“Overwhelmed or Just a Short Attention Span”

   September 15, 2019    Dr. Ray 

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Washington Post, June 25, 2019:  

[Trump administration cancels English classes, soccer, legal aid for unaccompanied child migrants in U.S. shelters]

CBP officials have said that Border Patrol stations, designed to hold adult immigrants for short periods, are neither safe nor appropriate places to house unaccompanied children for long stretches. CBP officials said this week that after HHS was able to take only 250 children from Clint, they had transferred the remaining ones out of the facility, placing some in a tent camp in El Paso, before rotating them back to Clint on Tuesday.

Meditation

Though we gather now on the heels of another week in which

            we have work to do, grass to cut, bills to pay,

                        not to mention the fact that the dog has to be walked,

                                    the kitty litter has to be changed,

                                    the laundry folded, and the email is piling up.

Still, we resolve in this week that we will be mindful of the fact

  that our very planet’s ability to sustain human life is being challenged

                        by the continued use of fossil fuels, 

            that nuclear weapons are being controlled 

by sociopaths and emotional children, 

that refugees from poverty and war 

are meeting with hostility all the world over,

         and that women everywhere still earn significantly less than men.

We actively choose to be aware that there are millions 

            in crowded and unsafe prisons and jails in America,

            that income disparity continues to plunge more and more

                        working families into poverty.

We will not forget that millions remain without access to healthcare

            not to mention higher education, 

or an expectation of a pension income.

By sheer force of will, 

we will not forget those who are discriminated against

            Because of race, religion, nation of origin, language, 

sexual orientation, or class.

Tearfully, we remember the tens of thousands

             who are likely to die this year,

             from drug addiction or senseless gun violence.

With broken hearts, we will lift up the plight of thousands of children

     who have been separated from their families at our southern border,

                        and caged in over-crowded and unsafe detention camps.

We hold in our hearts the transgender men and women 

            who face the threat of violence every time they present           

                        outwardly who they know themselves

      to be inwardly . . . or even when they have to just use the restroom.

We will not fail to consider all those who now sit on death row, 

            both the guilty and the innocent, 

            who await the time when they will be murdered 

                        by our government. 

Though we cannot be the solution to

             all of these forms of human suffering,

             we acknowledge that indifference is not the answer.

Our church found its genesis, the way a lot of good subversive movements do, as a book study meeting in a basement of a downtown Methodist Church. I selected this book, Middle Church, by the former member of congress and former General Secretary of the National Council of Churches, Bob Edgar, to kick off the conversation about whether or not we could start a church that would be more healthy and more meaningful than the denominational churches we had left. 

It was 2007. Our nation had been led by what we then thought was the worst president in American history into two illegal wars and even though Al Gore had presented a number of Inconvenient Truth(s) to the world about our decaying planetary environment, almost nothing was being done about it. Edgar’s book recognized the growing irrelevance of the mainstream church that was still devoted to answering difficult theological questions that no one was asking while ignoring the issues that really matter. 

He proposed that the church might have a renewal of relevance if it could let the old ways of being church die and invest ourselves in a new way of being church, concerned with these issues: the environment, war, terrorism and the divide of the world’s great faiths and cultures, and the eradication of poverty. 

Against all odds, here in this very deeply red, conservative little city in the midst of America’s fly over territory, we did start a church based on this model; abandoning the old religious emphasis on other worldly concerns and investing ourselves in ethics. Months later, America elected her first black president and the conversation about this short list of ethical concerns seemed to be finding a place in the sun. 

But folks, you know this, social progress almost never comes in a straight line and it never happens quickly or easily. The status quo is very powerful. It is almost like physics, a body at rest tends to stay at rest. What we often despised about the way that church used to be was all of the talk about love while tacitly approving of war. We talked about the sacred earth while plundering it. We grieved the deaths of victims of gun violence but what we offered in response was our sincere thoughts and prayers. We lionized Martin Luther King, Jr. while passively adjusting ourselves to the prevailing racism and poverty of our society with only symbolic gestures of protest. 

Let me illustrate: I used to know a minister when I lived in Kentucky who told people that he had studied at Cambridge. I was curious, so one day I caught him at a meeting where I could ask him about this experience. It turns out that he was never enrolled as a student at Cambridge. He didn’t earn a degree there. He didn’t even audit a class there. He went to England on vacation, visited the campus of Cambridge and read some stuff in the library there. He was embarrassed to have  graduated from a Bible college in Kentucky, so he told people that he had studied at Cambridge . . . even though it was just for a couple of days. 

