“Life is a shipwreck, remember to sing in the lifeboats”

“Life is a shipwreck, remember to sing in the lifeboats”  Nov. 10, 2019  Dr. Ray

click here to see the video

Ralph Waldo Emerson

“Write it on your heart

that every day is the best day in the year.

He is rich who owns the day, and no one owns the day

who allows it to be invaded with fret and anxiety.

Finish every day and be done with it.

You have done what you could.

Some blunders and absurdities, no doubt crept in.

Forget them as soon as you can, tomorrow is a new day;

begin it well and serenely, with too high a spirit

to be cumbered with your old nonsense.

This new day is too dear,

with its hopes and invitations,

to waste a moment on the yesterdays.”

I brought a first date to a very abrupt end when I made the very basic observation that chiropractics and acupuncture are largely based on a placebo effect. She took considerable umbridge to this claim and launched into quite a speech about several things she believes in passionately that are not rooted in science. Not that I like to turn to health insurance companies as arbitrators of reality but there is a reason why most of them won’t pay for visits to a chiropractor, an acupuncturist, a hypnotist, or for supplements, for much the same reason that they won’t pay for witch doctors, palm readers, astrologers, fortune tellers, or psychics. And I don’t say that to be incendiary or insulting. There is a lot of hard science behind physical therapy, and osteopathy, but a lot of what passes for holistic treatments are effective only when the patient believes that they are effective. History is full of examples of virtual “snake oil” treatments that enjoyed popularity for a long time, but people eventually stopped believing in them and they passed into the pages of history. 

Johann Hari introduces his book, Lost Connections, by talking about a 18^th century Connecticut doctor, Elisha Perkins, who noted that when he was extracting a tooth, if he touched the socket with one of his metal instruments that the pain was temporarily relieved. As one historian said, he put two and two together and regrettably came up with 5. 

He invented and very successfully marketed a metal wand that he called a “tractor” because when waved over any painful part of your body, it would pull the pain out. People everywhere, especially in the days following the Revolutionary War, fell for this. George Washington had them. He claimed that pain was disembodied energy that could be attracted into the wand and pulled out of the body. 

The miracle cure was so popular that it began to spread to England and there, a cynical physician in Bath, Dr. John Haygarth, disguised a wooden stick to look like the metal tractor and found that it had the same degree of success. Eventually, people realized that the pain, though sometimes temporarily relieved, usually came right back and the cure had nothing to do with the magic wand.

Now, to her credit, the woman at the center of this story did take the time to research what I had said and eventually reached out to me to say that she had discovered that I was right. Which, and I don’t think I am alone in this, is always music to my ears. But I was also able to say to her that the more important misunderstanding in our first conversation was that when she heard me say that these things were based on the placebo effect, that I meant that they were bad. I did not. 

Here is a very important point:  the placebo effective is proof that you have the ability to heal yourself. As a physician friend of mine has been fond of saying, if you catch a cold, it will take you about three weeks to wear it down on your own, but if you go see the doctor, you will usually get better in about 21 days. 

Athletes are notorious for fad supplements and techniques. A few years ago, during the summer Olympics, you could see circular bruises on several of the swimmers and divers who were engaging in what is called “cupping” a treatment that was basically putting a vacuum cleaner on parts of your body to increase circulation or something… if you think that wearing wearing magnets or copper fibers, or putting tape on your skin to affect the joints underneath helps you, then it helps you. I’m just saying that it helps you because you, at least temporarily, believe that it will.

To be completely clear, a whole lot of what prescription medications and medical treatments, including some surgeries, all of which are covered by insurance, work more or less the same way. Not to alienate every fan I have ever had, but all of the SSRI, serotonin drugs work in about the same way that the magic feather that Dumbo used to fly worked. And that is not me saying that, that is the conclusions of a study conducted at Harvard Medical School by Dr. Irving Kirsh. SSRIs work just as well as sugar pills though they have much worse side effects. 

A lot of medication works, a lot of psychological counseling works, because the patient or client believes that someone is taking their pain seriously and they are trying to help them. It is the caring connection to another person that contains most of the beneficial help. But, again, I am not saying that is a bad thing, in fact it is a very good thing. 

If you have meaningful and healthy connections to family members, especially a life partner, if you have meaningful work or if you are involved in meaningful volunteering, and if you spend time in nature, then you will not need very much of what they sell at Walgreens. There are exceptions, of course, and the fact remains that the mortality rate is 100%, so you can be the most centered person in the world and you will still eventually die… though, for example, Gandhi died because someone shot him . . . that will accelerate the heck out of the aging process.

One of the most common questions I get from traditional Christians who watch my videos or read my books is a fairly incredulous inquiry, “so you don’t believe in prayer?” That is as far from the truth as possible. Now, it is true that for me prayer is not a matter of presenting my wish list to a supernatural deity in heaven. That kind of prayer is closer to writing a Christmas wish list to Santa Claus than it is to the kind of prayer that is important to me. 

As Soren Kierkegaard said, “Prayer changes the one who prays, not the one to whom we pray.” Meditation, which in my use of the term, means to concentrate on an idea or a thing, and contemplation means to try to achieve internal silence in order to existentially and mindfully connect with nature, my own body, to enhance my awareness of my breath, the food that I eat, and the path beneath my feet.

I always counsel people who are fighting depression to make sure that they walk vigorously outside for at least 30 minutes a day. I have to battle depression more than most people do so I try to walk outside for about 2 hours every day. I think of that as either meditation or contemplation, it is my prayer time. But, beyond my own spiritual perspective on this, it is simply a matter of medical and psychological science that a regular dose of exposure to nature is good for us physically and mentally. 

