of these neuronal circuits in one direction reduces their activity in the other”. Each decision we make is something of a crossroads. Collectively and personally, our decisions answer the question: which direction do we choose?

As I’ve noted in the past, I am asked from time to time about why 

I have embraced the path of cultivating wisdom and compassion. Perhaps unsurprisingly in a society so often oriented around violence and coercion, the greatest anxiety is whether this path "works." I have also been told with some frequency about how naive I am to embrace wisdom and compassion and how, in doing so, I am endangering the whole planet. Most of these conversations come out of a moral view of violence, which rather pushes us into conversations about when violence is justified. But this can very easily camouflage the issue that violence always includes suffering: to victor and victim, to perpetrator and bystander, and to the earth itself.

Another of my memorable conversations in Cambodia came about when a very sincere man was struggling with these kinds of questions. He was just visiting Cambodia as part of a cultural exchange, learning about the types of peace and development work going on there. In Cambodia, he came face to face with horrible memories of still open wounds, many of the same tragedies our new friend talked about in that  wildlife rescue center gift shop. He had grieved the cruelty, brutality, and death recorded within the walls of S-21, the Khmer Rouge's torture machine. He had wept at the tower of skulls memorializing the killing fields. And he had listened to desperate stories of people facing violent eviction and land-grabbing, suffering violence in real time. He was overwhelmed and confused and found himself asking, over and over again, how can someone choose compassion and wisdom in the face of something like the Khmer Rouge? Won’t they inevitably fail?

        But if we visit these terrible places - the Killing Fields of Cambodia or the gas chambers of Germany or the mass graves of any one of the 20th century's genocides -  we need to remember what it is that we are witnessing. These are not testaments to the inherent weaknesses of wisdom and compassion, though they are testaments to our collective failure to cultivate wisdom and compassion. Instead, these places are monuments of violence, of the horrors humans are capable of inflicting and suffering when they do not learn the art of living with wisdom, compassion, joy and equanimity. We could similarly look at the ongoing violence endemic to our own society reflects the ultimate failure of violence as a long-term strategy for creating collective and personal wellbeing. 

        Arguments about when violence is necessary, justified, or unavoidable often distract us from the real issue at hand. And that issue is that it is unwise to wait to remove the greed, hatred and delusion from our lives until circumstances are at their worst. We should not wait to cultivate empathy and healthy social bonds until we are caught up in the terrors of war or when we are facing a great injustice. This practice is for every single day. It is about how you think about yourself, how you treat your children or work colleagues, and even how you express disappointment or respond to criticism. All violence is a form a suffering. We cannot wait until a crisis to begin the transformation. It really is like Thich Nhat Hanh said,

“When you have peace within yourself, you can bring peace to another person; when you both have peace you can bring peace to a third person. This is the only way.” 

It’s challenging to bring up this point without oversimplifying things. Cultivating authentic wisdom and compassion cannot be a retreat into unrealistic idealism. It's not pretending that pain and difficulty are never a part of our experience. And it's certainly not about coercing ourselves, resisting the present moment in favor of forcing positive or pleasant emotions onto ourselves or others. Instead, it's about being able to accept and engage that pain and difficulty with curiosity, openness, and love. "This is what it feels like when there is conflict, violence, suffering; this is what it feels like when there is anger, fear, grief; this is what it feels like when there is greed, aversion, and ignorance.” 

        The practice is to hold both the potential and mechanisms for violence together with the potential and mechanisms for wisdom and compassion. We have known for decades now, for example, that witnessing violence impacts the neurological development of children. Published in 1997, Bruce Perry’s  “Incubated in Terror: Neurodevelopmental Factors in the ‘Cycle of Violence’” remains a powerful exploration of how childhood experiences may condition us for life in a violent world (and thus perpetuate violence), as well as highlighting factors for breaking that cycle of violence. He wrote: 

 "It is in the nature of humankind to be violent, but it may not be the nature of humankind. Without major transformation of our culture, without putting action behind our 'love' of children, we may never learn the truth."

So how do we get there? How do we put into action our love for children, for one another, and even and especially for the Other and the enemy? One tool at our disposal is the Buddhist practice of metta, or lovingkindness, meditation, which I am planning to describe more fully next month. Very briefly, it is a simple technique for cultivating kindness, compassion, joy, and equanimity for oneself and others. 

