“The Gift of the Church to the World”

“The Gift of the Church to the World”    August 30, 2020  Dr. Roger Ray, pastor

Click here to see the video

Romans 12:9-21
Let love be genuine; hate what is evil, hold fast to what is good;
Love one another with mutual affection; outdo one another in showing honor.
Do not lag in zeal, be ardent in spirit, serve the Lord.
Rejoice in hope, be patient in suffering, persevere in prayer.
Contribute to the needs of the saints; extend hospitality to strangers.
Bless those who persecute you; bless and do not curse them.
Rejoice with those who rejoice, weep with those who weep.
Live in harmony with one another; do not be haughty, but associate with the lowly; do not claim to be wiser than you are.
Do not repay anyone evil for evil, but take thought for what is noble in the sight of all.
If it is possible, so far as it depends on you, live peaceably with all.
Beloved, never avenge yourselves, but leave room for the wrath of God; for it is written, "Vengeance is mine, I will repay, says the Lord."
No, "if your enemies are hungry, feed them; if they are thirsty, give them something to drink; (for by doing this you will heap burning coals on their heads.")
Do not be overcome by evil, but overcome evil with good.

 

As we come to the last few months of the 4 year sentence America subjected itself to in the presidency of Donald Trump, the one armchair sociology question many of us have been trying to answer through every stage of this tragic piece of history is, how can one third of Americans still support him after all of that he has done?

 

Credit where credit is due, Donald Trump is a master manipulator of the media. You don’t have to be a psychic to be able to tell that virtually all of the journalists on CNN, MSNBC, and a solid half of the Fox News people, despise Trump and yet they are all just cats that can’t tear themselves away from a catnip mouse when Trump says or does something outrageous. 

I contend that there have been very many reasons why, with proper attention and investigation, that Donald Trump should be behind bars if not standing in front of a firing squad, but he has been a master of diversion, getting out attention drawn away to the next thing and the next thing as if we were all school children with serious ADD who were all out of Ritalin. 

 

I tried to go back and look at two different things… the first were indications of character flaws and general ignorance which should have kept people from voting for him in the first place, like when he carried out a campaign to have the Central Park Five executed even after DNA evidence proved their innocence . . . which was just disgustingly racist and paranoid, and the other being things of a criminal nature for which any president should be impeached and removed from office, like his recorded admission that he sexually assaulted women and was a sexual predator towards teenagers in a beauty pageant. I know several people who are in prison for 8 to 15 years for much less than what he confessed to on the Access Hollywood recording. With a recorded confession, I don’t know how he was charged, tried and imprisoned in 2016 . . . maybe it is the money . . . yeah, I bet it’s the money. 

 

There are very many reasons why, from a character argument, that no one should have voted for Donald Trump. For the life of me, I don’t know how this incident of making fun of a journalist with a horrible disability didn’t do it. How do you see this and think, “now there, there is a president I can be proud of?”

So, I don’t have time to speak to all of these character charges that would stem from racist things like the Muslim ban and the pardoning of racist Sheriff Joe Arpaio, but his firing of James Comey and his refusal to turn over his tax returns as promised should have sparked a real and in depth investigation of his financial ties to Russian banks or worse, Russian organized crime, and the credible conviction that Vladimir Putin as compromising material on Trump. This is inside the ball park of treason for which execution, not just impeachment, is the constitutional punishment. And even the two year long Muller investigation never looked under the rock to see what was there. In the end, we have to say that Bob Muller stalled and protected Trump from a real investigation. 

 

As the senate report on the 2016 election, that 1000 page plus tomb, clearly states, Trump and his family and aids did collude with Russia in the 2016 election and the 2019 impeachment hearings proved, in spite of the Republican senate votes to protect him, that Trump and his aids colluded with, extorted, and mob boss style, exploited the government of the Ukraine to influence the 2020 election. He even publically, on the media, asked for China to dig up dirt on Joe Biden. This doesn’t call for an expensive or lengthy investigation, this is treason, T-R-E-A-S-O-N, on the face of it and there is no rational way around it. 

The hush money paid to porn star, aka Stormy Daniels, was a campaign finance violation which is impeachable, and the multiple instances of obstruction of justice related to that and the Russia investigation are all impeachable offenses. 

 

As much as he says that he hates them and wants to wall them out, Trump has been found to have knowingly employed illegal immigrants on both construction sites and to maintain his hotels and golf courses. A crime that has forced the resignation of many other politicians in the past who were not as wealthy as Trump . . . do you think it is the money?  I bet it’s the money.

 

He has removed troops from Syria, basically turning it over to Russia. He has defunded, alienated, and withdrawn forces from NATO, an apparent favor to Russia. . . moves that are so treasonous that it seems difficult to explain merely with a pee-pee tape an charges of mafia money laundering which does call for a substantive investigation of exactly what Russia does have on their POTUS puppet?

 

Trump not only approved of the political murder of an American journalist, Jamal Khashoggi, by the Saudi crown prince, but late last year reports surfaced that Trump had actually given orders to shoot and kill immigrants crossing our southern border. Regardless of who he thinks that he can shoot and get away with it, murder is still murder and even a billionaire president can’t get away with that. 

In November of last year, Trump had to pay more than $2 million dollars in fines for having misused and stolen money from the Trump foundation which has now been shut down due to a history of fraudulent and illegal activities. We can only hope that there are state indictments waiting until Trump leaves office in January. 