Last year, Scotland instituted a practice in which physicians can literally prescribe exposure to nature as a treatment. They now send out suggestions and examples of experiences in nature for different seasons and places. The objective truth is my favorite meeting ground for science, medicine, psychology, and religion and this is clearly one of the best examples of this. Japanese doctors call it a forest bath and they aren’t talking about those Cialis adds with bathtubs in the woods … they simply mean spending time in nature.

But, as regards contemplative prayer, internal silence is often quite difficult to achieve and the largest reason for that is the other side of the coin of the placebo effect. Just as it is true that you have the ability to heal yourself, your mind has the ability to cure you, it also has the ability to make you sick or even to kill you.

As one of my professors at Vanderbilt said, “You may think that a witch doctor has no power but there are incidents in which a witch doctor can invoke a curse, break a chicken bone and point it at a man and that man will instantly drop dead… if that man believes in the magic of the witch doctor.” We might call it a heart attack, but, at least for that man, the curse was real.

The reason we teach meditation, talk about it, write about it, study it, is that for reasons which seem to be horribly contrary to evolutionary logic, left to its own devices, our minds will often automatically gravitate to things that kill us, usually killing us slowly through torturous memories of faithless friends, heart breaking endings to love relationships, missed opportunities, unjust endings, and tragic mistakes.

I have lived in Springfield for most of my adult life, 28 years now in the queen of the Ozarks. For no apparent reason, the other night, while trying to get still enough to go to sleep, the memory of an insulting exchange that happened more than 30 years ago came to mind. 

I was a young pastor in new church and a real jerk of a guy, for no apparent reason, pretending to be talking to someone else but saying it loudly enough to be heard by the 20 people in the room, called me an obscene name. The two men got a big laugh out of their put down and I had no idea what to do in that moment. But all these years later, my heart started to race, my face flushed red, and my blood pressure shot up so fast that I literally felt faint. 

I was literally, physically, reliving the moment. Now that I have had a lot of experience as an a-hole whisperer, I thought of all of eviscerating things I might have said in that moment, literally wishing that I could go back in time and defend myself. But these were mean old men back then. They are surely dead now. 

As my friend Dan likes to say, if you will sit quietly be the riverside long enough, you will see the bodies of your enemies float by. But, I don’t have a score to settle with those two jerks. They mean nothing to me. They have no power to hurt me or insult me ever again. However, if I let my memory go back to that incident, I can give them the power to make me miserable, to take my joy, to literally haunt me like ghosts of toxic churches past . . . but, and this is sincerely not an overstatement, the stress we embody by dwelling on these things can cause heart disease, stress can literally turn you into a diabetic . . . it can shorten your life . . . it can kill you. 

His theology is typically pretty labored but C. S. Lewis had great insight into people and relationships. He cautioned his readers, “You can’t go back and change the beginning, but you can start where you are and change the ending.” We don’t have the ability to undo past mistakes, bad decisions, and ill-advised love relationships, friendships, or even career moves. But, we can start where we are today to change the course of our future. 

The title of my sermon today is a quote falsely attributed to Voltaire though, to be fair, it was a comment made by someone writing about the theme of Voltaire’s Candid: Life is a shipwreck, so remember to sing in the lifeboats. I don’t want for you to hear that in a trite way. 

It echoes the famous line that Scott Peck uses as the first line of his famous book, The Road Less Traveled, “Life is full of suffering but as soon as you accept that fact, it no longer matters.” Most love relationships don’t last. Most people have no idea how to sustain a meaningful friendship. You can eat healthy foods, exercise, live like a saint, and you will still die. 

Many of us are plagued with excessive awareness of chaos in politics and world events. Even those who celebrate the long-delayed consideration of impeaching Donald Trump must be aware that no matter how necessary it may be to do, the process will be divisive and chaotic. The stock market will go through roller coaster rises and falls, and even the crime rate will have spikes as we move into a chaotic time that will likely last for the next year until matters are temporarily settled in the 2020 presidential election. 

In very many ways, life is a shipwreck, but along the way, even if it is not permanent, you will experience love, friendship, joy, sometimes you are the bug, sometimes you are the windshield.

Prayer is a matter of consciously choosing to forgive those who have wounded you, abandoned you, lied to you or about you, the ones who stabbed you in the back or just abandoned you. Prayer is choosing nobility over revenge. In meditation, we do not deny reality, we acknowledge it, honestly, courageously, and decisively move beyond these things, to, as Neihbur famously prayed, find the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things that I can, and the wisdom to be able to tell the difference. I think that one of the reasons the Christian religion has survived and dominated so much of modern history is because it teaches the very practical disciplines of forgiveness, compassion, empathy, and piety. With or without a supernatural theistic deity, a dying a rising savior, or sacraments; forgiveness, compassion, prayer are sustainable and life-giving habits.

The Buddhist philosopher, Alan Watts, said, “You do not sing a song to get to the end.” The point being that we must learn to love the process of living, even in the hard times. Almost all of us in graduate school where fighting to get to graduation and only too late we realize that our lives were not on hold while we were grinding through assignments, writing papers and earning credits . . . learning itself is a thing to be relished, regardless of grades, credits, and degrees. 

When I was younger, I was a runner. I ran two mini-marathons every year, one in the spring and one in the fall. I trained all year to run my best mini-marathon, always knowing that I would cross the finish line near the back of the pack of thousands of runners. 

