“Speaking Truth to Power”

“Speaking Truth to Power”   Dec. 1, 2024    Dr. Roger Ray

 

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Religious terms can mean very different things depending upon the circumstances. For someone to be a prophet or to be a prophetic preacher can be two very different things. Someone who describes themselves as being a prophet may well be an insane person who may or may not wear head gear made out of aluminum foil. A prophetic preacher is someone, often with no official position within a religious institution, who publicly speaks truths that the official religious institutions or governments don’t want to hear. 

 

In science fiction and fantasy books and movies, you hear the word “prophesy” used to mean some ancient prediction of the future, often the distant future, as with a figure like Nostradamus, the 16^th century astrologer who absolutely did not make accurate predictions about things that would happen centuries after he had died. He didn’t even make meaningful predictions about things that would happen during his lifetime but, the gullible public is always looking for a mystery they can claim offers them special insight since they seem to be so immune to reason. 

 

In the context of theology and biblical studies, neither Nostradamus nor astrologers, nor Chinese fortune cookies are prophetic. Gandhi was prophetic. Martin Luther King, Jr. was prophetic. The Berrigan brothers, to a certain degree, Thomas Merton and the Dali Llama are prophetic. 

 

And, in fact, what it ultimately means to be prophetic has nothing to do with predicting the future and it has everything to do with speaking the truth to power. So, in that light, it is not even necessary for the person speaking to be in any way religious. They just have to be willing to articulate something which they are persuaded is true to institutions and governments that don’t want to hear it.

 

Many of the Hebrew bible’s prophets were also priests though possibly not in great standing since they were often so critical of the priesthood, but some of them were just inspired individual, like Amos who said of himself:  “I am no prophet nor a prophet’s son, but I am a herdsman and a dresser of sycamore trees.” Amos was a shepherd and a farmer and not a part of a prophetic or priestly community. 

 

I suspect that many journalists, novelists, philosophers, and poets were prophets but not usually mentioned as being such. But then there were prophets who were priests but then it is difficult to tell how many different people and generations wrote using their name. The book of Isaiah may be the most important book in the Hebrew Bible but even though it, on the surface, purports to have been written by one person, the text makes it obvious that the writing stretches from the 8^th century BCE into the 5^th century BCE, so, clearly a lot of people may have had a part in forming a book that covers a time period of 200 years. How much it was influenced by the Temple priesthood is hard to say, but from the oldest part of the book, the prophet has some pretty rough things to say to the clergy. And I would like to spend some time looking at that critique today.

 

I think that I can defend the generalization that all of the great world religions began as a reform movement. Faith becomes a vehicle for the hopes of the victims of power, an appeal to conscience, to higher values but, sadly, every major religion gets coopted by the very power that it began to protest. Christianity was decidedly anti-empire in the time of Jesus but in a very few generations, it became the religion on the empire, a tool used by the empire to raise armies and enforce its abusive economy. The historical Jesus was a liberator who challenged the values of both state and church, but he soon became the symbol of monarchical power and whatever he had once promised to the poor in terms of housing, food, and freedom became the empty promise of heaven after a lifetime of bondage and servitude. 

 

Isaiah lived in a time when the temple was already a couple of hundred years old. The priests had become a favored class who lived under the shadow of the king’s palace. They helped to control the people in return for being allowed to live comfortable lives of what Isaiah thought was drunken debauchery. So, the prophet has some tough things to say as he sees Judah sinking into the swamp of its own privilege and greed. . . made worse by the fact that the priests were totally irrelevant. I am sure that they didn’t see themselves in that light.

 

I can almost hear the priests saying that they just tried to avoid talking about politics. They didn’t want to offend either the King or the congregants. They were trying to be practical. They talked about holy scriptures, they ran the ceremonies and rituals of the temple and kept harmony among the people. If they got upset about something it would be because of a rival religion, mistaken doctrine, errant religious texts, but it wouldn’t be about military abuses, excessive taxation, it wouldn’t be about slavery, misogyny, racism, classism, or any of the practical issues upon which a stable government and society depended.

 

I’ve been there, more times than I care to recount. I had a pretty rough go of it in deeply red Missouri for more than 30 years. I was there, loudly protesting the invasions of Afghanistan and especially of Iraq. Leading in protests and loudly objecting to an obviously illegal war against a nation that had nothing to do with the 9-11 attacks for which the Bush administration was trying to blame on them. 