 

I am not even going to create a slide for 2020 because this year defies being briefly summarized, but you know all too well how badly he has botched the management of the pandemic, how he has used pardons to obstruct justice and fired other patriotic civil servants, also to obstruct justice, and now he is tampering with the United States Postal Service to try to rig the 2020 election in his favor, all of which are impeachable on either criminal or incompetence grounds. 

And his available administration friends who can attend White House lawn cook outs has gotten pretty small since so many of his staff and advisors are in jail, with Steve Bannon waiting in the wings for his turn behind bars.

 

That is now five pages and 10 minutes of your life that you can never get back, that I have used to remind you of this basic fact: The president of the United States, Donald J. Trump, is one of the most horrible, immoral, dishonest, and clearly criminal human beings on earth. And for my audience, I probably could have just started with that sentence and moved on, you have my apologies.

 

But the question that I, as a parish pastor, and you, as citizens of a democracy, have to answer is: Since this level of really creepy immorality, dishonesty, corruption and even treason is plainly obvious, how can 40% of our neighbors, family members and fellow citizens still approve of and say that they are going to vote for 4 more years of this nightmare? 

 

Where is the Republican Party? Where are the senators and members of congress who ran for office with pledges of patriotism, as advocates for family values, morality, honesty, and the interests of the American people at heart. Why do we never hear from a Republican who is seeking re-election who will speak up against this travesty against humanity and mother nature itself?

 

For all of the wrong reasons I love this Face Book meme that says that the bat that gave the world Covid-19 is one of the invited speakers at the Republican Convention. Obviously a joke, however, reality is not much better and certainly more shocking.  

Patricia and Mark McCloskey, who have been charged with a felony for threatening Black Lives Matter protestors who marched past their million-dollar home in St. Louis have been invited to speak, prior to their eventual conviction and imprisonment. Trump has invited Nick Sandmann, the former Covington Catholic High School student whose interaction with a Native American elder in Washington was captured on video, to the shame of teenagers everywhere . . . Nick will speak at the convention. I don’t know if he is really going to have Scott Baio back, or if Mike from My Pillow ads will be trotted out again, and I hope the demon-sperm doctor is just in this picture as a joke, but so far, it looks like the GOP convention could be fairly labeled, “Darwin’s Waiting Room.”

The Republican Party has, by and large, watched in silent consent as Trump has disassembled the alliances that have prevented wars and kept the world safe since World War II. They have silently consented to the dismemberment of democratic government in the creation of a Fascist government, so much so that the term, “antifa” or “anti-fascist” has become an insult.

Let me take a moment to remind you that these young men who fought and died on the beaches of Normandy were anti-fascists. My father, who suffered through dozens of bouts with malaria while fighting in the south Pacific during WWII was an anti-fascist. Heck, 

Woodie Guthrie, the author of “This Land is My Land,” that peace loving folk singer of the mid 20^th century, his guitar was emblazoned with the words, “This machine kills fascists.” Woodie Guthrie was antifa!

 

The Republican Party, Republican voters, by and large, Republican donors have, by default, apparently decided that fascism is now in. That is a harsh thing for me to say and you guys know me, I do not readily or rashly say harsh things. . . unless it happens to be true. The resounding question is, why? Why? How could this have happened?

 

Last year, Washington Post columnist Michael Gerson, asked: “How can you defend a president who is a danger to democracy?” Appropriately, Gerson says the issue would benefit from psychological study.

No one less than John Dean, of Watergate fame, and Bob Altemeyer, the famous Canadian psychologist who is an expert on Authoritarianism, wrote a powerful response, observing the fact that this psychological study has been done over the past century as we have seen over and over, in nation after nation, how many people literally prefer a “strong man” authoritarian government over democracy. 

 

Wealthy donors have a different set of motivations. They really do believe that there should be an aristocracy and a class of serfs who make them rich. They attempt to influence government to create an economic system that they can exploit for personal gain. But the majority of Trump supporters, and forgive me for saying this, but the majority of Hitler supporters, are the evangelicals who combine self-congratulatory religion with deep personal fear verging on paranoia. 

 

These people want a strong leader who will stomp out the dirty people, the inferior people, the criminal element, those who are viewed as “takers” and not “makers.” Hitler used fear and prejudice to blame Jews, Travelers, gays, and the handicapped for the perceived problems in Germany and it doesn’t seem like much of a stretch to point out that Trump uses fear and prejudice to blame immigrants, Muslims, and black people for the perceived problems of Evangelical Christians in America.

 

It is not original to me, but I will repeat the observation that America’s problem is not that Christianity is not taught in our public schools. Our problem is that Christianity is not being taught in our churches! I said last week that our churches have failed our culture and this is one of the most crucial aspects of that failure.

 

People make bad decisions when they are afraid. Prejudice is a by-product of fear. Militarism is a by-product of fear. Hoarding, greed, are fueled by fear. 

But folks, faith should be an antidote to fear. Faith should bolster character, instill values and character in religious people. Even when we are afraid, our faith should demand that we still be good people. 

I get that Mark and Patricia were scared when they saw hundreds of black people marching down the street in their gated community. Awash in white privilege and, well, being lawyers, you can see that they were paranoid about those black people coming close to their mansion but is this armed reaction what good people do? Is this Christian? Is it even Episcopalian?

