The Ten Commandments of Logic

The Ten Commandments of Logic    May 17, 2020   Dr. Roger Ray, pastor

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The 10 Commandments of Logic (original source uncertain)

• Thou shalt not attack the person’s character, but the argument. (Ad Hominin fallacy)
• Thou shalt not misrepresent or exaggerate a person’s argument in order to make them easier to attack. (Straw Man fallacy)
• Thou shalt not use small numbers to represent the whole. (Hasty Generalization fallacy)
• Thou shalt not argue thy position by assuming one of its premises is true. (Begging the Question fallacy)
• Thou shalt not claim that because something occurred before that it must be the cause. (Post Hoc/False Cause fallacy)
• Thou shalt not reduce the argument down to two possibilities. (False Dichotomy fallacy)
• Thou shalt not argue that because of our ignorance the claim must be true or false. (Ad Ignoratum fallacy)
• Thou shalt not lay the burden of proof onto the person who is questioning the claim. (Burden of Proof Reversal fallacy)
• Thou shalt not assume that “this” follows from “that” when there is no logical connection. (Non Sequitur fallacy)
• Thou shalt not claim that because a premise is popular that it must be true. (Bandwagon fallacy)

The rules of logic are not like the rules of a Monopoly game that just guide the way you play a game. The rules of logic are more like the health department’s standards for food handling for restaurants, rules so that you won’t get food poisoning from your next omelet. The rules of logic are intended to clean up our conversations and make sure that we don’t poison our minds. 

Earlier this year, I was sitting in the home of some friends and, as usually happens when I am around, the conversation turned to politics and the primary that, at that time, still included a couple of dozen candidates. This was before Michael Bloomberg had been a part of a debate, before he had given an interview or made many personal appearances, but he was pouring millions of dollars into market research and carefully crafting a media image for himself that voters would like.

My friend turned to me and said, “I’m really liking Michael Bloomberg.” And because, as you know, I am nothing if not the consummate dinner guest and absolute paragon of patience, I said, “Really?” But what was racing through my head was the fact that they knew nothing about the real Mike Bloomberg, all they knew were his elaborately concocted TV ads that contained no more truth about Bloomberg’s history and policies than my kitchen trashcan contains of the British crown jewels. 

I liked the Michael Bloomberg in the Bloomberg TV ads, who wouldn’t? It’s just the fact that they were not talking about the real Michael Bloomberg. But a month later, when Bloomberg had dropped out of the race, I saw this on TV:

Now, I don’t want to be mean about this. I make mistakes. Last week I put up a picture of Isabelle Peron and called her Eva Peron. Three years ago, I called the river running through the Standing Rock Sioux tribal lands the Mississippi River rather than the Missouri River but, folks, I don’t have a staff of writers back here in my suite of offices and, besides that, Brian Williams is paid $15 million dollars a year . . . he knows something about millions of dollars, and he should know that he could not give a million dollars to 15 million people because he makes 15 million dollars a year. He could give them one dollar. And if Michael Bloomberg gave $500 million to Americans, we would each get about $1.40. And yet, Mara Gay, of the New York Times, no less, sits there shaking her head and saying, “It’s true, there’s just too much money in politics.” This is supposed to be the news channel for educated people! Can somebody revive Walter Cronkite please?

Math and logic are not the same things, but they are related, and both involve learning the rules and using them to come to sane conclusions. Our modern society was created by the age of reason and now our technology threatens to destroy the intellectual processes which make it possible. 

Things do not become true because you believe them, or because you wish them to be true. They are not even true if you think that you feel it or see it. From the singular perspective of this Trump supporter, the earth is both flat and stationary. But thought logic and critical thinking, we know that the earth is spherical and rotating. In the same way, why physicists tell me that the universe is comprised 

of 12 particles of matter held together by four forces of nature, even though I cannot see Quarks or Leptons, nor can I feel the weak force or the strong force, I know that there are well researched and reasoned explanations for how these subatomic particles and forces operate. 

There are things, men and women, which can be known, that can be proven, by reason even if we cannot see them or handle them. 

But in the universe of religion, we find people wanting us to believe, even to believe with passion unto martyrdom, in things that cannot be seen or handled and which, frankly, cannot stand up to critical analysis. Which is fine if that is what they want to do but, what I’m suggesting is that it does not make sense to try to talk about it. 

Should you venture outside of this building and try to engage a religious person in conversation about what is and what is not true, they will almost inevitably cite scripture. They will assert that the Bible is the word of God and that its authority cannot be questioned. If you ask how they know that it is the word of God and that it cannot be questioned, they will tell you that it says it is in the Bible.

