“A Snake Doesn’t Have to Bite You to be a Snake”

“A Snake Doesn’t Have to Bite You to be a Snake”    January 30, 2022

Dr. Roger Ray, co-pastor  

click here to see the video

That “magic ratio” is 5 to 1. This means that for every negative interaction during conflict, a stable and happy marriage has five (or more) positive interactions.

“When the masters of marriage are talking about something important,” Dr. Gottman says, “they may be arguing, but they are also laughing and teasing and there are signs of affection because they have made emotional connections.”

On the other hand, unhappy couples tend to engage in fewer positive interactions to compensate for their escalating negativity. If the positive-to-negative ratio during conflict is 1-to-1 or less, that’s unhealthy, and indicates a couple teetering on the edge of divorce.

https://www.gottman.com/blog/the-magic-relationship-ratio-according-science/

 

I moved to Springfield, MO 30 years ago to become the senior minister of a large Christian Church that had just harassed the former pastor into resignation after a very short tenure. The associate pastor, administrator, secretary, and janitor all left at about the same time, fleeing what had become a toxic environment.

I was foolishly confident that this would not happen to me. After all, I had served three other Disciples of Christ churches, and each time I had followed ministers who had been fired and, in each case, I had managed to stay longer than my predecessors and left on my own terms. I was used to managing organized opposition and was sure that I could do it again.

But when the same people who had needled my predecessor into leaving Springfield like a Dominos delivery driver with a 29 minute old pizza, started taking me out to dinner and trying to become my closest friends, the wise old chairman of the board took me out to lunch and gave me a bit of sage advice that I have never forgotten. 

When he raised the topic, warning me that they might try to do the same thing to me that they had done to the previous pastor, I assured him that they seem to be quite friendly towards me, he said, “A snake doesn’t have to bite you to be a snake.” That advice has turned out to be one of wisest and most important pieces of advice that I have ever been given, and every time that I have ignored it, eventually, I have been very very sorry. 

One of the foundational truths of psychology is, the best predictor of future behavior is past behavior. We can be very narcissistic about these things. We all tend to interpret the universe from our own experience, judging everything as if it was just a flavor of ice cream or a kind of music. One person likes vanilla, and another likes Rocky Road, but it isn’t that one of them is right and the other is wrong. Once person likes classic Rock and another likes Country music and, well . . . that one doesn’t work as well, clearly, anyone who likes Country music is just wrong . . . but you catch my drift.

We want to believe that just because this person I am very attracted to cheated on her first husband, and then cheated on her second husband, that she will be faithful to me because she really loves me, is not horribly rational. A snake doesn’t have to bite you to be a snake.

And yes, people can change . . . if I stop believing that, I really need to give up on preaching and counseling. People can change. But they rarely do and when they do, it is because of a powerful and costly commitment to change. People don’t change easily, or quickly, and they usually don’t change much. 

We who discovered our spirituality within one of the major world religions, all treasure the value of forgiveness, of mercy, of second chances but the same one who the gospels tell us taught us to love our enemies also cautioned us not to cast pearls before swine. Compassion is a primary value of spirituality but that does not mean that a narcissist will not see your compassion as a weakness to be exploited. Get real, you are not some kind of Harry Potter/snake charmer. If you have seen a snake bite someone else, even if they have not bitten you yet, don’t kid yourself. The famous Maya Angelou quote may have been repeated to the point of exhaustion, but it is none the less true, “When someone shows you who they are, believe them the first time.”

Dietrich Bonhoeffer said that forgiveness without confession is cheap grace. Sociopaths, both narcissists and people with anti-social personality disorders, will lean on your spiritual instincts to be, not only forgiving and accepting, but to be downright amnesiacs, pretending that what you saw with your own eyes, what you heard with your own ears, what you experienced in your own flesh, did not happen, or at the very least, it did not matter . . . don’t fall for that kind of gaslighting. 

In 1983, then President, Ronald Reagan, naively referred to the Soviet Union as being the “evil empire.” With much more wisdom and maturity of thought, the Russian novelist, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, replied:

 “If only it were all so simple! If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds, and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart?”

There is a paradox here. I have spent more than 40 years talking about ethics, character, personal choice and almost always with the binary assumption that good and evil exist and yet, trying to simultaneously encourage people to suspend judgement, be forgiving, tolerant, accepting, and even loving. I want to encourage the good in human potential and discourage evil and yet, try very hard to fully acknowledge that the line between good and evil runs right through every one of us. 

Rather than judging others, we preachers try to encourage people to examine themselves, to root out the evil in their own character and try to fertilize and encourage their better traits. Ironically, like Michael Jackson’s song, “Man in the Mirror,” in which he sings: 

I'm starting with the man in the mirror
I'm asking him to change his ways
And no message could've been any clearer
If they wanna make the world a better place
Take a look at yourself and then make a change

 

After it became unavoidably clear that Michael Jackson was guilty of child molesting, Sean asked me if it was still alright to use this song in our services. If you had to answer that question, what would you say? The message of the song is spot on, to make the world a better place, focus on changing the guy you see in the mirror, but the artist famous for recording the message, clearly had not done the most important changing that he really should have done…. Can I ignore that and use his music without at least some disclaimer to put some distance between our church and a known pedophile? 

No one is perfect. No one is innocent. But how far does a person have to go down the path of imperfection and sin before they become, if not irredeemably evil, then, at least, predominantly evil? 

There have been a plethora of sci-fi movies in which time travel was possible in which they discuss going back in time and killing Hitler in his infancy . . . in fact, I may even take it as proof that time travel is impossible because if anyone had managed to make time travel possible, they surely would have already killed baby Hitler, and since no one has ever shown up in time to do that, it stands to reason that it cannot be done. 

But we are not here to talk about time travel.

My point is that some people are bad people, even if they have some redeeming qualities, we tend to think of them as being bad. And almost all of history’s true heroes also have feet of clay. Many of our nation’s founders, whose faces we chisel in gigantic stone relief, were slave holders, womanizers, and self-dealing greedy people . . . who also did a lot of good, if not downright brilliant things. 

