Saving Ourselves from this Corrupt Generation

Acts 2 (NIV)

“‘In the last days, God says,

I will pour out my Spirit on all people.

"All people"? Well, there's God being all egalitarian and accepting and open, ain't that it?

Your sons and daughters will prophesy,

And daughters? Well, as long as they're silent about it and let the menfolk handle the serious studying of God's word.

your young men will see visions,

your old men will dream dreams.

Even on my servants, both men and women,

Again with the women!! Get it together, already. Women can't preach so why waste your spirit on them?

I will pour out my Spirit in those days,

and they will prophesy.

I will show wonders in the heavens above

and signs on the earth below,

blood and fire and billows of smoke.

Blood and fire! Fire! Fire! Yes! Burn those gays and heathens and Messicans and Arabs!

The sun will be turned to darkness

and the moon to blood

before the coming of the great and glorious day of the Lord.

And everyone who calls

on the name of the Lord will be saved.’

Oh cool! It's all about the end times and the rapture! Yippeee!! Bring on the BLOOD BATH!!

The above was brought to us by the ancient prophet Micah by way of the Jesus-follower Peter on the first Pentecost, and then interrupted by a common Bible Belt interpretation. It's a selfish understanding of the Bible, one focused largely on our own experiences and formed by a consciousness of privilege and fueled by a spirit of vengeful persecution.

"Wait til Jesus comes back and gets those liberals/welfare dependents/elites for slighting me!"

It's an odd mix to have. Not that there wasn't a lot of blood and wrath on the minds of the Old Testament prophets, or even in the stories that Jesus and the apostles told. But their sites were set on the oppressive empires that were actually oppressing them. Making it impossible for them to live, to operate. Abandoning widows and orphans. Conquering them with military force. Excising all their wealth into a centralized body.

Israel, Assyria, Babylon, and Rome and their emperors and their ways of exploitation and domination were, in the language of the prophets and the apocalyptic writers of the bible, the sun and the stars and the moon that would be darkened and bloodied and overcome. 

If I were the rest of the world, I would know this passage to be speaking of the end of the American empire and her multinational corporation partners. And I'd be rejoicing.

Pentecost

But the end of empire-dom does not occur through bloodshed. It will not happen through the art of war, via tanks or bombs or guns. Neither will oppression cease through a supergroup of superpowered superbeings or via battleships or really terrible lightning bolts coming from a grey-bearded god in the sky. Those are the old ways, the language of oppression and dominance and violence. When we follow the old ways, we are only replacing one tyrant with another. 

If we continue in the old ways, what are we saving ourselves from and what are we being saved into? From the violence of one group to the violence of another? Would we be replacing the czars only to end up under totalitarian rule - dolled up in the language of equality - all over again?

We will be saved by the singular mission of a people united in speaking the same message - the message of freedom, of equality, of sharing, of equal access, and equal power, of beaten swords and spears, of shared plows and tools - and acting as a people liberated from the message of the empire, that "Might is right."

Peter's last words to the gathered crowd were, “Save yourselves from this corrupt generation.”

How did the new followers then save themselves? From the end of that same second chapter of Acts.

They devoted themselves to the apostles’ teaching and to fellowship, to the breaking of bread and to prayer.  Everyone was filled with awe at the many wonders and signs performed by the apostles. All the believers were together and had everything in common. They sold property and possessions to give to anyone who had need. Every day they continued to meet together in the temple courts. They broke bread in their homes and ate together with glad and sincere hearts, praising God and enjoying the favor of all the people. And the Lord added to their number daily those who were being saved.

The people were not saved into an eternal life that would start after they died. They were saved into a new way of being, a new humanity, a new ethos, a new kind of rule separate from the predominant empire. Jesus' rule wasn't an earthly type of rule - it was one of kindness and sharing and giving and peace. The kind that takes the old and turns it into something new.

".....and they shall beat their swords into plowshares, and their spears into pruninghooks: nation shall not lift up sword against nation, neither shall they learn war any more."

Restoring the Lands

The housing bubble of the 00's followed in Chicago's westside Austin neighborhood as if on steroids. The median sales price of a house in Chicago at the beginning of the decade was roughly $150K, and for a house in the 60644 zip code was 100,000. Just before the bubble crashed the Chicago-wide value climbed over twice as much, fueled by speculation, predatory lending, greed, widespread beliefs (spread by experts) that the value of housing will never depreciate, and - most importantly - from a can't-fail attitude by the banks and loaning institutions that were eager to cash in on rising prices.