That sounds kind of pathetic, until you think about some of what the church has done in the face of the world’s great ethical challenges. In the face of the breakdown in our global ecology, we’re being asked to stop using plastic straws and to wash our clothes in cold water. And you know what, we should conserve energy by washing our clothes in cold water and we should try to avoid using single use plastic anything, but if we are not going to stop burning coal, and pumping oil and natural gas out of the ground to power our cars and heat our homes, then putting your paper, aluminum cans, and glass bottles in a recycling bin will mean nothing at all. It is like outlawing vaping while doing nothing about the sale of assault rifles and handguns. We can save four or five lives a year if we get rid of vaping but in light of the 40,000 who will die from gun fire, that hypocrisy just doesn’t seem relevant. And like plastic straws, recycling, and washing our clothes in cold water, we ought to get rid of vaping, but not until we get rid of assault rifles and hand guns.

I think that Bob Edgar’s book was a good start, especially where we were a dozen years ago. But things have changed, and the progress of previous generations is at risk and we have a whole new set of social evils about which we have good reason to be deeply concerned. The stakes are high. 

As Noam Chomsky warned us, this is a dangerous moment: “we’re in a stage of history for the first time ever where we’re facing literal questions of species survival.” (Requiem for the American Dream, yes, but I can’t find my copy to find the page number) Our very existence is threatened by the dual challenges of the threat of nuclear war and ecological destruction of the planet. Our massive military budget is not only bankrupting our ability to accomplish other important goals, but the deployment of forces and hardware all over the globe is precarious. To quote Bonnie Tyler’s 1980’s pop song, “we’re living in a powder keg and giving off sparks.”

You don’t have to have a Hollywood imagination to see several potential scenarios of conflicts with nuclear-armed, unstable states that could lead to a globally lethal nuclear war. 

And it is no exaggeration to list the United States of America, the most nuclear-armed nation, as being rather more unstable than ever before. John Kennedy managed to thread the needle during the Cuban missile crisis and prevented nuclear war fifty years ago, but is there anyone, Republican, Democrat, or Independent, who believes that if Donald Trump had been president on that day that there would still be a human civilization on earth? We have been lucky for 50 years of the nuclear age, but much of that luck involves having had educated, experienced, and qualified people in charge of the nuclear football. That, sadly, is no longer the case in the United States.

As to the environment, we are already passed the tipping point for massive sea level rises. I may be able to safely retire in Florida someday. Maybe even my daughter could too. But if she has children, most of Florida will be under water by the time they reach retirement age, no matter what we do to stem the tide of global climate change. Horrible things are going to happen over the next century. The only question is whether we can arrest the speed and the degree of the damage. 

But even if we can through science and statesmanship avoid global destruction through war or environmental collapse, our nation has a laundry list of ills, most of which are traceable to the conflict between democracy and capitalism. Democracy, as a form of government, and capitalism, as an economic system, can and often have, work together to strengthen the other. However, what we have seen in our lifetimes is what Naomi Klein calls “a naked corporate takeover, one many decades in the making.” (No is Not Enough, p. 4) Capitalist interests are no longer simply trying to influence the government, they have taken charge and are sitting in the seats of government power, turning our democracy into an oligarchy, just as Aristotle warned could happen in his 2500 year old book on politics. 

It is not the sanity and concern for the welfare of the public that has prevented the United States from joining the rest of the western world in offering universal health care to all of our citizens, or from becoming one of the growing number of western democracies that offer tuition-free higher education to their entire population. It is the profit-motivated corporate control over our government that has prevented these and similar things.

We have 2.5 million people in prison and more than 9 million on parole, many times more than any other nation in the world per capita, not because our residents are more evil or because we have a much more dangerous criminal element, but because our prison system is controlled by for-profit interest that reduce the employment pool by creating virtual slave labor camps, while funding jobs, construction, and supply contracts to corporations. We have a million human beings living in cages for no rational reason other than the transfer of wealth from the taxpayers to corporations. This is a moral travesty that should keep all of us awake at night, though it never seems to come to the front of our awareness until one of our own family members gets sacrificed to the system. 

In the last year, we have become aware of an insidious program of indefinitely holding undocumented immigrants in concentration camps, nearly 100,000 in all, about 30,000 of whom are children. The government is being billed $750 a day for each of these people but the for-profit concentration camps say that they cannot afford to provide soap, blankets, or tooth brushes without more funding.

This obvious corruption is frequently reported in the news, but it hardly makes a ripple in public reaction because we have become inured to moral outrage in America. 

Our nation is cursed with a paucity of jobs that pay a living wage, and the crumbling of our middle class is sending economic shockwaves around the globe. Our low wages pour gasoline on the chronic fires of poverty everywhere. Corporate exploitation of poor nations, combined with militarily enforced stability, is, in turn, the cause of terrorism in Europe, Africa, the Americas, the Middle East, and Australia. Regional wars create the refugee crisis and strain the tolerance of stable nations for welcoming strangers into their midst. 