 

It was in 2004 that I was given the opportunity of a lifetime, to take a sabbatical from my embattled place in Springfield, Missouri and to go be a fellow at Harvard. Harvard really is a bit like Hogwarts, I was immediately seduced by the architecture, the history, and all of the fame and tradition in which Harvard is steeped. Unlike my years at Vanderbilt, the faculty was amazingly friendly, inviting us into their homes for tea, meeting us for lunch or coffee. I was a fan.

 

But one day the divinity school put on a panel of local Boston clergy to talk about how they were dealing with the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq in their congregation. There was a Catholic priest, a Muslim Imam, a Jewish Rabbi, a Buddhist monk, a random protestant pastor, and a Unitarian minister. 

 

After laudatory introductions were made, the host went down the row, asking each member of the assembled clergy how they were addressing the wars within their faith communities. And one by one, every single one of them gave an excuse for having never spoken to the issue…. One said that there was a retired Army general in the congregation, another had a board member and major donor who was a military contractor, others talked about fearing public ire if they appeared to not be supportive of the wars. 

 

I had gone to Harvard, determined to not be an obnoxious ass; to keep my head low and enjoy a few months with absolutely no conflict . . . but I had expected to be surrounded by better people. 

I had been risking life, limb, and employment by speaking out against illegal wars and civilian casualties while I worked in one of the most hostile red states in the country. These pastors, ministers, priest, and rabbis worked in Boston, that haven of American liberalism, but even there, they were more concerned about attendance, donations, their own popularity and job security than they were about speaking a word of truth against a nightmare of an illegal war.

 

Isaiah was evidently a priest, a member of the clergy, serving at the nation’s hub of religion, at the temple in Jerusalem. But this is what he said:

Isaiah 28: 7

These also reel with wine
    and stagger with strong drink;
the priest and the prophet reel with strong drink;
    they are confused with wine;
    they stagger with strong drink;
they err in vision;
    they stumble in giving judgment.
⁸ All tables are covered with filthy vomit;
    no place is clean.

⁹ “Whom will he teach knowledge,
    and to whom will he explain the message?
Those who are weaned from milk,
    those taken from the breast?
¹⁰ For it is precept upon precept, precept upon precept,
    line upon line, line upon line,
    here a little, there a little.”^[a]

¹¹ Truly, with stammering lip
    and with another tongue
he will speak to this people,
¹²     to whom he has said,
“This is rest; give rest to the weary,
and this is repose,”
    yet they would not hear.

On the surface, you can see in the English translation of the prophet’s poetry that he is calling them a bunch of drunks. Probably not literally but who knows? It is an ugly scene, like the worst of fraternity parties where people are stumbling and vomiting everywhere. Obviously, whatever they had to say in their religious services sounded like drunken rambling, or maybe even worse.

 

I am certainly no expert in Hebrew but I heard a lecture by a Hebrew professor on this passage in which he said the words, “For it is precept upon precept, precept upon precept,  line upon line, line upon line, here a little, there a little.”^[a]

Are read like this: cav la cav, cav la cav, sav la sav, sav la sav, siershom siershom. He said that it sounded like a baby prattling, a baby, not quite old enough to speak clearly. Because their faith was nothing but meaningless word salad; precept upon precept, precept upon precept, line upon line, line upon line,” and then he says “here a little, there a little,” like a preschool teacher speaking to toddlers in the room, “here little one, there you little one.” 

 

Some years later, after I had burned all of my bridges with my former denomination, I was back in Missouri, trying to start a new church that would be willing to fearlessly share a prophetic message in such a troubled time in America. It was a tough assignment, trying to find enough progressives in Springfield, Missouri to support a new church. 

 

Every “butt in a seat” counted in those early years but that was when the rumors of torture at the infamous Abu Ghraib prison went from being probable to being certain. I railed against this official military practice of physical, sexual, and psychological torture. 

That afternoon I got a call from one of our leading donors and supporters. He just said, “I’m out. I won’t be back.” I was shocked and when I asked why he said that he would not tolerate hearing our soldiers being criticized from the pulpit. And, dumbfounded, I asked, “So you are going to go to a pro-torture church?” and he shot back, “I’ll go where I don’t have to hear about it.” 

 

And I realized, yes, yes, exactly. There were 300 churches in Springfield, and it was a pretty safe bet that there was only one where the issue of Americans torturing prisoners of war would ever be mentioned. Because, for most of the church, faith is just a matter of precept upon precept, precept upon precept, line upon line . . . . cav la cav, cav la cav, sov la sov, sov la sov….. meaningless, irrelevant, religious word salad. 