        One of foundational studies on this practice is detailed in “Open Hearts Build Lives: Positive Emotions, Induced Through Loving-Kindness Meditation, Build Consequential Personal Resources.” A research team led by Barbara Fredrickson (with Michael Cohn, Kimberly Coffey, Jolynn Pek, and Sandra Finkel) described the empirically supported broaden-and-build theory. It “holds that positive emotions broaden people’s attention and thinking” by training the mind to: 1 ) “widen the scope of people’s visual attention”; 2) “broaden their repertoires of desired actions”; and 3) “increase their openness to new experiences”. The broadening increases our “sense of ‘oneness’” with others, our “trust in acquaintances,” and even our ability to recognize people “of another race.” The second part of the theory is that we can “build consequential personal resources.” The authors called this a growth trajectory, where cultivating positive emotions lead to growth over time in our capacity for: optimism, tranquility, the ability to adapt to change (ego-resilience), mental well-being, and healthy relationships. 

        This broadening-and-building has obvious overlaps with and impacts our capacity to choose empathy, and to intentionally cultivate wisdom and compassion, over the shortcuts of violence and coercion. It helps us notice possibilities that we would otherwise overlook and to be open to strategies that we would otherwise be too inflexible to consider. It helps us understand how we are connected and recognize the potential to know and trust those who we might otherwise think of as too different and maybe even too dangerous. It keeps us adaptable, even when the circumstances might be screaming for us to dig in and make demands. It helps keep a path open, when otherwise we might see no other option but hate. 

In the 9-week study conducted by Fredrickson’s team, they found that loving-kindness meditation increased participants’ daily experiences of “love, joy, gratitude, contentment, hope, pride, interest, amusement, and awe.” These were slow and small changes, spread out incrementally over the nine weeks. And they were linked with real increases in intra- and inter-personal skills, such as mindful attention and self-acceptance. Satisfaction in life increased, while depression decreased. These were “long-term gains that made genuine differences in people’s lives.” Significantly, these impacts were not so much direct effects. Instead, participants were building resources “that make their lives more fulfilling and help keep their depressive symptoms at bay.” The authors concluded that: 

  “people judge their lives to be more satisfying and fulfilling, not because they feel more positive emotions per se, but because their greater positive emotions help them build resources for living successfully.” 

Building those resources is key, because we are on a path to make wellbeing, in ourselves and in community, available to all. And that takes moving away from a culture where fear, anger, greed, scarcity, and ignorance is normal. It takes choosing a path where wisdom and compassion become the norm, so that we are building resources, personally and collectively, where we can thrive. As the Buddhist monk and scholar Nyanaponika Thera wrote: 

“The world suffers. But most [people] have their eyes and ears closed. They do not see the unbroken stream of tears flowing through life; they do not hear the cry of distress continually pervading the world. Their own little grief or joy bars their sight, deafens their ears. Bound by selfishness, their hearts turn stiff and narrow. Being stiff and narrow, how should they be able to strive for any higher goal, to realize that only release from selfish craving will effect their own freedom from suffering? / It is compassion that removes the heavy bar, opens the door to freedom, makes the narrow heart as wide as the world.” 

Thank you for being part of a community and movement that seeks to make that transformation real, taking our narrow hearts and opening them, “as wide as the world.” 

 

“Nothing Humane”: A Lament and Plea for Rights-Respecting Border Policies

“Nothing Humane”: A Lament and Plea for Rights-Respecting Border Policies

David Ketchum June 4, 2023

Watch the video HERE

Ángel Eduardo Maradiaga Espinoza traveled to the United States earlier this year. He was 17 years old; he was a dedicated athlete who had dreams of being a soccer player. But he was from Honduras, and he wanted better medical care than he could access in his home country. A cousin in Tampa, Florida, agreed to be his sponsor in the United States, and everything was in order when he left Honduras on April 25. He even made sure to pack enough medication to last three months, just in case. Ángel entered the US on May 3 at the Reynosa, Mexico crossing, and Immigration and Customs officials placed him on a plane to Florida on May 5. His next stop was the Gulf Coast shelter, operated by Jewish Family and Children Services.  But on the morning of May 10, 2023, staff found that Ángel had died in his sleep, evidently from a seizure. 