We are now facing an epidemic of opioid overdose deaths, more than 60,000 per year. This number is higher than those for gun deaths and car fatalities combined, and is a symptom of the despair, poverty, and hopelessness that is increasingly noticeable in the rural parts of our country.

In the face of all of these crises, for a church devoted to ethics, preaching has become rather exhausting, for me to write about these things and for you to keep hearing about it all. During our time of passing the peace a few weeks ago, one of our very dear members took the opportunity of having just a few seconds in the aisle to speak to me and she said, “With so much bad going on in the world, it sure would be nice to hear a happy sermon.” I get that, I really do. And I have since tried to take a break from the constant drum beat of talks on ethics to sometimes turn my attention to more pastoral or personal concerns.

There is such a thing as compassion fatigue. How can any of us be concerned about all of these issues simultaneously without going totally insane? How can I be worried about opioid addiction, kids in cages, lead in the water supply, mass murders, a broken justice system, a small continent of floating plastics in the ocean, poverty, war, and domestic violence, when I still have to cut the grass, fold the laundry, pay the bills, clean the toilets, weed the garden, wash the car, and take out the garbage? 

Is it any wonder that there are those who brag about no longer watching the news? And though we wish they wouldn’t, don’t we understand why people have stopped going to church, they don’t go to vote, and they don’t volunteer with charities. How do we keep from being morally defeated and just giving up? This is what I know for sure: when I feel isolated, I just can’t muster the energy to care about all of this stuff. Survival seems like about all that I can handle. 

When I feel connected, when I come here and feel that I am generally surrounded by supportive and loving people with whom I share a passion for social justice. When I interact with people who are also outraged by moral injustice, racism, homophobia, xenophobia, Islamophobia, when I see you passing newspaper and journal articles to one another, circulating petitions, even some of the rather testy t-shirts I see you wearing, I know that I have a tribe, a community, a wolf pack . . . so that I can take out the garbage, pick up the doggy treasures in the yard, and still 

care about violence against transgender people in my own community and the suddenly homeless in the Bahamas in the wake of Hurricane Dorian.

Though America has been a beacon of freedom and opportunity for hundreds of millions of people through our brief history, we have never achieved the greatness that we are capable of. We never have quite made it to that goal of being the shining city on the hill, the truly great society that our patriotic songs and movies portray. Through the ingenuity of science, and if we could harness the united will of our diverse nation, we could bring an end to poverty, open the doors of our universities, and transform our military might into a renewable energy rescue mission to save the planet, making the part that remains above sea level safe for human habitation. We could care for our sick, give equal wages to men and women, pay everyone a living wage, and reduce our imprisoned population to a fraction of what it is now. Many of these ideals would not even be hard to accomplish, if we could swing the pendulum of power from capitalism to democracy and shift the momentum away from creating a super-rich ruling class to creating a civilized world. 

All governments rule by the consent of the governed. We have a long history of having our consent manipulated out of us through fear and propaganda. So we consented to slavery, unjust wars, economic and racial segregation, the exploitation of the poor, and oppressive gender and sexual norms. The task at hand is for us, as a people, to rise up and say, “That government doesn’t get my consent anymore.” 

David and I, along with a handful of other contributors, are trying to write a book, not about a better church but about a Great Society. The number of concerns we are addressing dwarfs Bob Edgars’ important work in Middle Church. David and I meet every Thursday to talk about this project and other things while, when the weather allows, we take a long walk. 

Recently, David asked me if there was anything I could say to help him find the energy and drive to keep working on it. Thinking about these things is taxing, emotionally and physically. There are times when I miss being more invested in church potluck dinners and devotional Bible studies. The world didn’t seem so frightening back then. But I choose to be engaged in the real world and to devote my time to real issues, no matter how tiresome that can be. But I can’t do it alone. Without friendship, without some sincere love, without a community, without connection, I’m toast. 

Friendships can be fragile, marriages can fall apart, in fact most of them do. Even within the faith community, people can get their nose out of joint in ego battles and go full bore sociopath. Still, when I feel isolated, I want to give up. When I feel connected to others, I want to forge ahead. These are not easy times, but as my favorite British philosopher, John Lennon, said: I get by with a little help from my friends.

“Jesus Never Laughed and Socrates Never Cried”

“Jesus Never Laughed and Socrates Never Cried”  Sept 8, 2019   Dr. Roger Ray 

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J. R. Benjamin, A surprising pronouncement from the end of the fifth chapter (“Action”) in Hannah Arendt’s 1958 book The Human Condition.