 

In what is an increasingly rare event for me, I took a passage from the New Testament for our wisdom lesson today. I am not much of a fan of St. Paul. He seems to me to be episodically a misogynist and a homophobe, possibly somewhat excusable in the world of the early first century but not laudable at any time. And even in this beautiful piece in which he is imploring Christians to be noble people he includes a sentence, possibly echoing the Old Testament claim that “vengeance is mine, sayeth the Lord,” but his suggestion that by doing good to our enemies is, in effect, heaping burning coals on their heads is the opposite of nobility. 

 

Still, bearing in mind that Paul has not yet been to Rome and he is writing to people whom he does not know, he boils down the goal of the Christian journey this way, telling them to:

Romans 12:9-21
Let love be genuine; hate what is evil, hold fast to what is good;
Love one another with mutual affection; outdo one another in showing honor.
Do not lag in zeal, be ardent in spirit, serve the Lord.
Rejoice in hope, be patient in suffering, persevere in prayer.
Contribute to the needs of the saints; extend hospitality to strangers.
Bless those who persecute you; bless and do not curse them.
Rejoice with those who rejoice, weep with those who weep.
Live in harmony with one another; do not be haughty, but associate with the lowly; do not claim to be wiser than you are.
Do not repay anyone evil for evil, but take thought for what is noble in the sight of all. If it is possible, so far as it depends on you, live peaceably with all.
. . . Do not be overcome by evil, but overcome evil with good.

 

Folks, we are standing on the threshold of the worst part of the coronavirus pandemic. We may be standing on the threshold of a new global economic depression. And I feel certain that we are about to enter a time of dramatic changes in governments, not just in the United States but in many places where people are having to face a contest between fear driving fascism and the hopefulness of a new kind of democracy and justice. 

 

I have spent the last four years decrying the moral corruption of American politics and I’ll tell you, at my estimable age, I look forward to being allowed to turn the page next year so that I can spend 2021 doing what churches are supposed to do, trying to encourage people to be good people. The gift that the church has to give to the world is not to weigh in on partisan politics or to try to legislate our morality on people who do not share our spiritual world view. 

 

The gift that we can give to the world post-Trump is goodness, character, honesty, generosity, virtue. When Trump either walks out of the White House or is drug out in handcuffs by the Secret Service, the Trump era doesn’t end when Trump is either on a golf course in Florida or making license plates in a New York state prison. Guard your hearts, my friends, not everything that is cathartic, and satisfying is good for our souls. 

 

What Trump has revealed to me is that the church has largely failed in its mission to teach people how to be good people, how to conquer fear with faith. How to, as Paul says, “overcome evil with good.” 

 

The Black Lives Matter demonstrators who walked down the street in front of mansion that is the home of Patricia and Mark McCloskey did not break down the gate of their private neighborhood. The gate was unlocked and they just walked in. When the McCloskeys saw them, what they saw were people who scared them. 

What good are the thousands of churches in our nation if we cannot teach the McCloskeys to see #blacklivesmatter demonstrators as their brothers and sisters? What if they had been the kind of people who could have greeted the demonstrators with cold bottled water, or even if they had been able to come out and throw roses on their path? 

 

You may say that I’m a dreamer, but, I can tell you this, I’m not the only one. I hope someday all of you can join me, and the world can truly be as one. 

Imagining a Post-Covid New and Improved World

Imagining a Post-Covid New and Improved World  August 16, 2020         

  Dr. Roger Ray, pastor

click here to see the video

 

Coco Kanters - PhD Candidate ‘There is an overabundance of research in the social sciences and humanities that substantiates the claim that our current political-economic world order is structurally unsustainable. The manifesto is important because it pools this massive repository of knowledge in a call to action. The policies and strategies used before covid-19 are inadequate to address the challenges of an increasingly fragile global system. From my research on alternative finance and urban economies, I know that concerted institutional effort is vital in achieving structural change on a broad scale. I hope the manifesto activates policy-makers and institutions to collaborate in – sustainably – re-building society.’

 

Well folks, it seems like it is time for some brutal honesty about this pandemic. We have spent the last six months negotiating with ourselves about when life would return to normal. When can kids go back to school? When can churches again try to fill the pews with throngs of congregants? When can we do something as basic as going to a movie, a concert, or confidently plan a vacation that involves air travel? 

 

When we felt we had to stop having Sunday services here back in March, we assumed that we would be back in May, June, at the latest. There was hope that the warmer weather of Spring would kill off Covid-19 as it usually does the annual flu. Sadly, it appears that this novel virus enjoys hot, sunny weather as if it were a college student on Spring Break. Rather than going dormant, infection rates just move around and spike in different places. The adamant states that will be forcing schools and universities to reopen will, quite stupidly, spark a rise in infections that will almost certainly kill tens of thousands of people if not, in fact, hundreds of thousands of people. 

 

Like many of you, I have places I want to go, people I want to see. I have had to cancel 5 out of state speaking engagements and my scuba gear is dry rotting in a closet.  Months ago, I had some confidence in the coming iterations of a vaccine, but sober minded virologists have been asking us to temper our expectations. The first vaccines may provide only very limited protection from Covid-19. The painfully honest answer to the question we have all been asking, “When will we get to go back to normal?” maybe a year, or two, but it may also be “never.” We may simply have to rethink what “normal” is. 

 

I do not know if our local opera and symphony will survive this long shut down and, frankly, I don’t know that the symphony and the opera will survive in Kansas City and St Louis, for that matter, I’m not sure about Chicago and New York. I have no idea if the cruise line industry will return or if it does, how many huge ships will simply be scrapped for metals and parts. In the new normal, will people ever go back to church and sit on pews, hip to hip with strangers, sitting only dozens of feet from large choirs? Will professional athletics become a pay-per-view, TV only event? 