But I never went out thinking that I would win. It wasn’t about the finish line, it was about sharing the 2 hours of running with all of those other runners, if I managed to run 13 miles, in my own mind, I was a winner. I didn’t even bother looking up to see who was first, or second, or third, it didn’t matter to me. It wasn’t about them, it was about the experience that I had, with sore knees, bleeding and chaffing, sometimes running in rain, heat, or cold, but finishing and feeling exhilarated about it. I get pretty much the same feeling these days from walking up a couple of flights of stairs but, you know, everything in its season.

Again, not to be trite about losses, but you can be tormented by the end of a love relationship, friendship, a career, or even your health, or you can be happy that you were able to have the experience at all. Being in love is sometimes like a beautiful fall day . . . you cannot stop time, you can’t store the day in a jar, you can live fully in the moment and be grateful for it, knowing full well that winter is still coming.

Depression comes from dwelling on the past. Anxiety comes from worrying about the future. Joy is never in the past or the future, it is always a present moment and nowhere else. Having an active prayer life should allow us to focus on the present moment, actively choosing not to sacrifice our present on the altar of bad memories of conflicts and losses in the past. 

Not to wade too deep into the weeds, but the addiction many young people have to playing video games and the addiction many adults have to gambling, is related to this matter of living in the present moment. An interactive video game allows an anxiety riddled teen to let go the rest of the world and to become immerse in a game that demands immediate focus. An unhappy adult can let go of depression and resentment to focus on the immediacy of a slot machine or a card game, never anticipating anything further ahead than the next card or the next spin. 

The problem comes when the money runs out or the game ends and the past and anxiety about the future reasserts itself. The better way is to be aware of your depression, your anxiety, your fear, so that you can reject it.  The popular Vietnamese Buddhist teacher, Thich Nhat Hahn, emphasizes in meditation instruction that your whole life is in the present moment and it would be a shame to miss it!

Your mind is very powerful, and when you dwell on past pain, depression can become your constant companion. Kierkegaard literally personified his painful depression when he said, “My depression has been my most faithful mistress, is it any wonder that I return her affection?”  As much as I have adored the work of Kierkegaard, you cannot really respect that acquiescence to depression anymore than you respect someone who suffers with psychosomatic illnesses but holds onto them because they believe that being sick gets them attention or makes them interesting. As one of my very southern aunts used to say in a withering way about some of the church ladies we knew, “Well, you know, Karen is enjoying ill health.”   

Kierkegaard was the product of an affair between his father and the housekeeper. His father, more or less, blamed Soren for merely existing and I sure that his childhood was unspeakably miserable. But, as Jung said, “You are not what has happened to you. You are what you choose to become.” We are living in turbulent times. The environment is being destroyed, militarism is causing massive casualties, millions are being made refugees and it is impoverishing the world. The wealth gap is growing, and politicians are so lost in their own corruption they are doing almost nothing to be helpful. Life is, in many ways, a shipwreck, but you must not forget to sing in the lifeboats. There is no way to avoid the hardships that are on the horizon but there is nothing that can keep us from dancing as forge ahead.

As Emerson said:

He is rich who owns the day, and no one owns the day

who allows it to be invaded with fret and anxiety.

Finish every day and be done with it.

You have done what you could.

Some blunders and absurdities, no doubt crept in.

Forget them as soon as you can, tomorrow is a new day;

begin it well and serenely, with too high a spirit

to be cumbered with your old nonsense.

This new day is too dear,

with its hopes and invitations,

to waste a moment on the yesterdays.”

Broken hearts eventually get better though they are apt to be broken again. Some friendships will fail, though we have reason to believe that there will be new ones. One day, Donald Trump will no longer be president and the news will have to make an awkward transition back towards reporting news again though there will always be another despot, another political disappointment, another cause to fight for around the corner. 

Garrison Keillor once said that When the country goes temporarily to the dogs, cats must learn to walk on fences, sleep in trees, and have faith that all this woofing is not the last word.

When Trump is gone, we will still be here, and so let us sing and dance along the way and not merely survive. 

“Healthcare – America Taken Hostage”

“Healthcare – America Taken Hostage”        Oct. 20, 2019       Dr. Roger Ray, pastor

click here to see the video

“…Gilens took about 1,700 policy decisions, and compared them with public attitudes, and closely correlated with corporate interests. Elsewhere he showed that about 70 percent of the population has no influence on policy – they might as well be in some other country. And as you go up the income and wealth level, the impact on public policy is greater – the rich essentially get what they want.”

- Noam Chomsky, Requiem for the American Dream, p. 139

I doubt seriously that I need to mount this apologetic for anyone here but for any more traditional religious folks who may catch this message on-line, let me make this distinction: politics is about political parties, candidates, and elections. Religion is about ethics, values, character, and primarily, compassion. Faith communities, as a part of society, provide spiritual rituals such as weddings, funerals, baptisms, and other coming of age and rites of passage ceremonies. But a big part of religious tradition is applying ethics, character, and compassion to the institutions of power all around us. 

Like when Moses said to Pharaoh, “Let my people go.” 

Or when the ancient Hebrew prophets, Elijah, Jeremiah, Amos, Isaiah, Hosea, confronted the rulers and businesses that oppressed the poor.

Or the Buddha, who is said to have abandoned royal station in life to identify with the poor and who taught compassion as a primary spiritual value.

Or Jesus who is said to have healed the sick, both the rich and poor, the white and the brown, without asking for co-pay, an insurance card, or to first satisfy an outrageous deductible. 

