I have been seeing lots of posts of late from folks, which make statements which could be boiled down to “Help our vets, screw the illegals” or “Feed our own hungry, and let the refugees fend for themselves”. All of these are commonly seen in posts and memes on Facebook, in statements by pundits and politicians, and elsewhere. And, it is an incessant drone, just like the tinnitus I deal with every waking moment, or like the cicada which come around every 13 or 17 years (depending on which brood you are dealing with). And it has passed the point of being annoying, so that I want to do my equivalent of this…
Seriously, our country has always had its issues, going clear back to at least the months following Cornwallis surrendering at Yorktown. But things currently are like a pot which has been left on the stove to boil for too long, and the contents of the pot are now stinking up the house. Slavery, the wave after wave of immigrants who are first treated as barely human, and then later when they have become mixed in, they treat the next wave the same way… the examples go on. But in the last century, humanity, mankind, homo sapiens has learned more ways to be inhuman, unkind and dispicable to others in greater numbers and with less effort than at any time before. Consider that just 100 years ago during WWI, 20 million were killed, representing roughly 1.25% of the population. For WWII, which started just two decades later, including those who died to disease or famine, the number is thought to be 80 million (some estimates are as high as 118 million), for around 3.5% of the estimated world population. Indeed, the death toll of just two missions at the end of the war resulted in roughly 200,000 dead.
But it is not just the technology that has allowed us to kill in “job lots”. Our attitudes have changed, and for the worse. Even though he would have done things exactly the same, Gen. Tibbets had on a couple of rare occasions gone past his “there is no morality in warfare” to admit that when isolated from the rest of the war, such an act was bothersome… but like so many others, they feared that far many more would die if we had had to invade Japan itself. And views changed even more during the Cold War, which was framed as a battle against “godless Commies” during the 1950s (and which is when the phrase “under God” was added to the Pledge of Allegiance and elsewhere), and became even more calloused during Vietnam. Throw in the writings of Ayn Rand, the fallout from the Civil Right’s movement and the Dixiecrats, and the resulting growth of Evangelical Christianity and the Moral Majority, and we have become a society where a significant proportion of folks have no issues with a group whose philosophy attitudes can best be summed up as “I have mine, screw you!” And this is even true of folks who are being screwed over, because they have latched onto a different group to which they can pass along the sentiment. Conservatives since at least the time of Reagan have been all over the idea of “Trickle-down economics”… well, it is not the money which is trickling down. Instead, what is trickling down is brown, runny, and smells like a cattle barn on a hot August day. But, you know what… those folks just gobble it up, along with the pablum fed to them by the likes of the Falwell family, Creflo Dollar, Joel Olsteen and others, who have twisted Christianity into a gordian knot to suit their desires, just like so many times before, both in the history of this nation and in the world (such as Nazi Germany, Spain during the Inquisition, and the Crusades themselves, just to pick a few “highlights”).
This twisting has been subtle. For much of the history of the Catholic Church, people were kept generally ignorant of the Bible, either through illiteracy, the scarcity of books in general, and for those who could afford a Book of Hours, by keeping things fairly selective. Indeed, it was not until the 1960s with the Second Vatican Council that services were conducted in the vernacular language instead of Latin on a widespread basis. And for those of you who have not studied a second language (while rusty, I have been quite fluent in both Spanish and German in the past, and have studied others), it is not easy to get all the nuances of a language when translating from a different language into your own. Even understanding the English of the Elizabethan and early Jacobean Eras (such as used by Shakespeare and the King James version of the Bible) is tricky at times. And with the rise of Evangelical Christianity in the US, we have new versions which have subtle differences from their older counterparts. But the net result has been that we have we have numerous demagogues who use their positions as political and religious leaders to multiply their power and wealth to have personal mansions, private jets and other idols to their personal egos. And when we have situations like the three richest “Americans” having more wealth than the bottom 50%… nobody can in their right mind and soul think that the problem is illegals or people being lazy. The problem is the fat cat at the head of a banquet table having created a system where they get the vast majority, the people sitting closest to him get a portion, and the people who could be sitting at the rest of the table left hoping that if they support that fat cat and grovel enough, they might get a bite or two of the leftovers. And so, we have the likes of Trump, Pence, Sessions, McConnell, Ryan and others in the political halls of this nation gaming the system, folks like the Falwell’s, Robertson’s and others going along with the game, and their supporters thinking that it is a choice of vets vs. immigrants, or our hungry vs. refugees, when that is far from the truth.