Gandhi, near the end of his life, had teenaged girls sleep with him. Martin Luther King, Jr. had dozens of affairs, abused alcohol, and was often terribly egotistical. Dorothy Day’s closest associates seemed to think that she was as much a narcissist as she was a saint. As awkward as it can be we have to be able to tell the difference between a Hitler and a Martin Luther King. Hitler was a pretty good artist. Fidel Castro was a pretty good baseball player, but in balance, we do not remember Hitler as a painter or Castro as a pitcher. Just as we do not remember Gandhi as a predator or King as a philanderer. 

It is not always easy to categorize history’s heroes and villains. Consider the fact that it has taken us nearly 200 years after the Trail of Tears to realize that Andrew Jackson was a horrible human being. We just recently stopped calling the annual Democratic Party rally here in Greene Co, “Jackson Days,” and now it is just called Democrat Days because they didn’t want to pick any one person to honor because, well, it took them 200 years to figure out that Andrew Jackson’s ownership of slaves and promotion of genocide were not honorable, so they didn’t want to make that mistake again. 

So, here is our paradox: We want to emphasize, as Gandhi famously suggested, that we embody in our own lives the changes we want to see in the world. We want to make the world a better place by focusing on the person staring back at us in the mirror each day. We want to suspend judgement, be tolerant, forgiving, loving, but we don’t want to pretend that ethics doesn’t matter. We don’t want to deny reality.

As we always counsel the family members of addicts, don’t try to act like you believe their lies. That doesn’t help them. In fact, it enables them to continue to abuse drugs or alcohol, while they run through the family’s resources trying to gaslight everyone else into believing that they are causing the addict’s substance abuse. 

Let me say this clearly: There is no such thing as unconditional love. Your Sunday School teachers lied to you!  If love were ever unconditional, then it would be entirely arbitrary. It would mean that we loved everyone the same. I would have no reason, for example, to love my daughter more than I love a stranger walking down the sidewalk. That is too absurd to even consider. I obviously love my daughter more than I do strangers. 

That doesn’t mean that I hate strangers, it just means that I do not award them a place in my heart, in my home, in my last will and testament, that is equal to the place that my daughter holds. You may be forgiving, tolerant and generous but love always happens within a behavioral context. If you continue to love and support a violently abusive spouse, that doesn’t make you a saint, in fact, that just means that you are both sick.

We have all had close friends with whom we have had a falling out. People like me try to discourage that. We talk about reconciliation, tolerance, forgiveness, but there are ways and times when people cross a line. Sometimes, to an outside observer, that line seems to be kinda silly and indefensible, but, we all have a line in every relationship that represents our boundaries of just how much bad stuff they can put into the relationship before we decide that we need to end the relationship . . . whether that is a marriage, a friendship, or even a parent and child relationship.

If you will give me permission to say this in a very crude way, a way that will make it easy for you to remember. After many years of doing both individual and family counseling, I concluded that just about everyone will be just as much of an asshole as the people around them will allow them to be. I haven’t patented it yet but one day, psychologists and sociologists will discuss Roger Ray’s Asshole Theory. What keeps almost any of us from becoming emotional terrorists and manipulative monsters is because of the people in our lives who push back. Who won’t let us get away with being dishonest, with being entitled, arrogant, and abusive.

The famous psychiatrist, M. Scott Peck, said that the only reason to get married is for the friction! And you should know that in spite of his brilliant writing and teaching, by his own admission, I have heard him say it, Peck was deeply flawed . . . he had myriad psychosomatic illnesses, he smoked, he drank alcoholically and worst of all, he was a serial philanderer and a terrible husband, but God only knows what a miserable human being he would have been without Lily who spent most of her life with Scott Peck, trying to keep him from being a complete asshole. 

The point of my theory is not that you need to be able to label someone a snake and then remove them from your life forever. It says, “Everyone will be just as much of an asshole as the people around them allow them to be.” Don’t ignore it when someone you care about is abusive to someone else. 

I am indebted to the comedian, Dave Barry, for this salient observation:

If the person you are with is nice to you, but rude to the waiter, the person you are with is not a nice person. For example, my daughter is beautiful, intelligent, and popular, but during her early adolescence as a middle school and high school cheerleader, I repeatedly had to emphasize that even though she is beautiful, intelligent, and popular, that there is no excuse for being rude or dismissive of people who were less intelligent, less attractive, or less popular. . . even if that person happens to be your father.

Scott Peck wrote a book about human evil, “The People of Lie” but in the introduction to the book he warned that the book itself might be evil if people used it to label everyone who annoyed them, disagreed with them, or simply rubbed them the wrong way, as being evil. I emphatically believe that we do have to push back on family members, friends, co-workers, and those who sit in the pews with us, and those with whom we serve in community organizations. 

Racism is not acceptable. We should not tolerate homophobia. Poverty in the presence of wealth is a sin. You can love someone while not ignoring their addictions, abuse, narcissism, or dishonesty. In fact, we only become better people if our peer group has some moral expectations of us.

It is not unlike our standards in the world of academics. You may be one of the smartest and most innovative researchers, writers, scientists, inventors, but if your work has not been exposed to peer review, critical thinkers will not pay much attention to you. I don’t want to name names, but some of my favorite scholars became too self-confident late their careers and began to publish books that they had not shopped around to professional peers, and they ended up publishing rubbish. 

No one less than Sigmund Freud, in a letter written to a friend in 1889, said, “I have examined myself thoroughly and come to the conclusion that I don't need to change much.” I suspect that even his beloved daughter, Anna, would have had something to say about that! If you have not recently apologized for something you have said or done. If, at this moment, you cannot thing of something about your character that could stand some correction or improvement, then you too just might be a malignant narcissist! 