Because sincere religion is always concerned with radical compassion, when the government comes between health care providers and the sick who need healthcare, it becomes sermon material. I would say, in 2019, any priest, pastor, rabbi, or imam who has not been preaching about access to healthcare in the last decade should seriously consider a career as a used car salesman and let someone with a conscience occupy your pulpit. 

Was that too strong? What I meant to say, to both male and female clergy:

Either grow a pair or shut up.

Because there are still 44 million people who have no healthcare in America and in spite of lying politicians who talk about how much people love their private insurance, the truth is that almost no one who has ever had to use their insurance likes it at all and right now, while a lot of people say that they don’t want to change to Medicare for all because they think what they have now is better, let me just say that if the premature deaths of 22,000 Americans every year because they don’t have healthcare makes you question your self-centered world view then you should consider yourself on the outside looking in on this conversation because you don’t have enough humanity in your heart to be taken seriously. 

It is like the gun advocates you know who are against any suggestion we have to make about how to stem gun violence, but they never offer any ideas about how to make a significant reduction in the 40,000-gun deaths we have every year. If you want to keep in place a set of laws that is allowing carnage at that level, then we have a special chair for you where you can sit down and shut up.

Because we know what kind of spiritual leader the world needs now, and you are not it. 

So, let me get to the subject at hand: I know this chart will be hard for many of you to read but let me just tell you, that compared to other western democracies, we spend, on average, twice as much per person for healthcare even though we do not provide healthcare to millions of people and hundreds of millions of others who do have health insurance, have deductibles that are so high that they hesitate to use it. England, Australia, Japan, Belgium, Canada, France, all spend less than half of what we spend, they cover everyone, and they have virtually no co-pay or deductibles. 

Why is this? Why do we spend twice as much and get so much less than other countries? Please allow me to give you an illustration from my personal life:

My doctor wants me to get an echocardiogram every few years because I have a heart murmur. What do you think that getting that test should cost? 

Let me tell you, when my insurance provided non-profit hospital called me to schedule the test, it was going to cost me $1450 out of pocket . . . for a test that I don’t know if I need it or not… it isn’t surgery, it isn’t treatment, it was just a part of a check-up. So, I might elect to skip it but I have access to another doctor who looked up an alternative where I could get the test done in Kansas City for $450. . . less than 1/3 of the cost here in town . . . and that was done by a for-profit practice. So what does it really cost to conduct this test? Maybe a couple of hundred dollars?

Why does healthcare cost more than twice as much in the United States? Because insurance companies, pharmaceutical companies, and healthcare providers have turned being sick into a money-making proposition in which they can turn your money into their money while getting you to vote for the bought and paid for regimes that keep the money spicket turned on.  

If America manages to go to a single payer system, whether it is Medicare-for-all or some other iteration of a single payer system, our actual costs will go down by about 50%. That is math. Politics will dictate who pays the remaining costs. If the cost of healthcare is distributed fairly across the economic playing field, lower income people will pay less and higher income people will pay more and that is what has the corporate news media and the oligarchic puppet masters of our economy up in arms.

I was holed up in a Kansas City hotel room after my $450 echocardiogram on Tuesday, watching the democratic debate in which the corporate media and the corporate candidates were trying to force Elizabeth Warren to say that her Medicare-for-all proposal would make middle class taxes go up. The truth is, as I have said from this pulpit before, we would be shifting from paying premiums to insurance companies to paying for healthcare through taxes. And employers who have been paying premiums for employees can stop paying those premiums and give the same amount of money to their employees as salary. 

So, costs will go down and they will go down dramatically, but how healthcare is paid for will change and that change may be a complicated debate. But it could be done fairly so that everyone is a winner in the long run. 

And I dare say that while many Americans just don’t understand how this would work and why they would benefit, we can be confident that all 12 candidates on the stage Tuesday night do understand the math, the political issues, and the process.

Pete Buttigieg is a veteran, he is a Rhodes scholar, a Harvard graduate and a self-proclaimed evangelical Christian. And yet, he stood on stage and lied like a cheap rug about the costs and benefits of Medicare-for-all. . . currently, Mayor Pete is second only to Donald Trump in political contributions from health insurance and pharmaceutical companies . . . proof that our system of political donations can corrupt even someone we would otherwise really want to like.

Senator Amy Klobuchar bills herself as a pragmatist and calls Medicare-for-all a pipe dream. And it is a pipe dream if you believe that your first priority is to surrender unconditionally to the outrageous and obscene profits pocketed by health insurance companies and pharmaceutical companies. If, however, you have compassion and want sick people to be able to get healthcare, it isn’t a pipe dream, it is a practical, efficient, and immanently affordable way to do it. You just have to decide if you want to serve the billionaire corporate interests or the interests of the American people and honestly, it isn’t much more complicated than that. I just wish that smart people would stop acting like all voters are as gullible as a pre-school kid being offered candy if they will just get into the van.

We currently have a president who lies about everything. Is it too much to ask for those who want to replace the liar-in-chief to tell the truth about things that are as important as healthcare?

In this moment I am not for any particular candidate and I am not against any candidate or candidates. What I am in favor of is compassion. I need to see America do what every other western democracy has done . . . provide healthcare to everyone, regardless of age, race, gender, or nation of origin. Period. End of story. Anything less than that is morally bankrupt, and haven’t we all had about enough of that?