This is what we call the fallacy of begging the question: Thou shalt not argue thy position by assuming one of its premises is true. (Begging the Question fallacy)

I have actually had people point out to me that it says on the cover that it is “holy” and either on the cover or just inside, it says that it is “authorized.” If you have never learned how to think critically, these sorts of circular arguments can be persuasive.

But more so, in the world of religious folks, the Bible is accepted by billions of Christians, the Quran by billions of Muslims, and the Torah by millions of Jews and within their own communities, it may not be cricket to question those texts but, the argument from popularity, is commonly called the “bandwagon fallacy” Thou shalt not claim that because a premise is popular that it must be true. What we in philosophy calls call an “appeal to the consensus mundi” or the “opinion of the world.” 

We recently had a fairly well known progressive writer taking issue with something Bishop Spong had said in one of the videos we have posted of him on our channel, and this fellow said, “Well Spong is wrong about this one point because very many people believe differently.” And I pointed out to him, what very many people believe is called “fashion” not fact. 

When I was in high school, leisure suits were very popular but mere popularity of those double knit polyester tragedies did not make them a fashion standard and by the time Richard Nixon was removed from office, no one would be caught dead in one and I’m not sure which one we were happier to see go . . . Nixon or the leisure suit.

Reality is not determined by popularity. Reality is determined by objective facts. Religion, when it is healthy, does not deny reality, it interprets reality. A person of faith is literally a person who courageously and prophetically interrogates society to demand that it conform to honesty and truth, not deny reality and invest itself in magical imaginary worlds that we have no reason to believe exist.

Again, traditional religion would have us to accept that our religion is true and others are false . . . Christians insist on Jesus as their savior, Muslims insist that only Allah is the true God and Jews point to Yahweh, but there is no evidence of any kind that any of them are right. Any one of them would tell you that you are mortal and have limited knowledge and that you cannot question God, … ok, but I sure can question what you say about God. Again, the rules of logic prohibit defending a claim based on ignorance. Thou shalt not argue that because of our ignorance the claim must be true or false. (Ad Ignoratum fallacy)

Nor does it stand to reason to defend a truth claim by simply saying that you cannot prove it to be false, that is when we say: Thou shalt not lay the burden of proof onto the person who is questioning the claim. (Burden of Proof Reversal fallacy). And, as any freshman logic student can tell you, no one can prove a negative.

I cannot prove that angels and demons are not real but then, I cannot prove that unicorns and leprechauns are not real. What I know is that there is exactly the same evidence for angels and demons as there is for unicorns and leprechauns which is exactly none, except for the people who have claimed to have seen them and only you can decide how much credibility that those people deserve. From my vantage point, the credibility seems pretty remote but some are more charming than others. 

The popular writer, C. S. Lewis, famously insisted that Jesus either is who he says he is, the son of God, or he is a mad man. That is what we call a False Dichotomy, or, “Thou shalt not reduce the argument down to two possibilities.” The larger truth there, something Lewis didn’t know because he didn’t spend a single day in a classroom learning anything about scripture or theology, is that we have no reason to believe that Jesus actually made any of those grand claims about himself, and if he had, then, yes, he was surely mad as a hatter. 

The problem for us, however, is that Jesus is buried in 2000 years of history, Muhammad in 1500 years of history, and Moses, if he existed, then he existed 3200 years ago. So, we end up with a lot of historical “in the weeds” arguments about what is and is not known about them. But religious leaders who have the misfortune of having lived in the modern era, such as the founders of the Mormon church, Joseph Smith and Bingham Young, we can fairly easily demonstrate that they were con men who tricked people into letting them start what was basically a sex cult with themselves at the center of the action. 

We can show, from the historical record, that most of the story line of Joseph Smith about the golden tablets and all of the history of the lost Tribes of Israel migrating to the Americas was plagiarized from a book published a few years earlier called the “View of the Hebrews.” DNA testing proves that there is no connection between ancient Hebrew tribes and Native Americans and that translation errors in the King James Bible are also found transferred into the Book of Mormon. 

The historical evidence that Joseph Smith was a con man is over whelming. Wait a second, wrong slide:

 Still, why are there 16 million Mormons in the world, a million and a half of them living in Mexico where many of the events described in the Book of Mormon were said to have taken place…. Where they know there is no evidence for any of it. . . how does this happen?  And yes, one of Joseph Smith’s 40 wives was 14 years old when he married her. None of this is to suggest that the nice family that lives in your neighborhood who are active Mormons believe in polygamy, or pedophilia, nor do they, I strongly suspect, actually believe that Joseph Smith found gold tablets buried in the hills of the Finger Lake region of New York that he was magically able to read through two rocks which described the history of the lost tribes of Israel living in the Americas. 