Ángel had a physical exam at a clinic on May 8, and he did not disclose his epilepsy or medication. He also did not have his (three months’ worth of) medication with him when he arrived on May 5, and it was unclear what happened to it. However, his family had sent his medical files to Gulf Coast, twice for good measure, and these documents were uploaded into the system. Tragically, staff did not read the files, and Ángel died just miles away from the better medical care he had come the USA to receive. 

        This was the kind of case where immigration policy is meant to shine, not end in heartbreak. But at least two stressors are prominent in making this tragedy possible. First, while the US itself might be the answer an asylum seeker needs, fear and uncertainty often characterize encounters with the US immigration system. For example, you might have found it curious that Ángel didn’t disclose his epilepsy, but it is not unusual for asylum seekers to hide medical conditions. As Danielle Hernandez, an immigration attorney, explained for the Tampa Bay Times, “You don’t know when you’re 17 that your health won’t be held against you when you’re seeking asylum.” Ana Lamb, an immigration rights activist, explained that this “climate of fear” was created by the types of immigration laws passed over the years. “All the laws being implemented in this state are terrorizing people, … . We will see more of this if we don’t take care of people coming in.” 

Second, the US immigration system is overburdened. In Ángel’s case, this resulted in the staff’s failure to read the medical notes that would have likely saved his life. And, in the tragic story described by Valerie Gonzalez in AP News, it was denial of care in the case of Anadith Tanay Reyes Alvarez, an eight year old girl who died in Border Patrol custody on May 17, 2023. Although the policy is that people are not to be held in custody more than 72 hours, Anadith’s family (her mom and dad, along with two siblings who were 14 and 12 years old) had already been in custody for nine days when Anadith died. After crossing the border in Brownsville, Texas, on May 9, Anadith was diagnosed with influenza by a doctor. They were then transferred to the Harlingen station on May 14. 

  That first morning at the Harlingen station, Anadith awoke to fever, headache, and bone pain. Her mother, Mabel Alverez Benedicks, reported these conditions, and the border agent (who was not a medical caregiver) waved it off, saying that “Oh, your daughter is growing up. That’s why her bones hurt. Give her water.” Mabel shared the doctor’s diagnosis and insisted on taking Anadith to the hospital, but agents said refused. Instead, they issued saline fluids and fever medication. But Anadith’s breathing worsened, she found it difficult to walk, and a sore throat kept her from eating. On Wednesday, they requested an ambulance, which was denied. Later that day, Anadith became unconscious and spit up blood. By the time agents agreed to take her to the hospital, she had no vital signs. 

Anadith was born with a congenital heart disease that required surgery three years ago. It was successful, and Anadith dreamed of becoming a doctor herself. Instead, she became another victim of the tragedies that have come to characterize the southern US border, even for those seeking asylum, who travel to the United States with the hope of relief from suffering or violence. 

      That the suffering on the border is overwhelming is an understatement.  For example, on May 21, 2023, more than 27,000 migrants were being held in detention by Immigration and Customs Enforcement. Over 240,00 more people were being monitored through the Alternatives to Detention programs. According to the ACLU, the United States spends $1.84 billion on these detentions. Border deaths have also been climbing each year. The dangers are well known. The terrain is often risky itself: dangerous rivers; extreme heat; deadly heights, including from border barriers. And then there is the deadliness that often accompanies smuggling organizations, who are notorious for everything from packing dozens of people into tractor trailers to abandoning migrants in dangerous places. In 2021, more than 560 migrants died, a new record – until 2022, when more than 850 migrants died. (This is despite the fact that Border Patrol has actually increased rescues and “life-saving operations.” In 2022, they performed more than 22,000 rescues, up 72% from 2021.) But these numbers are almost definitely lower than the real totals. The US Government Accountability Office issued a “Report to Congressional Committees” in April 2022 that documented that the: 

  “Border Patrol has not collected and recorded, or reported to Congress, complete data on migrant deaths, or disclosed associated data limitations. Specifically, Border Patrol … did not record all available information on migrant deaths from external entities in its system of record, or describe these data limitations in the report.”