It’s striking how frequently Jesus and Socrates are compared or counterposed, especially in works of philosophy. Perhaps this trend stems from the fact that each figure works as a respective stand-in for Tertullian’s Jerusalem-Athens paradigm, though there’s probably more to it. One of the more worthwhile recent musings on this matter came from Cornell West, who spoke of a historico-philosophical question which hefound particularly interesting:  “I sometimes wonder why Jesus never laughed and Socrates never cried.”

                                               

My father was the youngest of nine children. His oldest brother, Presley, was, in several ways, the humanizing, loving, generous, patriarch of the family. He didn’t have children of his own which gave him that wonderful freedom to be indulgent towards his nieces and nephews. 

When Presley was nearing his death, my father and I drove up to Chicago together to visit him. I had just finished graduate school. I had majored in pastoral counseling in my masters and doctorate but there was something about my own character that I had never been able to understand. Why did I have such a short fuse? Why was I angry so much of the time? I had worked with my counseling professor on the issue of anger. Dr. Mills was certain that it was a part of my family of origin, but I just couldn’t see it.

But this visit to see my dying uncle was when it all became clear to me. Presley was a very meticulous man whose lawn and garden was always manicured, his home was spotless, and his personal appearance was of the Beau Brummell sort. But, in his final weeks of life, things were falling apart. Presley’s clothes hung on him like burlap bags, the lawn was shaggy and the garden was full of weeds, and even the house was in bad shape . . . the silver needed to be polished, there were cob webs in the corners and dust bunnies in the hall. 

My father was stomping around in a rage. He wanted to fire the neighbor who mowed the lawn, the cleaning lady who was slacking off, and the health care workers who were not attending to Presley’s appearance. Dad was like a bomb ready to go off in any second. But I realized that my widowed uncle was lonely in these final days and when the neighbor came to mow, he would pull out a lawn chair and sit with Presley in the lawn and talk, rather than carefully weeding and trimming. The cleaning lady who had known him for years would make a couple of cups of coffee and just sit and listen to Presley as he sorted through his memories. Clearly, the healthcare workers saw that the end was near and emotional support was much more important than helping him to shave and dress up. Presley had cast his bread on the waters, and it was coming back to him. He was surrounded by love, except for my Dad.

And yet, I could say persuasively, that no one loved Presley more than my father, who had looked up to his oldest brother as a father figure. He was the only person that my father ever turned to for advice or help. What my Dad saw when we got there and realized that Presley was not going to recover, that he was going to die, scared him to death. Grief and fear filled him, but it all came out as anger. Dad needed to feel sad. He needed to grieve the inevitable with Presley, or, more like the macho man that he was and that I was raised to be, he probably needed to find a way to fix it, to stop death, to defy mortality.

Which he did by barking at the cleaning lady, yelling at the lawn guy, and making me and Uncle Presley very uncomfortable.

I call it “hillbilly rage,” a kind of unreflective anger that I see in my siblings and in their children. Anger poses as strength, ferocity, forcefulness. Anger presumes to be in charge, to be potentially dangerous. We see it in Fox News consumers who seem to think that anger even makes them smart enough to be condescending towards facts. 

When, in fact, anger is none of those things . . . anger is fear, or shame, or any one of a host of other emotions, all of which would betray a certain vulnerability that can be hidden by just expressing all of your emotions as anger. 

That is not to say that anger is always an inappropriate emotion. You can’t say that middle C on a piano is the wrong key. It is a very important key, one that is played repeatedly in most songs; however, it is not the only key, and, ask my piano teacher, it can also be played at the wrong time to disastrous results.

My favorite quote from Aristotle’s The Nicomachean Ethicsis,“Anyone can become angry - that is easy. But to be angry with the right person, to the right degree, at the right time, for the right purpose, and in the right way - that is not easy.” I don’t know how many generations this hillbilly rage goes back in my family, but I know this, I have made it my lifelong goal to bring it to an end in my own life.

There are a lot of reasons to be wary of too quickly or too easily throwing around psychological diagnoses, but a painful reality about our emotions is that we need to be aware of them, to name them, to understand them, to keep them from taking control of our lives. 

I appreciated hearing Dr. Cornell West riffing on the observation that Socrates never cried, and Jesus never laughed. 

At least according to Plato, even as Socrates was being handed the cup of hemlock that was the means of execution by the city of Athens, even when everyone around him was weeping, Socrates refused to be sad. He cheerfully talked with his friends as he accepted his unjust execution.

Socrates was a stoic. He insisted upon a life of the mind and was convinced that displays of emotions were simply a failure to properly discipline the mind.

I don’t think that it is at all fair to describe Jesus as being the opposite of Stoicism but while the gospels will tell us that Jesus got angry, that he was sometimes afraid, that he wept, felt grief and sorrow, and he loved friends and children, but the New Testament never mentions him laughing or being happy. 