They go along with a lot of nonsense for the same reason that Catholics and Evangelicals do. . . because their families, their faith community, their social ties, are all among people who either believe or pretend to believe, or who quietly ignore, the more patently absurd aspects of their faith. And no, it is not an ad hominin fallacy if the person’s character is the initial point.

Which, by inference, is how 42% of Americans can still insist that Donald Trump has never told a lie and that he is making America great again. I am not picking on Mormons any more than I am picking on Catholics, Evangelicals, or, for that matter, a lot of our progressive friends who are progressive simply as a matter of preference and not a matter of thought, a conclusion reached by critical thinking. Because, you know, whether he is the least bit sincere in his own faith or not, that Michael Pence knows enough about Evangelical Christianity to know that Donald Trump is not one of him, that he is dishonest, corrupt, and ironically, he is a playboy who has to pay a porn star to have sex with him.  Everybody knows, surely no one is actually fooled, but there is some payoff in pretending, like pretending you believe that Mormon underwear will save you from a plane crash or a Catholic scapular will keep a demon from getting into your heart. And no, the photograph on the right has not been doctored, that is a drunken, smoking, shirtless Mel Gibson demonstrating the proper way to wear a scapular. 

I don’t want to undermine anyone’s religious freedom or their right to choose whatever faith that coincides with their beliefs. I am begging Americans, the British, Australians, South Africans, and Canadians to think critically about your ethics, your politics, and your faith. Because there is a healthier way to live. 

“What Mom Really Wants: Equal Rights”

“What Mom Really Wants: Equal Rights”   May 10, 2020   Dr. Roger Ray, pastor

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NYT: Does Religion Oppress Women?

BY NICHOLAS KRISTOF

 DECEMBER 15, 2009 

At their most repugnant, the belief that women are inferior human beings in the eyes of God gives excuses to the brutal husband who beats his wife, the soldier who rapes a woman, the employer who has a lower pay scale for women employees, or parents who decide to abort a female embryo. It also costs many millions of girls and women control over their own bodies and lives, and continues to deny them fair and equal access to education, health care, employment, and influence within their own communities.

I’ve never been a fan of Mother’s Day sermons. While my mother was alive, I did the whole cards, flowers, and chocolates thing and visited when I could, but the solipsistic sermons always irritated me. In part because I have always known women who wanted to have kids who couldn’t, and women who had kids they didn’t plan and sometimes didn’t want, and the whole issue of family is such a mixed bag of guilt, manipulation, as well as sacrifice and celebration that I just never liked to try to speak to the issue of motherhood as if everyone experienced it the same way.

As I have grown old in the church, I have realized more and more that the issue is not about motherhood as much as it is about womanhood, and for me in particular, it is how religion has not consistently been a friend and an ally to the cause of women and of equal rights. 

Do you remember the powerful speech that Michelle Obama delivered in 2016 in which she commented on the painful irony of having lived for 8 years in the White House, knowing that the White House had been built by slaves? 

Sure, it was an important aspect of the progress made in America that a house once built by the forced labor of African slaves was then inhabited by decedents of slaves. The church I served in Kentucky when I was in grad school was also a building that was built by slaves. It was creepy and a bit haunting, but it was also buried in more than a hundred years of history. 

What took me another generation to realize is how the church was still enslaving women, setting the boundaries of who and what they could be. Still, I don’t want to be guilty of seeing women’s rights and the abuse of women purely from a western perspective. For those of us who grew up in the United States or Europe, it needs to be pointed out that the most common form of drudgery in the lives of women globally is that fact that most water in the world is still carried from a well or a natural water source and in almost every country in the world, the task of carrying water is still relegated, almost exclusively to women. 

I have seen it, in the Middle east, in northern Africa and in Central and South America. Carrying water and firewood, breaks down the skeletal structure of women and dramatically shortens their lives. Another topic that is difficult for us to hear is the practice of what they call “female circumcision” but which we more accurately call “female genital mutilation” in which young girls are made to suffer the painful, dangerous, and humiliating mutilation of their bodies so that they will derive no pleasure from sexual intercourse . . . another way of both controlling women and easing the fears many men have of the sexual potency of women. 