The International Organization for Migration, a UN group, recorded more than 1,200 migrant deaths in the West in 2021, and more than 700 of them were on the U.S.-Mexico border. They named that border “the deadliest land crossing in the world.” Last September, a Morning Edition report from NPR recounted how a county sheriff in Texas even shared that their local funeral director had run out of room to store bodies until they could be transported to a neighboring county. “Right now,” he said, “they’re overwhelmed.” 

It’s important to look at this situation honestly, even though it is painful: immigration is an issue of life and death. Beyond the politics of choosing strategies to address immigration issues, we need to return to the question of ethics. Basic human decency should energize and motivate all of us to resist easy narratives that allow us to justify the status quo. As Robin Reineke, a University of Arizona professor and co-founder of the Colibri Center for Human Rights, has rightly explained: "It isn't just a matter of strategy anymore. … It's a matter of human life and the costs, socially and morally to an entire generation of border residents, and families of those who died crossing."

At the heart of our flawed policies is a commitment to deterrence, a commitment that has been prominent since at least the 1990s. The idea is that if illegal crossings could be stopped at the safest, easiest, most accessible places, potential migrants would be discouraged from trying to cross the border. It would simply be too dangerous. But that did not happen, and immigrants continued to cross the border. Each renewed commitment to deterrence created more and more dangerous crossings, and yet migrants continued to be willing to take those risks. This history should make it clear to us that deterrence policies, at least as they have been generally legislated and enforced, do not address the root issues driving immigration. Our policies have failed to honestly wrestle with the conditions that make dangerous border crossings worth the risk to thousands and thousands of people every year. 

Instead, we have focused on criminalizing migrants, refugees, and asylum seekers. We have also normalized denying them basic rights, including the right to a trial for those facing deportation. As Erica Bryant wrote for the Vera Institute of Justice, “Many immigrants with the legal right to live in the United States are deported simply because they can’t afford an attorney to help them navigate notoriously complicated immigration proceedings.”  For example, more than three fourths of immigration court cases in 2019 “had no legal representation” – even though studies have shown “that immigrants with attorneys are 3.5 times more likely to be granted bond (enabling release from detention) and up to 10 times more likely to establish their right to remain in the United States than those without representation.” Deportation can then have severe impacts on already vulnerable people, including “exile from home, separation from family, loss of income, and even forcible return to dangerous conditions in a person’s country of origin.” As the ACLU reminds us, “When the government has the power to deny legal rights and due process to one vulnerable group, everyone’s rights are at risk.”

These stories and issues are particularly relevant and important now, as the Biden administration rolls out a new border plan that largely relies on recycling past policies. For the last two years, the administration’s approach has depended on extending the Title 42 policy that the Trump administration created, which used the Covid-19 pandemic as a pretext to quickly expel migrants. As that policy finally expired last month, officials anticipated a wave of new migrants, joining the already crowded border. In response, 1,500 more troops were deployed to the border. This means that the US now has 4,000 soldiers stationed on the southern border. As Fernando Garcia, executive director of Border Network for Human Rights, put it, 

  “Now, without a doubt, we can say that the US-Mexico border is one of the most militarised borders in the world. … That continues to perpetuate this idea that the border is an issue that can be resolved through enforcement, in this case the deployment of the military. That is very wrong because it fails to recognise the nature of what we’re seeing.” 

The Biden administration’s reliance on Title 42 was already broadly viewed as a failure to live up to Biden’s campaign promises that the US “must do better to uphold our laws humanely and preserve the dignity of immigrant families, refugees, and asylum-seekers.” This criticism was intensified when the administration proposed its own asylum ban that doubled-down on the some of the most cruel aspects of past policy. Ari Sawyer described the rule for Human Rights Watch: 

“Through its ‘presumption of asylum ineligibility for certain noncitizens,’ Biden’s new rule combines a version of former President Donald Trump’s ‘third country transit ban’ – a policy Biden once campaigned against and a federal judge ruled unlawful – with additional asylum restrictions, … .”