Of course, Plato is not trying to give us an accurate biographical sketch of Socrates, and the gospel writers have little insight into the comprehensive character of the historical Jesus, but Dr. West quotes this observation about Socrates and Jesus as a way of exploring both the range of human emotion and our flawed efforts at controlling them.

I would like to think that the historical Socrates was able to cry when his dog died and that the historical Jesus would have laughed at any early Palestinian version of “a rabbi, a priest, and an imam walk into a bar . . .” stories he may have heard. 

The famous psychiatrist, M. Scott Peck, talked about the need for balance. Our emotions can either work for us or they can destroy us. I hesitate to use two musical instrument illustrations in one sermon since I cannot play any of them, but obviously, for the strings on a guitar to make music, there has to be the right amount of tension on them. If they are too loose, they don’t play at all, if they are too tight, they will break the instrument, and in between those two extremes, there are many wrong ways to tune a guitar string but basically only one that is right. 

Babies cry when they are hungry, they cry when they are wet, they will cry when they are lonely, bored, sick, or scared, and a part of growing up is learning that you don’t have to cry about everything. 

A generation ago, when I first started writing opinion columns for the NewsLeader, I was outraged by many of the letters the opinion editor would publish in response to my thoughtful and well-researched columns. Many of them were quite personal, they were often mean and inaccurate . . . honestly, they should not have been published but of the dozen or so editors I had over the years of writing for the paper, my first one was indisputably, the worst. I literally lost sleep over some of them . . . I was angry, but I was also hurt, embarrassed, I felt rejected, and scorned. 

The editor I did not care for just said, “If you are going to put your name on a controversial article, you just have to take what you get in response.” 

So, I had to say, “Well, Robert Ledger, I guess I’ll have to take irrational criticism as a part of the cost of trying to get the public to think about ethics.” I could learn from honest critics but the rest of them, well, lions don’t spend much time worrying about the opinions of sheep or newspaper editors.”

Learning to live with public criticism wasn’t easy and even now I don’t like it but, if I had ever gone to see a doctor to tell them about the stress I felt as an opinion writer, the pressure, the public scorn . . . I have little doubt that I would have been given a prescription for some anti-depressant in the serotonin family, and some kind of benzodiazepine – something like Xanax for anxiety, and maybe something for sleep, like Trazadone or Ambien, both highly addictive sleep aids. 

About 60 million Americans take some kind of prescription sleep aid, about 10 % of adults take some kind of benzodiazepine anti-anxiety drug. And I’m not saying that there are not people who need these medications, I’m just saying the numbers are awfully high.

I am not a medical doctor, but what I know of providing medical care to about 40,000 people in the rural parts of Nicaragua through the Rainbow Network is that none of our doctors dispensed anti-depressants, sleep aids, or medication for panic attacks or anxiety. I can’t tell you exactly how to tune that guitar string but somewhere between 0% and 10 or 20% of the population, there is a lot of room for abuse. And that is without even mentioning how many people use alcohol or marijuana to dull their awareness of their feelings. 

I was talking to a woman recently who told me that she took a Xanax every day for panic attacks. And I asked her what she was panicking about? She said, “I don’t really know, I just know the pill helps.”

Just as Paul Thomlinson and I were talking about in July when we talked about depression treatment, your emotions are not your enemies and they are not the stagecoach driver of your life. Your emotions should be listened to before they are medicated away. 

One author I read suggested that the Trump administration itself is to blame for the rapid increase in anxiety medications and I can sort of see that, but I can tell you that politics and economics in Nicaragua is pretty rough too and I just never hear about anxiety disorders. 

What I am looking for here is balance. I believe that I have seen men die young because they were so stoic that they never allowed themselves to feel and to express themselves. I believe that I have had any number of emotional terrorists in my life who regularly give themselves permission to cloud up and rain down their emotions on whoever happens to be at hand. 

Obviously, some people are more sensitive than others and everyone is sensitive about some things. I have some emotional triggers. There are ways that people sometimes try to tease me that make me seethe, but I won’t let any of them force me to take medications. As are most adoptive parents, especially in inter-racial adoption, I can channel my inner lion if someone says something demeaning about my daughter. 

As my friend, Dan says, I sometimes feel compelled to explain to someone exactly how the cow ate the cabbage . . . I consider it to be a free educational service that I provide when it is needed. But I am alarmed when people just seem to be willing to catalogue their triggers. I have a hot button that you can find if you try hard enough, but you shouldn’t become covered in hot buttons.

You have heard me quote Jung before, where he said, “All neuroses are a replacement for legitimate suffering.” Maybe Jung overstated his case a bit, but I don’t think he miss the mark by much. We need to understand our negative emotions, not just turn over the steering wheel to them.