60644, Chicago Recently Sold Homes

As we can see, the prices rose over a period of time to astronomically silly levels. In another Chicago neighborhood, Logan Square, my pastor showed me several houses and the sky-rocketing prices that they went for as much as twice to three times to then even quadrupling over what they previously were sold for within the range of about fifteen years. The largely Mexican American residents and working class whites were being sold and forced out of their homes by rising tax properties or landlords who smelled opportunity. In the meantime, they were losing their homes and communities, friends, schools, churches, doctors, support networks.

When the prices astronomically dropped (about three-fourths in Austin overnight), many others had lost what little equity they had.

Doesn't sound like losing much to some people. Middle class whites like to say, "If you don't like it, just move." And maybe it's easier for them, but when it's been your home for a generation, and when you consider that a sizeable portion of our society is constantly on the brink - deciding between housing and food and clothes and medicine and insurance becomes much harder when you also have to factor in extra transportation costs and time, plus the thousands of hidden costs related to moving. When you consider that landlords usually now demand two and a half months, at least, for rent and deposit before moving in and that most working poor families do not have that kind of cash available, or that credit ratings for poor are low - and disproportionately so for people of color - and therefore deny access to decent living accommodations, it's little wonder that many displaced families end up homeless in the same neighborhoods they've just been residing in for the last generation.

But what if the very people of these communities had power to control their destinies? What if the property they took care of, rejuvenated, lived in, worked from, and worshiped, went to school, and shopped nearby, the property they inhabited fully - what if that property were given back to the local community? What if we could fill all the now-vacant houses with the families currently out in the streets? What if families did not necessarily need to double-up just to make it by, sharing one bathroom and two bedrooms with eight or more people?

What if - and this may sound cah-raaayyyyy-zeeeee - what if the empty lots that line every block - sometimes residing in nearly one-third of the area - could be turned into gardens and even mini-farms for fresh, healthy, affordable food? Could that even be a means of providing local jobs and meaningful work for several of our community members? What if the abandoned factories, closed storefronts and shops, and vacant warehouses could be creatively reborn?

Daycare and after-school centers. Job training. Clothes manufacturing. Bicycle repair. Computer and phone refurbishing and repairing. Alternative energy. Sign manufacturing. Specialty restaurants. Mechanics (locally-based, so you can trust them? Nice). Health clinics, including mental wholeness. Library co-ops. Music centers. Recycling/Reusing/Renewing centers. Office space rentals. Art galleries. Furniture manufacturing and repair. Think tanks for scientists, artists, entrepreneurs, mothers, community leaders, students, and environmental workers to go, study, research, teach, learn about how to holistically restore the community.

Factory (sash window)

Okay, so I'm not the most creative. But the point is, the community decides what it needs, what it has, what it can give and offer, what it is skilled at and what skills and resources it needs to build. But it needs space to occupy, ferment, and accomplish its dreams. It needs its own space. And then it'll need less from the center. We won't need to worry about food stamps or medicaid or social security, because the community will be able to take care of its own.

So long as others are in control of our land, we are not truly empowered and we are - to a significant degree - dependent on their mercy. That is what happens when our entire society is centered around a consumerist modus operandi. We give everything away to far off places via trading and buying merchandise and pray and expect that we'll receive back in monetary value that we spend, again, on merchandise that is centralized in far off places - corporations that do not invest in our communities except on the rarest of occasions (and with the most triumphant of fanfare). We need a space of our own and an economy of our own.

We desire, earnestly, to work with our minds, our hands, and our lands.

Under the Brunt of The American Dream: Narcissistic Stockholm Syndrome IV

Essayist and book critic William Dereseiwicz wrote an opinion piece in the New York Times on Sunday called "Fables of Wealth." It's worth both lengthy excerpts and a few discussions, because its topic, a criticism of capitalism as a system that benefits psychopaths, is so rarely laid forth so brutally in mainstream press - even in so-called liberal media as the Times, even in an op-ed piece. But here we have it.

A recent study found that 10 percent of people who work on Wall Street are “clinical psychopaths,” exhibiting a lack of interest in and empathy for others and an “unparalleled capacity for lying, fabrication, and manipulation.” (The proportion at large is 1 percent.) Another study concluded that the rich are more likely to lie, cheat and break the law…

The only thing that puzzles me about these claims is that anyone would find them surprising. Wall Street is capitalism in its purest form, and capitalism is predicated on bad behavior...

Enron, BP, Goldman, Philip Morris, G.E., Merck, etc., etc. Accounting fraud, tax evasion, toxic dumping, product safety violations, bid rigging, overbilling, perjury. The Walmart bribery scandal, the News Corp. hacking scandal — just open up the business section on an average day. Shafting your workers, hurting your customers, destroying the land. Leaving the public to pick up the tab. These aren’t anomalies; this is how the system works: you get away with what you can and try to weasel out when you get caught...