 

We are all aware that in the past generation our nation has become more divided than ever before. Isolation has become so epidemic that even the surgeon general is talking about loneliness as a major threat to public health. Vitriolic partisan political discourse has us choosing up different news sources that will stroke our own egos and we have, for most purposes, forgotten how to talk with people who are not just like us, which is approximately no one, and so we are more and more isolated in our own little bubble.

 

As churches try to survive this age when church attendance seems to be of less and less importance . . . we’re lonely. We would like to have more friends . . . but we seem to have accepted that the only way to do that is to reduce our conversation to baby prattle. We don’t know how to discuss important matters, so we focus on the mundane. Churches become places of entertainment . . . life enhancement . . . but no longer a place where a prophetic word is welcome.

We don’t have a lot of reliable historical information about the ancient prophets of Judah, but I suspect that Isaiah, Elijah, Jeremiah and their ilk were pretty lonely characters. I wish that there were more prophetic preachers in the church, but I have taken my lumps. I have been fired, lied about, threatened with bodily harm, and left on my own a good deal and I wouldn’t wish that life on anyone. 

But what I have come to believe in these years of declining church attendance is that we don’t need brave silver-throated prophetic preachers as much as we need prophetic communities of faith, or at least, communities of friends who know how to disagree but to stay in conversation with one another. 

 

After all, Gandhi did not accomplish major social change in India on his own. 

If Gandhi had marched over 200 miles in 12 days in 1930 all by himself to protest the salt tax, we would have never heard about it and it wouldn’t have accomplished anything. It is only because he was joined in his protest by thousands of others that made Gandhi an effective leader.

Martin Luther King, Jr. was a prophetic preacher, a great writer and teacher, but all of those thousands of people who turned up for speeches were not there just to hear a prophet preaching. They showed up because they already knew what he was going to say, what he stood for, the reforms that he was demanding . . . they showed up to make the change happen.

 

Folks, we don’t need another Gandhi or another Martin Luther King, Jr. as much as we need congregations that are willing to show up, to be prophetic communities that will speak truth to power whenever there is a truth that needs to be spoken. German and Polish churches largely watched the holocaust happen. . . maybe they watched in horror, but if they had come together, they could have stopped it.

 

The churches of the south in the 19^th century, had its examples of protesting slavery and maybe even protesting the genocide of the Native Americans but there were not many. 

 

My patriarchal relatives both started a Church of Christ and were the largest slave traders in Kentucky. The Trail of Tears marched thousands of Indians off of their property in a death march towards Oklahoma and walked right through towns and farms, past churches and cathedrals, towards their virtual extinction. That’s where we need to be different, radically different. Because, if we will not be silent in the face of evil, evil will have to hide in shame. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Morality and Climate Change

Morality and Climate Change    

November 17, 2024   Dr. Roger Ray

 

Click here to see the video

 

 

The week of my first anniversary of living in Florida was greeted by back to back hurricanes. I live between Ft Lauderdale and Cape Canaveral on the Atlantic coast. While Helene caused massive damage in parts of Florida and as far north as North Carolina, it was nothing but pretty normal rain for me. But Milton was another matter. Living through a hurricane is something like surviving a herd of charging turtles. You know about it for more than a week before it shows up. The news media, dependent upon fear or anger to attract viewers, catastrophizes hurricanes to the point that you might think that there will be no homes and not much sod left behind when it passes through. 

 

For me, even though Milton passed right over us, even Milton was pretty much a non-event. I have a home built to resist hurricanes, with ever hurricane proof windows and roofing. I keep my trees trimmed and thinned to avoid having a threat from falling trees or limbs. My neighborhood maintains storm sewers, there is a retention lake across the street, we have buried utilities, and I am far enough away, and high enough above sea level, to not worry about storm surge. 

 

In short, I survived the hurricane that killed many of my neighbors, destroying homes, tearing off roofs, and closing businesses and knocking out electric and water service to more than 3 million people in the comfort of the insured middle class. I did relief work in the New Orleans area with teams of church volunteers for more than a year after the devastation of Hurricane Katrina. I have seen what a hurricane can do, and having lived most of my life in the Midwest, I have seen, firsthand, that a direct hit from a tornado can tear down the strongest of buildings, even a modern hospital. But the building codes developed in Florida following previous disasters can and do work. People may hate regulation of building codes and the requirements of even the nailing patterns for putting shingles on a house, but they make a difference.

 

Florida’s removal of the words “climate change” and “global warming” from text books, has turned out to not be helpful. J.D. Vance says that he doesn’t want to discuss controversial science but, in spite of controversy created by climate deniers or people who just don’t understand the science involved, government regulation can make a difference.

