“Ordinary people with Extraordinary Vision”

“Ordinary people with Extraordinary Vision”    Sept. 27, 2020     Dr. Roger Ray

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From John Lewis’ opinion column published posthumously in the NY Times on July 30, 2020

Ordinary people with extraordinary vision can redeem the soul of America by getting in what I call good trouble, necessary trouble. Voting and participating in the democratic process are key. The vote is the most powerful nonviolent change agent you have in a democratic society. You must use it because it is not guaranteed. You can lose it.

You must also study and learn the lessons of history because humanity has been involved in this soul-wrenching, existential struggle for a very long time. People on every continent have stood in your shoes, through decades and centuries before you. The truth does not change, and that is why the answers worked out long ago can help you find solutions to the challenges of our time. Continue to build union between movements stretching across the globe because we must put away our willingness to profit from the exploitation of others.

Though I may not be here with you, I urge you to answer the highest calling of your heart and stand up for what you truly believe. In my life I have done all I can to demonstrate that the way of peace, the way of love and nonviolence is the more excellent way. Now it is your turn to let freedom ring.

When historians pick up their pens to write the story of the 21st century, let them say that it was your generation who laid down the heavy burdens of hate at last and that peace finally triumphed over violence, aggression and war. So I say to you, walk with the wind, brothers and sisters, and let the spirit of peace and the power of everlasting love be your guide.

I am the 4^th and youngest child born to white southern racists in Kentucky. They were not the mean kind of racists who displayed Confederate flags and salted their daily speech with insulting references to race, but they were descendants of rural southern slave owners who, though they were certainly church going folks, inherited a belief from their environment that the races had different places to hold in society. They were George Wallace supporting Democrats, you know, racists with swagger. 

 

When my mother died fifteen years ago, the pastor of their home church had only known her as a sick old woman and I simply could not bear to sit through the classic “sick old woman” funeral for my mother, and so I agreed to preach the eulogy myself. 

 

When mother died, I drove to the Gethsemane Monastery in Kentucky which was and is, my “safe place.” Unlike those families that tell funny stories and share loving memories at a funeral, I can honestly say that I have no memories of my mother ever laughing and this photo from their post war marriage is more of a smile than I ever saw myself. Born into the most harsh of economic depressions and surviving a war that included fear of invasion on both our east and west coasts, life for my rather Puritan parents, was a challenge to be met, not much of a journey to be enjoyed. 

 

But I remembered my visits to her family home in Appalachia. When she was born, the water came from a well in the back yard which was suspiciously close to the outhouse that was their only bathroom. The house was heated with wood burning stoves and lit by oil lanterns. I realized that my very own mother had lived through the birthing of the modern world. Though electricity may have been harnessed, cars invented, and airplanes in common use, none of that had shown up in Appalachia in 1919. 

 

My mother saw the introduction of indoor plumbing, electric lights, gas powered transportation, telephones, radios, the invention of the television, and I gave her her first cell phone which she never used, and my brother gave her her first computer on which she played solitaire. My parents were educated in one room schoolhouses and if they ever read a book, I never saw it, not even books that I wrote before they died! 

They attended my doctoral graduation at Vanderbilt but never asked what I had studied, the topic of my dissertation, or why I spent so much time in Catholic monasteries. 

 

But walking through the forests on the grounds of the Gethsemane Monastery, thinking about my mother’s life, I remembered one summer before we got air conditioning; mom would drop me and my brother, Billy, at the community pool while she went to work as our church’s secretary. We could escape the summer heat at the pool until she got off at 4 o’clock but one day she arrived and saw that the pool had been integrated and that Billy and I had been swimming with black people.

 

She showed some unsavory colors that day, hysterically yelling at us as she drove us home and insisted that we get in the bath tub and scrub ourselves of any dangerous germs we might have picked up in the pool from those . . . people. It was still summer, and our house was still not air conditioned, so it only took a couple of days for Billy and me to be back in the pool. I don’t know if she talked to our minister about it or if she had to dig down deep into her own soul to figure it out but the barrier that had stood between southern blacks and southern whites was breaking down. 

 

She had to send us to schools that were newly integrated. I was just 11 years old and though integration was awkward in my school, it was not violent as it sometimes was for my older siblings in high school. I know that it scared her. I know that she didn’t like it, but in her own bowels, in her gut, she had to make integration work in Glasgow, KY. 

The sons of local farm hands joined our little league baseball teams and became our friends and somehow, my parents knew not to say what they were thinking. 

 

When my then wife and I decided to adopt inter-racially, I had to break the news to them carefully. I told them, “We are about to tell you the best news of our lives and before we do, you have to understand that I will remember how you react for the rest of my life and what you say now will determine our future relationship.”

They both walked from the room to compose themselves before they said the wrong things and though their best efforts would have been pretty tepid to your ears, I knew that it came hard for them. They were always kind to their only brown grandchild though I never asked them to babysit and they never offered. I know that pictures of her were kept in a drawer and taken out and put on display only when we visited but, folks, sometimes, you fake it to make it. 