We should probably have Paul Thomlinson come back to deliver a more comprehensive description of what psychologists mean by Emotional Intelligence, but the 4 main pillars are:

1.    Self-Awareness

2.    Self-Management

3.    Social Awareness

4.    Relationship Management

It is easy for me to see that virtually no one in my family of origin was ever aware of hillbilly rage and might not believe it if they heard me explain it. Many people think that their emotions just come out of thin air, that they are what they are, and you simply inflict them on the rest of the world. That is not true. We all have to work to be aware of our emotions and to learn how to manage them . . . we are not, after all, babies still crying about everything, and we don’t have to be alarmed by having feelings to the point that we medicate them away. Self-awareness and self-management involves examining your own life and choosing to learn from and manage your emotions through your own powerful decision making.

If we use our feelings to be able to empathize with members of our society then it can meaningfully change our society, so that, for example, we stop tolerating a government that imprisons 2 million citizens and tens of thousands of immigrants for profit . . . just for an example.

And emotional intelligence should include a relationship awareness that helps us not to inflict our most irrational feelings on those who are closest to us. My public role, both in print and internet media, means that an awful lot of people give themselves permission to try to take a pound of flesh out of me as a way of compensating for their own fear, prejudice, and ignorance. So, I have to conserve emotional energy such that when someone in casual social settings also gives themselves permission to make a withdrawal from my emotional bank account to compensate for their insecurities or malice, then I have to put some distance between me and that sort of emotional terrorism. 

We should all have sufficient emotional intelligence not to inflict emotional harm on others, and we should all have enough self-respect not to tolerate it out of others.

There is a middle path between Stoicism and some kind of hysteria in which you can express yourself rather than embracing heart disease, and you can grow beyond the kind of hillbilly hostility which is little more than an infant crying in a poopy diaper. You can manage your emotions without either suppressing them or medicating them away. 

I’m not trying to defame pharmaceuticals, Socrates or Jesus . . . I’m just trying to advocate for being healthy in the most natural way possible with as few trips to Walgreens as we can manage. 

As I have cautioned you before, no one should change their medication regimen based solely on what I have said here in public but if you do decide to consult with your doctor about these things, you can tell her that I sent you. And, before you turn to drugs or alcohol to manage difficult emotions, may I suggest that you try what works for me . . . take up scuba diving. Your phone doesn’t work down there, and no one can text you or even talk to you. You may say that’s just my opinion but, you know, I am a doctor, of a sort.

Capitalism (private-for-profit) vs Socialism (at public expense)

Capitalism (private-for-profit) vs Socialism (at public expense)         Sept. 1, 2019            Dr. Ray

click here to see the video

Dr. Cornel West on Joe Rogan’s podcast, July 30, 2019

Socialism is part of America. The pledge of allegiance was written by Francis Bellamy, a socialist. The song “America the Beautiful” was written by Elizabeth Lee Bates, a socialist professor. America’s greatest poet, Walt Whitman, had deep ties to socialism. America’s greatest philosopher, John Dewey, was a democratic socialist. Helen Keller was a socialist. Martin Luther King Jr. was a democratic socialist. Democratic socialism is as American as apple pie, however, in the American mind, socialism becomes associated with communism. Upton Sinclair was a socialist – he helped put anti-child labor laws in place. Lots of Americans don’t want to have socialistic laws because they see them as giving free rides to the poor or people who don’t work hard, but what makes you think that the rich don’t get free rides?

When a wealthy business owner dies and their children inherit a massive amount of wealth, isn’t that also a free ride?

When a rich parent knows the headmaster at a prep school, thus allowing their children to get in because of the connection and not merit, isn’t that a free ride?

       

Earlier this week I put on my black clergy vestments to stand on a street corner in our late August summer heat, to be a part of a demonstration against our governor’s efforts to cut funding for Medicaid, leaving more than 100,000 Missouri children without healthcare.

I have found that wearing a clerical collar to protests cuts down on the number of people who shout obscenities at us, and fewer pickup truck drivers lift a single middle finger in our direction to announce their IQ. 

But one brave, patriotic, American did use his time while stopped at the light to repeatedly yell at me, “For free? You want to give everyone health care for free?” 

It is very difficult to have a meaningful conversation with someone at a noisy intersection where more than 60,000 cars pass every day. But shortly after my time baking on the sidewalks, I attended a dinner at which I was seated across from a man who is a cancer patient. He talked passionately about how he was having to fight for his life against the poor healthcare he had received locally, traveling to a famous cancer center to receive the help he needed. 