 

The conservative government of North Carolina is to blame for much of the loss experienced in the torrential rains dropped by Hurricane Helene in the mountains. The state legislature has rejected legislation to limit construction on steep mountain sides or to require houses to be built at least a foot above anticipated flood levels. 

 

For the first half of my career in ministry, I tried to avoid making any partisan comments in sermons and if circumstances seemed to make it necessary to be critical of one party or another, I always tried to balance that with a criticism of the other party so that I could claim to be above political partisanship. I never had a political sign in my yard or a bumper sticker on my car; but times have changed.

 

I was critical of the way that the Bush administration handled FEMA’s response to Hurricane Katrina because there were a lot of politically motivated bad decisions being made. But we learned a lot about the changing weather of this century from Hurricane Katrina.

We have done better since then in many ways, but still, we have two political parties, one which may be guilty of occasional exaggeration and one that is regularly guilty of wholesale denial of reality, and, as we have most recently experienced in the lies and conspiracy theories espoused by Trump and Vance regarding FEMA’s response to Helene, we cannot avoid saying that the Democratic party seems to strive to provide meaningful leadership and help and the Republican party seems to be determined to make matters worse, cause more human suffering and death, and to make the worse economic decisions. 

 

What is it that makes climate change politically controversial? Why would anyone be so determined to deny the obvious impacts of a warming earth, seen especially in earthquakes caused by fracking, stronger hurricanes and tornadoes caused by greenhouse gases, and water scarcity caused by deregulation and poor management?

 

 The quote is broadly attributed to the fiction writer, Kurt Vonnegut, though I confess that I cannot find the source, but he is reported to have said that “We’ll go down in history as the first society that wouldn’t save itself because it wasn’t cost-effective.” Coal, oil, and gas interests don’t want us to move towards renewable energy sources. Builders don’t want to raise construction costs and labor by being forced to meet safer building codes. Developers don’t want to have to provide for water retention and drainage when they build new neighborhoods and shopping centers.

 

Electric vehicles are cheaper to build, easier to maintain, and they are, frankly, faster than their gas-powered counterparts. And the evolving self-driving features of EV’s are safer than human operated cars no matter how good you think you are at driving! But we resist the change because so much of the economy, especially in the United States, is tied to gas burning cars and trucks. And, of course, mass transit is more efficient, has less climate impact, and uses up less space than billions of private cars we depend upon now, but that efficiency strikes at the heart of the profit centers of the automobile industry.

 

 High speed rail passes within blocks of my home more than 30 times a day but the nearest train station is more than a hundred miles away because property developers do not want to allow train traffic to stop in the pricy retirement communities along the Atlantic Coast. 

 

We could slow the negative effects of climate change through technological advances if decisions were not so commonly made by monied interests who do not consider the impact this has on the poor and the vulnerable who end up paying the highest percentage of their household income for transportation and who are the most likely to live in manufactured or unsafe housing. 

 

As a pastor, I have mobilized dozens of teams of volunteers to do relief work in Appalachia, the Ozarks, Ecuador, and Nicaragua. I have raised the money to build more than 300 houses for poor families, I have built medical clinics, feeding centers, and emergency shelters. I have provided food for tens of thousands of hungry people, but as Bishop Desmond Tutu said decades ago, 

“There comes a point where we need to stop just pulling people out of the river. We need to go upstream and find out why they’re falling in.” I am deeply grateful for the opportunities I have had to bring relief to the chronically poor, hungry and unhoused, to those who have been victims of floods, hurricanes, and tornadoes; but what sense does it make for religious people to keep trying to rescue people who are being victimized, generation after generation, century after century, by monied interests to rig the system so that they can be enriched by causing suffering for others.

 

In some ways, those of us who volunteer and donate to charitable relief efforts are, in effect, empowering the monied interests to go on exploiting the vulnerable. I don’t want to offer an apologetic for those who refuse to donate or volunteer . . . trust me, I am involved with local relief efforts in the wake of these two hurricanes, but I know that it is not merely an accident of nature that kept me and my immediate neighbors safe while several people who live only a few miles away were killed, and many are now homeless after losing absolutely everything in the hurricane. 

 

We must not stop pulling drowning people out of the river but if we know that someone upstream is literally throwing these people into the rushing water, then aren’t we obligated to try to stop them? Climate change is not ethically neutral. There are winners and there are losers. There are forces of oppression and there are victims.

