“No One Hears the Sound of a Wooden Bell, and No One Hears the Voice of the Poor”
Nov. 19, 2023 Dr. Roger Ray
There is an old Haitian proverb that says, “No one hears the sound of a wooden bell, and no one hears the voice of the poor.” It is no surprise that this proverb comes to us out of centuries of Haitian experience of colonialism. Their transiti
on from foreign rule towards democratic self governance has been painful and still, the poor of Haiti could say that their voices are not meaningfully heard.
You have heard me say in the past that most of the major world religions were formed in a time of rebellion, a rebellion of the poor against the ruling class, or the rebellion of slaves against captors or invaders. There is a way of reading the Jesus narrative as a message of love and peace that encourages people to be long suffering if not martyrs, to sell all that you have and to give to the poor. But most Jesus scholars also see a tradition that may be older that portrays Jesus as a revolutionary who was opposed to the Roman Empire and those among his peers who had made uncomfortable alliances with the Empire. Which makes the crucifixion a lot easier to understand. For Rome to execute an insurrectionist makes sense, killing a preacher for teaching people to be loving and generous doesn’t really make any sense, does it?
Buddha also taught that life is full of suffering, but there is an anti-monarch, rejection of the ruling class in Buddhist tradition as well. Muhammad, unlike the tradition of opulent califs who followed him, lived in poverty, by choice, to identify with the common people.
Just as Jesus said that it is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a rich person to enter the Kingdom of God, Muhammad said, “The poor will enter paradise 500 years before the rich.”
In the modern era, those of us who try to articulate a spiritual world view, often talk about not simply giving alms to the poor but actually empowering the poor so that their voices will be heard, so that the government really will be compelled, by the ballot box and by democratic government, to treat the rich and the poor, the privileged and the under privileged in the same way. The Kingdom of God is, by definition, a civilization which observes the values of God . . . which is about justice and not just charity.
And employer who puts out a box of free canned goods and some frozen turkeys during the holidays for low salaried workers to take home, has confused charity with justice. That employer should be paying the staff enough to buy their holiday dinner with dignity and not have to serve up humiliation first.
Most of us were expected to read George Orwell’s 1945 novel, Animal Farm, when we were in school. It is generally believed to be a parody of communism, which starts out with high ideals but quickly evolves into a kind of abusive totalitarianism. But when we look at it today, I’m not so sure that the shoe fits any better on the communist foot than it does on the western democracy foot.
In the novel, the animals on a farm have a successful revolution, getting rid of the farmers. After a sort of constitutional convention in the barnyard, the animals came up with seven laws that would guide them:
It included such things as “no animal shall wear clothes, or sleep in a bed, or drink alcohol,” but it concluded with the firm affirmation that, “All animals are equal.”
The seven laws were publicly displayed but as the novel proceeds, we see how the pigs were more intelligent, more inventive, than the other animals and they began to reward themselves for their extra responsibility with special privileges. And extra words would appear over night on the laws . . no animal shall sleep on a bed, with sheets!
But the one that we all remember the most clearly is the change from “All animals are equal,” to “All animals are equal, but some are more equal than others.”
Our nation’s founders, sick of rigid European class structures and with heads full of French philosophy, wrote in the Declaration of Independence that we are all equal; well, it was 1776 so they said that all men were equal, but they didn’t really mean that either…. White men were a lot more equal than black men. They penned those words about equality in a culture that still defended the institution of slavery, of indentured servanthood, and which, both in practice and in law, regarded women as having little more than a supportive role in society.
And so, in the name of liberty, equality, and freedom, they wrote a constitution that was riddled with compromises. They were inspired by the ideal of society defined by equality, but they caved into the reality of their day in which black Africans were slaves, poor Europeans were indentured servants, all women were almost without rights, and children could be made to work in both agriculture and industry.
There was, at that time, a vigorous debate about the legitimacy of slavery and so the larger slave holding states wanted to make sure that their right to maintain the institution of slavery wouldn’t come down to a matter of majority vote, a vote that they knew they would lose. The slave holding states were agricultural and so they had much smaller populations than the more industrialized northern states. So the make up of the legislative branch was itself, a compromise. The Congress was made up of a fluid number of representatives, depending upon how many people live in a state. Right now, Alaska, North Dakota, and South Dakota, only have one member of congress each because so few people live there. California has 52 and Texas has 38. But the balance was struck by creating a senate in which every state gets 2 senators. North Dakota has two and California has two.
In the eighteenth century, this protected states like Georgia from being ruled by a state like New York but in our time, it means that a Senator from California represents about 20 million citizens and a senator from North Dakota represents fewer than 400,000. Our founders would never have conceived of a state with 40 million people in it. There were fewer than 3 million people in the United States when the constitution was written.