There are ethical corporations, yes, and ethical businesspeople, but ethics in capitalism is purely optional, purely extrinsic. To expect morality in the market is to commit a category error. Capitalist values are antithetical to Christian ones. (How the loudest Christians in our public life can also be the most bellicose proponents of an unbridled free market is a matter for their own consciences.) Capitalist values are also antithetical to democratic ones. Like Christian ethics, the principles of republican government require us to consider the interests of others. Capitalism, which entails the single-minded pursuit of profit, would have us believe that it’s every man for himself...

Wall St Solo - Montusci via Flickr

And on the "Wealth Creators" and "Shouldn't the Risk-Takers and the Hard-Workers and the Smartest Earn their Rewards?" fables:

[I]f entrepreneurs are job creators, workers are wealth creators. Entrepreneurs use wealth to create jobs for workers. Workers use labor to create wealth for entrepreneurs — the excess productivity, over and above wages and other compensation, that goes to corporate profits. It’s neither party’s goal to benefit the other, but that’s what happens nonetheless...

MOST important, neither entrepreneurs nor the rich have a monopoly on brains, sweat or risk. There are scientists — and artists and scholars — who are just as smart as any entrepreneur, only they are interested in different rewards. A single mother holding down a job and putting herself through community college works just as hard as any hedge fund manager. A person who takes out a mortgage — or a student loan, or who conceives a child — on the strength of a job she knows she could lose at any moment (thanks, perhaps, to one of those job creators) assumes as much risk as someone who starts a business.

He then ends with a quote by Kurt Vonnegut from Slaughterhouse 5, but I'd like to excerpt a longer quote:

America is the wealthiest nation on Earth, but its people are mainly poor, and poor Americans are urged to hate themselves.... It is in fact a crime for an American to be poor, even though America is a nation of poor. Every other nation has folk traditions of men who were poor but extremely wise and virtuous, and therefore more estimable than anyone with power and gold. No such tales are told by American poor. They mock themselves and glorify their betters. The meanest eating or drinking establishment, owned by a man who is himself poor, is very likely to have a sign on its wall asking this cruel question: “if you’re so smart, why ain’t you rich?” There will also be an American flag no larger than a child’s hand – glued to a lollipop stick and flying from the cash register.

Americans, like human beings everywhere, believe many things that are obviously untrue. Their most destructive untruth is that it is very easy for any American to make money. They will not acknowledge how in fact hard money is to come by, and, therefore, those who have no money blame and blame and blame themselves. This inward blame has been a treasure for the rich and powerful, who have had to do less for their poor, publicly and privately, than any other ruling class since, say Napoleonic times. Many novelties have come from America. The most startling of these, a thing without precedent, is a mass of undignified poor. They do not love one another because they do not love themselves.

What Vonnegut says here is complicated and needs a moment to unpack. It has elements of damning truth and yet damning self-defeating lies in it. Throughout the history of the world, the most generous people have been the poor. But they've also tended to be those with the most violence inflicted upon them. The first to go to war, the first to be attacked, the first to go hungry or homeless, to last to receive medical attention, the last to be protected and the first to be unprotected. But with what little they have, they share. That's the nature of hospitality and community. That's why, when Sodom is condemned in the Hebrew Scriptures, it is for the sin of inhospitality (in both the Genesis and the Ezekiel accounts - both the Law and the Prophets condemned them for being mean to strangers and to their own). That's why Jesus tells his disciples to go from town to town and just accept the open arms and doors and meals of those they meet in their way. Because, generally speaking, they can expect to find that. It wasn't a miracle; it was the way of life. And if a town did not accept them? They were to insult them by wiping the dust from their feet.

People on Stairs - Patrick Moyan via Flickr

This level of hospitality is much harder to come by in America. We've been trained that being able is to be fully self-sufficient and completely independent. We've been trained to believe that if we're not self-sufficient, there is something wrong with us. We've been trained to believe that if we work hard and smart and long enough, we'll reach that plateau finally, the one we deserve - self-sufficiency and, even more anticipated, luxury. As a friend from the Middle East put it, in the US we are so used to outsourcing everything we are not able to find the assets of our own community.