There were memorable moments of break-through. I was home once in 1984 and I watched the Democratic primary debate with my parents in Glasgow, KY and near the end my father said, with a certain tell-tale surprise in his voice, “You know, I think that Jesse Jackson is the smartest one of the bunch,” and though I voted for Jesse Jackson in that primary, I didn’t ask my folks if they had been able to break through the color line and vote for the best candidate rather than the best white candidate. But I knew that they knew, that Jesse Jackson was more than a symbol in that race. 

I am sharing all of this rather personal stuff today as a reaction to the posthumously published letter that Congressman John Lewis wrote for the New York Times. I’ve waited a couple of months after John Lewis’ death to talk about him because I 

didn’t want to let this message fall into the mire of the media frenzy that paid tribute to him for a couple of weeks before returning to pretending he had never existed. Knowing that his death was near, he wrote this short essay so that he could, in a way, preach his own eulogy. 

 

He started by talking about ordinary people with extraordinary vision. Lewis was a little younger than my parents, but he shared a lot of history with their world. He suffered beatings, arrests, and imprisonment in the battle for integrated schools, neighborhoods, and workplaces. But, folks, I hope you know that segregated schools, neighborhoods, and workplaces was never the creation of black Americans. I’m not saying that black people are free of racism . . . it’s just that their racism is so well founded that we try not to talk about it. 

 

But the institutional racism that John Lewis spent his early life fighting was not a black invention, it was a white institution and it took more than the prophetic voices and sacrifices of black martyrs to change those institutions. When I delivered my mother’s eulogy, I talked about how she had helped to give birth to the modern world, not just in transitioning into the technology of electricity, television and telephones, but by embodying the movement from racial segregation into racial integration. 

 

The Civil Rights Movement was ushered into America on the voices of prophets like Martin Luther King, Jr., Malcom X, Rosa Parks, Ralph Bunch, Jesse Jackson, and John Lewis, but it was carried into existence in rural Kentucky, Tennessee, Alabama, Arkansas, Oklahoma, and Georgia, on the shoulders of sometimes begrudging ordinary white people who made the difficult decision to do fierce internal battles with their racism, their pride, their privilege, and . . . and this is the big issue, their fear in order to embody a new and different world than the world they had inherited. 

 

Folks, racism doesn’t end until white people decide to stop being racists! I know that my parents didn’t change as much as I wanted them too. I know that they went to their graves without having ever fully seen my daughter for the amazing young woman that she is but the fact that they were willing to fake it and to do it so convincingly that my daughter never knew that they were faking is what it means to be an ordinary person who does extraordinary things in times of global change. 

 

John Lewis wrote in this final essay: Though I may not be here with you, I urge you to answer the highest calling of your heart and stand up for what you truly believe. In my life I have done all I can to demonstrate that the way of peace, the way of love and nonviolence is the more excellent way. Now it is your turn to let freedom ring.

 

I don’t know if John Lewis really trusted us but the cancer that ravaged his body didn’t leave him with any choice but to pass the baton onto us in the midst of these very troubling times. Ed Luce recently wrote in the Financial Times that America is drifting into a perfect storm. Both Republicans and Democrats currently believe that the other side is trying to rig, to steal, the 2020 election. There is so much distrust that on the fringes there is even talk of civil war to reject the outcome of the November election.

I was very young in 1963 when George Wallace delivered his “Segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever,” speech but I can tell you that I believe that I can remember that even then, everyone knew he was wrong. A lot of white people might have liked the sound of it at the time, but in their hearts, they knew it was wrong, and it was just a matter of time before Wallace had to publicly apologize for his racist views.

 

Now, I am less certain. The polarization of America’s culture is now so deep, so fierce, so dark, that I am not sure that there is any light breaking into large factions of American racism, tribalism, and sectarianism. The dog whistle of racism, misogyny, homophobia, xenophobia has been blown so much in the past few years that there are a lot of people who are believing that prejudice is not something to be ashamed of but rather it is something to embrace.

I always want to be careful about too lightly making references to Nazi Germany but just as Lewis speaks of ordinary people with extraordinary vision, we really must remember that millions of ordinary people in Germany were convinced to go along with the genocide of Jews, Gypsies, and homosexuals. Donald Trump is a disgrace and I sincerely hope that shortly after he is voted out of office that he is walked into a jail cell for a number of egregious crimes but whether he spends the rest of his miserable life making license plates in a prison or playing golf in Florida, my real concern, our real concern, are the millions of ordinary people all around us, our neighbors, sometimes our family members, who have fallen into prejudice through the portal of fear. 

 

John Lewis concludes his final essay saying, “When historians pick up their pens to write the story of the 21st century, let them say that it was your generation who laid down the heavy burdens of hate at last and that peace finally triumphed over violence, aggression and war.” 

 

John Lewis is expecting us, not to be social prophets, not be take a baton to the skull the way he did on the Edmund Pettis Bridge or even to be locked up in the Greene Co. jail. We don’t have to be famous. We don’t have to run for Congress. We don’t have to be martyrs, but we cannot be afraid to get into good trouble. We absolutely must be among the ordinary people who do not give into the seduction of prejudice, blaming our woes on those we define as being somehow different from us. 