The compromise they made in the late 18th century to keep the slave owning states in the union has become a matter of gross under representation of larger states and absurd over representation in smaller states. . . which allows my home state of Kentucky to send both Mitch McConnell and Rand Paul to the Senate. I can see why people in Kentucky might vote to send those two almost anywhere to get them out of the state, but, you see, it gives them a disproportionate amount of influence in government. That is not one person – one vote, that’s not democracy.
We can say that all Americans are equal, but people who live in the Dakotas and Alaska are about 50 times more equal than people living in California, at least so far as having a voice in the senate goes. And, oddly enough, there are not huge impoverished black and Hispanic neighborhoods in the Dakotas or Alaska. That kind of skewed proportion effectively means that the poor in our most populated states can’t be heard as easily as we might hear a wooden bell.
The second compromise enshrined in our constitution is the creation of the wholly and exclusively American institution that we call the electoral college. When we vote for a president, we don’t just add up the votes and declare the person with the most votes the winner. In fact, two of our presidents in this century, lost the popular vote but still became president because they won the electoral college vote: both George W. Bush and Donald Trump failed to win the popular vote.
You hear people in our area, here in Missouri, saying that there is no reason to even cast a vote in a presidential election because even if the vote is divided by 51% to 49%, the winner gets all of the electoral votes, and in Missouri, that will be the Republican candidate.
In this century, even though the vote is statistically close, the Republican candidate gets all 10 of our electoral votes. . . the sometimes as high as 49.3% of Missouri voters who vote for the Democratic candidate literally don’t get their votes counted at all. 48 states give all of their electoral college votes to the winner with only Maine and Nebraska dividing their votes proportionally. Because of this, voting in either reliably red or reliably blue states means next to nothing. It is only the swing states that actually choose a president. And there are not many of those.
I am saying all of this exactly one year before our next presidential election because you are going to be treated to lots of talk in the news over the next year about Gerrymandering, redistricting, and dozens if not hundreds of state laws intended to suppress voting among poor, immigrant and minority populations. For those of us who are white, straight, middle class, native born Americans, all of this can sound like the buzzing of talking heads in the background.
People like me rarely feel that we are marginalized. We don’t feel, in any existential way, that our government is set up to discriminate against us. I am a liberal in a red state but for most of my life, when I have called one of my senators, the senator calls me back. When I have shown up for a demonstration in Washington, D.C. even our Republican representatives make time to talk to me. They assiduously ignore everything that I say to them, but I can’t say that I don’t have a voice…. It is a loud, irritating, and largely ineffective voice, but it is my voice.
Having a weekly political column in the region’s newspaper back in the day when people actually read newspapers gave me a megaphone rarely afforded to my ilk.
But if we are actually spiritual people, defined by our compassionate world view, we can’t ignore the suppression of the votes of the poor and minorities just because we happen to be neither poor nor a minority.
Hard fought for civil liberties are being eroded or blatantly taken away from us. Last summer, women lost control over their own reproductive lives, and many conservatives have the marriage rights of the gay community in their sights. . . and you shouldn’t have to be either a woman or gay to be exercised about this.
As a straight man who advocates for gay civil rights, as a man who advocates for the equality of women, I and people like me cannot be satisfied with simply being an advocate for oppressed minorities of which we are not a part. We white liberals need to give up on seeing ourselves as the saviors of the black race. Men do not need to constantly act like we’re in a leadership role in the feminist movement, and straight people need to promote gay leaders of gay rights and not try to be heroes in our own right.
I don’t regret any of the years that I have spent in publicly advocating for the poor, for minorities, and the LGBT+ community, but it is not my voice the world needs to hear. Those of us in the privileged majority need to make space for the voices of the marginalized. We don’t need to play as saviors and heroes, we need to applaud the leadership that is emerging in each of these groups.
After 50 years of civil rights and equality speeches, with all of we liberal clergy members, journalists and politicians, still, when you look at our congress, which has more women than any previous congress, but they still make up only one fourth of the Senate and Congress and the last time I checked, women make up just over one half of the population.
Our current congress has more openly gay members than any previous congress but that number is still just 13 . . . hardly representative of the size of their community.
More than half of the members of congress are millionaires and very few have ever been what we would call poor. All of the efforts at voter suppression are intended to have the effect of keeping our congress primarily white, male, straight, and rich and that is just not the America that I know.
We have taken some serious steps backwards in the past few years. I suppose that it was naive to hope that progress would always go in a straight line. But we must not give up. I no longer pray for the the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, The courage to change the things I can, And the wisdom to know the difference.
I think that it is time for a new prayer, now I pray for the strength to change the things that I cannot accept and I hope that you do too.