Politics is sometimes the art of dividing people against one another so that they can never see who is really controlling their destiny and taking their wallet at the same time. This now famous sign is a perfect example of that. This insulin user is outraged by the amount of money being spent to save heroin addicts from overdoses, but the real problem is not the money spent to save addicts, the real question is why does your insulin cost so much? 

If the same vial of insulin costs 90% less in Canada as it does in the United States, your problem is not heroin addicts, your problem is politicians who are addicted to the political donations of pharmaceutical companies. You have every reason to be angry, but you should be angry about who is really robbing you rather than someone who is probably just as much of a victim as you are. 

It is difficult to gauge exactly how much public support there is for Medicare-for-all because there are so many lies being told by both Republicans and Democrats about healthcare in order to protect the financial interests of the super wealthy providers but this much I know for sure, 100% of people who are sick want to have access to healthcare and 100% of those people will believe that they ought to be able to get it without going bankrupt and that is the system we do not currently have in this country and I plan to keep talking about it until we do.

Folks, this is what I believe. I believe that peace in the absence of justice is nothing but surrender, and this is no time to surrender our health to corporate profit.

“Columbus Was A Jerk”

“Columbus Was A Jerk”    Oct. 13,2019    Dr. Roger Ray, pastor

click here to see the video
Genocide and Slavery: The Evil Twins of Colonialism by Dina Gilio-Whitaker

Colonization at its very core is the exploitation of non-white others to advance the economic and political agendas of those who deem themselves superior. Colonialism’s evil twins are genocide and slavery; blacks and Indians paid the highest price in the building of the United States, and we know all too well the legacy of that exploitation is still very much alive today.

Feb 23, 2015   https://newsmaven.io/indiancountrytoday/archive/genocide-and-slavery-the-evil-twins-of-colonialism-KerGe7W3iEeUgILWu0ljYg/

You have not really lived until you have had to sit and listen to me and Dan Goodwin tell stories about our Christmas 2016 trip to deliver winter camping gear to the protestors at Standing Rock, North Dakota. The Dakota Access Pipeline being built through Sioux reservation land and over the Missouri River was a threat to both the water supply of millions of people, and a violation of the sovereignty of the Sioux tribe. I had been outraged by the abuses of local law enforcement against the protestors and I was determined to do something to help. 

When I heard that the police had blocked a couple of hundred protestors on a bridge and hosed them down with fire hoses in the sub-zero temperatures and kept them there freezing for hours, we decided to leave immediately, on Christmas morning. Driving into a North Dakota blizzard turns out to be a lot more of a heroic measure than either of us had anticipated. It took three days to make the drive. One day we were on the road for 9 hours and only covered a hundred miles in the zero-visibility weather.  

Tribal elders had ordered the protestors to leave the camp in the severe weather, so, when we arrived, only a couple of hundred stalwart folk remained in the impossible circumstances. 

The blizzard had collapsed several of the teepees and makeshift buildings. I had just broken my arm falling on the ice here at church, so Dan was ordered to shovel snow within the first sixty seconds that we were on the camp and circumstances didn’t much improve during our time there. 

It was an honor to meet Chase Ironeyes and to present him with the financial support we had raised to help in their efforts. But it was not a universally good experience. The single largest problem on the camp for the several months that thousands of people had been there was the rape of female protestors. There was a lot of theft, and though drugs and alcohol were forbidden in the camp, it was there. 

Of course, it was not only native Americans who were there. The protest effort had drawn both celebrities and bleeding-heart liberals, but it had also drawn opportunists and con men and it didn’t take long to start sorting out who was who. I met a young Palestinian woman who had grown up in territorial protests and traveled to America to be there in support of the Sioux. I didn’t meet any other ministers but I’m getting used to that. 

But it wasn’t just the people who were drawn to the camp who had dubious moral qualities. There were serious problems among the Indian population as well. This goes to the complication we have always had in understanding the Indigenous Peoples of the Americas. 

Most of what we know about Indians, unless you grew up near a reservation, is based on TV shows and movies and you can count on virtually all of that is false. 

There is no singular Native American culture, spirituality, or ecology. From the Innuit Eskimo population in the polar north, to the Mapuche of Argentina, there were hundreds of tribes, languages and histories. There is no Native American spirituality because there were a thousand of them. While there were written languages among the Indigenous of South America, there does not seem to have been any in what we call North America and when you try to talk about Indian culture, you have to talk about pre-Columbian, or post colonization. 

Many Native Americans don’t want to be called Indians or Indigenous, but prefer to be identified as Sioux, or Cherokee, because their tribes are as different as being English can be from being Croat. There is not a single Europe, Asia, or Africa. And there is not a single Indian culture, character, language, or religion. 

We know of no Indigenous tribes that were entirely hunter-gatherers. All of them practiced agriculture and, in fact, many were much better at it than the first colonizers from Europe.

Columbus had one advantage over the Indians he first encountered in the Caribbean. They had better weapons. Columbus wrote in his journal regarding his first meeting with the islanders, “They neither carry nor know anything of arms, for I showed them swords, and they took them by the blade and cut themselves through ignorance." 

Their lack of metal weapons left them vulnerable to the ravages of the Europeans.  The reason why Elizabeth Warren and most of we white folk here have a small percentage of Native American blood in us is because thousands of young women were taken to Europe as sex slaves in the first two centuries of contact with the northern European people who would eventually colonize the Americas. 

There is no way to meaningfully polish this turd. Columbus spoke in his journal about bringing Christianity to the Americas but what he brought was disease, slavery, exploitation, violence, and finally, genocide. 