 

I don’t think that Ed Luce was being alarmist when he said that America is drifting into a perfect storm. We are on the threshold of a dangerous election that will be followed by a period of dramatic conflict. Change is going to come. It is overdue. We cannot tolerate another generation of police shooting unarmed black men in the back. We cannot tolerate another decade of income disparity that offers the world’s best education, healthcare, and standard of living to the top of the economic ladder and which locks the children of the poor into multiple generations of poverty, ignorance, and suffering.

 

There are a lot of ordinary people right now who are acting like they are extraordinarily stupid and possible even evil. 

I want to tell you that they are neither. I want to tell you that even they can do the right thing, they can come along, they can be a part of the solution. I know because I have seen it happen. I know because my racist parents were two of those people who started to get it right after generations of getting it wrong. If they were alive right now, they would both be 100 years old. My father lived long enough to vote for Barak Obama in 2008 and I hope that you can appreciate how far that he had to come to get to that point. I can only urge you to not give up hope on the ordinary people who can carry the next decade of change on their shoulders, even if it feels to them like a punch in the gut, they can do it, they can feel their way into what John Lewis invited them into, a century when they can lay down the heavy burden of hate and usher in a century of peace.

“A Memorial for the Confederacy”

 

“A Memorial for the Confederacy”   September 13, 2020    Dr. Roger Ray, pastor

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Wisdom lesson Mississippi State legislature’s 1861 declaration of secession from the union:

A Declaration of the Immediate Causes which Induce and Justify the Secession of the State of Mississippi from the Federal Union. 

In the momentous step which our State has taken of dissolving its connection with the government of which we so long formed a part, it is but just that we should declare the prominent reasons which have induced our course. 

Our position is thoroughly identified with the institution of slavery-- the greatest material interest of the world. Its labor supplies the product which constitutes by far the largest and most important portions of commerce of the earth. These products are peculiar to the climate verging on the tropical regions, and by an imperious law of nature, none but the black race can bear exposure to the tropical sun. These products have become necessities of the world, and a blow at slavery is a blow at commerce and civilization. That blow has been long aimed at the institution, and was at the point of reaching its consummation. There was no choice left us but submission to the mandates of abolition, or a dissolution of the Union, whose principles had been subverted to work out our ruin.

I hail from a long line of clergy; it skipped a few generations at times, but we seemed to keep coming back to the family trade. I am directly descended from Rev. John Rogers, the side of the family from which I received my first name. John’s career as an English clergyman came to a sudden end one day in 1555 when Mary Queen of Scots had him burned alive at the stake. An event which evidently put the desire to go to seminary on ice in my family for a few generations. But always the rebels, it was Edmund Rogers who found, after the fall of Cromwell, that it was time to give up the island nation which had been our home, to come to America.

Edmund Rogers distinguished himself in service during the Revolutionary War and later settled to farm in southern Kentucky, founding the small town that bears his name, Edmonton, KY.

For more than two centuries my patriarchal family managed a large farm there, and for most of the first half of it, it was a prosperous slave plantation. I grew up near the family farm hearing stories about the good ol days before the Civil War had plunged my family into poverty. A hundred years after the war, they were still repeating stories that included lots of apologetics for the 19^th century version of my ancestor’s lives.

 

My great grandmother, Nina Biggs, told me that she had been cared for as a child by a former slave who had not left family service because the slaves were well provided for and they were happy being slaves. I helped to mow the family cemetery where slaves were buried in a corner of the family graveyard.

 

I went to school with black kids who had my family name and we assumed that they were descendants of the freed slaves from the family plantation. What I did not allow myself to consider until many years later, is that they were probably also my cousins.

 

In high school, my history teachers told us that the Civil War was not really about slavery. The real issue, we were told, is that the south had produced the raw materials for the industrialized northern states but when southern states started to industrialize, to process and weave their own cotton and wool, that it economically threatened the north and so the Yankees attacked us. I was told, in history class, by my teachers, that slavery was used as a cover for a war of what they called, “Northern aggression.”

 

A monument to “Our Confederate Dead” still stands on the courthouse lawn in my hometown. An essay I published in the Glasgow Daily Times a few years ago, urging my hometown peers to move it to a nearby graveyard so that it would not appear to be a reflection of our city government was met with dozens of death threats and a very demanding letter from my brother, who still lives there, to never write for the Glasgow Daily Times again.

 

The myth is that such memorials represent southern heritage. The claim is made that it is not about racism. These statues and memorials represent our pride in our ancestors, and they honor their memory. It is all a part of the fabric of the myth that the descendants of slave owners wove for themselves. That myth normalized the southern culture of which slavery was a part in much the same way that turning corn into bourbon and eating grits with your eggs was just a part of the culture.

 

Of course, then along comes a history teacher like our own Dr. David Adams who read our wisdom lesson today, directly reading from the Mississippi State legislature’s 1861 declaration of secession from the union which very plainly gives the lie to the myth about the causes of the Civil War, stating plainly, “Our position is thoroughly identified with the institution of slavery-- the greatest material interest of the world.”

 

Arguing imperiously that the products of the agricultural south were crucial to the world but explaining, “none but the black race can bear exposure to the tropical sun.” Saying, in effect, you know, we don’t want to be slave owners, but you can’t seriously expect white people to work in the hot sun!