And he peppered his narrative with repeated assertions that “Obamacare messed up healthcare in America, ever since Obamacare passed, healthcare stinks.” Again, he was a cancer patient and I didn’t want to debate him and, honestly, for people like that, debate is really just a shouting match since obviously his views were not predicated on any information. 

But both the man yelling at me from his car and the man woofing down his delicious tacos are symptomatic of a problem we have in America with being terrified about the prospect that someone might get something of value without paying for it. Without knowing much about what the word means, they assume that every public program is socialism. 

But, while the right uses “socialism” as a scare word whenever a public benefit is mentioned, the left is not entirely innocent of using the term incorrectly either. I am generally very fond of the videos and social media posts produced by Robert Reich, the former labor secretary under President Bill Clinton. His charts and succinct lectures on economics and employment are very instructional but even a mountain goat stumbles sometimes.

Reich posted this meme that would have you believe that Republicans tried to scare people to keep Franklin Roosevelt from starting Social Security in the 1940’s and, in the 1960’s, to keep Lyndon Johnson from starting Medicare. While there was considerable conservative opposition to both programs, they were both passed with bi-partisan support. Though they are made to look old, these political buttons were forged in 2009. 

The partisan divide that has so paralyzed our current government is worse than it has been in any time in the past century. The man at dinner who was certain that he got better healthcare when 80 million Americans didn’t have access to healthcare, might not have been concerned, even if he had he known that I am one of those 80 million who is on some form of Obamacare, so that if I should have the misfortune of discovering that I have cancer, I would at least be able to access the same horrible care he is receiving. 

You would think that someone who is a cancer patient would want everyone who is a cancer patient to get appropriate care. And I would even go out on a limb and say that this patient I met is not a bad guy, but he has been trained through the polarization of the political rhetoric of our day, to dehumanize those of us who did not end up working for a large corporation with great healthcare benefits. 

What I want you to go home having heard me say today is that everyone you hear trying to use “socialism” as a scare word, doesn’t understand what the word means. And everyone who assumes that our budget pockets are bottomless, doesn’t understand economics. America has a blended economic system. Some of it is private and some of it is public. The current problem is that the economic system has been manipulated to keep shoving resources up to the top 1% which is going to destroy both capitalism and public services if we do not correct course and, my own belief is, that the course correction needs to be dramatic and it needs to happen soon. 

I sometimes meet with the parents of young men who are in Federal prisons. One of these very passionate and loving fathers is an avid Trump supporter who, before I blocked him on social media, used to constantly send me videos and articles by right wingers who were condemning socialism. In a quiet moment after a support group meeting, over a cold beer, I pointed out to him that he is employed as a bus driver. The buses in Springfield are owned and operated by City Utilities which is a publicly owned utility company. 

Ergo, as we say in logic classes, he draws his salary from a socialist institution while I draw mine from an institution that I started that receives no tax funds and is supported by the donations of consumers. . . so, he is a socialist and I am a capitalist. And, as happens so often in those kinds of exchanges, none of what I said seemed to make any difference to him at all. 

It reminded me of the very first episode of the Chappell Show, in which Dave Chappell did a skit where he played a blind black man who was a member of the KKK. My bus driving friend left our encounter hating socialists and refusing to recognize that the was one of them.

But before anyone feels the need to prove to me that they also went to high school, I understand that the common use of the terms socialism and capitalism are not being used in a technically correct way. What we are really talking about is what is paid for individually and what is paid for corporately. 

The cost of public schools, Kindergarten through 12^thgrade, is paid for through public funds, largely levied as property taxes. It doesn’t matter if you have kids in public schools or if you ever had kids at all. We have determined that it benefits our society to have an educated public and so we all pay taxes to support the schools. And then, in a more convoluted way, some of our taxes go to support state universities and to a lesser degree, private colleges and trade schools. Somehow, people have been taught to think of K through 12 as being free because that’s how you operate a capitalist society, but a K through 16 system would be socialism. 

Whether you personally go to college or not, you get to live in a better society if the people who will take care of you at the hospital did go to college. Whether it is a trade school, a professional school, or a liberal arts college, you are benefited by living in a society in which people have been able to be trained, educated, and prepared for specific careers. If you don’t believe me, go home this afternoon and paint your own car. 

A few weeks ago, MSNBC’s Chris Matthews interviewed Elizabeth Warren. He tried to conduct an “I got ya” interview with Warren, asking her how much middleclass taxes would go up to pay for Medicare for all? She made several valiant efforts at explaining how the change would work, but Matthews kept interrupting and demanding to know, “how much would taxes go up?” And she never just gave him a flat-footed answer. Matthews has since told dozens of his guests that he tried to get Warren to admit that taxes would go up by thousands of dollars, but she just wouldn’t admit it. 

