“How Much Does it Cost Me?”

“How Much Does it Cost Me?”        Feb. 25, 2024         Dr. Roger Ray

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Like most parents, when it came time to start teaching my daughter about how to manage money, I started to give her a small allowance so that she could save for the things she wanted to buy between major gift giving holidays. Somehow, she seemed inherently to be very good at saving, and by saving, I mean that she never wanted to spend “her” money but still managed to come up with passionate requests for things that cost money to buy.

 

I must have made a mistake at some point and offered to subsidize a purchase; I don’t remember the incident, but I know that we went through about ten years of her asking me, “But how much would it cost me?”  If the necklace she wanted cost $50, she would seriously ask, as if there were an automatic princess discount, “But how much would it cost me?” Somehow, her money was always more precious than my money. My money was fluid and evidently an endless resource. Her money was like a family heirloom to be treasured and never to be parted with. It is possible that she learned this perspective from her mother, but it would be rude for me to speculate about that here.

 

My daughter’s question, however, continues to be a part of our entire culture. Countries that have universal healthcare may have free medical service at the point of receiving the medical care, but that doesn’t mean that it is free. Someone is paying for it somehow.

 

In most cases there is no charge to drive on our city streets, or for calling the fire department, the police department, or for sending our children to public schools, and yet all of these things cost a great deal of money. 

 

What is disturbing to many of our peers is the simple fact that the United States is not, on the whole, a capitalist country. Our economy is more socialist than it is capitalist, we just don’t want to allow ourselves to be made aware of it. I have always found it odd that with rare exception, even the most conservative among us, do not object to the fact that public schools provide 13 years of education at no charge to the families that use it, however, when we it is suggested that community colleges and state universities should be made to be tuition free, we begin to hear protests about socialism. We have free public schools because we are a better and more prosperous society if most of our citizens are literate. But most countries in the world realize that they will have an even better and more prosperous society if those are able to take advanced training. As some kind of trade school or college education becomes more and more crucial to economic success in our country, we will become an increasingly economically tiered society if only the children of the affluent can go to college. 

 

Looking at this map, you should take special note of the fact that countries that are wanting to emerge economically, are making the sacrifice to make higher education tuition free. If you get tired of not being able to find a physician, physical therapist, or dentist, who is from the United States, take a look at this map and you can see why. We are importing professionals because it is simply too expensive for most Americans to even consider going to college long enough to earn those degrees.

 

It may surprise you to learn that there was a time when fire departments were owned by insurance companies. If your home was insured, the insurance company would send the fire department to put out the fire in your house but if your neighbor’s house was on fire and they were not insured, well, get out the marshmallows because that baby was going to burn. But, as it turns out, letting my neighbor’s house burn is not good for my house. We are all better off if the fire department is dispatched to the houses of the poor, even if it adds to the tax burden of the community. 

 

And when it comes to healthcare, you don’t want to be watching TV with me when one of those commercials comes on featuring kids with cancer or with serious birth defects, begging for donations for life saving treatments, prosthetics, surgery, or wheelchairs. Every other developed country in the world realizes that the whole of society needs to provide basic healthcare to those who need it but in the richest country in the world, the richest country in all of human history, will still trot out kids with horrible diseases to beg for change from donors to get the care that they need. We tend to accept this as just being normal but if you travel abroad, it is pretty hard to defend this situation to others.

 

I was visiting Copenhagen a few years ago, to visit the grave of Soren Kierkegaard, which shouldn’t come as a surprise to any of our regular listeners. I was sitting in a coffee shop, studying a tourist guidebook, and a local struck up a conversation with me. He was a dentist who had immigrated from Iran, and he was so proud of his adopted homeland that he insisted on being allowed to give me a tour of the city himself. 

Waving his arm around the world’s largest open air shopping mall, he exclaimed, do you notice that there is no one begging in the streets? No disabled people asking for help? Sure, he said, our income tax rate is about 50% but we don’t have a homelessness problem, we have very few people in jail. Higher education is provided by the state and even with a high tax rate, I live in a nice home with a view of the ocean, I have two cars, lots of time off, and I travel around the world when I vacation. 