This isn’t true across the board, even in America. Poor and working class communities of color tend to be more community-oriented than poor and working class white communities – but this culture of outsourcing and consumeristic value has deeply infected much of the African American community as well, which is part of the reason SUVs and items of clothing are symbols of status - are seen as a replacements for the breakdown and rape and humiliation of their history and culture by the ruling classes, who are eased by the social and psychological humiliation they've heaped on to lower class whites, many of whom blame other poor people - in addition to themselves secretly - for their status.

It is here where it becomes important to note that we need solidarity, not more division. But without recognizing the sources of our division, we cannot truly unite.

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Now, about those studies that purport that the rich are less ethical than the poor?

Abstract:

In studies 1 and 2, upper-class individuals were more likely to break the law while driving, relative to lower-class individuals. In follow-up laboratory studies, upper-class individuals were more likely to exhibit unethical decision-making tendencies (study 3), take valued goods from others (study 4), lie in a negotiation (study 5), cheat to increase their chances of winning a prize (study 6), and endorse unethical behavior at work (study 7) than were lower-class individuals. Mediator and moderator data demonstrated that upper-class individuals’ unethical tendencies are accounted for, in part, by their more favorable attitudes toward greed.

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It's like we're all lost in the supermarket...

Knocking It Out

Trigger warning: Homophobia, parental abuse, spiritual abuse

Much negative publicity has formulated around the Beat the Gay out of Your Kids pastor (all types of triggers). As well it should. This pastor, who is incidentally in the same state as the Amendment One anti-equality bill, gave his congregants a special leniency to crack and punch (to applause and laughter) their four year old sons if they started acting “limp-wristed” in order to knock that problematic homosexuality out of them. He then went on to say that "butch" girls need to "dress themselves up" to be "beautiful" and "attractive". Because we all know that lesbians are ugly, right? And that, in order to become straight, all they need is to look purty.

My fear, though, is that in pointing to him as an example of extreme homophobia, we may be doing normal homophobia a bit of a solid. Opponents of equal rights use that example as they use the example of the God Hates Fags church. “At least we’re not like those guys. Those guys are sick, amirite?”

They continue:

BtGooYK Pastor is a bad man for even joking about violently disposing children of their homosexual behavior. At least we’re not like that. At least we don't purposefully beat them. Though we don't frown on bullying by their peers. If a kid wants to beat the gay out of another kid, who are we to stand in their way? We only seek to ex- their gayness by using shoddy psychiatry and shaming. We only seek to keep them from children because their gayness may catch on them – or they may practice their gayness on the kids, because that’s what the gays do. They do the gay with little kids. We only want to keep them from exercising the same rights straight folks have in openly declaring their love for another.

At least we’re not like those other guys, the say.

Soft-peddled homophobia is still homophobia. And just by getting caught, the hard-peddlers make it easier for the soft-peddlers to enforce their religious views on others. They can claim that they aren’t bigoted (and they may honestly believe that) in the same way that a racist can claim to not be racist because he’s not burning crosses or lynching, even as he’s writing newspaper articles about how Jay-Z’s basketball team should be called the Brooklyn N*****s.

What is up with the Amendment One thing, anyway? Is this the first amendment given in a state constitution that moves AWAY from and even contradicts the Bill of Rights? Can a state constitution be ruled unconstitutional on the basis that it clearly establishes a religious practice over civil practices? Because it does. Not even a good one.

So, congratulations, North Carolina! A small minority just decided that a smaller minority of you are sub-human. Like the chattel slaves of old, homosexuals are not even worthy of the dignity of getting married. And voters did this in Jesus’ name. Amen.

I suppose they’re coming for adulterers next. I’m sure the amendment will be amended to exclude fornicators from marrying. And divorcees, definitely, will also be excluded from that right – unless their previous spouses cheated on them, or they remarried their original partners. I mean, it’s not that we hate these sinners. Just their sins, right?

No? Nobody ever is going to suggest these laws? Just for teh gheys and the lesbos? Oh. I see…

Because we all need something to meditate on

Kicking and Fightin' through the Church: Doc on Kickstarter

There is a project to help fund a documentary on Christian involvement in Mixed Martial Arts on Kickstarter now.

They are right now under 10% of their monetary goal. Here is the preview that they've been able to put together so far:

FIGHT CHURCH is a feature documentary about the confluence of Christianity and Mixed Martial Arts. The film follows several pastors and fighters in a quest to reconcile their faith with a sport that some consider violent and barbaric. Faith is tried and questions are raised. Can you really love your neighbor as yourself and then punch him in the face?

What do you think about this in terms of substance and in terms of form?

In terms of substance, I mean, what role and relationship should Christians, and more specifically, Christian leaders have with staged fighting? Does this reflect a certain theological frame? Do you think that the pastors promoting this route are promoting a type of violence and/or abuse, or possibly and alternative to it?