When humans mostly lived in small tribes and villages, you could not easily escape those who would give you a good peer review, perhaps more often than you really wanted. No one would have gotten away with saying that they had thoroughly examined themselves and found little that needed to change. 

But now, few of us live near the place we were born. We are not surrounded by people who have known us well all of our lives. Friendships come and go. We change careers, neighborhoods, states. We can be isolated or self-select a group of associations who never provide the kind of friction we need to be sincerely self critical. Now we have to choose to be in community and we have to choose to be vulnerable enough to both invite and take criticism seriously. And you cannot turn a blind eye or simply ignore egregious moral failings in the people that you love. A snake doesn’t have to bite you to be a snake, but maybe that person doesn’t really want to be a snake . . . maybe they need for you to love them enough to encourage them to become their best selves.

 

Although no one has ever seen a dragon, virtually every human culture in every century has had an image of a mythological dragon. Jung speculated that dragons are an archetype in our unconscious reflecting human potential. A dragon is, after all, a snake that can fly. And that, men and women, is all of us. As Solzhenitsyn correctly observed: the line between good and evil runs right through the middle of us. We all have the potential to be a snake. We all have the potential to soar like angels. Most days we do some of both. Every day we should be self-aware enough to try to soar more than we slither. 

 

 

 

Growing into a Vision: Reflections on Restorative and Transformative Justice

Growing into a Vision: Reflections on Restorative and Transformative Justice

by David Ketchum 

January 16, 2022 

Click HERE for the video

    I have been quite critical of my religious upbringing in other talks, and all of that is quite true. Of utmost significance to me was that, rather than having access to quality mental health and medical care, I had to rely on religious books and ideas to help me cope with and try to recover from the abuse I experienced as a child. So I want to be clear that I am not erasing any of those criticisms when I say that it is also true that I don’t know if I would have survived adolescence without the powerful vision of peace and justice that I found in the lives and teachings of Jesus and the prophets. 

    I was probably around 12 years old when I first began reading and studying the Hebrew Bible and the Christian scriptures. I encountered plenty of confusing stuff, but there was also this persistent, insistent plea for us to make things right, to create a world where we could live without exploitation, injustice, or oppression. And it felt realistic to me; these values were often aspirations, a vision of how things could be. Only false prophets lied and said everything was okay when it wasn’t okay. I appreciated that honesty, because the world I grew up in was certainly not safe, just, or particularly kind – but I wanted it to be, and these readings helped me hold on to the vision that this was possible. One of these passages that happens to be the lectionary text for this Sunday, when Jesus goes to a synagogue in Nazareth and reads from a scroll from the prophet Isaiah: 

"The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he has anointed me to bring good news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim release to the captives and recovery of sight to the blind, to let the oppressed go free, to proclaim the year of the Lord's favor."

    In the story, Jesus is very purposeful, unrolling the scroll and finding these particular words. And, when he had finished reading those words, he rolled up the scroll and said to the captivated crowd: "Today this scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing." (Luke 4:14-21, NRSV) 

Lessons Along the Way

I learned a lot from these kinds of stories. First, there is a long history of those who responded to the suffering in the world with compassion and the resolve to make it better. The prophet had to say it or write it down, but that wasn’t enough. Others had to think it was important enough to remember and pass along. This memory itself was important, keeping the vision alive. It found me, and I took it to heart, because it meant that I wasn’t alone, even when the suffering and injustice in the world left me feeling alone. 

Second, I learned that the living conditions for the marginalized and oppressed were the measure of a society. The prophets didn’t measure the health of a community by how the most privileged were doing. Instead, they forced the community to look at the painful places. The good news would be for the poor, the prisoners, the disabled, and the oppressed. But this was coupled with a third lesson, that not everyone would consider this good news. Reading the prophets, you got a clear image that a certain number of people benefitted from the mistreatment of others, and they were loath to give up their power, privilege, and wealth. And others were in a sort of middle place, sometimes hoping that they could climb that social ladder, and sometimes just desperately holding onto the ladder for dear life, unwilling for any change to disrupt their fragile position in the social order. Promising to put revolutionary ideas into practice is very often unsettling. Humans can quickly get caught in the “better the devil you know” trap, and Jesus’ very human listeners were sufficiently furious with him that a mob tried to throw him off a cliff. 

    Coming under the influence of these teachers and teachings, I rather quickly found myself in activism and community work that took its measure of society from the wellbeing of the most marginalized. It took many forms, including restorative and transformative justice programming. I began volunteering in our criminal justice system while I was in college, when I offered pastoral care in the county jail and participated in visitation programs at the state penitentiary. Since then, I’ve volunteered in local, state, and federal jails and prisons from Missouri to California to Cambodia. I’ve been involved in drama workshops, music programs, nonviolent communication courses, meditation classes, and book studies. I’ve been a pen pal and a correspondence course mentor. I’ve also served as a mediator and facilitator in diversion programming, such as victim-offender mediation and family group conferencing. I have tried to participate in ways that support everyone involved: inmates, guards, administrators, victims, and everyone’s families and communities. 

    I mention this because I also know that many people quickly dismiss a vision of a society without state-sponsored violence, punitive justice systems, and incarceration. I’m not an expert on transformative justice, and I happily defer to those who are. But, in my experience, most of us who advocate for this vision have been deeply involved in the work of engaging with violence and crime, helping heal the harm, and trying to create communities where we reduce violence as much as possible and have the tools and resources we need to transform it when it does occur. We are not a naïve crowd, and we understand that the questions we are asking and the actions we are proposing are complicated and have real life consequences. 

A Basic Framework

    With that in mind, I’d like to offer a basic framework for having conversations around a society’s justice system. Specifically, we can observe three large trends in how to approach crime and violence: retribution, restoration, and transformation. This is by nature oversimplified, but it is meant to help us begin to recognize how we handle conflict, crime, and violence, and then empower us to choose those ways that are most healthy, effective, compassionate, and just.  