There are moments when I really wish that I could be a political speech writer because when you are trying to make someone like Chris Matthews understand a complicated issue, you have to break it down into bite-sized pieces, and, evidently, y o u  h a v e   t o  s p e a k  v e r y   s l o w l y….

If, to pay for my private health insurance policy, I have to pay $700 a month out of my right pocket, but if we switch to Medicare for all, I won’t pay any insurance premium at all but by taxes will go up by $400 a month. So, yes, my taxes go up by $400 a month but I am saving $300 every month.

So, Mr. Matthews, yes, your taxes will go up, but you will be saving thousands of dollars on healthcare costs every year, even if you never get sick. If you do get sick, you will discover that you no longer have to pay the first $7000 deductible that you used to have to pay. So, not only will a publicly funded healthcare system give you better coverage for half as much money, but also, everyone will be covered …. Even those desperately poor people that you Catholics claim to care so very much about.

As Dr. Cornel West makes so clear in our wisdom lesson today, the United States has always had a blended economy with some of what is called socialist or publicly funded programs and some that are capitalist, or private. My suit, my shoes, my glasses, shirt and tie were made by capitalists. But this morning, I woke up to publicly subsidized electricity, lighting and air conditioning my home. I showered and made coffee with publicly subsidized water. I drove here on public streets. Our streets are protected by a publicly funded police force. Our borders are protected by a publicly funded army, navy, and air force. Our building is protected from fire by a publicly funded fire department.

And though I stopped by a capitalist restaurant on my way here, the pork, poultry, dairy, and grain products on my plate were all subsidized, in one way or another, by the public. 

You know, taxes are always a matter of redistribution of wealth. We use taxes to create a civilization. Sure, we should subsidize school lunches because we should feed our kids well, but do you know when we started a federal school lunch program?  It was started in the 1940’s by Harry Truman because military leaders feared that too many of America’s youth were too malnourished to become good military recruits.

(https://healthyschoolscampaign.org/policy/common-misconceptions-about-the-national-school-lunch-program/)

The military has lately weighed in again on school lunches because they now fear that America’s kids are getting to be too fat to fight. 

As a pastor, I would love to see our nation go to universal health care coverage because it is morally right to take care of sick people whether they are rich or poor but we will do it because it is cost effective. I wish that we could make college tuition-free because we want the children of the poor to have the same educational and career opportunities as the wealthy, but we will do it because all of these countries already do and if we are going to economically compete in a global market with these countries, we will have to do it too. 

Speaking of fake memes . . . most of us have heard the 19^thcentury French political philosopher, Alexis de Tocqueville, quoted as having said that “America is great because she is good. If America ceases to be good, America will cease to be great.” Look, Tocqueville visited America during our genocide of native Americans and the expansion of our use of African slaves. 

He didn’t think that we were all that good. In fact, he spoke at length about the irony of how popular our churches in America are, and how cruel we were to Indians and black slaves. . . a kind of social schizophrenia that continues to this day as we, a nation of churches, want to grind the children of the poor up to make the bread for the tables of the rich. He did, however, think that we were hard working and fairly ingenious. 

I hate to give up on thinking that America could be great because Americans are good, but I do have hope that America could become great because we are smart enough to realize that some things are done better, more efficiently, and more affordably when they are done publicly. 

When everyone gets a living wage, has access to decent healthcare, and education, and housing, then everyone, the rich and the poor, get to live in a better, happier, and healthier country.

Unlike our President, I have been to Denmark. I didn’t go to buy Greenland. I went on the rather more obscure goal of visiting the home and grave of Soren Kierkegaard . . . which, I understand, can only mean that I have issues but that will not come as a surprise to any of you. 

After a frozen slog through the icy slush of Copenhagen, I was warming up over a mug of hot coca and met an attractive young Danish dentist. When she found out that I was using all of my time in Denmark looking up Kierkegaard memorabilia, she insisted on giving me a personal whirlwind tour of Copenhagen. 

She was an immigrant from Iran, but you could have never met a native-born Dane who was higher on Denmark than she was. 

We walked through the frozen but festive Tivoli Gardens, and the largest open-air mall in the world, featuring many of the classic Danish designs in china, furniture, and electronics. In the midst of the crowded mall, she threw her arms wide and said, “Do you see any beggars? Do you see anyone who is homeless? Is there anyone who does not have a warm coat or good shoes?” She explained, “Sure, we have a 50% tax rate, but we have no poverty and almost no crime.” She said, “I live alone in a house with a view of the ocean and I have two Mercedes. Taxes don’t matter if you still get to live a prosperous life.” And she, my friends, is a socialist. But more than that, she is a decent human being who has empathy, and that is what I am hoping to see more of in America.