Globally, women are both feared and desired as sexual beings. Again, this is very difficult for us to allow ourselves to think about, and though it happens to young boys as well, the majority of people who are being trafficked around the world for sex, are young women. One of our listeners is a young mother with whom I correspond regularly who was trafficked and while she survived it, this is not something one recovers from quickly, if, in fact, recovery is possible. It happens in Asia, it happens in Africa, and, it happens in the United States, mostly in Florida, California, and Texas. The numbers are difficult to cite with certainty but in those three states, we can confidently say that there are more than 40,000 young girls being taken and trafficked in the sex trade.

I’m not going to be specific enough to get sued, but I can tell you that there are more than 10 Asian Spas here in Springfield that are covers for prostitution of trafficked Asian women, women who are moved around the country to truck stops and massage parlors where they are prevented from learning to speak English or to make friends so that they remain trapped in an abusive cycle from which they are not likely to escape with their lives. 

There was one right down the street from my home and I asked the business owners around the spa why they tolerated it on their block until they finally demanded a police raid. The spa was closed but no arrests were made. The trafficked women were moved to other locations, the male customers were just sent home . . . 2020, on the south side of Springfield, within walking distance of half million-dollar homes, a high school, and an elementary school, and a couple of our larger churches. I don’t say this to be shocking or to be offensive. I’m just stating a part of the reality of what it means to be a woman in the 21^st century.

Normally, when people like us get together to talk about women’s issues, we are talking about wage disparity, the glass ceiling, and the fact that no woman has yet been elected to the office of the president and even though we have women serving in the house and the senate, their numbers are nowhere near being representative of the 51% stake they have in the population. 

There are 100 members of the senate, only 26 of them are women. And, in spite of a number of additions of women to the congress in the 2018 mid-term elections, they still just make up 24% of the Congress. Sure, their numbers have grown dramatically over the past two generations from purely symbolic levels to a quarter of each house but when women are more than half of the population, can we call this success?

And yes, many other countries have elected women as heads of state, something we have never accomplished. But, and it pains me to say this, but while India had Indira Gandhi and Israel had Golda Meier, Pakistan had Benazir Bhutto, Argentina had Eva Peron, and there have been many more in recent years but can you name a major western nation that has had two, other than the United Kingdom and I am not the only person who is trying to forget about both of those? It takes a few hours for sound to cross the pond but if you listen hard you will hear some “amens” coming across the Atlantic in about five hours. 

And I am not here to tell you today that women being forced to carry fire wood and water, that female mutilation, sex trafficking, hiring discrimination, the wage gap, and election inequities are all the fault of organized religion but I am here to tell you that organized religion has fostered and helped to perpetuate this diminished role of women in the world from the dawn of time. 

The Catholic Church has, for centuries, venerated if not actually worshipped Mary, the mother of Jesus, but you know, “virgin” was not really Mary’s first name. She is venerated as the virgin mother and later tradition has it that she was a perpetual virgin . . . that is, the notion that she was holy and to be honored was tied to her having never had sex and if you can’t see that worshipping a woman because she was forever a virgin is not directly connected to the practice of female genital mutilation then let me submit that you just don’t want to acknowledge the obvious. Both are born of the male fear of the power of female sexuality. 

For centuries Catholics were encouraged to read daily devotions that were the lives of the saints and a huge portion of the female saints became sainted because they died defending their virginity. . . hence, the “virgin martyrs.” Imagine being a little girl and being taught by the church that the two most valuable things a woman can do in the world is to give birth to children and to die a virgin. 

It would seem that Greeks had a somewhat better lock on biology than the early church did. While Greek religions are full of heroes who were born of a divine and mortal union, they didn’t call them virgin births. . . it was, though they didn’t call it this, typically a one night stand with a god, which might have made for a better story to tell mom and dad than that the baby daddy is a local fireman you met at Crossfit. Still, for Greek and Roman demigods, sex was involved. 

Added to the paradoxical message that women are saved through childbirth but still expected to be perpetual virgins is the fact that for almost all of history, Christians have portrayed God as a man and then there is, of course, Jesus, and a history of male popes, patriarchs, priests, pastors and a decidedly male set of church officers, teachers and leaders and women have been made to feel like second class citizens in the world of religion which then applies to every other dimension of life. 

Jews and Muslims have avoided art that depicts either God or people but until very recently, female leadership or even influence has been rare. 