 

We are probably all glued to the news these days, trying to figure out and predict when normal will come back but, and I hate saying this, but given the current political environment, you cannot really rely on the information we receive from the White House, or even the WHO or the CDC because everyone is cooking the books to make Covid-19 seem to be less lethal than it really is. I hope this will change if we get a new administration in the White House in January but even though we are being told that there have been more than 160,000 covid related deaths in the USA, and that is a nightmare scenario on its own but that number is the result of calling covid related deaths something else, most of the time. 

We are not just undercounting covid deaths, we may be trying to hide the majority of them. Florida and Texas are great examples. For the past several years, each state experienced a four month spring death toll from pneumonia of just under a thousand people. But as the virus spread to those red states, they reported only one or two thousand covid deaths but the rate of death from pneumonia went up by 400% in each state over previous years. Now, Mark Twain was fond of saying that “there are lies, damned lies, and then there are statistics.” I realize that people can reasonably argue about charts like this but the sad truth is that we don’t know what the real sad truth is about how many people have died in the USA from covid-19. The reported number is certainly an undercount, that is impossible to dispute but is it off by 40% or 400%? We don’t know because, at this present moment, the government of the United States and of many of our states, simply cannot be believed. 

 

Whatever the true number is, what we can count on is that the death rate is going to go up dramatically as schools re-open and the fall flu season joins forces with the coronavirus. For historical comparison, American deaths during the 4 years of WWII were just over 400,000. We will certainly pass that number in the first year of Covid-19. 

 

This is a war but we are not on a wartime footing, in fact, all we seem to talk about is trying to get back to normal when things are going to get a lot less normal over the next few months.

 

We have a certain longing to go back to the way it was before the pandemic but, at a more crucial level, I’m going to ask you today to reconsider that. Because, honestly, “normal” was never all that great. And just as World War II changed the face of government, industry, the workforce and the marketplace, I believe that we need to be thinking about a new normal that must emerge from this mortal battle we are currently engaged with. 

 

Like all of you, I am hoping for a major change in our government at the end of this year. Also, like many of you, the current Democratic ticket is not at all what I was hoping for. I really thought that we were ready for a true progressive this time and we are not getting that. I don’t want to step on anyone’s toes but the best thing that I can say about Joe Biden is that he is a better choice than Marianne Williamson.

 

I have not seen Oprah on screen since I watched the Color Purple in a theater in Louisville, KY in 1985. But since she became famous, she has made one quack after another famous. Oprah has given the world so many fraudulent snake oil salesmen: Dr. Phil, Dr. Oz, Deepak Chopra, and Marianne Williamson and so, Oprah, if you are listening, please give it a rest. Your suggestions are nearly as dangerous as Covid-19! If that offends any of you then let me say now that I’m sorry . . . . that you didn’t get to go to college. 

 

But the big thing that we have reason to hope for in a new administration is that, unlike the Trump administration and the administration of governors like Florida’s Gov. Ron DeSantis, Texas’ governor Greg Abbott, and Georgia’s governor Brian Kemp, we expect a Biden administration to pay attention to medical scientists.

Clearly, the reason why the pandemic has been so much more lethal in the United States than it has been elsewhere is because Trump has insisted on ignoring the advice of serious doctors and scientists and instead pushing false narratives and snake oil cures. Governors DeSantis, Abbott, and Kemp, along with their cult leader, Donald Trump, have been too worried about holding onto power and propping up the economy and not nearly worried enough about fighting the virus and saving lives. We have every good reason to believe that this insanity will come to an end on inauguration day in January. 

 

But just like we want scientists and doctors trying to lead the charge on the medical battle with covid, what I want to earnestly beg for today, is that we similarly pay attention to what the experts and academics have to suggest about how the world’s economy, government, and environment recovers from this crisis.

 

We need to be able to walk and chew gum at the same time. We need to follow sane medical advice going forward to stem the spread of Covid-19 and the inevitable pandemics that will follow it in this overcrowded, and ecologically stressed planet. But we need to more than simply be reactive. We had problems before we had a pandemic and many of those problems have only gotten worse. 

 

In January of this year, before the virus had affected us at all, our for-profit, heartless healthcare system was failing us. Our capitalist economy that kept pushing resources into the hands of fewer and fewer people was failing us. Our government that holds onto power through corporate donors was, and let’s call it what it really is, our government run through bribes and corporately written legislation was failing us. Our symbolic gestures towards recycling, earth day postage stamps, and environmental accords that were largely ignored and were too little too late in any event have been failing us. And, men and women, don’t you know that our churches and synagogues, our mosques and holy sites that are charged with speaking truth to power, teaching morality, giving voice to the voiceless, do you need for me to tell you that the church has been, for a thousand years, failing us?

 

As the author, Laurie Buchanan, has pointedly said, “Whatever you are not changing, you are choosing.” Maybe we don’t want to pollute the earth. Maybe we don’t like the way we finance our elections in America. Maybe we don’t approve of the lax gun laws in our country or the huge wage disparity between the rich and poor . . . but come on, we’re not in elementary school. We’re not helpless children. If we are not actively changing what we don’t approve of then we are tacitly choosing it and if I may channel my inner assistant middle school principal, let me say, “Stop it!”