The historical fact is that the Civil War was about slavery. It is also a historical fact that almost all of these statues were not put up at the end of the war to honor those who had been traitors to the United States, but they were erected during the Jim Crow era, along with the rise of the KKK. More were added during the Civil Rights Movement, always as an assertion by the white majority that equal rights would never be given to black people.

 

But it became a part of the background of southern life. White people had the luxury of displaying Dixie flags and talking endearingly about the south as if the myths were true and there was no harm done in our history of slavery. Even as

recently as 1989, the generally liberal singing trio, now named the “Chicks” were known as the “Dixie Chicks” for nearly 30 years. I’m not sure that their new name would pass muster with many feminists these days but even with that moniker’s problems, they sure didn’t want to continue to use “Dixie” in their name.

 

I am sure that many of the people we know would write off all of this movement to ban Confederate flags, tear down Confederate monuments, and even to scrub our language of references to the Confederacy that help to hide the horrors of our early history in slavery as a matter of political correctness, of liberals trying to change history, or even of a kind of cancel culture. But the truth is that symbols, statues, flags, names of Universities and military bases do make a difference.

 

If you cannot immediately see the connection between the culture of accepting Confederate flags and monuments in our midst and the fact that a white cop and shoot an unarmed black man in the back seven times then I hope you will understand it before you finish reading this.

There is a reason why the police drove right past 17-year old, Kyle Rittenhouse, even though he was out after curfew, was carrying an illegal weapon, and had just shot and killed two people and literally nodded at him, even as people in the streets were loudly identifying him as the shooter, but the police will shoot unarmed black men in the back, even when they pose no threat. If you still don’t see the connection to the fixtures of institutional racism to the way that black people are treated by employers, in the courts, and in law enforcement, then let me fix your glasses.

 

 

Why is there so much resistance to things like changing the name of the

Edmund Pettus bridge to the John Lewis bridge?

I mean, other than Dr. Adams, does anyone here even know who Edmund Pettus was, beyond the vague fact that he was a part of the Confederacy? Lots of people fought in the Civil War. Pettus got a bridge named after him because he was one of the first Grand Dragons of the KKK. That’s a part of Alabama history, for sure, but not especially a good part . . . not something that should get your name on a public works project.

 

There are things that are undeniably a part of history that don’t deserve a public monument. Mary Queen of Scots played a very distinct role in my family history but even 500 years after she had Rev. John Rogers burned alive, I don’t need a portrait of her in my living room to remind me of what this Catholic anti-Reformationist did. Do you know, she was only 13 years old when she ordered Rev. Rogers taken from prison and burned alive . . . who gives that kind of power to a hormonal teenager? You don’t have to be mad for me, but you can see why I’m kinda mad that after 500 years of not having a statue of Mary in Scotland, someone put one up recently. That’s on my list of monuments to deface. But I digress . . .

 

Back to the topic at hand, I think that the final word in the argument about taking these Confederate statues down was published in the New York Times on June 26th. It is in a piece written by the Vanderbilt professor, Caroline Randall Williams. I don’t normally read this long of a passage from someone else’s pen but please indulge me to read a few paragraphs from her essay:

I have rape-colored skin. My light-brown-blackness is a living testament to the rules, the practices, the causes of the Old South.

If there are those who want to remember the legacy of the Confederacy, if they want monuments, well, then, my body is a monument. My skin is a monument.

Dead Confederates are honored all over this country — with cartoonish private statues, solemn public monuments and even in the names of United States Army bases. It fortifies and heartens me to witness the protests against this practice and the growing clamor from serious, nonpartisan public servants to redress it. But there are still those — like President Trump and the Senate majority leader, Mitch McConnell — who cannot understand the difference between rewriting and reframing the past. I say it is not a matter of “airbrushing” history, but of adding a new perspective.

 

I am a black, Southern woman, and of my immediate white male ancestors, all of them were rapists. My very existence is a relic of slavery and Jim Crow . . . I am the descendant of black women who were domestic servants and white men who raped their help.

I am more than half white, and none of it was consensual. White Southern men — my ancestors — took what they wanted from women they did not love, over whom they had extraordinary power, and then failed to claim their children.

What is a monument but a standing memory? An artifact to make tangible the truth of the past. My body and blood are a tangible truth of the South and its past. The black people I come from were owned by the white people I come from. The white people I come from fought and died for their Lost Cause. And I ask you now, who dares to tell me to celebrate them? Who dares to ask me to accept their mounted pedestals?

You cannot dismiss me as someone who doesn’t understand. You cannot say it wasn’t my family members who fought and died. My blackness does not put me on the other side of anything. It puts me squarely at the heart of the debate. I don’t just come from the South. I come from Confederates. I’ve got rebel-gray blue blood coursing my veins. My great-grandfather Will was raised with the knowledge that Edmund Pettus was his father. Pettus, the storied Confederate general, the grand dragon of the Ku Klux Klan, the man for whom Selma’s Bloody Sunday Bridge is named. So I am not an outsider who makes these demands. I am a great-great-granddaughter.

 

So far as I am concerned, Professor Williams has said the last thing that needs to be said on this topic. There is no defense, no excuse, for the public display of Confederate monuments. The Confederates were traitors who sought to defend the institution of slavery in a country that had the temerity to speak of freedom and liberty.