It may be stepping outside of my lane to criticize the treatment of women in Islam,

In fact, most Muslim women have been very clear about the fact that while they may criticize Islamic strictures within their own families and communities, they do not appreciate criticism from outside of their own community; in much the same way that gay people are getting tired of straight saviors, and black people are weary with white martyrs, and women in general may be tired of overly zealous male feminists. But, it is my job to deliver about 50 lectures on ethics every year and I cannot help doing that from the perspective of a white, male, heterosexual. 

And sermons about cisgen, white, male, hetero, American liberation are sort of in the wheelhouse of the KKK, so, I’m going to give myself some license here:

Forgive me, but I have a very hard time  seeing this as protecting and honoring women . . . this looks like the subjugation of women and robbing them of both sexuality and femininity . . . you don’t see Muslim men being compelled to cover themselves up in this way.

And though it was a style of dress specific to holy orders of women, it cannot be denied that there is a Christian precedent here as well. This still looks to me like a denial of sexuality and femininity but both traditional Catholics and traditional Muslims 

have pointed out the obvious hypocrisy of western capitalism and exploitation because, you can’t say that how we use women’s bodies in advertising and entertainment is not exploitative and, in much the same way, controlling. 

If I may beg your attention for just a few moments more . . . I do not want to fail to give plaudits to the women who both bore children and who loved and sacrificed for them. I want to honor those who nurtured the sick, tutored the struggling, encouraged the faint of heart, and counseled the troubled but I want to reject the notion that women gain notoriety either for being perpetual virgins or famous sex symbols. The path to being fully human does not have to involve the uterus though it certainly may.

Western religions have a long tradition of segregating and discriminating against women, and certainly not just in leadership but also even in the physical seating arrangements for worshippers. Christian churches had women on one side of the church and men on the other, with even different doors for entering and leaving the church. Jewish synagogues a century ago had a wall dividing a women’s seating area or balcony from the men, but in both Christian and Jewish tradition, such gender discrimination is now nearly non-existent but in Islam it is still the rule:

In fact, even here in religiously conservative Springfield, our local Muslim house of prayer is the only place I know of where women are required to sit behind men in services. 

Pulitzer prize winning authors, Nicholas Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn attempt to answer the question “Is Islam Misogynistic?” in their very important book: Half the Sky. They make the observation that when Muhammad founded Islam, it was an improvement in the condition of women in Arab culture, affording women rights and protections previously unknown in their culture. However, rather than ignoring some of the Quran’s more discriminatory passages and evolving towards greater female liberation, they have actually gone in the other direction. While female honor killings and genital mutilation are not unknown in Africa and the East among Christians, it is almost exclusively an Islamic problem. 

I have heard Americans justifying our occupation of Afghanistan as being a force for liberation for the women there but Kristof and WuDunn write about how a young girl who is just accused of not being a virgin may be sentenced to years in prison and a woman who shows even an inch of skin in the marketplace once would have been beaten but now is raped as punishment. Islam must experience a thoroughgoing reformation. There really is nothing else to say about it. 

The 19^th amendment in America gave women the right to vote in 1920. The passage of one hundred years has been a history of both progress and setbacks for women’s quest to become fully equal citizens in the United States. And, as you know, there are things that can become true in law that do not become true in practice until people change the way that they think, and though we pastors, priests, preachers, rabbis, and imams often feel ignored by our congregations, the truth of the matter is that over time, the pulpit has probably been afforded more influence than it deserved . . . present company excluded, of course. 

After a very expensive and exhausting primary season that saw many qualified men and women, people of color and people of varying sexual orientations, this fall we will come down, once again, to choose between one old white guy or the other old white guy. . . and neither one is even one of my favorite old white guys, but this is the mark of a system shaped by an ideology that leadership almost always comes down to this kind of sausage party, and speaking as an old white guy, I’m sick of it and we just can’t allow this to ever happen again. 

We have waited too long for a more colorful choice. It is said that the Buddha taught that there are three things that cannot remain hidden: the sun, the moon, and the truth. I’m here to tell you that the truth is that there is too much powerful, intelligent, insightful leadership in women of color for them to remain hidden from our society any longer. As sure as the sun will make itself known tomorrow morning, one of these women needs to move into the White House while I am still young enough to jump and shout. 

A New Economy for a post-Covid world

A New Economy for a post-Covid world           May 3, 2020      

Dr. Roger Ray, pastor

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Wisdom lesson:  

This is my friend, Dr. William Jimenez, suited up to go into an exam room to treat a Covid-19 patient in New York. William and I had planned to meet this past week in Puerto Rico for his kids to enjoy their Spring Break on the beach and for us to sit on the balcony and solve the problems of the world.