 

The banner I helped to design when we started our church in 2008 bears a quote from the holocaust survivor and Nobel Prize winning author, Elie Wiesel, “Thou shalt not stand idly by.” In his reflections on the holocaust, he concluded that such things are only possible when people refuse to take a moral stand. He explains that neutrality never serves those who are victims of oppression but, in fact, neutrality literally makes you a partner with the oppressor. 

 

My previous career as the pastor of a denominational church had made me sick of the moral relativism of most of mainstream religion . . . always afraid of offending someone, religion is reduced helping the poor to carry their flood damaged furniture and appliances to the curb to be hauled away without ever trying to stem the causes of poverty and extreme weather. 

 

When a group of friends prevailed upon me to start a church for the genuinely progressive people of faith, my primary insistence was that we would no longer try to constantly straddle the fence out of fear of giving offense. There would be no more standing idly by and remaining neutral in the face of injustice. 

 

That hasn’t been an easy row to hoe for us. We gained liberal members when I was critical of George W. Bush and lost many of them when I was critical of Barak Obama. A church cannot remain moral if it aligns itself with a political party. Every employment contract I have negotiated during my entire career has included a passage about the freedom of the pulpit but I found in every instance that most board members stopped believing in freedom of the pulpit when I said something that stepped on their toes. 

 

I will have more to say about this in my next sermon which will be posted on December 1^st. 

Voting in an Empire of Lies

Voting in an Empire of Lies     

 

November 3, 2024    

Dr. Roger L. Ray 

 

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I was awakened one day this past week by a text message from one of my very few conservative friends. He is my age, an educated professional, and a pretty fair racquetball player, who regrettably gets all of his environmental, financial, and political information from Fox News. He was sending me a video clip which he believed would justify his support for Donald Trump. It was an interview with representatives Wesley Hunt & Byron Donalds from the great states of Florida and Texas. They were passionately telling an entirely apocryphal story about how President Biden was so weak that adversaries had confidently attacked seven of our embassies which Biden was then forced to close. 

 

Donalds and Hunt insisted that this had never before happened in American history. They then went on to relate a fictional story about how Donald Trump had stood up to the Taliban and had left them shaking in their boots. I watched the video and went to Google and found their stories to be entirely false and, what is more, while no embassies have been lost, there have been evacuations due to unrest at 29 embassies during Biden’s time in office, but this happened 37 times while Trump was in office. 

 

So, I asked my friend, “based on your standard of strength, Trump was a much weaker president than Biden, so I am sure that you won’t be voting for Trump now?” To which he replied, “I’m not changing my vote,” he declared, “I already pay too much in taxes!” 

 

He is a mostly retired CPA, so I pointed out to him what he already knows, that unless you make over $400,000 a year, your taxes will go down under Harris. I asked, “Do you make more than $400,000 per year?” I have not heard from him since I asked that question. 

 

I am certain that if this was a two-way communication medium, that many of you could tell a similar story. Similar in that someone has told you something with great confidence which you demonstrated to be entirely false, and the person who shared the Russian propaganda with you, even when confronted with contrary facts, refused to change his or her views. 

 

More than 300 years ago, Jonathan Swift, said in a letter to friend that you cannot use reason to change a person’s opinion if they did not use reason to arrive at that opinion. We are going to the polls on Tuesday, November 5, if you have not voted already, and we will wait up on Tuesday night to see if the election is conclusive enough to be decided on that day. Other than the Bush v Gore contest of 2000, we’re used to getting the conclusion pretty soon after the polls close on election day, but our nation is so evenly divided these days, that it is almost impossible to know who will win.

 

I know who should win. Most of the people who served in Trump’s first administration have said that he has neither the intellect nor the character to be president. Several members of his family have said the same thing. Prominent members of his party have announced their intentions to vote for Harris. 

In short, no one who cares about our economy, about civil rights, who cares about democracy, foreign policy, or who loves America should vote for Donald Trump and yet, knowing all of this, about half of American voters will vote for Trump. . . and no amount of honest information can persuade them to do otherwise. 

 

Republicans have spent decades gerrymandering voting districts to try to keep people of color and minority votes from counting for much and I hate that but I’m about ready to also propose that we restrict voting but I would like to restrict voting to people whose IQ is over 140. It would make election day pretty simple since that would be less than half of 1% of the population and it would mean that candidates like Trump would never be in danger of being elected. However, our system allows virtually everyone to vote, no matter how little they know about our government or how much they have been influenced by propaganda, lies, and misinformation. 