 

 As it happens, since Denmark has managed the pandemic in their nation very well, a group of 170 Dutch scholars from five different universities came together to compile a list of things the world needs to do in the wake of the pandemic. I’m including the headline from the Dutch national newspaper just because I find the language to be impossible to speak or comprehend and I assume that you have to be really smart just to be Dutch. 

 

Here are the 5 things they recommend to us all:

For the benefit of our podcast listeners, let me read these five propositions that the rest of you can see:  1) Move away from ‘development’ focused on aggregate GDP growth.

2) Develop an economic framework focused on redistribution. 3) Develop a form of agriculture that is regenerative. 4) and you’re gonna hate this one – Reduce consumption and travel. And finally, 5) debt cancellation. Please allow me to hit on each one of these 5 points quickly:

Our western economy has been built on what Greta Thunberg calls a “fantasy of endless economic expansion.” We cannot go on making economic expansion our goal when we know that expansion is based on using up limited resources and trying to drive our work force to produce more every year. Folks, now that I am within a year of my own retirement, I am painfully realizing that there is more to life than working more hours and trying to increase production. Europeans keep trying to make their work week shorter and their vacations longer and we Americans keep trying to figure out how to lower wages and increase hours…. which simultaneously shortens lives. The mortality rate is 100%. So, get some friends, fall in love, and try not to get the perfect attendance record at the office. 

 

We need to develop an economic framework that distributes resources more equitably and does not constantly shove profit into the hands of the 1%. And this is as true of healthcare as it is athletic shoes. The reason why healthcare in America sucks so much is because we have designed it to make a profit. Sickness should never have been a capitalist opportunity. The first question to be asked, especially in a pandemic, is “how do we provide affordable healthcare to everyone who needs it?”  The system we have is based on scarcity and hoarding and it is driving us to the bottom of the developed world. We have written our copyright and patten laws so that we create billionaires at the top of the ladder when what we need to be doing is spreading the growth in innovation and technology among the whole of the population.

 

Just look at how differently our current education system is being run…. As the pandemic forces schools into distance learning without providing computers and internet access to everyone, some students are doing ok while others are falling farther and farther behind every day. And if you think that’s sad but you are not worried about it because your kids have computers and wifi, let me tell you, you don’t want to live in a country where half of the citizens are functionally illiterate. How do you think Trump got elected in the first place? We want everyone to be as educated as possible!

The third point is about developing a regenerative agriculture. And again, capitalism has reshaped agriculture over the past two generations so that we have killed off family farms. We grow and subsidize the food crops that can be grown in thousands of acres at a time with all mechanized farming methods: corn, rice, potatoes, wheat, and soy. Which also happen to be the five crops we should try hard to eat very little of. On September 20^th I am going to deliver a sermon on the politics of food and drill down on this topic but for now, let’s say, we are growing crops that deplete the soil while they kill the consumers. Let’s not choose that, let’s change that. 

The fourth thing our Dutch friends suggest is that we reduce consumption and travel. All forms of travel come with a certain environmental impact. Cars and airplanes are the worst. I hate that because I love to travel but to be kind to the earth we need to reduce our carbon output and that means we need to stop building larger closets and covering the landscape with storage units and just stop buying so much stuff and stop burning coal, oil, gasoline, and natural gas. 

 

In this one arena, the pandemic may actually be teaching us some important lessons. Very many business meetings can be held over zoom. Many employees can be trusted to be very productive from home. We don’t have to fill up our city streets at rush hour, and we don’t always have to have in person meetings. And it may, in fact, not be unreasonable to suggest that we plant a tree every time we take a round trip flight somewhere because we have to strive to live in a carbon neutral way.

The fifth suggestion from our congress of scholars is the shortest and the most complex. To say simply “debt cancellation” is to give us an assignment whose application is going to be more complicated than the issue of reparations for the descendants of African slaves, but it is similar to it. Raising salaries is one aspect of redistribution of resources but another is the fact that capital itself is so unfairly distributed that some means of putting capital back into the hands of families is crucial to creating a fair society. Just one example is seen in the way that Americans organized the land distribution in our western push towards the east coast. 

When we opened up places like Oklahoma for people to just go out and claim land that, in any rational sense, belonged to Native Americans, we only allowed white people to participate. When you give capital to one racial group and specifically deny it to Latinx, Asian, Black, and Native groups, you are building the structure of poverty.

 

There is a very basic rule of capitalism that you have probably heard: poor people pay rent to the rich, and the rich have rent paid to them. We need to cancel student debts and find a way to subsidize home ownership that doesn’t make it a life long journey to get out of the tenet-landlord trap. 

 

I said earlier that the church has failed us. Institutional religion has failed us in many ways from gifting us with neurotic guilt for evolutionary appetites and for teaching us to focus on an unknown, unseen, and probably imaginary after life rather than trying to clean up the mess where we are now. But what I have specifically in mind today is that the church has taught us to be charitable when it should have been teaching us to love justice. 

 

I loved all of the years that we took meals to the homeless at Bill’s Place. Those days will be etched in my memory as sacred times for the rest of my life. But every week, I was coming to realize more and more powerfully, that as loving and as holy as charity can be, charity is not justice. As long as those homeless people continued to be dependent upon people like us to feed them, we were delaying justice. The church has failed us as long as it taught us that we were supposed to be good people in an evil society rather than working together to make society more just. I love the powerful reminder of Dr. Cornel West who asks us to “Never forget that justice is what love looks like in public.”