    Howard Zehr, adapting exercises by Dave Dyck, created descriptions and accompanying reflective questions to help us get a better idea of what these different approaches look and feel like. (https://emu.edu/now/restorative-justice/2011/03/10/restorative-or-transformative-justice/ ) In general, you can notice a movement from rules to relationships to systems. 

        In the retributive approach, the focus is on 1) determining what rule has been broken, 2) assigning guilt and blame, and 3) handing out punishment. It’s easy to recognize this as the dominant mode of US culture, from our courts to workplaces and schools to families to our own consciouses. Even if you are convinced that this approach is necessary (or sometimes necessary), you can also see the focus is first on guilt and punishment, rather than personal or community wellbeing. 

    In contrast, a restorative approach typically focuses on 1) understanding “who has been hurt” and their needs, 2) identifying who can and should “address these needs,” and 3) connecting with those who will be involved with healing and transformation. Zehr explains that “The incident is a violation of people and relationships.  It creates obligations to make things right.” (ibid) Restorative practices have gained more widespread acceptance over the last few decades and are often associated with diversion programs within existing criminal justice systems. Here locally, for instance, restorative programs are offered in conjunction with local courts and other community organizations, including: victim-offender mediation, family group conferencing, victim impact panels, and community mediation. This restoration can also include looking down the road to the changes that need to happen so that the harm is not repeated, and points to our third approach.

    Transformative justice shifts attention to social systems, focusing on 1) analyzing the social conditions that “promoted the harmful behavior”, 2) comparing “structural similarities” to understand patterns of incidents and harm, and 3) transforming social systems “in ways that help to prevent the occurrence and re-occurrence of harmful incidents.” (ibid) These tend to be long term programs that address a cluster of social issues that are the roots of violence and crime, rather than solely focusing on criminal acts. The goal is to create cultures and communities that are 1) less likely to have members who rely on violence, coercion, and crime and 2) more likely to have resources, practices, and support to honestly address and heal the violence when it does occur. The transformation, then, is not just for individuals, but for systems. We try to imagine a society where people can thrive, where we can assume wellbeing, and where we don’t have to rely on punishment and threat.  

An Excess of Retribution

    Unsurprisingly, the retributive approach has been very successful at arresting and imprisoning people. Using information from World Population Review, we see that the United States “has the highest prison population [of] any country, comprising 25% of the world’s prisoners. Prisons are overcrowded, and inmates are forced to live in inhumane conditions, even those who are innocent and awaiting trial.” And the recidivism rate is off the charts: 

“The United States has some of the highest recidivism rates in the world. According to the National Institute of Justice, almost 44% of criminals released return before the first year out of prison. In 2005, about 68% of 405,000 released prisoners were arrested for a new crime within three years, and 77% were arrested within five years.” (https://worldpopulationreview.com/state-rankings/recidivism-rates-by-state )

We could add to this list an awareness of similar issues, such as the school-to-prison pipeline; the criminalization of poverty, race, disability, mental health, and other marginalizations; or the problems and injustices of a court system driven by plea deals. Mia Mingus makes the further point that transformative practices are most associated with these communities who have been most harmed by the current system: 

“State responses to violence reproduce violence and often traumatize those who are exposed to them, especially oppressed communities who are already targeted by the state. It is important to remember that while many people choose not to call the police, many communities can’t call the police because of reasons such as fear of deportation, harassment, state sanctioned violence, sexual violence, previous convictions or inaccessibility. / [Transformative Justice] was created by and for many of these communities (e.g. indigenous communities, black communities, immigrant communities of color, poor and low-income communities, communities of color, people with disabilities, sex workers, queer and trans communities). It is important to remember that many of these people and communities have been practicing TJ in big and small ways for generations–trying to create safety and reduce harm within the dangerous conditions they were and are forced to live in.”  (https://transformharm.org/transformative-justice-a-brief-description/ )

  

     Jeremy Travis and Bruce Western, described this “Era of Punitive Excess”:

“Today’s landscape of punishment also includes the extensive criminalization of social problems such as homelessness and mental illness, intrusive policing policies such as stop and frisk, the imposition of fines and fees that exacerbate poverty, the legislatively defined collateral sanctions that close off opportunities for a full life to millions with criminal records, and the new technologies that place the entire public under a form of state surveillance. … In its multiple manifestations, damaging impact, political durability, and unbridled reach into all aspects of American life, the modern expression of society’s need to marginalize the poor and people of color through criminalization and punishment has become a stubborn social fact.” (https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/analysis-opinion/era-punitive-excess )

    Despite these issues, most people I encounter cannot imagine any other way of dealing with violence and crime, especially in the short term. When things are going well for privileged communities, there is not a strong motivation to address systemic concerns. But when the circumstances get bad enough that even the privileged want something done, the long-term solutions that transformative approaches depend on move at too slow a pace to get widespread support. The uncomfortable reality is that our collective unwillingness to create a just, equitable, compassionate society signals our willingness to tolerate and even promote unhealthy communities. Crime and violence are both symptoms of an unhealthy society and perpetuate those unhealthy systems.

“Now I want justice” 

    Changing all this is hard work, and it is slow work. And despite research showing the promise of restorative and transformative approaches (e.g., https://www.justice.gc.ca/eng/rp-pr/csj-sjc/jsp-sjp/rr00_16/p3.html ), there are also plenty of ways for things to go wrong. It’s important to listen to and learn from these painful stories, too. (e.g., https://stillmyrevolution.files.wordpress.com/2015/12/tj-zine-final-with-cover.pdf and https://transformharm.org/i-hope-we-choose-love-notes-on-the-application-of-justice/  ) These limitations and failures can be discouraging, but they are also corrective. We can’t get things right if we aren’t open to learning about how and why things go wrong. 