People have migrated for all of human history. Invasion, conquest, colonization has always been a part of that. In fact, I find this whole DNA testing craze to be quite ironically narcissistic. Folks, we are all from Africa. All humans come from our evolutionary ancestors in Africa and we have adapted to different environments and diets, but we are all pink on the inside.

Race, itself, is a construct of language more than it is of biology. But America was built on a concept of racial, religious, and cultural superiority and that narcissistic assumption was enforced with superior weapons. America has two original sins, the genocide of Native Americans, and the enslavement of Africans. Both were predicated on the assumption of some kind of superiority based on the color of our skin. It is such a horrible sin that it becomes difficult to talk about because you either buy into, as racists do either openly or unconsciously, or you feel so guilty about it that you start to sound like a self-flagellating zealot who is so full of self-loathing that they have lost contact with reality.

Now, I am talking about this because tomorrow is still a banking holiday called Columbus Day and there should not be a holiday, a statue, or any kind of tribute to a man that history clearly records was a jerk more on the level of Hitler than Hitler was. We should change Columbus Day to Indigenous Peoples’ Day and begin to get real about our history and our present day dubious ethical responsibility towards America’s first nations. 

It is important to note that Columbus Day did not become a national holiday until 1937. For the first 160 years of our nation’s existence, Columbus didn’t rate a national holiday but in the early part of the 20^thcentury there were about 4 million Italians who emigrated to the United States and they were facing tremendous xenophobic prejudice. So Columbus, an Italian, had his reputation polished to give Italians a claim to having found the Americas. Ironically, this statue is in Columbus circle in New York City. Columbus never set foot on the North American mainland. He landed among the Caribbean Islands. But the statue is in NYC because that was where Italian immigrants were suffering from calls to “go back to where you came from.”

Italians have other great inventors, artists, and businesspeople to hang their heritage celebrations on. Columbus needs to become a footnote in history.

Similarly, and this is for free today, this monument to “Our Confederate Dead” that has stood on the courthouse lawn in my hometown of Glasgow, KY since 1905, has virtually nothing to do with those who had died 40 years earlier in the Civil War. It was raised by white people as a warning to black people that even though they lost the war, their fundamental racist sentiments were unchanged. As proof of that fact, a couple of years ago when I wrote an editorial for my hometown paper suggesting that they move the bronze statue to a nearby Civil War graveyard, I was inundated with hate mail, many from my former classmates who assured me of some violence if I ever came back to Glasgow . . . and they are safe, I had no desire to do that, but still, what I’m pointing out is that monuments are not always what they present themselves as being on the surface.

But it is important that we all start to let Indigenous people be people. They were not savages and they were not noble environmentalists. They were not always peace loving, egalitarian, generous, or good. They often attacked and robbed and raped among neighboring tribes. Some would drive hundreds of bison off a cliff only to harvest a dozen of them. They burned forests to open farmland or to foster hunting. Some practiced slavery before encountering European colonizers but afterwards, some joined in the southern practice of owning African slaves. 

 The most notable of which was the Choctaw chief Greenwood LeFlore who had a fifteen-thousand-acre plantation in Mississippi where he kept more than four hundred African slaves. 

I would love to be able to say that the victims of our nation’s two original sins, Native Americans and African slaves, were natural allies who rose up together to fight off the oppression of European colonizers but there appears to be virtually no historical record of it. 

In fact, many tribes sided with the Confederacy during the Civil War. Apparently, racism can be an infectious disease. Native American historian, Paul Chaat Smith, says, “The Cherokee had a very successful trade in guns and slaves in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and as Southern slavery grew, they were not at all reluctant to take part.” (The Sun, August 2019, page 8)

People who live near reservations often think of Indians only in association with casinos and the crime that comes with unemployment, drug and alcohol addiction, and poor education systems. White liberals are equally racists when they portray them as being some kind of new-age forest bunnies. 

But my point is this, the first nations of the Americas do not have to be paragons of environmental virtue and magically connected to nature in order for us to come to a sane and balanced awareness that they have been historically victimized by colonization, that there numbers have been decimated by genocide, diseases, land theft, and discrimination, and while they have issues of their own, it is time for us to take our boot off of their throats and give them both the respect and the opportunity to forge what it means to be a real Indian in the 21^stcentury.

Columbus was one influential character in history. We cannot undo the migration of people from the east into the Americas but we can recognize that while Columbus had some virtues, his sins are such that we should not praise him or publicly honor him. And while Indians are not saints, they are people and it is high time that we started treating them like they were more than movie props and names of sports teams.

 As for me, my next pipeline protest will be in Florida. The moral issues are the same, but I have learned that my old bones prefer palm trees to blizzards. Let the Indigenous Peoples rise up. 

“Drugs, Race, and Prisons”

“Drugs, Race, and Prisons” Oct. 5, 2019    Dr. Roger Ray, pastor

click here to see the video

John Ehrlichman as quoted in Harper’s, April 2016 “The Nixon campaign in 1968, and the Nixon White House after that, had two enemies: the antiwar left and black people. You understand what I’m saying? We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities. We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did.”

If you will allow me to channel my inner Steve Rattner this morning, I need to start off with a few charts. You don’t see them, you may think that you don’t know them, it may have never happened to you but in America today, we have about 2 million people in jails and prisons and another 9 million on some kind of supervised parole. This is a stunning figure, especially when you compare the United States to other western nations where you can see that as a percentage of population, we have almost no rivals, with even Russia coming in a distant second.