Before we rush to try to go back to the normal that was unjust, let’s try to imagine a world that doesn’t institutionalize the poverty, environmental destruction, and illness of the way things used to be. Let’s do better. Let’s be better. Let’s change rather than choosing the evils we had grown accustomed to. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

“Against Human Sacrifice: Reclaiming Self & Community Care”

“Against Human Sacrifice: Reclaiming Self & Community Care”

David Ketchum

August 8, 2020

click here to see the video

 

 

I have a difficult relationship with the term self-care. On the one hand, it’s been wonderful seeing self-care become more widely discussed and appreciated. In many cases, it’s become part of our everyday conversations with each other, and there’s more acceptance than ever that self-care is not only legitimate, it is essential to both personal and social well-being. On the other hand, self-care has become (predictably) commodified, and self-care is increasingly discussed in terms that have a price tag in time, money, and resources that (also predictably) make it mainly available to those with the privilege of financial and social stability. Self-care is also increasingly weaponized against people, such as working class folks, who are told that they need to do a better job of self-care so that they can endure what are essentially unhealthy, unjust working conditions. But the goal of self-care is NOT to become better at accommodating injustice. 

 

Self-Care in the Time of COVID-19

 

When it comes to self-care, COVID-19 has intensified both the needs and the concerns. There’s a proliferation of web pages and news programs about how self-care can help you get through the pandemic, such as these words from the Mayo Clinic: 

 

“The COVID-19 pandemic can feel overwhelming due to new information, long work hours, and caring for your family and yourself. It's important to pause for a moment and collect your thoughts, as worldwide pandemics can be taxing. Remaining calm can help. / It is normal to feel stressed or overwhelmed during uncertain times. Emotions in response to uncertainty may include anxiety, fear, anger and sadness. You also could feel helpless, discouraged and, occasionally, out of control. Physical responses may include headache, muscle tension, fatigue and sleeplessness. / Taking care of yourself is important so you are equipped to help your family through this time.” (https://www.mayoclinichealthsystem.org/hometown-health/speaking-of-health/self-care-tips-during-the-covid-19-pandemic  )

 

The page goes on to list strategies for supporting your physical and mental health, symptoms to watch out for, and links to other pages, including one for helping children cope with the pandemic. 

 

And it appears that this is exactly what people are doing. Last May, the Harris Poll surveyed over 2,000 adults who reported doing many of the types of things that show up on those self-care lists: doing creative activities, praying, having meaningful conversations, using technology to stay connected in new ways, spending time outside, and eating healthy foods. But that is not all the survey revealed. It also described that, despite all the self-care, people are generally struggling with the uncertainty of living in a global pandemic. 46% said they are having difficulty maintaining “their whole health (i.e., physical, mental, and spiritual health)”. I suspect none of this will come as a surprise, but 30% reported a lack of energy, 29% were having trouble sleeping, and 29% were “exercising less”. Moreover, 45% “of all U.S. adults say they have failed to get preventive healthcare (e.g., wellness visits, standard vaccinations, screenings, etc.) during the pandemic.” (https://drwaynejonas.com/covidsurvey/ )

 

These survey results fit with the words of the Mayo Clinic, who told us that, during a global pandemic, “You also could feel helpless, discouraged and, occasionally, out of control.” What they didn’t mention is that it is reasonable to feel that way when: 

 

• The US economy “contracted at a 32.9%  annual rate” in the second quarter and the nation “is still down nearly 15 million jobs since February” (https://www.cnn.com/2020/07/30/economy/us-economy-2020-second-quarter/index.html ); 
• 40% of renters in the USA are facing eviction  (https://www.forbes.com/sites/niallmccarthy/2020/07/28/report-more-than-40-of-us-renter-households-are-at-risk-of-eviction-infographic/ ); and 
• “more than 10 million Americans are expected to lose employer-sponsored health coverage between April and December 2020” (https://finance.yahoo.com/news/lost-health-insurance-coronavirus-pandemic-125934943.html ). 

 

We could also detail the unfolding impacts on disabled people, women and children, Black/Indigenous/People of Color, gender and sexuality minorities, the elderly, and other vulnerable groups, but I think the point is clear enough. Self-care advice is great, but it is insufficient. Being able to stay present with ourselves and one another, monitoring our emotional regulation, and paying attention to what supports our well-being are all wonderful and important skills. The problem with the self-care movement in the midst of a pandemic is not in providing this kind of information, and I’m glad places like the Mayo Clinic are putting it out there. No, the problem is that all of this is largely impossible for a significant number of people.

 

Heroism or Human Sacrifice? 

 

I mentioned that self-care is also being weaponized against us. In particular, people experiencing unhealthy and unsustainable circumstances are often being asked to do extra work, at their own expense of time, money, and energy, in order to accommodate those who profit from not providing humane conditions at work or in society. In this way, the powers that be encourage self-care as a way to prop up unjust systems, allowing them to survive while avoiding accountability for exploitative practices. But the pandemic is pushing even this to absurd extremes. 