What is the truth… it is one of priorities being wrong. In 2017, we spent $610 billion, compared to the combined total of $578 billion spent by China, Russia, Saudi Arabia, India, France, the UK, and Japan combined (add in Germany, and their total would only be about $620B). You wonder why China and Russia spent $228 billion and $66 billion respectively? We are the bully on the block, and a chunk of their mindset is “We need to protect ourselves”. And Saudi Arabia, which just tortured to death a journalist in their own embassy, and to whom folks like Pat Robertson and the TOTUS are giving a pass because of a arms deal… their roughly $70 billion represents 10% of their GDP, while most countries are well under 5%. If we took just $100 billion from defense, what could we do with that? Well, we could repair 50,000 miles of roads and bridges, feed 3.4 million people, build 1000 miles of street car/urban rail (~50 cities with new systems), run fiber internet to 8.3 million households, and power 700,000 homes with solar energy…. ALL COMBINED… and I am sure somewhere in all of that we could find $2.5 billion for 50000 teachers. Another $25 billion would also allow us to build roughly 294,000 houses… but then, Fox Business found in 2014 that there were roughly 18.6 million homes without residents, while the homeless numbered only 3.5 million. So instead of building new homes, refurbish and upgrade existing homes where possible, and give them to those who are homeless… But why can we not do these things… PRIORITIES! We have to do tax cuts, corporate subsidies for already profitable industries, and military arms spending to allow our wealthiest individuals, as well as the banks and other corporations including defense contractors arms manufacturers they heavily invest in to gather up more riches (or put another way, to multiply their riches), and screw the rest of us… while paying lip service to religion, which was never supposed to be a part of our government.
Lip service? I can actually think of a different term. I’ve already covered the swords instead of plowshares part. Let us consider our treatment of immigrants and the poor. In places such as Hebrews 13, Leviticus 19 and Matthew 25, it talks about how we should treat those strangers among us, as well as the poor and hungry. But instead of doing as was written about the feeding of the masses, where they gathered up five loaves of bread and two fish, and redistributed it to in the end satisfy 5000 with bread left over. But in the gospel according to Ayn Rand and many conservatives today, Jesus would ignore the sick, poor and hungry, and rather than feeding the masses, Jesus and the disciples would have kept it all to themselves and eaten it in front of the masses. And so many go on about how our nation is declining because of things like abortion and gay marriage, even invoking Sodom (where do you think the word sodomy comes from)… Consider this… Ezekiel 16:49:
Now this was the sin of your sister Sodom: She and her daughters were arrogant, overfed and unconcerned; they did not help the poor and needy.
Even when you read the total context of it, and Genesis 19 with the context of Genesis 18, there is overall the theme of hospitality. Abraham and Sarah were blessed for their hospitality in Genesis 18, and Lot and his family were saved due to their hospitality and Sodom as the whole condemned for the lack of it. And you can find many articles out there on the topic written by clergy and scholar alike, such as this one.
So rather than forget that one of the primary topics of the New Testament is LOVE (remember how John 3:16 starts? For G*d so loved the world…), meditate upon this as demagogues spout their message of fear, hatred and judgement, and try to encourage us that it an either/or type decision on our part, when the true either/or is they multiply their power and riches at the expense of the rest of us, as opposed to a more equitable solution where none are left wanting.