Of the western democracies with whom we would like to associate ourselves, England, France, Canada, Sweden, Finland, we have between 5 and 12 times as many people in prison per capita. At 2 million people, our inmate population is virtually a nation within a nation. 

This stunning fact demands an explanation. Why? Why do we incarcerate so many people? The best way that I know to explain it is to employ that line made so famous in the 1976 film about the Watergate scandal, “Follow the money.” Or, in this case, it may be about money, and power, or, more accurately, it is about money, power, racism, classism, and irrational prejudice. 

I find it amazing that he was willing to admit it in an interview, but I am not the least bit shocked by that facts revealed by Nixon administration advisor, John Ehrlichman, in a 2016 interview, that the Nixon administration increased the criminal sentences for marijuana and heroin, not because they really wanted to fight a drug war but because marijuana was a drug common among young Vietnam War protestors and heroin was associated with the black community that was finally finding a voice and political clout in the Civil Rights movement.

You cannot even imagine Richard Nixon being concerned about drug abuse, but, as Ehrlichman said, he considered blacks and war protestors as his domestic enemies, and he would do anything to destroy them. 

Increasing punishment for drug possession and distribution allowed them to break up meetings, jail leaders, and generally harass and threaten Nixon’s perceived enemies. Ehrlichman concludes the interview saying, “Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did.”

This is not Stalin’s Russia, this is not Mao’s China, this is our America…sweet land of liberty, the home of the free and the brave, the greatest Democracy since ancient Greece. I hope that you know that I take no pleasure in either revealing or rehearsing these facts. Here is the naked, unavoidable, and painful truth: the government of the United States, in successive administrations, has lied to the population to gain their acquiescence to policies that result in the oppression and imprisoning of minorities and dissidents. They do this in many ways but one of the most insidious and dishonest is the use of drug charges. 

Now, let’s be very honest about this. Heroin is a scourge. It is a highly addictive yet relatively cheap and available drug that is killing tens of thousands of people. If making it illegal and criminally charging those who manufacture, distribute, and use it would wipe it off the face of the earth, I would feel differently. But what we know for a fact is that 50 years of a war on drugs has failed entirely and our policies have ruined the lives of millions, cost us billions in tax dollars, and has, almost single handedly, broken up minority families and kept the sons and daughters of 19^thcentury slaves locked in chaos and poverty. 

The so called “War on Drugs” has utterly failed. Almost every western democracy has realized that addiction is not a crime, it is medical problem. It does not call for incarceration, it calls for treatment. Why does the United States persist in doing what we have clearly seen for 50 years is a disastrous failure?

Because it has only be a disastrous failure if your goal was to eradicate drug use. If your goal is to make money, it has been a colossal success. Just the Mexican drug cartels make over a half a trillion dollars in the United States every year and while numbers like that are hard to imagine, let me just say, by contrast, that is more than Walmart . . . and Walmart is everywhere and is the largest legal employer in America. So the industry is huge, and the profits don’t stay in the hands of drugs dealers. Our banking system gets to launder all of that money and law enforcement depends on the drug trade to fatten their budgets. 

If you have not spent time around a county jail, that last point might easily pass you by but let me drill down on this for just a moment:

Of the 2 million Americans in jails and prisons, a half a million of those are being held in local jails awaiting trial or sentencing. You have heard about all of the overcrowding at our relatively new county jail here, and that overcrowding is largely due to our sheriff agreeing to keep people awaiting a federal trial, many of whom are not a flight risk, but they are in jail before sentencing for . . . wait for it, . . . wait for it, . . . they couldn’t afford bail. And because they are too poor to afford bail, And because they are too poor to pay for it, tax payers are forced to pay about $50,000 per prisoner per year, to keep them in jail. 

And those fees pay for law enforcement salaries, construction, utilities, food, clothing, supplies, and transportation. If this obscenity doesn’t make you mad as hell then you might have a cold hard place where your heart was supposed to be but if you need a little more of a nudge in that direction, let me tell you something else about this situation:

They take these half a million people, shove them into overcrowded cages and then they don’t provide many of the basics of life. They make nearly $2 billion every year by selling personal items, phone privileges, and snacks to inmates. They use for profit phone systems that charge the inmate several dollars to make a phone call. A phone card at the Greene County jail costs $60 and is good for about five calls at $16 each. Why do they charge so much? Because they can.

And if you think that this is a problem that exists mostly in more populated states, you should know, Missouri is one of the worst. Our incarceration rate is 20% higher than the USA on average and, of course, 10x to 20x the incarceration rate in most of western Europe.  

But the money trail doesn’t end there. Prison labor is another way to make a profit off of mass incarceration. We have more black men incarcerated now than we ever had slaves in 19^thcentury America, and when you can pay them about 25 cents an hour to work, we have not really abolished slavery in America, have we? Prisoners ironically make a lot of military and police garments and bullet-proof protective gear. They make McDonalds uniforms and, it may come as a surprise to many of you, but whatever Victoria’s other secrets may be, the one she wouldn’t want you to know is that some of their unmentionables are manufactured in prison labor camps for pennies per panties. 

The “why” of America’s mass incarceration is almost entirely a “follow the money” explanation. Explaining how we do it has a lot to do with power.

I made several attempts to communicate with Missouri’s last democratic senator, Claire McCaskill and I can say that I struck out every time. Claire political posture was basically, “I’m better than the Republican alternative,” and, low and behold: that was true. But like a lot of politicians, Claire rose to political prominence as a prosecutor and so, selling herself to the voting public as being tough on crime was a well-worn path. When I tried to talk to her or her staffers about the absurdity of the size of our prison population and begged for them to look at shortening sentences for non-violent crimes, the reply was always a flat-footed response about political realities . . . no politician wins votes by showing sympathy for criminals. 