In a nutshell, the policy continues the practice of turning away people seeking asylum at the US border, unless: 1) their request for asylum was already rejected at another country they traveled through; or 2) the asylum seeker waited for months in Mexico in order to get an appointment at the border. In the latter case, Sawyer points out that: 

“These appointments would be available only through a privacy-intrusive and internet-dependent cellphone application used by Customs and Border Protection called CBP One, which facial recognition technology that has been shown to reinforce racial discrimination in law enforcement and has driven family separation.” 

Unfortunately, this rule risks increasing pressure for migrants to cross the border illegally. For example, metering programs like CBP One sound convenient, but the courts have previously ruled them as illegal for good reasons. While asylum seekers wait, often indefinitely, while they try their luck at getting one of a few appointments, their safety is increasingly at risk. They are forced to endure uncertain and violent conditions, whether in their home country (which was dangerous enough that they want to migrate) or in border cities, which have their own dangers. And while they wait, the risks of a dangerous border crossing become more tolerable. The Biden administration’s rule was sufficiently outrageous that employees from the Department of Homeland Security, the asylum personnel that would implement the policy, filed a complaint against it. They called it “contrary to the moral fabric of our nation” and said implementing it would require them to violate their oaths. The union (representing 14,000 employees) commented that rule “rewrites the statute Congress enacted” and, 

  “At their core, the measures that the proposed rule seeks to implement are inconsistent with the asylum law enacted by Congress, the treaties the United States has ratified, and our country’s moral fabric and longstanding tradition of providing safe haven to the persecuted, … . Rather, it is draconian and represents the elevation of a single policy goal—reducing the number of migrants crossing the southwest border—over human life and our country’s commitment to refugees.”

I agree with that criticism, while also recognizing the complexities involved. To their credit, the Biden administration did establish a program, led by Vice President Kamala Harris, for creating a “U.S. Strategy for Addressing the Root Causes of Migration in Central America.” They released a report in July 2021 that acknowledged:

• “addressing the root causes of migration is critical to our overall immigration effort.”
• “providing relief is not sufficient to stem migration from the region.”
• “unless we address all of the root causes, problems will persist.”

        The report’s pillars are solid, naming important root causes driving  immigration: economic insecurity and inequality; corruption; lack of human rights (including labor rights and a free press); organized violence and crimes; and sexual, gender-based, and domestic violence. And Vice President Harris’ cover message also emphasizes the need to “build on what works” while pivoting “away from what does not work.” “It will not be easy,” she wrote, “and progress will not be instantaneous, but we are committed to getting it right.” 

        The challenging truth is that it is difficult to be patient during a crisis, even if the crisis has been centuries in the making. And from a political point of view, public discourse tends to be caught in a tug-of-war between arguments emphasizing the necessity of a secure border and arguments emphasizing the rights and humanity of those crossing the border. And because immigration is tangled up in so many other open wounds in US history and culture, talking about immigration puts us directly in the path of discussions about colonialism, imperialism, and centuries of systemic racism and classism. There are painful, difficult, and even shameful parts of US history that we are tempted to forget, rather than honestly acknowledging and addressing them. The related social issues are also painful and complex, from honestly acknowledging intractable economic injustice and labor exploitation to wrestling with the painful realities around drug production, distribution, and addiction, on both sides of the border. These kinds of conversations and transformations are hard work, and it is easier to dehumanize immigrants - and one another. This has made immigration issues particularly vulnerable to partisan divides. And while we argue, more people suffer. 

I called this reflection a lament, because my main goal was simply to return our awareness to the tragedies suffered by migrants (especially along the US southern border, but also around the world) to our grief, and hopefully to our care.  As James Baldwin taught us, “The world changes according to the way people see it, and if you alter even by a millimeter the way people look at reality, then you can change it.” Beyond our partisan divides, beyond our fears, beyond the difficult history that both binds us together and drives us apart, we share a common humanity. No one wants to suffer, and our well-being is bound up together. To be fully human in this moment requires us to honestly look at the continued abuses and injustices suffered by migrants, and to act in ways that embody and insist on the humanity, safety, and wellbeing of all – including and especially vulnerable asylum seekers and refugees. We should not – we cannot – stand idly by.