    But we also remember when something beautiful and new becomes possible. So I’ll close with a memorable interaction from my time in Cambodia. A team of peacebuilders were offering training in conflict transformation to inmates. At first, it was common to hear the guards teasing the inmates about the training, especially when they were practicing active listening and expressing empathy. But the teasing slowed and stopped, and the guards started paying attention instead. Eventually, they requested to receive the training themselves and Peace Bridges began a program for 15 guards, focused on listening to prisoners with respect and responding to them without violence. I visited the training near the end of one of the courses and was amazed at the type of interactions between inmates, guards, and each other. What were typically very antagonistic interactions full of threats and swagger were now characterized by respect. A prison guard shared this story with us: 

“There are often conflicts among prisoners and it’s my job to keep things under control. Recently there was a conflict between the senior prisoner in his cell and a guy who was always causing problems. This was just after I finished the training (a PEACE BRIDGES graduate) and I decided to address the problem differently than I always had before. I met with each of two guys separately to understand his side of the story and then brought them together to talk about how to avoid such conflicts in the future. / I was amazed that they were honestly able to solve their conflict in this peaceful way. Up until that point, I was the one to take the decision and offer the punishment. You ask me what I would have done in a situation like this before the Peace Bridges training. The answer is simple: I would have simply sided with the one I liked best. Always. And now I realize that this is not fair and it’s not right so I won’t do this anymore. Now I want justice and I wasn’t so interested in this before- I just wanted order.”  (https://pbstories.blogspot.com/2009/04/siding-with-one-i-liked-best.html ) 

    We definitely have a long way to go; our current justice system is often more unjust than not, and our restorative and transformative practices are still taking shape. But I do feel confidence that we are slowly growing into this vision that the best among us have preserved and handed down for centuries, across generations and cultures. I keep returning to that lesson I learned as a child, that the living conditions for the marginalized and oppressed are the measure of a society. This prophetic vision of proclaiming release to captives and letting the oppressed go free gives us an opportunity to reflect more deeply and look more intentionally at the world we have and ask what kind of world we want to create. I hope we’ll all keep dreaming and working to make it possible. 

"Until Everyone Is Safe": Vaccine Equity and Healthy Communities

“Until Everyone is Safe”: 

Reimagining Social and Community Well-Being Through the Lens of Vaccine Equity

by David Ketchum

January 16, 2022

Click HERE for the video 

Those of us here in southwest Missouri probably remember last August when Christopher Key (of the infamous “Vaccine Police” website) made headlines in a local Wal-Mart for saying that the people who administered covid vaccines should be executed under the Nuremberg codes, comparing the vaccines to bioweapons. Key has now returned to the spotlight for his enthusiastic (and horrible) recommendation of how to bring an end to the pandemic: drink your own urine. (https://www.forbes.com/sites/brucelee/2022/01/10/vaccine-police-founder-claims-drinking-your-own-urine-is-covid-19-antidote/?sh=42f692833735 ) This appears to be connected to a larger movement touting the benefits of drinking urine, demonstrated by a 37,000 member Facebook group called “Urine Magic.” That group recently featured posts from a member who adds urine to lemonade to make popsicles for her daughter – and her daughter’s friends. "She doesn't seem to notice and I can see the benefits already,” the mother wrote. She also voiced her confidence that the friends’ parents would also be grateful to be included after they saw the “undeniable” improvements in their children’s cognitive abilities. (https://www.newsweek.com/i-would-have-restrained-internet-eviscerates-parent-adding-urine-popsicles-1667792 ) 

So on the off chance that these words find someone who needs to hear it, I now have to add another item to the list of things I never thought I’d have to say: please don’t drink urine, yours or another’s. As Healthline points out, urine is not sterile (contrary to popular myth) and, while it probably isn’t dangerous in a small amount, it frequently contains bacteria, toxins, and medications. Please do not drink it. (https://www.healthline.com/health/drinking-urine?c=170670256443 ) And also, please, do not substitute drinking urine – an act without scientific and medical support - for actual life-saving, medically sound precautions and practices – like, for instance, the covid-19 vaccines. 

“650 Million Doses Short”

  Like many people whose community work involved being in close contact with vulnerable populations, I can’t adequately describe the relief, gratitude, and hope I felt when I received my first injection of a covid-19 vaccine in February 2021. In fact, not a day goes by that I don’t feel grateful, and with good reason. Natalie Musumeci reported this week on a recent research letter in JAMA Network Open that revealed, from December 2020 through June 2021, these vaccinations “prevented more than 14 million” covid cases and saved approximately 241,000 lives in the USA alone, cutting hospitalizations and deaths “by nearly half”.  (https://www.businessinsider.com/covid-vaccines-saved-more-than-240000-lives-us-research-says-2022-1 ) The vaccines have been both life-saving and life-changing. As a fully vaccinated and boosted person, I don’t have to live with the stress of life before the vaccines and I can’t imagine facing the Omicron variant without it. Tragically, I am one of the lucky ones with this option. While the main obstacles to an adequate vaccination rate we face in the Ozarks have been related to vaccine hesitancy and conspiracy theories, many places in the world have not had that luxury. 

     Early in the vaccines’ availability, in February 2021, distribution under the COVAX initiative began, as Joseph Stepansky reported, “to coordinate simultaneous distribution to both wealthy and poor countries”. After all, it was understood that “an equitable vaccine rollout … was essential to preventing mutations of dangerous variants that would prolong the pandemic, and potentially evade vaccines.” But what began as a grave acknowledgement and compassionate aspiration has not turned out as we had hoped. For example, the World Health Organization (WHO) had a goal that all nations would reach a 40% vaccination rate by the end of 2021. In Africa, where vaccine inequity has been severely pronounced, only five nations were on track to reach that milestone, with most failing to even reach 20%. (https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2021/12/22/will-low-income-countries-be-vaccinated-against-covid-in-2022 )

“An Indictment on Humanity”

Compare this to high-income countries, most of whom have surpassed a 50% vaccination rate and are now focusing on administering boosters. Yet these nations are also the ones that continue to stockpile doses. Just before we began learning about the Omicron variant last November, the COVID GAP report documented that, while the world was approximately “650 million doses short of reaching the 40 percent goal by the end of” 2021, the world’s wealthy nations had stockpiled more than 834 million vaccine doses. (ibid) Al Jazeera has also documented that “Only 5% of people in low-income countries are fully vaccinated against COVID.” (https://www.facebook.com/aljazeera/photos/a.10150243828793690/10160528237278690/ ) Of course, vaccine equity isn’t as simple as one statistic. But this one statistic is a powerful symbol and reminder of our world’s failure to address the pandemic in just, equitable, compassionate, and wise ways. 