 

As a white man in America, while my family has boasted many scholars, scientists, and pastors, I cannot dare speak of that fact without also apologizing for the undeniable fact that my blood lines also contain slave owners, slave traders, and very probably slave rapists and while there is no way to go back in time and undo those tragic, unjust, criminal and immoral events, there is no way that any self-respecting white person in the country should not be the first in line to hold the rope that pulls down the Confederate monuments.

 

Their history of human chattel slavery, physical abuse and undeniable rape is a part of our history, but it is a part for which we must apologize and seek to amend.

 

It is interesting, isn’t it, that when we object to police shooting unarmed black men in the back that people think that we are being critical of the police in general. Is shooting unarmed black men so much a part of policing that people seriously can’t separate the two? I mean, what would policing be if you took away the part about shooting unarmed black men in the back? The fact that people cannot seem to imagine objecting to police over use of lethal force without objecting to police entirely is why we have to make some deep cultural changes. It means that we change the way we talk. . . when someone says “black lives matter,” don’t ever reply with some inane, “blue lives matter” or worse yet, “all lives matter.” If someone tells you that their mother just died, do you correct them and say “All mothers die?” We announce that black lives matter because that has not been clear through the past 400 years of American history.

 

And we pull down Confederate monuments because while the Confederacy is a part of our heritage, it is a part of our history in the same way that Nazis and the holocaust are a part of German history and while there may be some right wing German groups that would love to put up statues of history, the German people know to keep telling those racist nuts to sit down and shut up.

 

So, in that spirit, all that is left to say to those among us who still want to defend Confederate flags, monuments, and names, let me say this in the nicest way that I know how:

And if telling you to sit down and shut up doesn’t sound all that nice, let me invite you to imagine what I might have said if we were not in church. This case, men and women, is closed.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Politics of Food

 

The Politics of Food    Sept. 20, 2020     Dr. Roger Ray, pastor

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NYT, Aug. 2, 2016,   GENE BAUR  President and Co-founder Farm Sanctuary

What we eat is one of our most important decisions every day. Our food can either promote health, or it can make us sick. Agriculture can contribute to vibrant, healthy communities, or it can undermine them. Farmers can use scarce natural resources responsibly, or they can squander and deplete them.

Unfortunately, American farm policies have enabled a harmful system to take root. It doesn’t have to be this way. As consumers become more concerned about our broken food system, they are voting with their dollars. There is growing demand for organic produce, and farmers markets are spreading along with community gardens.

This is what my breakfast plate often looks like. I love having fruit for breakfast and I have a special fondness for melons and strawberries. I love it so much, that if I don’t have it for breakfast, I am likely to have it for lunch or dinner. But as common place as this may look to you and me, my grandparents would have never seen a plate like this. In fact, they would have gone to their graves believing that such a thing would not have been impossible. Do you know why?

 

Because strawberries grow in the early spring, and watermelon and cantaloupe are picked in late summer. When I was young, local grocery stores would advertise on billboards when blueberries were in, when peaches were ripe, and when it was time for the apple harvest. Now, if Starbucks didn’t try to put pumpkin in coffee every October, a violation of nature, if you asked me, we wouldn’t have any sense of growing seasons for anything.

My grandparents were farmers. My parents grew, canned or froze most of the vegetables we ate year-round. I am afraid that I have reduced my family’s agricultural heritage to a purely symbolic backyard garden that produces only a fraction of the food that I eat and, my fear is that even if she wanted to keep up the family heritage, my daughter wouldn’t know which end of a tomato plant goes in the ground. While the pandemic has reacquainted many of us with that tiled room in the house where there are machines that make things hot and keeps other things cold, we have become increasingly disconnected from where we get our food.

 

I have several friends who have chickens and while they gleefully gather and share eggs, none of them actually eat their chickens. They give them names and eventually, they become the keepers of an old chickens’ retirement home because they couldn’t imagine participating in the barbarism that makes wings and tenders possible. And, I’ll add, I’m right there with them. I am not eager to become a vegetarian but if the choice was between a forever salad bar or actually butchering my own meat, then I’m afraid that I would have to stick to rabbit food.

If I may tax your memory and possibly our friendship, last month I gave a talk about the five things that a large group of Danish scholars had published that needed to be changed in a post covid world. One of them, that I told you I would be returning to, is about agriculture, not so much creating a new form of agriculture as going back to an older form of agriculture that was less taxing on the earth, better for the environment globally, and a lot better for our health generally.

 

The family farms I grew up around, almost all had a combination of beef and dairy cattle, chickens and pigs, and they grew corn, beans, potatoes, and the hay and alfalfa fed to their livestock. Crop rotation and being able to feed the livestock the excesses of the agriculture of the farm, kept anything from being driven very far and continually refreshed the earth.

 

To put strawberries and watermelon on the same plate and to do so very nearly 12 months out of the year means that I am not only not buying my produce locally, I’m not even getting most of it off of this continent. Fifty years ago, the only thing in our kitchens that had come from a thousand miles away was our coffee and bananas, now, well, we don’t all shop the same way in the same places, but I would hazard a guess that most of us don’t have more than a fraction of our fresh food from Missouri and only a small percentage from the United States.