 

If you ask him, what does it cost him to live in a compassionate, civilized society, he would tell you, it costs him half of what he earns, but unlike most of our American peers, he is happy to pay it in order to have such a wonderful life. 

 

What does it cost us to not have tuition free higher education, to not have universal healthcare, to not have enough public housing, enough child care, and mental health services? What it costs us is chronically feeling unsafe on our city streets. It costs us in panhandlers at busy intersections. It costs us having home security and enough paranoia to make many of our citizens arm themselves like they are preparing for a zombie apocalypse. It costs us in having the highest rate of incarceration in the world:

This chart shows incarceration by percentage of population. You would think that Canada wouldn’t be that much different from us but we have five times as many people in prison as they do. Ten times as many as Denmark. We have more of our citizens in prison than any other western nation, by far. AND we have nearly 4 million people on parole. 

What does it cost us to not pay a living wage to workers, to not provide educational opportunity to the whole of the population? What does it cost us to limit medical and mental health care? It costs what we spend on building bigger prisons, hiring more police, paying higher insurance premiums, and, of course, being afraid to go downtown at night or ride on public transportation. 

 

As it turns out, it costs a lot of money to be greedy and cruel. Look, I know that using words like “greedy” and “cruel” may seem harsh but this is what it comes down to. Still, it is counter intuitive because we end up paying more in taxes to beef up our police forces, and build larger prisons than it would cost us to make healthcare universal and to make it easier to go to college. And we should be aware that our national greed and cruelty ends up costing you your quality of life, your feelings of safety and security, and makes it hard to go insisting that this is a great country. This is a rich country with a lot of poverty and a lot of citizens in prison.

 

For my entire adult life, I have drawn a salary from a charity, and not just any non-profit but, rather uniquely, a non-profit that ostensibly provides exactly the same services to those who do not donate at all as it does to those who donate very liberally. In fact, in my experience with church, nearly half of those who attended never donated, at least not in a way that we could record. There were those who made an impressive pledge every year who never actually donated any of it, year after year. Oddly, the families in question were rather wealthy and they didn’t mind throwing their weight around in board meetings but, in actual fact, they had no skin in the game. 

 

Hospitals are non-profits but, trust me, they don’t wait for your donations for the services they provide. 

But churches are unique in that they need money to survive but they can’t bill their users. Which is why they tend to talk about money so much. I have not brought up the matter of supporting my work for several years. I bring it up now because even though we have several thousand listeners, we have only about three dozen donors, some of whom donate as little as $1 a month. So, do the math, how much of your money will it take to keep me off of the pickleball courts for a few hours per week?

 

Forgive me for making this so personal but, I’m afraid that it needs to be said. We are now nearly a generation removed from when people paid for subscriptions for newspapers and news magazines. We get most of our content from the internet but who is producing that content and are they reliable, do they have credible credentials? Increasingly, we are a generation that no longer attends any church but I’m trying to hold onto a place on the internet to at least provide a spiritual perspective on current events and public ethics.

 

Our congregation in Springfield, Missouri was the heart of my work for many years, but the pandemic coupled with my looming retirement made us decide to sell our property and to eventually stop having services in Springfield at all. I packed up this pulpit and microphone and moved to Florida where it has been my plan to continue to work on a part time basis. The church now physically exists in two rooms in my home, one is an office, and the other is this recording studio.

 

I believe that health care and higher education should be paid for out of the public purse, but I accept that churches, even an online only church, only continues to exist when those who value its work will donate enough to keep it afloat. 

 

I could charge a download fee, but I have resisted that idea because, just like a bricks and mortar church, I want people to have access to our progressive content whether they can or will also donate. In that sense, I am a real capitalist. My listeners get to vote with donations to keep me going. When what I do is not sufficiently important to people to support my work, then I will start kayaking more often and playing more pickleball. 