But the problems of the world got to New York and most of the rest of the world before we got to take our long-awaited vacation. But we talk most days now about what it is like for him to be on the front lines of a battle where 62,000 Americans have died in the past two months and where no real cure, treatment, or vaccine is realistically in sight. 

I fear that William is too big hearted for this virus. When one of his long time patients contracts the virus and dies, William suffers so dramatically from each loss that I am sincerely worried for him as well as for all of the people in New York and New Jersey and New Orleans, and Washington. But he tells me, “This is my calling, this is what I was born to do.” 

It is that kind of courage and devotion that makes New Yorkers go outside every night at 7 and applaud, blow their car horns, and bang on pans on their balconies, showing appreciation and respect for our nation’s healthcare workers. 

My concern for the stress my friend is under was heightened this week when I learned that a young E.R. doctor in the hospital where William has worked, a physician who had Covid-19, recovered and went right back to work . . . a physician who even was making masks during her recovery for her peers to wear at work, succumbed to the overwhelming 

sadness of it all and took her own life. Dr. Lorna M. Breen’s father is also a physician. He told reporters that she was a casualty of the pandemic as much as anyone who died on a respirator at the hospital and he asked only that she be remembered as a hero.

I know that you all get this. You have all heard most of this in the news. I know that even if no one you know personally is on the front lines or is a patient, I know that your heart has been filled with grief just as mine has. But here is what you may not know, in the middle of all of this drama, and grief, and strain, William and the other doctors in his group were told this week that they would not be getting paid this month.

You see, the measures taken to deal with the pandemic: cutting patient load, video conferencing, canceling surgeries, and reserving space in hospitals and clinics for an unknown surge of coronavirus patients has meant that physicians are not billing for medical services at even a third of the normal rate . . . so while they are working harder, and risking their lives every time they go to work, and most will have some level of PTSD when it is over, they are also being asked to do it without getting paid . . . no rent money, no grocery money. How crazy is that?

And locally, while our hospitals ramped up to prepare for pandemic patients, emptying offices and rooms for a surge of patients we have not seen here in Missouri, the hospitals are laying off, firing, or furloughing thousands of employees. 

In fact, William shared this email with me from a surgeon in his group literally begging his peers to send him some referrals for surgeries he can perform in his office in off hours so that he can pay his mortgage this month. I’m sure he is a great guy but I don’t think I want a surgeon taking a scalpel to me under that kind of pressure! 

Just when people in Italy, Germany, England, and all over America, are standing up to give tribute to healthcare workers for taking care of us in the midst of a medical crisis, our hospitals are giving out pink slips to these same heroic healers. 

This not happening, of course, in Canada or Great Britain where their national healthcare services employ doctors, nurses, therapists, cooks, and cleaners to serve the healthcare interests of their citizens. In the United States, our healthcare system is still based on the profit derived from the illness of others. The individual doctor or nurse may have the highest and most noble motivation to be of service to the sick, but the system is all about the spread sheet and the bottom line. And as little sympathy as I typically have for our hospitals and health insurance companies, right now, in our state, when they are losing more than $30 million a day, even I have to acknowledge that they can’t just bear that loss.

But what is wrong here is the system. We have not designed our healthcare system to deliver healthcare, we have designed it to make money and profit is not the issue with illness. It never should have been, I’ve been saying this for 40 years, but now, the coronavirus is making it painfully clear. We need to get healthcare out of the marketplace and make it a human service as it should have always been.

The capitalism that may work well in the competition among fast food restaurants, coffee shops, retail clothing outlets, and lawn services absolutely does not work in the universe of healthcare. We spend twice as much per citizen as most western nations, yet we fail to care for nearly 10% of our population, and the people who do receive care have worse outcomes than in other western nations.

 Though many politicians like to still loudly proclaim that the United States has the best healthcare system in the world, the objective truth is that we are not in the top 10. We are not even in the top 25. In fact, among the developed world, we are dead last; considering all the nations of the world, we are now #59.

The only category in which we were rated as #1 at the beginning of this year was, we were considered to be the best prepared to deal with a pandemic. I don’t know who was in charge of making that estimation and I don’t know where he is selling used cars now; but real life experience shows that we were the worst in preparation for the arrival of covid-19!

I am, of course, very worried about the nearly 30 million people who have lost their jobs in the past two months. . . but I am forced to wonder how many of those 30 million have historically opposed the idea of giving Medicare to everyone because they liked their employer provided healthcare? How do they like it now that they don’t have an employer? It is amazing how clear this issue becomes when the comfortably insured suddenly find themselves among the ranks of the uninsured. 