Even as high-income nations have hoarded vaccine doses, the powerful have hoarded vaccine profits. For example, “at least nine new billionaires” were created by May 2021 on the strength of covid vaccine sales, including the CEOs of Moderna and BioNTech. (https://www.cnn.com/2021/05/21/business/covid-vaccine-billionaires/index.html ) And by last November and as documented by Oxfam, we knew that Pfizer, BioNTech, and Moderna were “making combined profits of $65,000 every minute.” And they’ve done this despite receiving over $8 billion in public funding. As Maaza Seyoum of the African Alliance and People’s Vaccine Alliance Africa pointed out – 

“It is obscene that just a few companies are making millions of dollars in profit every single hour, while just two percent [at that time] of people in low-income countries have been fully vaccinated against coronavirus. / Pfizer, BioNTech and Moderna have used their monopolies to prioritise the most profitable contracts with the richest governments, leaving low income countries out in the cold.” (https://www.oxfam.org/en/press-releases/pfizer-biontech-and-moderna-making-1000-profit-every-second-while-worlds-poorest )

     I’m trying to walk a tightrope here, emphasizing both gratitude for the amazing work that made the creation and distribution of covid-19 vaccines possible and the conviction that a public health crisis should not be made into an opportunity for profit. Hoarding billions of dollars at any time, but especially while hundreds of thousands of people die due to lack of vaccines and health care, is immoral. But if you prefer the voice of someone who believes “It is misguided to lament that private companies are profiting in the current crisis,” I can also offer the words of Brink Lindsey, who wrote last June about the “fundamental mismatch between the policy design of intellectual property protection and the policy requirements of effective pandemic response” and concluded that:  

“What matters isn’t the existence or size of the profits, but how they are earned. We have good reason to want drug makers to profit from vaccinating the world: the comparative price is minuscule, and the incentive effects are a vital safeguard of public health in the event of future crises. What we want to avoid at all costs is putting drug makers in the position where drug companies can profit from standing in the way of rapid global vaccination. That is why intellectual property rights need to be taken out of the equation.” (https://www.brookings.edu/blog/up-front/2021/06/03/why-intellectual-property-and-pandemics-dont-mix/ )

     Importantly, these are not unusual convictions, and leaders from around the world have been pointing it out for months. In September 2021, for example, South Africa’s President Cyril Ramaphosa extolled covid-19 vaccines as “the greatest defence that humanity has against the ravages of this pandemic” while condemning the global community for its collective failure to sustain - 

“the principles of solidarity and cooperation in securing equitable access to COVID-19 vaccines. ... It is an indictment on humanity that more than 82 percent of the world’s vaccine doses have been acquired by wealthy countries, while less than 1 percent has gone to low-income countries.”

And Zimbabwe’s President Emmerson Mnangagwa emphasized that “Vaccine nationalism is self-defeating and contrary to the mantra that no one is safe until everyone is safe.” (https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2021/9/23/african-leaders-highlight-vaccine-inequity-in-un-speeches )

“Solidarity and Cooperation”

These deadly and tragic trends are part of the overall shape of our global response to the pandemic, which we’ve discussed many times and that caused Oxfam to describe covid-19 as the “inequality virus.” In short, “oppressive systems have made the pandemic more catastrophic. Social and economic injustice, and the disparities they create, are deadly. The pandemic has amplified their deadliness.” (https://www.welcomingpath.com/2021/05/our-whole-selves-may-day-mutual-aid-and.html ) 

The world as we know it has been shaped by an approach to economic and social development that has fueled terrible inequality, catastrophic climate change, and now, covid vaccine inequity. Our society’s leaders, or at least too many of them, seem comfortable with the idea that it is okay to sacrifice the wellbeing of the poor for the sake of the profits of the rich. But what about those principles of solidarity and cooperation that President Ramaphosa mentioned? What might a society look like that was oriented around those kinds of values?

Thankfully, other approaches have been offered to help us re-think how we relate to ourselves, each other, and the earth. We get glimpses of this other world all the time - if we get in the habit of looking. And one of the more beautiful sights to see right now comes to us from Texas, where the Texas Children’s Hospital and Houston’s Baylor College have developed an open-source, patent-free, low-cost covid-19 vaccine named Corbevax. Initial and limited clinical data about the vaccine has shown it to be “at least 90% effective against the SARS-CoV-2 virus, and 80% or more effective against its Delta variant.” India has authorized it for emergency use and Biological E. Limited, an Indian pharmaceutical company, already has produced 150 million doses for distribution, with a goal of producing a billion doses of the vaccine this year. The Texas team is also consulting with the World Health Organization to explore how the vaccine can be shared around the world. (https://www.commondreams.org/news/2021/12/30/texas-team-applauded-giving-what-big-pharma-refuses-patent-free-vaccine-world )

Despite being told that this kind of result is not possible without an extreme profit motive, the team who developed this vaccine, led by Dr. Maria Elena Bottazzi and Dr. Peter Hotez, are motivated by saving billions of lives. And they have done it without the benefit of the $8 billion in public funding that Pfizer, BioNTech, and Moderna received. In fact, Corbevax’ creation was funded on a relative shoestring, receiving $7 million largely through private investment. This small budget is both a testament to the team’s hard work and an obvious limitation, especially when it comes to having resources for performing clinical trials. So while these initial reports are promising, we do not yet have the open data necessary to truly know how effective Corbevax will be, especially against the Omicron variant. This is both wonderful and heartbreaking news. As Hotez said to the Washington Post, "If we had even a fraction of the support that Moderna had, who knows, maybe the world would be vaccinated by now, …. We wouldn't be having a discussion about Omicron." (https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2021/12/30/corbevax-texas-childrens-covid-vaccine/ )