 

When I sample what other progressive religious exists on line, I still feel like what I am doing is valuable and contributing significantly to the available content. If you agree, I hope that you can get some skin in the game with me and begin to support us at whatever level you can afford.

 

You can donate through Paypal by clicking on our website: wwwspfccc.org

Or you can set up monthly donations to come from your bank’s bill pay option, sending your donations to the Emerging Church at 1015 E. 13^th Square, Vero Beach, FL 32960. 

 

I hope that this content matters enough to you for you to become a partner with me in making it available to the world.

 

“Fear is the Root of Anger”

 “Fear is the Root of Anger”   Feb. 11, 2024     Dr. Roger Ray

 

click here to see the video

 

 

 

 

 

 

Many years ago I heard the famous author and psychiatrist, M. Scott Peck, say in a lecture that if you need therapy but you can’t afford it, pretend that you are an alcoholic and go to Alcoholics Anonymous meetings. It is actually pretty good advice. AA literature is the best distillation of psychological insight and treatment that you are going to find anywhere. It isn’t perfect and clinicians often argue with their methods and conclusions but, there is a lot of wisdom collected through their decades of experience in their literature.

 

One of my favorite passages in AA’s “Big Book”, is found on page 66 where it says: If we were to live, we had to be free of anger. The grouch and the brainstorm were not for us. They may be the dubious luxury of normal men, but for alcoholics these things are poison.

 

 

I love that phrase that calls anger a “dubious luxury.” There are things to be angry about . . . injustice, racism, poverty, hunger, war, and the media’s obsession with Taylor Swift but as a product of the patriarchal south, I can tell you that anger was sharpened into being the only emotion allowed to men in almost any situation. We were not supposed to cry, we couldn’t be too sad, too depressed, too worried, or scared, but we proved our masculinity by being angry. 

 

I can remember it as if it was just yesterday, nearly 40 years ago my father and I took a trip to visit my uncle, my father’s eldest brother, who was near death. Presley was a kind old bachelor who lived in a little house on a lake near Chicago where he kept an immaculate house and well-tended flower and vegetable gardens. 

 

But this visit was marked by chaos. Presley was wasting away from all of the side effects of diabetes. His clothes hung on his withered body, he was unshaven, and his hair and fingernails were too long. My father saw what I saw, and he became very angry. He was made at the cleaning lady who had not polished the silver or properly cleared the house of cobwebs. He was mad at the neighbor’s son who was sloppy in his job of mowing the lawn and weeding the gardens. He was mad at the visiting nurse because, well, because Presley was obviously dying, and she hadn’t stopped it.

 

What I saw in my father was fear . . . fear of mortality . . . fear of losing his father figure . . . fear that he couldn’t do anything about it. What I saw was that the nurse, the cleaning lady, and even the teenaged neighbor had all realized that Presley was a lonely old man who was near death and so, when they came to his house, they spent time sitting in the lawn chairs just talking to him. They listened to his stories about his years on a farm in Kentucky, about his decades of work in the steel industry, about his late wife, his vineyard, his church, his friends.  Because it was time to let the silver tarnish and the weeds to have their way with the gardens. It was time to just show a dying man some love.

 

When Presley died, his minister came to talk to dad and me, the way that ministers do when an old church member dies . . . he had only known Presley as a sick old man who was rarely able to attend church and so he asked us to tell him about Presley. My dad stuttered and shook and just said that he didn’t know what to say. His mind was so clouded by fear and anger, he couldn’t even describe his favorite person in the world. Presley was the only one of nine children who never had children and so he lavished patriarchal attention on his nieces and nephews. I told the minister a lot . . . that in my childhood, if I got to eat in a restaurant, it was because Uncle Presley was buying. If I got a nice present on Christmas, it was because he sent it. He noticed potential in me that no one else did, and he sent me a subscription to National Geographic so that we could talk on the phone about the places it described.

 

We exchanged photos of the birds at our feeders and talked about the migratory patterns of songbirds. He took me to science museums, the Chicago Adler Planetarium. My father undoubtably had many more profound memories that he simply couldn’t articulate because, well, to say it plainly, anger made him stupid. 