 

I knew that my racquetball partner was entirely mistaken about what he says about Trump, but I also knew that he was going to vote for Trump, no matter how much factual information I shared with him. I wish that people reasoned their way into their convictions, but I have been a pastor long enough to know that even smart people believe completely ridiculous things because it pleases them to believe obvious lies, even when they know they are lies. 

 

I don’t want to discourage you from trying to talk your crazy uncle off the cliff but, sadly, in all but very rare cases, you cannot use reason to persuade someone to change a conviction they did not come to by way of reason. 

 

I have always heard that politicians lie. 

I have tended to believe that they generally are not lying but that they are either exaggerating or simply engaging in wishful thinking but in this year’s campaign, there have been a lot of lies. They were not all lies told by Republicans, but I think that it is safe to say that more than 90% of them were Republican lies. 

 

Writing about 50 years ago, the German-American historian and philosopher, Hannah Arendt wrote: If everybody always lies to you, the consequence is not that you believe the lies, but rather that nobody believes anything any longer. This is because lies, by their very nature, have to be changed, and a lying government has constantly to rewrite its own history. On the receiving end you get not only one lie—a lie which you could go on for the rest of your days—but you get a great number of lies, depending on how the political wind blows. And a people that no longer can believe anything cannot make up its mind. It is deprived not only of its capacity to act but also of its capacity to think and to judge. And with such a people you can then do what you please."

 

She wrote that as a German Jew who had escaped the holocaust and made it to America, obviously, she was reflecting on how the Nazis had managed to take control of Germany, not by convincing people to believe their propaganda and their lies, but by leaving them bereft of a willingness to believe anything. And that was a long time ago.

 

We had reason to hope that with the advent of the internet and then smart phones, such that we all carry the information superhighway in our pockets, we have constant access to any published information that could be found in all of the libraries in the world, right in the palm of our hands, but rather than make us more informed, it appears to have shortened our attention span and made it seems like finding out what is true is just too hard, too time consuming, requiring too much energy, so that people brag about not reading newspapers, not watching reliable news sources, and instead our minds are filled with propaganda, pornography, and videos of talking cats and dogs. It doesn’t mean that most people are stupid, but it does mean that they are stupid adjacent. 

 

They could be more informed, but they hear that Biden has closed seven embassies and they like believing that Biden is a confused, and weak man, so they will believe that he closed seven embassies and not allow themselves to be bothered by better information. And learning that Trump actually evacuated embassies more often than Biden is equally meaningless because they never cared about embassy evacuations in the first place. Such issues are useless except for what my mother called, “mindless beauty shop gossip.”

 

Nazis also used a great deal of fear in their propaganda. It doesn’t have to be true if the threat you mention presses a hot button of a familiar fear. Governments often try to unite and control their populations by stoking fear of a common enemy, anyone that they can portray as being “other.” Of course, the Nazis were the ultimate racists and homophobes. I don’t know if Trump is imitating Nazis or if his natural prejudices just make him a terrible racist and homophobe such that he just looks and sounds like a Nazi.

 

It is no great mystery why he has continued to beat the drum about the entirely legal immigrants from Hati who have settled in Ohio. Hattians are black, they speak with an accent, and their cuisine, while delicious and wonderful, also smells different from hamburgers and fries. Republican politicians in Springfield, Ohio have refuted all of Trump and Vance’s lies about these Hattians but, again, facts don’t matter when you are  just using racism to stoke fear. 

As Harris has risen in the polls, in these past few weeks, Trump’s lies and name calling have just gone off the rails. He started months ago accusing her of only recently identified as being black when, in fact, she went to a historically black college and joined a famous black sorority when she was a teenager. But it has gotten ugly. He says that she is mentally impaired. He calls her “Comrade” Harris. He says that she is a communist and that, if elected, she will turn America into a 3^rd world country. He claims that she has promoted open borders and stopped prosecution of violent crime. He has even said that if she is elected that an illegal immigrant will come into your kitchen and cut your throat. 

 

If facts mattered, voters would know that violent crime is down, illegal immigration is down, and our economy is the envy of the world. He throws out this libel only to hit fear buttons in a gullible public. There is no information here. Trump is the one who bows to the will of communist dictators. Trump is the one who played golf more often than any other president and who didn’t even attend briefings, nor does he read classified reports, not even the ones that he steals and leaves unguarded in his hotel bathrooms. 

 

Pollsters never want to infer why but they always note that Trump gets more support from people who do not have a college degree and Harris gets more support from educated people. They poll the demographic, but they never just say that education makes a person less inclined to fall for the lies and largely Russian and Chinese propaganda that Trump and Vance so often repeat.