Honestly, I don’t have much sympathy for people who are crying wolf now who refused to find some compassion for their uninsured neighbors but maybe now they realize how wrong they have been since the efforts of Roosevelt, Eisenhour, Nixon, Kennedy, Johnson, Carter, Clinton, and Obama to give healthcare to everyone has been thwarted for 80 years. Isn’t it time for that battle to be won?

Healthcare is just a prime example of why our economic system is broken and demands to be changed to something that is less tied to the feudal lords who enslaved the peasants of medieval Europe to make them rich. We were not prepared for a pandemic, not with PPE, masks, hand sanitizer, or ventilators. And we were not morally or ideologically prepared for the economic implications of this pandemic.

We seem to think that the economy has to work the way it has worked for the past two centuries, where the only way to have money is to either be born rich or go work for a salary. But, look at how we divide up our public and private work:  Teachers are trying to teach on-line. . . I’ve taught online courses, it can be a lot of work but you have to know that there is not as much education going on in that way. But, they are still being paid the same.

Doctors are being confined to video conferences and exams, but they get paid little or nothing for that unless they can order an MRI, a blood panel, or some treatment that they can bill for. Why, since the pandemic is forcing both teachers and physicians into online work, wouldn’t we pay physicians for complying with the pandemic regulations just like always?

Last month I applauded the government’s decision to send $1200 to every American adult which, I thought, was a good start. If we could just get our heads out of feudal economics, we could realize that we should give a Universal Basic Income to everyone every month. And I am not going to wade back into a conversation about Modern Monetary Theory this morning, just suffice it to say that we currently operate 800 military bases in 70 nations… that’s not defense… that is an empire. If we dramatically reeled in our massive and indefensible military spending, we could give Americans a Universal Basic Income, universal healthcare, and tuition free college.

It may be above my pay grade to say how many military bases on foreign soil we really need but I can tell you that we have 9 in Columbia alone, and they are there to stem the drug trade from South America to the USA. How is that working out? 

If you had 9 Taco Bell restaurants and none of them had sold a Taco in 20 years, how long would you keep paying people to keep them open? People act like this can’t be done when, in fact, it would be as easy and stumbling and falling down these stairs, and you already know that I can do that (we’ve destroyed that video, right?). 

So, now that we have closed down the retail and service economy almost everywhere except for Sweden which is taking a very risky herd immunity approach to the virus, many American governors are determined to lift the mandatory closing. Our governor says that restaurants, bars, hair salons, and retail shops can open on Monday. And, of course, people are not going to rush back into those places because people know that it still isn’t safe. 

And shop owners who have to restrict the number of people who can come in and try to get them to stay several feet apart, will not be able to have enough volume of business to be able to turn a profit. But what lifting the ban does is it keeps them from applying for business stoppage insurance. It keeps their staff from drawing unemployment.  This means that they have to go back to paying their landlord and their utility bill and it cuts them out of applying for special assistance from either the state or the federal government.

Rather than change the system to recognize the lethal nature of the pandemic, they are going to force people to die to support an economic system that is obscenely out of date. 

The one thing that should be obvious to everyone is that all of these billionaires crying out to send people back to work are realizing that they don’t make money, their employees are the ones making money, and without the people they have refused health care, a living wage, and available education to, they will go broke.

But here is what you can bank on, Missouri’s Gov. Parsons won’t be going to a bowling alley and renting shoes and using one of the bowling alley’s balls. His family will not be crowded into a booth at TGI Fridays and they won’t be getting their haircut at Hudson Hawk Barber shop. They want you to risk your life, but they are not going to be joining you in this very risky behavior!

There are very few things that will make me dive for the remote to turn off the TV faster than hearing Bill Kristol’s voice on the news, but even he, and you have to know, this guy is so far to the right that even most Nazis won’t be seen in public with him, but even he bemoaned the hypocrisy of sending employees back into meat packing plants where hundreds of employees have been diagnosed with Covid-19 and many have died. In the current system, the corporation is given a waiver for the unsafe working conditions, but employees are compelled to return to that unsafe environment or be fired and lose their unemployment benefits. And, yes, this is specifically Republican hubris, but you can’t see it separate and apart from a system of capitalism that favors profits over people. 