 

Anger is a dubious luxury. I’m angry about the repeal of the Roe v Wade protection of women’s reproductive rights. I’m angry about the thousands of immigrant children who were kept in cages to punish their parents for daring to flee violence and hunger to give their children a better life. And, paradoxically, I’m angry about Israel’s history of oppression of Palestinians, and I’m even more angry about the terrorist attacks against Israelis by Hamas, Hezbollah, and whoever Iran is arming now. 

 

But I don’t want to waste anger on the drivers at the intersection who get so lost in their cell phones that they forget to drive when the light turns green. I don’t want to waste the energy of being angry at the server who gets so caught up in a conversation in the kitchen that they forget to ever come back to the table and actually provide service. I don’t want to be angry about having to wait in line at the pharmacy, at the department of motor vehicles, or at McDonalds when someone ahead of me is staring at the menu board as if they have never heard of a hamburger before. 

 

This topic came to mind lately as the media gave nearly constant coverage to the caucus in Iowa and the primary in New Hampshire. Over and over again, interviewers asked voters who they were going to vote for or who they voted for and, as you know, most of  them favored Donald Trump, who they said, “had been a good president.” 

 

They obviously weren’t interviewing people who were on their way out of the monthly MENSA Club meeting, but they looked normal enough, the kind of people you see in the grocery store or in line at the DMV but they were just casually referencing Donald Trump as having been a good president and, I’m entirely sincere here, I have no idea what they are talking about. 

 

And I’ll tell you, after moving to Florida, I found a nearby coffee shop where I liked to sit and study but the owner kept coming over to my table and asked me what I was working on. This past week, when I told her that I was working on a sermon about grievance and MAGA voters, she and her sister came unglued in stereo. 

 

They both insisted that they were not Trump supporters because they were angry about anything but rather it was because Joe Biden is so evil. They insisted that he is giving the country away to China, with no examples given, and that he had turned America into a socialist country, again, with no examples of encroaching socialism . . . Biden is old but public schools, police and fire departments, the army, air force, and navy, all socialist institutions, were not his idea. 

 

It is true that Biden is old and it is true that he isn’t the smartest man ever to occupy the oval office. He is not the sharpest knife in the drawer, and he may not even be the sharpest spoon in the drawer. He graduated near the bottom of his law school class but he did graduate on his own, rather than having his sister write all of his papers for him which is how Trump got through college. He isn’t an Einstein or even a Kennedy or an Obama, but you just can’t say that he is evil. He is a nice old man who has a big heart who probably shouldn’t have ever run for president but this is how our nominating system works . . . or, more accurately, doesn’t work.  Still, as one friend recently said to me, Biden would be a better president as a cadaver than Trump would ever be and that, in my estimation, is not hyperbole. It is a fact.

 

But let me not go on an MSNBC style rant, what do the people who worked closely with Trump say about him, the Republicans who worked in his administration:

General John Kelly, the former director of Homeland Security, was hand picked by Trump to serve as his chief of staff to bring stability to the White House and the Trump administration but he left in 2020 saying: “The depths of his dishonesty is just astounding to me. The dishonesty, the transactional nature of every relationship, though its more pathetic than anything else. He is the most flawed person I have ever med in my life.”

https://www.cnn.com/2020/10/16/politics/donald-trump-criticism-from-former-administration-officials/index.html

 

 

His Attorney general, Bill Barr, after defending him against all comers for years, finally broke ranks with him over the theft of nuclear secrets and other classified documents: 

Barr also said Trump is a “fundamentally flawed person who engaged in reckless conduct.” 

“He had no right to those documents,” Barr said. “The government tried for over a year quietly and with respect to get them back, which was essential that they do, and he jerked him around.”

https://ny1.com/nyc/all-boroughs/politics/2023/06/19/ex-trump-officials-among-loudest-critics-in-documents-case

 

His first Secretary of State, Rex Tillerson, said: “(Trump’s) understanding of global events, his understanding of global history, his understanding of US history was really limited. It’s really hard to have a conversation with someone who doesn’t even understand the concept for why we’re talking about this.” Of course, after a private conversation trying to explain NATO to Trump, Tillerson famously left the oval office muttering that Trump was a “fXXXing moron.” 