“The Health of Entire Communities”

Yet this shadow should not dim our celebration of the hard work and generosity that made Corbevax possible. This is very good news. If it continues to be successful, Corbevax gives us an incredible tool in addressing vaccine inequity. And it also helps us shift the conversation around what kind of society we live in and what kind of society we could live in. Peter Maybarduk, director of Public Citizen, emphasized that the development of Corbevax challenges “the false narrative that vaccine production and medical innovation thrive through secrecy and exclusivity.” (ibid) 

The hope is that initiatives like Corbevax can help us shift that norm, and not just for vaccine production. In order to achieve real justice and equity in the pandemic, we need to insist on things like: better sick leave policies that protect essential workers; access to effective masks and other PPE; improved testing options, from availability to transportation to cost; safe housing for anyone who is unsheltered and for those who share shelters but need to isolate; universal health-care; universal education, especially for current and future health care providers; and massive investment in infrastructure, especially in our health care systems. As Ed Yong wrote, 

“Rather than trying to beat the coronavirus one booster at a time, the country needs to do what it has always needed to do—build systems and enact policies that protect the health of entire communities, especially the most vulnerable ones. Individualism couldn’t beat Delta, it won’t beat Omicron, and it won’t beat the rest of the Greek alphabet to come. Self-interest is self-defeating, and as long as its hosts ignore that lesson, the virus will keep teaching it.” (https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2021/12/america-omicron-variant-surge-booster/621027/ )

“Self-interest is self-defeating.” Vaccine inequity is a potent reminder of this, but there is an even more important reminder in the story of Corbevax: inequity is not inevitable. Dr. Bottazzi, Dr. Hotez, and their team remind us that people can make a difference even when we don’t have access to the same power and resources that the current system enjoys. As Dr. Keith Martin, executive director of the Consortium of Universities for Global Health, told NPR: 

"CORBEVAX is a game changer …. It's going to enable countries around the world, particularly low-income countries, to be able to produce these vaccines and distribute them in a way that's going to be affordable, effective and safe." (https://www.npr.org/sections/goatsandsoda/2022/01/05/1070046189/a-texas-team-comes-up-with-a-covid-vaccine-that-could-be-a-global-game-changer )

This may be a turning point in our struggle against vaccine inequity. And hopefully, our combined responses to the pandemic can be part of much, much more. Because a world where everything that every person needs to thrive and enjoy life is “affordable, effective and safe” is within our reach. (https://www.un.org/sustainabledevelopment/development-agenda/ ) Having born witness to the pandemic’s terrible toll on human life and wellbeing, may we all resolve to work together in whatever ways we can, “until everyone is safe.” 

"Ten Commandments vs the Beatitudes”

Ten Commandments vs the Beatitudes”    Jan. 9, 2022   Dr. Roger Ray

click here to see the video

 

“For some reason, the most vocal Christians among us never mention the Beatitudes (Matthew 5). But, often with tears in their eyes, they demand that the Ten Commandments be posted in public buildings. And of course, that's Moses, not Jesus. I haven't heard one of them demand that the Sermon on the Mount, the Beatitudes, be posted anywhere. 'Blessed are the merciful' in a courtroom? 'Blessed are the peacemakers' in the Pentagon? Give me a break!”― Kurt Vonnegut, A Man Without a Country

 

As comedians so helpfully and so often do, Kurt Vonnegut pointed out the hypocrisy of modern Christianity in so often demanding a public display of the Ten Commandments, with all of its harsh regulations and enumeration of sins, while they rarely mention the Beatitudes, which Matthew attributes to Jesus, with all of its more hopeful, inclusive, and comforting words. Though his son actually earned a degree in religion and at least flirted with the idea of being a Christian minister, Kurt Vonnegut probably had no idea what a powerful juxtaposition the Ten Commandments read along side of the Beatitudes really gives us.

 

I don’t want to bore you with a lot of seminary talk about the finer points of Biblical scholarship but allow me to just say briefly that the author of the Gospel according to Matthew, organizes his material in a way to present Jesus as a sort of “new Moses.” The gospel is even set around five major speeches the way that the Old Testament’s book of Deuteronomy is organized around five speeches from Moses, and there is little doubt that he offers the beatitudes as a new version of the ten commandments . . . not something Kurt Vonnegut would have known but, he also probably would not have much cared. 

 

If you will allow me a brief jaunt into history: We don’t know if there actually was a historical Moses, and, in fact, if I had to bet, I would bet against it. We don’t have anything written down about him prior to the Babylonian exile in the 5^th century BCE and, frankly, it is a tad too convenient for the Judeans, living in captivity as slaves in Babylon, to have a historical founder of their religion who had liberated their ancestors from slavery in Egypt. Parts of the story certainly reflect a more ancient history but, all in all, I think we have to take the Moses narrative with a grain of salt. 

We are not in possession of the tablets of stone we saw Charlton Heston holding in the old Cecil B. DeMille’s movie, but we do have this 7-foot-tall Babylonian stella from about the time period we would place Moses in, if he had actually been a historical character.  This piece contains one of the most ancient examples we have of a king handing down laws to a kingdom. This is the code of Hammurabi. The two figures you see at the top show king Hammurabi receiving these laws from the seated and much larger figure of Shamash, the Babylonian god of the sun.

 

So, you see how the Hebrews reinterpreted the ancient belief that laws were given by god to the current ruler which is intended to give the laws much greater importance and to make it a rather more frightening thing to ignore. 

You see, there is a kind of religion that is called “civil” religion . . . a religion that is useful to the state, the government. 