I am a southern boy, I don’t want to run out of country ham for my biscuits or pulled pork, but if I have to pay more for it and have it less often so that these guys can have a safe work environment . . . and what kind of moral monster would object. . . other than the Republican elected officials in Iowa? We always hope that electing women to high office will give us better government but, in a word, Kim Reynolds was obviously the wrong woman. 

Years ago, Warren Buffett made the observation that the class war has been going on for years and the rich people are winning. The current crisis brings into focus who is valued in a society and who can be discarded or at least disregarded. People, this seriously calls for a revolution, nothing short of the poor demanding a more fair distribution of wealth will work. The rich will not do the right thing simply because it is the right thing to do. They will, however, do the right thing when they have no other options and that is the point America must come to. 

Last year, Frank Snowden published the frighteningly prophetic book, Epidemics and Society. He is a Yale history professor, so this is not a prediction that a pandemic was around the corner, but Snowden painstakingly describes the way that epidemics have shaped how the world works in the past.  And often, Snowden points out, a pandemic holds a mirror up to society to reveal its weakest moral points.

It is not an accident that people of color are dying in numbers way out of proportion to the white population because, as in the Plague, and other epidemics, the people who live in the most crowded conditions, the people with the poorest diets, the people with the least access to health care, are much more likely to die. And, as we are seeing the Trump administration’s insistence that meat packing employees go back to their dangerous and low paying jobs, we cannot feign surprise that the majority of those employees are people of color.

Again, it is the system we have, it is not a necessary matter of nature. Our system doles out the best healthcare to the top of the income ladder and the whole employer-based health insurance system, keeps the unemployed from having reasonable access to healthcare at all. That is not nature. That is not human need. That is an economic system designed to serve the rich, and though the doctors’ lounges at Mercy and Cox hospitals have been full of Trump enthusiastic aspiring millionaire physicians for the past three years, I suspect that things have fallen rather quiet lately. I bet I could walk into a physicians’ lounge today and casually make the observation that doctors in England’s National Healthcare System typically have shorter work weeks and a much better standard of living than American doctors and still walk out without a scalpel in my back. 

How we react to an epidemic depends greatly on who is the most likely to die. Gov. Kim Reynolds will send laborers back into meat packing plants, but members of congress are refusing to cram over 400 people into a room that is actually a lot smaller than it looks on TV. In the 1980’s you remember how the married and straight reacted to the AIDS epidemic which was perceived as being an almost exclusively gay liability. The news media even blithely used the term “innocent victim” to reference someone who was exposed to HIV through a blood transfusion or an accidental needle stick. . . as if gay people were not innocent since they got the virus through sex . . . sex is, of course, something the rest of us have never done, right? Or is this not the church of perpetual virginity? Is there something you guys aren’t telling me?

Compare that to how people reacted to things like tuberculosis or polio, which affects the rich and the poor, the young and the old, equally. A pandemic can teach us a moral lesson. 

When we hear about an Ebola outbreak, we need to stop thinking about that as an African problem or thinking of poverty as someone else’s problem. We are all connected. We not only need to have universal healthcare, but we need a universal basic income, a guarantee of employment, retirement, housing and education. 

This pandemic brings us to the threshold of change . . . what kind of future do you want to live in?

I often think of the different visions of the future in fiction literature. Gene Rodenberry imagined the world of Star Trek in the mid-22^nd century where there would be no currency and people pursued careers based on their interests and talents, but everyone had their quarters, and shared from the same recreational facilities, foods, and past-times. Or the more dystopian types like Mad Max in which society simply breaks down and everyone fights for what they can get.

I fear that our system is much more like the Hunger Games, in which the poor are pitted into mortal competition against one another, for the entertainment and security of the wealthy. And that system, I submit. Must stop. It can stop peacefully at the ballot box through better government, or it can stop through revolution. But it has to stop. 

As Gandhi famously said, “We have more than enough to meet the world’s needs, we just don’t have enough to satisfy the world’s greed.” I don’t know about you, but I’m done trying to sacrifice to satisfy the greed of the 1%. We can provide safe housing, a healthy diet, meaningful work, a living wage, universal healthcare and education to everyone…. We have the resources to do it, and if that means we have to go from 800 foreign military bases to just three or four hundred, then, somehow, we’ll get by. 

I am not equipped to hazard a guess how many lives will be lost this year in this pandemic. Many experts say that we are only in the second inning and we have a lot yet to endure this fall and winter but whether the number is 60,000 or 600,000 let’s not let them die in vain. We have seen our society’s weaknesses and we know that we can fix them and there is no excuse short of damnation if we fail to do it.