 

Our Wisdom Lesson for today comes from Kim Kelly, writing in April 2020 for the Washington Post, with the headline of: 

 

“Essential workers don’t need our praise. They need our help. Calling essential workers ‘heroes’ makes it easier to pretend that they signed up to sacrifice themselves for the rest of us.” (https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/2020/04/30/essential-workers-dont-need-our-praise-they-need-our-help/ )

 

Like with so many other issues, the United States’ mishandling of the pandemic hasn’t created a new problem in this regard, but it is most certainly amplifying these problems. Our economy has a long history of mistreating and exploiting workers, with poor working conditions and poor pay leading to misery and death. COVID-19 has made it abundantly clear that this philosophy and practice has not changed. In the absence of adequate social infrastructure, we have created a situation where it is somehow considered acceptable, necessary, and even prudent to demand that a significant portion of the workforce, as Kelly put it, to “sacrifice themselves for the rest of us.” 

 

Kelly reminds us that essential workers have always been essential and that “they deserve every iota of praise, especially since so many of them are normally ignored or quietly exploited.” But she also rightly insists that -

 

“Calling them ‘heroes’ allows those of us who are, unlike them, privileged enough to remain home to imagine that these workers agreed to serve as human sacrifices, that there is an inherent nobility in the risks they’re taking. It gives us a chance to ignore the rotten, hazardous conditions that have been allowed to fester thanks to capitalist cruelty and federal malfeasance, and absolve us of any complicity. But most of these workers didn’t sign up to be first responders, and are now overwhelmed by the magnitude of what’s being asked of them. They keep telling us that they don’t want compliments, they want help, but we have continued to fail them.” (https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/2020/04/30/essential-workers-dont-need-our-praise-they-need-our-help/  ) 

 

This is a familiar refrain, and it is inexcusable that it continues to be ignored by our society. Last May, Dr. Dhruv Khullar, a physician and researcher in New York City, described his own experiences in the New Yorker. Even as infection rates began to slow, he noticed that essential workers were being required to “expose themselves and their families” to COVID-19 every day, and they were paying the price in higher infection rates. He wrote: 

 

“We’re now debating whether it’s safe to reopen the economy, but for essential workers it never closed. Each morning, during the apex of the deadliest pandemic in a century, these men and women have been venturing out into the epicenter of disease, to cook and clean, deliver food and carry mail, drive buses and stock shelves, patrol the streets and tend to the ill. Many have paid with their health—some with their lives. / It’s becoming clear that essential workers experience a disproportionate share of death and disease owing to covid-19. During one week not long ago, I cared for a police officer, a grocery-store clerk, and a bus driver. During another, my clinical service of fifteen patients included three food deliverymen. (The last time I can recall caring for a delivery worker was more than two years ago: his leg was broken after he was hit by an S.U.V. at a busy Manhattan intersection.)”

 

Dr. Khullar went on to point out the systemic racism at work, as 75% of New York City’s essential workers are people of color.  (https://www.newyorker.com/science/medical-dispatch/the-essential-workers-filling-new-yorks-coronavirus-wards )

 

The narrative about heroism and the noble sacrifice allows us to avoid this reality, to hide from the rampant racism, classism, disablism, and other oppressive systems that so deeply characterize our society. Hiding behind this image of heroism, we turn away from one another, refuse to understand what is actually happening, and comfort ourselves that all of this is somehow okay. What does – what can? - self-care mean in the context of such disparities and injustice? 

 

Who Is in the Room? 

 

From time to time, I have given workshops on this topic of reclaiming self and community care. And I begin with questions like these, to get an idea of where people are coming from. I’ll ask: 

 

·      What connotation does self-care have to you?

·      What words do you associate with self-care?

·      What are some popular strategies? 

·      Are there any patterns to these answers? 

 

And -

 

·      Why do we need self-care in the first place? 

 

The answers I get usually depend quite a bit on the people in the workshop. If it’s mainly financially stable, generally healthy, White folks in the room, the answers usually have to do with coping with stress, taking time to unwind and recharge, and being kind to oneself. All of that is great and important, and I only bring it up to put it in contrast with the answers that come up when the people in the room are poor, working class, disabled, chronically ill, or not White. Then, the answers are usually about survival, and self-care is typically a luxury with neither time nor money to afford, or energy to enjoy. 

 

Part of this is an issue of definitions. When self-care became commodified, an opportunity to make profit, our popular associations of care were largely reduced to bubble baths, spa days, and luxury resorts. Self-care became about some justifiable pampering; we needed to remember that it was okay to spend some money on ourselves and indulge in some guilty pleasures. 

 

But, with these connotations, it’s no wonder that people from oppressed communities have been largely alienated. Self-care as consumption just creates a further gulf between those who can afford to spend time, money, and energy on products and experiences, and those who cannot. The result is that self-care now has an accessibility problem, and self-care as consumption reinforces oppressive systems, especially along ability status, economic, and racial lines.

 

The commodification and weaponization of self-care work in favor of the status quo, and the status quo is a social system that relies on and perpetuates injustice. Further, people are so busy surviving that there isn’t much leftover to invest in social change. It is no accident that unhealthy, unsustainable, and unjust work and life conditions serve to both perpetuate oppressive systems and cultures AND leave those most impacted with the least access to time, resources, safety, and energy to devote to movement building.

 

From Self-Care to Dual Power

 

But the roots of self-care in social justice movements are much more liberating. As Audre Lorde taught us, “Caring for myself is not self-indulgence, it is self-preservation, and that is an act of political warfare.” When we reclaim self and community care, we find that it is about surviving and resisting injustice, so we can stay in the fight and bring about change. Self-care is an act of defiance against a society that says we exist only to prop up unjust systems, and this defiance dares to envision a world where everyone’s well-being is important and where everyone’s needs can be met. Because, in a healthy, functioning society, self-care is integrated into its habits, relationships, organizations, and culture. You wouldn’t need anything special, except in cases of crisis, trauma, or disaster. Self-care would be the norm, and resources would be abundantly available for when those times of crisis did arise. 