My nutritionist friends tell me that we should try to eat whole foods but if we must eat packaged foods to make sure that we never eat anything with more than five ingredients and none that you can’t pronounce. But the marriage of modern farming to capitalist industries has given us even something as healthy sounding as Sun Chips and Whole Wheat Bread with more than 20 ingredients in them, many of which I cannot pronounce but one of the secret words, in almost every case, translates into sugar.

Corporate farming has wiped out the diverse family farms in order to produce single crops as far as the eye can see of soy beans, corn, wheat, sorghum, rice, and potatoes which demands more chemical fertilizers, pesticides, and gasoline to produce.

Again, even this reimagined food pyramid would not be endorsed by most nutritionists who want for us to eat many more green vegetables and almost no grains or dairy, and much less of the high carbohydrate root vegetables. But even still, if we should have only small servings of meat and dairy, why does most of our federal agricultural subsidies go to meat and dairy? If we should largely avoid grains and completely eschew sugars, why is most of the rest of the budget going to those crops? If we are supposed to eat more fruits and green vegetables, why is less than 1% of our government spending in agriculture devoted to what we are supposed to eat the most?

 

It is a complicated issue. You can’t blame farmers for growing the crops where they stand to gain the most profit but you can blame a government that has allowed lobbyists and special interests to grab hundreds of billions of dollars every year to make the foods that will kill us the most affordable and easy foods available to us.

Many of us have volunteered in our local food pantries that serves the most food insecure families in our communities for decades but I have to tell you, the more I have learned about nutrition and processed foods, the more guilty I have felt about my involvement in this ministry that gives the poor such a carbohydrate rich diet that while we may be preventing hunger, we are certainly helping to cause cancer and type 2 diabetes. The poor eat the worst foods and because they eat what they can afford, they have the worst health outcomes and highest medical bills. It is literally insane.

 

This is a touchy topic for me as I am obviously terribly overweight. I would remind our viewers that the camera notoriously adds 15 lbs. but I have to confess that the other 85 extra pounds is pretty much on me. In fact, one snarky comedian recently said that we should stop talking about type 1 and type 2 diabetes and just call them what they are, “pretty much not my fault diabetes” and “yeah, pretty much my fault diabetes.”

This chart shows the growth of type 2 diabetes in our nation over the past 60 years. We get richer, we have better health care, and the rate of diabetes in adults has gone from half of one percent to almost 10% . . . that’s not natural, in fact, it is specifically unnatural. It is a direct product of bad food, and way too much of it!

Asia had almost no diabetes and no heart disease until the last 30 years when we exported Kentucky Fried Chicken, Pizza Hut, and McDonalds to Asia. The British tried to kill them with opium, then it looked like we would kill them with Philip Morris tobacco products, but it looks like the real villains are Col. Sanders and Ronald McDonald.

 

Just as capitalism has not been a friendly force in healthcare, it is possibly even worse in determining what we eat. There is a very powerful influence of the marketplace on our politics and both of them seem to exercise power over our food supply.

I was approached several years ago by one of the founding members of Jesus Seminar who asked me to write a book with him about the politics of food in the New Testament. The project never made it into print, but I spent years thinking about the very odd New Testament story found in Mark and Matthew about a birthday party for Herod. I can never decide if the gospel writers were sufficiently sophisticated to intentionally use the metaphors in their stories as literary devices or if they just immerged unintentionally out of their unconscious, but this narrative is full of images of power and poverty.

 

There was a lot of palace intrigue in the messed up family history of marriages in Herod’s family, but his wife had a daughter from a previous marriage whom she had dance at the party, the implication being that it was a very sexy dance that put the drunken king off his guard and he offered to give her anything she wanted. Her mother told her to ask for the head of the imprisoned prophet, John the Baptist.

 

 But, again, reading the text from Mark 6 very closely, the girl’s mother tells her to ask for the head of John the Baptist but the girl goes before the king and very specifically says, “I want you to give me right now the head of John the Baptist on a platter.” They are at a party, what is brought out on a platter? Food, right?

Please forgive me for being so very graphic but, while you may think of David presenting the head of the Philistine warrior, Goliath, or the ancient practice of putting the heads of criminals or national enemies on a spike in public, but a head on a platter – that’s different and I can’t let go of the apparent metaphor that while the young girl was being treated as an object of lust, even still, she was a member of the royal family and she could treat the poor and vulnerable as if they were a plate of French fries. Not literally, but certainly figuratively, economically, politically, the rich have always eaten the poor.

 

In 1729, during the great Potato Famine, in Ireland, Jonathan Swift wrote a satirical piece called “A modest proposal,” which is the basis of the song that Sean is going to sing in a moment. Swift suggested that the poor Irish sell their children as food to the well-heeled English. His intent was to shame the moral indifference of the English towards the Irish which, historically, didn’t seem to actually work very well.

 

You could wish that farmers could just decide that they are going to throw profits to the wind and only grow healthy foods in an organic way but as much as farming may be a cultural lifestyle, it isn’t a hobby for very many people. It has to be profitable. The whole reason that we have a federal government with a tax system and departments that hand out subsidies is to manage desirable outcomes.