If we ask ourselves, “Who should be in prison and how long should they be there?” I guarantee you that your answers would be much more compassionate than the reality we see in our very broken judicial system. 

One in five inmates are locked up for drug charges. Two-thirds of our 2 million nation of inmates are locked up for non-violent crimes. 

I have sat in courtrooms with parents of young men being sentenced for crimes such as possession of child pornography…. Not for rape, not for child abduction, not for producing or selling or even buying child porn, but for being a stupidly curious young man and looking at it on line, and they will be sentenced to ten or fifteen years in a federal prison. Child pornography is illegal in most countries but in most of Europe, the maximum sentence is five years. In the United States, we have grown our prison population, largely, by adding years and years onto the sentences of those convicted of a crime. 

This goes to the character of America. Do we put people in prison in order to reform them? To change their criminal ways and help them to become better people or do we imprison them for some kind of social revenge? Do we want a pound of flesh from the inmate or do we want to protect society from criminals while helping the criminal to be reformed? 

By treating prisoners as being subhuman, literally exposing them to overcrowding and degradation that would not be allowed at an animal shelter for stray dogs and cats, we keep our prisons full by teaching inmates to be criminals so that they re-offend and return to prison life. 

More than half of the inmates in America will return to jail after their release, compare that to Scandinavian countries, where most prisons offer much better living conditions and many more personal freedoms, so that even though being in prison is not nearly so harsh, their recidivism rate is less than half of ours. Here is the formula, in countries with harsh and punitive prison systems, most people become hardened criminals in prison, and they will come back. In countries where prisoners are treated respectfully and given educational and recreational opportunities, they return to society and live productive lives. Why isn’t this obvious to everyone?

http://www.antoniocasella.eu/nume/Deady_march2014.pdf

I must thank you for being patient with me today as I have flipped through charts and statistics about the injustice of our justice system, but I cannot leave this topic without saying something about race. 

It is never entirely accurate to globalize from any one case but the contrast between the white actress, Felicity Huffman, and the black homeless mother, Tanya McDowell is irresistible. Huffman bribed and SAT test administrator $15,000 to cheat on her daughter’s test to get her into a better school. She was found guilty and was sentenced to 2 weeks in a comfy jail. Tanya McDowell used her father’s address to register her six-year-old son in a better school than he would have gone to from the homeless shelter and she was sentenced to 5 years in prison. Now, don’t get me wrong: Felicity Huffman paid a $15,000 bribe but when she was sentenced to two weeks in jail, she also had to pay a $30,000 fine. Honestly, that seems about right to me. We have too many people in jail for way too long and I think that given the public humiliation, criminal record, spending a few days in jail and taking a financial hit is punishment enough.

It is Tanya McDowell’s case that reeks of racism. If they found her kid didn’t deserve to be registered in the school where his grandfather lived, then, I suppose you could move him to another school. But in what universe is it a crime for a poor mother to try to get her kid into a better school? A five-year sentence for this? Am I the only one here who thinks that she should be applauded for taking action to get her kid into a better school? The problem here is that Felicity Huffman had too much money and way too much sense of white privilege and Tanya McDowell was poor, desperate, and doing what she could. Call me a rebel, but justice here does not include any criminal charge for Tanya, and far from jail time, I think Felicity Huffman should have paid her $30,000 fine to Tanya McDowell so that woman could rent an apartment in a good school system. That’s just my opinion . . . it just so happens that I am right. 

The ACLU reports that, on average, a black person’s prison sentence is 20% longer than a white person’s who committed the same crime. 

https://www.aclu.org/sites/default/files/assets/141027_iachr_racial_disparities_aclu_submission_0.pdf

But as bad as that is, the larger fact that is more difficult to quantify is that Latino, Native American, and black people are more likely to be apprehended, convicted, and incarcerated than are white people. One famous example is the way in which Billie Holiday and Judy Garland were treated when they were both addicted to heroin.

Judy Garland’s doctor told her to take longer vacations and spend more time with family and friends, which, ironically, is the best way to treat addiction. Billie Holiday was put in jail and handcuffed to a bed, and that is where she died.

Look, James Taylor was a heroin addict… do you think of him as a criminal? Sweet Baby James? Is it a weak-minded person who sang “I’ve Seen Fire and I’ve Seen Rain?” If James Taylor were black, he would probably be dead now and that is the issue about race and drugs in America.

Forty-five years ago, when Nixon turned Johnson’s war on poverty into a war on the poor by jacking up laws to criminalize drug use this nation was sold a lie. And you have it straight from the mouth of a Nixon administration advisor, John Ehrlichman, who said, “Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did.”

Let me sum up by saying that we need to stop thinking of addiction as a crime and start treating it like the medical problem that it is. And I think that we need to put protections in place to make sure that justice is blind to race and to class. And furthermore, I think that we need to turn the tables and put the justice system on trial. Justices, prosecutors, and politicians have transferred billions of dollars and grabbed corporate and political power by abusing minorities, the poor, and the vulnerable. We need to shorten prison sentences and use prisons to reform rather than to get revenge. We need to release most of our prisoners by using prisons only for people who represent a real threat to society. 

People who smoke pot or register their kid in a better school district are not a threat to you or your rights.

My modest suggestion is that we put rapists in prison rather than on the bench.