 

So, with the commodification and weaponization of self-care, we’ve begun to shift our language to community care. This is meant to bring our attention back to the ways that self and community care have been, and can be, radical expressions of resistance - of our insistence to survive, persist, and organize in the face of direct, structural, and cultural violence. This reclamation can in itself be a radical act: building social capital, cultivating community, redistributing resources, modeling partnership (against domination), and making organizing more resilient, sustainable, and just.

 

And this is how I’d like to see more people re-envisioning community care, especially for those of us in positions of relative power and privilege. We can leverage the growing acceptance and popularity of the self-care movement, even one oriented around consumption, to make self-care more accessible to people who belong to marginalized and oppressed communities. Over the years, I’ve collected a few working principles for supporting this kind of shift. 

 

1. Both activism and taking a break can be expressions of self and community care, especially for people from marginalized and oppressed communities, and our strategies need to include room for both. 

 

I start here because sometimes, in our enthusiasm, we create pressures and expectations on ourselves that contribute to burnout and compassion fatigue. Sometimes, my activism is exactly what I need to help me channel my anger and feel empowered. At other times, I need to step away and process my emotions and experiences. I don’t step away often, but I might take a break more regularly if our movements were set up in a more sustainable way, so that activism included encouraging and supporting self care. 

 

2. Self-care should flow out of and embody values and aspirations.

 

Though sometimes characterized as selfish, self and community care connect us to our deepest understandings of love and justice. Identifying those needs and aspirations can bring clarity and be empowering. As we continue to build and adapt our movements for social change, we need to dream and plan: what kind of world are we creating? What will our communities look and feel like? How do we want to be treated and how will we treat others? We can design self and community care practices that move us in the direction of our dreams and begin to make those values and aspirations a reality. 

 

3. Because an unjust society profits from our lack of self-care, making us more vulnerable to exploitation, we need to integrate both accountability and support for decisions related to our well-being.

 

Especially for any of us who belong to marginalized communities, we have typically been well-trained in neglecting our own well-being. Surviving this present moment is often a more pressing task. Radical self-love and self-care need to be normalized, including both 1) the legitimacy and necessity of taking care of ourselves and 2) the methods and resources for doing so. And if you happen to have extra resources, you can contribute to this change in social norms by directly supporting marginalized communities. 

 

4. Self-care strategies should be flexible and will change over time as our circumstances and needs change. This means that reflective practices are often essential.

 

I hope that this is an obvious one. Care will look different to different people at different times. But I’ve witnessed some self-care shaming at times, and that hurts us all. Additionally, we need to remember that self-care practices are often culturally defined, so that we can treat these kinds of conversations and one another with respect. As we go along, we can learn how to best support one another to better identify our needs, so that we can each choose the self-care practices that are most likely to meet our needs in healing and empowering ways. 

 

5. We don't have to judge ourselves for using coping mechanisms that we understand are not sustainable for the long-term. However, we can become intentional about replacing strategies that are helpful in the short term but maladpative over time.

 

This is another area where there is often self-care shaming, but that ultimately undermines the whole point of self-care. I can share a more lighthearted example of this from my own life. I do not like eating donuts. I don’t generally like their taste or texture, and they are too sweet for my palate. But I often crave donuts when I am feeling exhausted and stressed out. And I don’t want just one donut; I want a dozen. And I want to eat enough in one sitting that I know I will not feel good afterwards. I don’t indulge in it very often, but I’ve done it twice already in 2020. I don’t feel guilty about the desire, and I don’t feel guilty if I indulge. I know it’s not something I want to make a habit, but sometimes it helps make the world feel better, at least for twenty minutes or so, and that can make a big difference. Ideally, I’ll manage my stress successfully so that I won’t rely on a donut binge to cope – but I’m not making any guarantees that I won’t eat another dozen before 2020 comes to an end. 

 

Obviously, there’s a balance here. We don’t want to make decisions that harm ourselves or others. But even when we feel the urge to do something that is ultimately unhealthy, we can be compassionate with ourselves, seek to understand the underlying need, and make the best choice that we are capable of making. 

 

6. Expanding our attention also bridges self-care to community care. We are building communities and movements that embody and cultivate the type of society where self and community care are available for all. 

 

Oppressive structures and cultures are the biggest barriers to self-care, and we wouldn’t need a self-care movement if we lived in a wise, compassionate, just society. The longer we are delayed in accomplishing this work, the more people will suffer. The COVID-19 pandemic has laid bare the gaps in our support for self and community care, and that calls for creativity, persistence, and solidarity. When we advocate for hazard pay, we are supporting community care. When we demand extension of unemployment benefits, that is community care. When we insist on disability justice and accessibility during the pandemic, that is community care. When we work together, giving each other rest and sharing resources so that the work can continue, that is community care. Social justice is self and community care. 

 

 This is also how we connect self and community care with the social change practices of mutual aid and dual power, but that’s a reflection for another day.  In the meantime, we can begin by deepening our understanding of the relationship between creating communities and societies that promote and support self-care and creating communities and societies that live up to our values of equity and justice. We can commit ourselves to building that society – one that refuses to tolerate the exploitation of the earth or our fellow human beings, so that we might truly know the joy of caring for one another.