 

The problem is, with our system of government, Herod keeps lustily leaning towards Herodias’ bare bosom and telling her that she can have whatever she wants. And what she always wants is the head of the poor on a platter.

 

We the people, in order to form a more perfect union, need to give voice to what the poor need to say before the axe is laid to their necks. We can’t do it all at once without upsetting the economic apple cart, but we know where we need to go and we can start making changes with every year’s budget, so that we shrink the subsidies of meat, dairy, rice, corn, soy, sugar, potatoes, and wheat, and we start subsidizing green vegetables, fruits, and other organically grown foods. And, yes, that will make many foods more expensive, but it will lower our medical bills by very much more and give us longer lives.

 

Our politicians, because they owe their jobs to the donations from lobbyists, cannot tear their eyes off of the enchanting Herodias. We need to help her to put her shirt back on and go sit down. Our government must work for us and right now they are poisoning us and that must stop. They will not do it on their own. They will only do it if we insist on it, and we can do that in the ballot box or we can do that in the streets but either way, allowing politics and profit to set the table for us has us continually eating the poor and that, my friends, really must stop.

A Universal Basic Income

A Universal Basic Income      September 6, 2020    Dr. Roger Ray, pastor

click here to see the video

From “The Hill” By Austa Somvichian-Clausen | June 29, 2020

 

“We are living in uncertain times with even greater widening economic disparity as a result of COVID-19,” said Stockton Mayor Tubbs, founder of Mayors for a Guaranteed Income. “As mayors, our problems may look different from town to town, but we are united in our duty to ensure the economic security of our residents and it is unacceptable that people who are working two and three jobs can’t afford basic necessities. We encourage all U.S. mayors to join us in strengthening our communities by supplementing the existing social safety net and driving forward this powerful tool for racial, gender, and economic equality.” 

 

Last fall I was contacted by the Andrew Yang campaign to see if I would speak at one of his events. I was not a part of the “Yang Gang” but one or more on my talks on the concept of the Universal Basic income had come to the attention of his campaign and they wanted to get me in front of their supporters. I couldn’t be in New York last October, when they first wanted me, then we rescheduled later in the primary season, but he concluded his bid for the presidency before that date arrived. 

 

I was willing to be on his roster of speakers because, while I would have argued with some of his numbers, he was the first presidential candidate to champion the concept of a Universal Basic Income seriously and I was excited about being a part of that. Yang proposed that every American adult receive a monthly check for $1000 regardless of need or circumstances. He called it a “Freedom Dividend” literally, a reward for living in the richest nation of the world, similar to the way that Alaska now pays all of their citizens about $2000 a year from the excesses the state earns from oil revenue. If you didn’t know that Alaska did that, that could be a commentary on how effective that has been in getting people to move to Alaska. Thanks, but no thanks. 

Though many on the right, and by “the right” I mean both Republicans and Democrats, tried to portray Yang as being a bit crazy, he is, in fact, a very successful businessman who, I will venture to guess, knows more about math and economics than any of his critics. He, and many other forward thinking capitalists, realize that with increasing automation and robotic labor saving, that we now have an excess of labor and that, to keep the monopoly game going, we need to give every adult a stipend that will support at least minimal living. 

 

Yang’s plan would have cost a bit less than $3 trillion a year and he proposed paying for that by cutting out food stamps, subsidized housing, and other costly social welfare programs to save more than $300 billion per year, and he was counting on about half a trillion in new income from economic growth from the stimulus spending, and the rest from increased taxes on the wealthy.

 

While that plan didn’t sound good to either corporately controlled party, Yang was really making a very modest proposal. If I were designing the program, I would make the monthly payment about $2000 a month, and stage that down to 0 for people who made more between $70,000 and $100,000 a year. I would pay for the rest of the cost by cutting our military spending by about 50%, which I would like to do anyway.

I would also cease all corporate subsidies for coal, gas, oil, and crops that kill us like corn, potatoes, rice, soy, and wheat, and I would take a hard look at dairy. All things we should do anyway regardless of whether we were going to pay a freedom dividend or not. And that, ladies and gentlemen, is why I will never hold elected office. 

 

Call me crazy if you want to, but here are the hard facts. We are in a spending war between our bloated military and the planet we live on. The United States spends 30 times as much on military spending as we  spend on the environment. China’s ratio of military to climate spending is 8 to 1. Which country do you believe plans to survive until the end of the 21^st century? Check your own hearts, you know it isn’t us.

 

The question progressives are always asked is, “How are you going to pay for it?” Our current president complains that our postal system loses money, as if the Air Force, Navy, Army and Marines, along with our fire departments, police departments, and public schools were all turning a profit!  We have to clear our minds of the existing economic system that has evolved over the past two centuries to serve corporations and our tax system which has been manipulated to serve the rich. We can afford to give every human being in our country a decent and safe and meaningful life, but we can’t do it while continuing to worship corporate profits and allow the wealthy to control all of our assets.