Mark Esper, the former Secretary of Defense said: “I think he’s unfit for office. … He puts himself before country. His actions are all about him and not about the country. And then, of course, I believe he has integrity and character issues as well.”

 

In a recent article, CNN lists 24 former administration members, from the former vice president to a 20 something-aid to the chief of staff, who have said that Trump is unfit to hold office again.

https://www.cnn.com/2023/10/03/politics/donald-trump-former-allies-what-matters/index.html

 

This is not a matter of partisan politics. These are just obvious and indisputable facts, without even going into the personal stuff about his public statements about wishing that he could date his daughter, the dozens of women who have accused him of sexual assault, his recent trial that involved both rape and defamation of character, and the more than 90 indictments against him for voter fraud, tax cheating schemes, and insurrection against the United States…. Of of which my former friend at the coffee shop says, are fake allegations . . . even the ones where we have video and audio tapes of the crimes as they took place.

I think that the Georgia journalist, Jay Bookman put my feelings into words when he said: For me personally, the most painful aspect of his rise has been the damage it has caused to my faith in my fellow Americans.   I do not understand how a person can watch what he says and does and still believe he belongs in the Oval Office. 

This is the issue, isn’t it? What is the attraction of Donald Trump that has a sweet little old lady leaving a New Hampshire polling place saying, “I don’t like how he runs his mouth but I think he is a good president”?

 

Like Cornell West, the Union Seminary Professor, who said on Bill Maher’s show in 2020, “How can, in a country of more than 300 million people, we end up with Joe Biden and Donald Trump as our candidates for president?” And now, he is so disgusted with the fact that we are going to end up with the same choice in 2024 that West is running for president himself, but he has a point. These are two horrible candidates, its just that one is so much more horrible than the other one.

 

Seriously, if we were given a choice between Trump and Charles Manson, I’m afraid that I would still have to vote for Charles Manson . . . at least he has been dead for 7 years and isn’t able to do much more harm; Trump is dangerous to democracy, to the global economy, and he is a friend to every dictator and tyrant in the world. And yet, about half of American voters are poised to vote for him again.

 

What, we all wonder, is the draw? It is too easy to say that MAGA America is a cult. Even a cult has to give you something to draw followers. All I can see that Trump gives to my older brother, to the lady at the coffee shop, and the disgruntled voters of America is a validation of their anger. 

 

But anger is exhausting. I don’t think that anger is the real root of people’s attraction to Trump, I think it is what lies behind anger, which is fear. White people who are afraid of losing privilege. Evangelicals who are afraid of losing control of society and social norms. I think that it is men who fearful of female autonomy. I think it is poor people who are afraid of losing their chance of becoming rich. I think it is low wage employees who are afraid that illegal immigrants might take their jobs at even lower wages. 

 

I have heard Bill Maher say several times that we can hate Donald Trump but we can’t hate all Trump voters but, I will confess that I don’t always feel that way. I hate racism. I hate misogyny. I hate xenophobia. I hate homophobia. I hate classism. And, in effect, isn’t that the same thing as hating Trump voters? 

 

But maybe, just maybe, if we can not react to them as simply being racist, white privileged, angry white fascists and see them as being more pitiable frightened people who need to be made to feel safe in their own homes, who need to be reassured they are not being replaced by poor immigrants, Jews, or college educated people . . . they’re just being replaced by AI and robots . . . because, even if self driving taxis sometimes have accidents, you at least don’t have to listen to their racist screeds while being driven to the airport. 

In the end, I just want to say what I have said to you before through the years. Let go of your racism. Set aside your need for privilege. Embrace immigrants, and people of other gender identities, and religions as your equals and the best way to do that is to simply stop being afraid.