 

If you live on an island by yourself, there are no laws. Whatever you do, when you live alone, is beyond much ethical deliberation. When there are just a few people in a tribe, conduct is governed by the consensus of the tribe. But when a society starts to get a bit more populous, then, as they say, every worksite needs a manager and a water boy. Someone has to be in charge and there have to be rules in order to maintain a stable society. 

 

The code of Hammurabi is more complex than the Ten Commandments, but they have a lot of similarities. They both prohibit murder, stealing and lying, and taking your neighbor’s spouse, and they both demand a certain exclusive loyalty. All of that stuff in the Ten Commandments about honoring Yahweh was not so much about God being inherently jealous or possessive as it was about keeping the tribe of Hebrews separate and apart from all of the competing tribes in the region. 

 

The exclusive monotheism of the Jews, along with their dietary code, and rules regarding family, property, and even how they dressed, helped to keep them from just being lost in the biological and cultural soup of the Ancient Near East. And, it worked pretty well because it isn’t too hard to find Jews in our society but turning up a community of Hittites, Girgashites, Amorites, Canaanites, Perizzites, Hivites or Jebusites is almost impossible!

 

So, the Ten Commandments were more about maintaining a stable society in a region where you lived near competing cultures, religions, languages, and where resources were scarce than it ever was about starting a religion. Religious anxiety just helped to enforce the laws, the laws didn’t create the religion. So, as in the United States, we often see religious symbols in government buildings and we see American flags, literally, our battle flag, displayed in church sanctuaries. The church and the state are often two hands washing one another. 

 

And, it isn’t hard to see how the laws served those who had something to steal or something to fear from the masses of the poor who might kill them to take their land and food and to put their feet on the furniture. Rich people can’t have nice things if they are always afraid of the poor who so terribly out number them. It is no great wonder then that it is usually the conservative white supremacists who live in majority black parts of the country who keep wanting to put the Ten Commandments on the courthouse lawn. . . but I digress.

 

Civil religion is not all bad. I don’t want to live in a place where murder and theft are not strongly discouraged. I don’t want to live behind security fences or be heavily armed to protect myself in my home or in public. I’m sure Kurt Vonnegut would have felt the same way, still, as useful and sometimes helpful as civil religion can be, it is not the same thing as the kind of loving spirituality we hope to see in the teachings of Jesus. 

 

Again, not to wade too deeply into the weeds of biblical scholarship, but I very much prefer the version of the beatitudes found in Luke. Matthew’s are better known because they sound more like the Jesus you would find in stained glass. Where Luke has Jesus saying, “Blessed are those who hunger now for they shall be filled,” a promise of a reversal of the economics of poverty, Matthew churches that saying up to read, “Blessed are those who hunger for righteousness for they shall be satisfied.” 

Honestly, have any of you ever felt or even known anyone who hungered for righteousness? And if you did, would you want to hang out with them? Go to a movie, or out to get a beer with someone who could honestly tell you, “You know, what I’m really Jonsing for right now is more righteousness”?

“Check please!”

 

 

Christians don’t bring up the Beatitudes very often for much of the same reason that all of those “What Would Jesus Do?” bracelets disappeared from convenience store counters the day after 9-11. There are times we don’t want to ask ourselves what Jesus would do because we know good and well we are about to do the opposite…. For about 20 years, we have been bombing people who had absolutely nothing to do with 9-11 because we got scared. Still, there was never a market for the “Who Would Jesus Bomb” bracelet because, well, we didn’t want to know the answer to that.

The late evangelical preacher, Tony Campolo, at least tried to challenge the hypocrisy and narcissism of evangelicals when he pointed out that even though that whole thing about being born again only appears once in the gospels, and yet evangelicals all seem to be eager to identify themselves as having been born again, and yet the injunction to sell all you own and give it to the poor is actually in the gospels twice, but you just never meet a “I sold all I own and gave it to the poor” Christians. 

 

Of course, while we have a little more reason to believe that there was a historical Jesus, any honest scholarship will acknowledge that we don’t know much about him and certainly he did not originate very much of what is attributed to him in the New Testament. However, the most reliable of Biblical scholars who have examined which parts of the gospel sayings that might actually have come from Jesus are things that most Christians would really very much prefer to believe that Jesus either didn’t say it or he didn’t mean what it looks like he said. 

 

The single most universally affirmed verse of the New Testament that scholars agree is a legit Jesus saying is this: Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you. When was the last time you heard a sermon on that?  Or that business about it being easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a rich person to enter the Kingdom of God? Or how about, “Forgive the one who has offended you, not 7 times, but 70 times 7 times!” Or, “Don’t return a blow to the one who strikes you but instead, offer them the other cheek?” and “If someone asks you for your coat, give them your coat and your shirt and shoes too!”

 

If someone actually showed up in most churches saying things like that you would not find them in the pulpit, it would be more likely that you would find them out in the parking lot behind the dumpster, bound and gagged. And, just as a thought experiment, what would happen to someone who said things like that on Fox News?. . . but we’re not here to talk about Fox News. 

 

I don’t know if traditional bricks and mortar churches have much of a future. As a corollary to what I said earlier about Moses, if I were betting on the church being around in another generation or not, I’m afraid that I would have to bet against it. I’m hope that I am wrong. Even as keepers of the traditions of civil religion, they have performed some useful purposes and are usually more or less free places to hold A.A. and AlAnon meetings and those are at least useful even if their Sunday services are more disappointing.

 

But sincere spirituality is not simply a hell avoiding ticket to heaven (neither of which actually exist) but rather a journey towards being a better person, a more generous, forgiving, loving, justice seeking person. 

 

I have not personally identified as a Christian for several years now. After all of those years of seeing bishops and pastors writing responses to my newspaper articles telling me that I am not a real Christian, I finally realized that they are right. If they are Christians, then I am certainly nothing like them. But, there are some very challenging teachings that are at least attributed to Jesus, whether they originated with him or not, that we could all learn from and that’s probably all that Jesus would have wanted from us anyway. He didn’t ask anyone to wear his name, he really just asked us to be better people and I’m all for that!