 

But, there is very little time left before the polls close on Tuesday and I can only implore you, my listeners, friends, supporters, and peers, to make sure that you vote before the polls close on Tuesday if you have not already. There are virtually no undecided voters left to persuade in this highly divisive election year. Now it is a matter of voter turnout and, please, you just can’t sit this one out. 

‘No Way To Prevent This,’ Says Only Nation Where This Regularly Happens

‘No Way To Prevent This,’ Says Only Nation Where This Regularly Happens

October 20, 2024   Dr. Roger Ray            click here to see the video

 

For a decade now, the satirical news site, the Onion, has run this same headline every time there is another large mass shooting. They change the article very little, placing the news story in a fictitious town but always including the quote

 

“This was a terrible tragedy, but sometimes these things just happen and there’s nothing anyone can do to stop them,” said North Carolina resident Samuel Wipper, echoing sentiments expressed by tens of millions of individuals who reside in a nation where over half of the world’s deadliest mass shootings have occurred in the past 50 years and whose citizens are 20 times more likely to die of gun violence than those of other developed nations. “It’s a shame, but what can we do? There really wasn’t anything that was going to keep this guy from snapping and killing a lot of people if that’s what he really wanted.”

 

Of course, maybe the Onion should make a joke about any mass shooting just as many right wing politicians and gun fanatics always insist, in the wake of a shooting, that “this is no time to talk about politics.” They will feign concern for grieving families, insisting that this is a time to mourn, not to debate gun legislation. It is, of course, a ruse. They know that the public’s attention span is very short. 

It was almost 12 years ago now when a lone gunman with an AR-15 went into the Sandy Hook Elementary school and killed 26 people, 20 of whom were six and seven year old children. President Obama thought, surely now the nation will get behind serious gun reform. 

But even the bodies of 20 little children, torn apart by the battlefield force of the bullets from an AR-15, even though many parents have tried to keep their children’s memory alive, continually lobbying Congress for serious action . . . but nothing happened. People get distracted, they forget, and they move on.

The deadliest mass murder came less than five years later when a man with an AR-15 killed 60 people and wounded more than 400 others from his hotel window in Las Vegas, randomly shooting into the crowd at a country music concert. It was symbolic, really, but at least after that incident the infamous “bump stock” was outlawed…. A device that used the recoil of the rifle to turn a semi-automatic rifle into an automatic rifle, a virtual machine gun. But this summer, in June, our out-of-control Supreme Court overturned the legislation that made bump stocks illegal. 

 

Machine guns were outlawed in the United States almost a century ago, but this Supreme Court put them back on the streets. 

 

Then, six years ago, when a former student from the Parkland High School in Florida went into his school and killed 16 people, that seemed to ignite an organized protest that featured several amazingly articulate students who went on a speaking tour of the country, I tried to get one of them booked to come speak at our church and couldn’t even get the booking agent to return phone calls because they were so in demand. But still, nothing changed. 

 

Defenders of the gun industry have tried to tell us that we have these shooters because our young people play violent video games all of the time. But, folks, kids in Japan play video games more than American kids. Do you know how many school shootings there were in Japan? Zero. None. Nada. 

 

Like it or not, the Onion is still right, we are the only country where this regularly happens. We know why it happens here. And we lack the political will to do anything about it. 

Of course, school shootings are just a small fraction of the gun murders in the United States ever year but they are among the most noticeable. Just over 300 students were killed in school last year and 288 of those were in the USA. 8 in Mexico. 6 in South Africa. 5 in India. 4 in Pakistan and Nigeria. 3 in Afghanistan. 2 in Brazil, France, and Canada. Only one each in China, Russia, Turkey, Germany, Kenya, Greece, Azerbaijan, Hungary, and Estonia. None in most of the rest of the world. But we lost 288 students. Unimaginable. Indefensible. Isn’t it fair to say that it is insane? 

 

Of course, the death toll is the worst but the beyond the dead and wounded, there is to be considered how every school child in the country is traumatized by these constant “active shooter” exercises. Bullet proof backpacks for your kids is now a thing. Schools, which are always strapped for resources, are now having to spend precious dollars on security guards, metal detectors, hardened doors, additional staff.

 

And what’s more, schools and police departments are now always on edge and our schools are awash in cell phones so that anyone who wants to create some excitement or get their school closed down for the day just has to make a call. Late last month, April Ruben reported in Axios that:

 

• In a single afternoon last week, schools in Tennessee, South Carolina, Minnesota, Ohio, Florida, Pennsylvania, Arkansas, Texas, Michigan and Maryland all received threats.
• In Volusia County, Fla., the sheriff's office received 54 tips about potential threats in a single night this month. All the threats turned out to be false.
• In Springfield, Ohio, schools closed over hoax bomb threats following the GOP presidential ticket's amplification of a debunked conspiracy theory that immigrants in the city were eating pets.