As the famous founder of the Catholic Worker movement, Dorothy Day, said early in the last century: Our problems stem from our acceptance of this filthy, rotten system.” We have simply got to clear our minds of 19^th century models of economics and employment and begin to think in a 21^st century way. Allow me to propose a thought exercise:

 

Suppose that we were passengers on a ship of random tourists. There were 100 people on board, 94 passengers and 6 crew members. Alas, the ship is wrecked in a storm on an uninhabited island. The island, fortunately, has a fresh water source and several kinds of tropical fruits and edible game along with abundant fish. How will they survive? There are several options ranging between a Gilligan’s Island model and something like the Lord of the Flies.

 

Some might be inclined to strike off on their own, build their own shelter and gather their own food. Some alliances might be formed around families or similar interests who would move off and claim their part of the island and build their own self-serving tribe. However, some are elderly, perhaps some have handicapping conditions, maybe some have mental issues. Maybe, logically, you would assess the skills of those 100 people and collectively assign tasks appropriate to their skills to make sure that the children are protected and fed, the elderly and infirm cared for, and everyone shares in the resources of the island equally. 

 

However, imagine that the six crew members felt that since it was their ship, their cruise, and the resources from the boat belong to them and so they assert that they are in charge and that the island's resources all belong to them. And, let's add that they have weapons to enforce their claims. Now everyone works for them and no one can hunt or fish, gather firewood or water or build shelter without their approval, permission, or "taxation" in the form of labor, favors, etc. That more closely matches the system we now have. The 1% has a legal claim to 80% of the assets so that the majority of society are enslaved by an economic system created by the 1% to serve the 1% and those who break their rules are subject to punishment, banishment, imprisonment, or death. Maybe the 94 passengers would play along since the crew is armed . . . but for how long? 

 

The more I watch the news, the more mysterious it becomes to me why we have not seen a violent revolution in our nation. In fact, the burning and looting in some of our cities that have been sparked by police violence against minorities is surely the tip of the spear of a cumulative anger that has been building among the poor and the oppressed who are willing, faced with repeated social insult, to burn down the stores where they cannot afford to shop. Blacks and whites, Republicans and Democrats condemn the looting and burning but, if you will notice, only white people are mystified by it. Most black people may be against it, but they understand. 

 

White privilege gets on its high horse and condemns the demonstrations so loudly that some white kid with an assault rifle . . . how many news stories must we endure that start with some white kid with an assault rifle . . . decides that he is being patriotic by just coming out and shooting some of the demonstrators. And then Ann Coulter, the queen of white privilege, says she wants this 17 year old murdering terrorist as her body guard, or as her president!

If I may make an aside here, news and talk show hosts, please, let this woman’s career die right here. Think back, when has she ever said anything that made any sense? When has she contributed to the social dialogue? Can’t you see that she is just dangerously crazy? I hereby resolve to never mention her again as long as I live, and I hope that the media will do the same. 

 

But back to our island though experiment. If there were only 100 people on the island, the cruelty of our current economic system would be obvious. We would not build two houses for five people and leave five others homeless. We would not fail to feed the elderly, ill, or handicapped just because they had a pre-existing condition. 

 

On a small scale, if we were all on this island of my imagining, we could see that there were enough resources for everyone. We could see that if we pooled our labor, that we could save each other. And if we lived that way for a few years before we were “rescued,” would we again resume stepping over the homeless poor in the streets and demanding that we be allowed to keep our health insurance even if doing so means that many millions are kept from having healthcare?

 

In the mid-eighteenth century, when European settlers lived side by side with Native American communities, Ben Franklin observed, “When an Indian child has been brought up among us, taught our language and habituated to our customs, yet if he goes to see his relations and make one Indian ramble with them, there is no persuading him ever to return.” The European colonists were more wealthy, more technologically advanced, more secure in most ways. And yet, while it was not uncommon for a white settler to vote with his or her feet to go live with the tribal Indians, it almost never went the other way.

Among the Indians, work did not mean leaving your children behind, being apart from them for most of the day. Growing, hunting, fishing, building, did not mean that some became wealthy when others remained poor. Superior weapons technology eventually gave the European invaders control of the continent, but that does not mean that they had the superior culture and certainly not the superior economic system. 

 

This weekend’s Labor Day observance was created as a poor substitute for the International Workers Day which is observed around the world on May 1^st. International Workers Day is about workers’ rights. Labor Day is about giving laborers a round of applause. Our nation’s leaders didn’t want our laborers to get any ideas about having the right to organize, to demand safer working conditions, a living wage, and a share in the profits. They just wanted them to feel appreciated.

 

The famous attorney, Clarence Darrow was approached by a client after winning a case, and she asked him, "How can I ever show my appreciation, Mr. Darrow?" 

Darrow replied, "Ever since the Phoenicians invented money, there has been only one answer to that question." 

 

On this Labor Day weekend, I do sincerely applaud our healthcare workers, firefighters, essential workers of all sorts but more than applause, I want you to have bigger piece of the pie in a more just, safer, and more environmentally secure future. Organize my friends. Oppressors never grant you a piece of the pie until you demand it. There is a fake Confucian proverb that really comes from Jules Renard that says, 

 

“He who waits for roast duck to fly into his mouth, waits for a very long time.” Don’t wait. Join the tribe. Organize. And accept nothing less than justice. The status quo is a stinking, rotten system. The choice for us now is either justice or revolution.