The threat of gun violence is real. We have nearly 300 dead students every year to prove that, but then schools across the country are regularly disrupted by fake reports that, regardless of the fact that they are fake, have to be taken seriously and investigated. Is it any wonder then that so many of our schools have become so ineffective in performing their primary mission which is to educate?

Law enforcement officials across Florida have started to arrest students who call in threats and they perp walk the student and the student’s parents hoping that public humiliation will help to curb this dangerous trend. School has just started and they have already arrested dozens of kids between the ages of 11 and 15. One 11 year old turned out to have a small arsenal of guns and swords in his room, stockpiled for when he actually would attack his school. 

 

Nothing can be done, says the only nation where this regularly happens.

We used to hear the NRA claiming that gun laws don’t work, except for the fact that they do work in every other nation of the world. They point at murder rates in Chicago and New York, where there are strict gun laws, as their proof that they don’t work, when, obviously, a city law doesn’t keep someone from just outside the city from bringing a gun in. 

 

I have pointed out before that Mexico only has one legal gun store in the whole country and they only serve members of police forces but there are more than 6000 gun shops in the United States, just across the border from Mexico so that our gun shops are literally arming the drug cartels in their civil war in Mexico. You know, a lot of the undocumented immigrants to the USA are coming here because it is so dangerous in Mexico but, come on, why are there so many guns in Mexico? Where there are a lot of guns, there are a lot of shootings. This is how it works.

 

The NRA has said for years that guns don’t kill people, people kill people, but the truth of it is that people with guns kill people, particularly people with assault rifles and hand guns, both of which are made solely for the purpose of shooting people. You don’t deer hunt with a pistol. You don’t shoot pheasant with an AR-15. If you need to defend your home, get a shot gun. If you need to shoot a duck, get a single shot rifle. If you need to shoot a duck four or five times, that bird is probably too tough to eat anyway. 

 

I have no idea how many credible assassination threats are made against presidents, candidates, politicians, and celebrities. The secret service doesn’t give out that information. We only hear about it when shots are fired, or a gunman is apprehended. 

Naturally, when Donald Trump was wounded in an assassination attempt, Trump allies tried to blame Kamala Harris and those of us who have been warning for years that Trump is a danger to democracy. But the blame rests squarely on the shoulders of the Republicans who have made it absolutely certain that almost anyone with enough money can buy a battlefield styled assault rifle. 

 

I don’t think that the USA has a much larger population of crazy people compared to other countries. Probably, we have an average number of crazy people, it is just that this nation is so awash in guns that crazy people, kids, angry people, or just lonely teenagers who want attention, can get their hands on lethal weapons, and thousands upon thousands of rounds of ammunition and in that context, it is a wonder that we don’t have more people killed than we do. 

 

Look people, the Second Amendment was written when the arms they referenced where highly inaccurate, single shot, muskets. There is no rational argument that the authors of the constitution could have imagined assault rifles with a 100 round capacity. It should also be noted that the Second Amendment was added to the bill of rights as a concession to slave owners who were frequently dramatically outnumbered by their slaves and in constant fear of a very reasonable revolt. This was a very real fear of George Washington’s. 

 

I know it will get some people all twisted up like a pretzel to hear me say it, but the Second Amendment is in sore need of amendment. Jesus didn’t write the Second Amendment. The Second Amendment was written by paranoid slave owners. 

Our children and grandchildren should not be traumatized every school year with active shooter drills and seeing armed police officers storming the building because someone called in a fake threat. Every other developed nation in the world has found a way for people to own the arms they actually need, and to store their hobby guns at shooting ranges so that our kids can feel safe when they go to school without having to wear a bullet proof vest on the school bus. 

 

The NRA, thankfully, does not have the political clout they once had, and they no longer have the financial resources to buy politicians that they once had. But still, we have a shortage of courage among our legislators but here is the good news:

The majority of Americans favor sensible gun laws, and so if we just stop voting for the politicians who refuse to give us sensible gun laws, we will have sensible gun laws, much like the rest of the world, in a single election cycle. It is just that easy, if only people would begin to vote in favor of their children living long enough to graduate. 

 

The only reason that the most common cause of death among children in our country is being shot is because of the indifference of voters who will not vote for change.