In terms of form, I'm thinking of the filmic qualities itself. And specifically, how do you feel about its overall tenor as presented in this preview? I must admit I get a bit wary when documentary makers allege that they are being objective. The whole point of any movie or project is that one can't truly be objective. Just in the telling, you are presenting a perspective. But, I guess they are trying to not be polemic. In not trying to make this about right v wrong, however, how do you think they fare? Do you think they should be more out front and taking a stand?

Putting Mouths Where the Money Is

Well, it seems my conservative Christian friends will finally get their chance to prove how awesome and correct they are if the House has its way. Representative Paul Ryan "aims to empower" those closest to the problem of poverty to do something about it by... Well, by putting the onus of caring for the poor directly and squarely and solely on their lap.

As Bread for the World notes, Congress is planning on leaving such a humongous multi-billion dollar hole (169,000,000,000 smackeroonis, in fact) in food assistance benefits that thousands upon thousands of families will starve. A few members of said Congress whom are proposing these cuts suggested that local religious organizations should plug in that hole. What they failed to mention is that each and every church or religious congregation in the US would have to pony up roughly $50,000 a year just to make up for this shortchange.

Churches like this one in LA. (Lord Jim via Flickr)

This isn't counting, of course, the staff and volunteer hours needed for this. This isn't counting the hours to pick-up, deliver, stockpile, organize, throw out bad food, and distribute the food. 

The suggestion that churches rather than government should serve the poor is, in other words, foolishness that comes out of the mouths of people with little direct involvement in the actual work of food pantries, soup kitchens, congregational work (or lack thereof), church finances, congregational politics.

First, it's not an either/or issue. Local parishes/synagogues/mosques cannot possibly cover this need on their own, but they play an integral part of a much larger whole. Secondly, though there is a lot of money invested in our churches, most of it is centralized and/or tied into real estate which is not so easy to liquidate. 

Which is not to say that congregations can't put in more than they are currently. Nor that communities shouldn't be the center of aid. But all of our interactions are, as a friend recently put it, outsourced. Which means, partially, that we need to recover them. Which means that we need to recover property that's centralized, which largely goes to profit for the benefit of a few. A few of whom go to big churches, where the majority of liquid church assets are apparently centralized.

Of course, it's all much more complicated than the way it appears here. Most churches that I've run into - tax-free or not - don't have that kind of money - even if they weren't to pay their light bills, heating, and the cost for the essential staff. Certainly not in those areas where the need is great. A few megachurches easily spend that much money and maybe more aiding some of the smaller churches in their sphere of influence. But there's no way that a Willow Creek - for instance - could possibly keep up with the needs of the most needy of such churches in its metro area, even splitting with other area megachurches.

And that's just in terms of just the money for the aid. What of workers?

There are good ways to fight poverty locally (I argue for local sustainability), there are barely adequate, problematic ways (relying on a greedy, full-of-itself, centralized US Congress, for instance), and then there are the ways of people who've maybe spent a couple days in food ministry and who spot a few people "misusing" food benefits and therefore give the US Congress a justification out of their basic moral obligation. But actual people starve when we say such stupid, ignorant bunk. "Deserving" or not.*

American Christians, join in the efforts of your local food pantry, soup kitchen, homeless outreach for about ten years. Limit your budget to about ten thousand a year for a few years (Oh, what's that? You got a family, you say? Ok, 18,000, then), while leasing - or trying to pay mortgage (Note: college years don't count). Evangelicals: Meet up with your local Christian Community Development Association-connected ministry and run your ideas by them. Catholics: I can think of any number of impoverished parishes you could join and assist.

Then feel free to speak up about the "unworthy" poor, or how the government is just getting in the way of volunteer and charity efforts.

Or, think about it in terms of cracks. What do you do when you see people falling through the cracks? You help them out, right? But what if those cracks are too big for you and all your friends to help out the millions of people falling through them? What if everybody around you was poor and in need of basic food? What do you do then? You seek assistance from where you can find it - even if it feels degrading to ask the government to help your family eat because you just don't make enough.

If this is not news to you, if you believe that the work of TANF is necessary to the survival of families and workers and the unemployed, please sign this petition.


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*It's beyond troubling that a religion which posits itself on grace and the idea that we are all made in God's image would allow for such anti-Christ talk.

Jesus Is for Losers, John Boehner!

CROWLEY: This is a time -- an economic time when people are hurting and have been hurting for quite some time.
Do you think that someone who is as wealthy as [Mitt Romney] is, who has had as much privilege as he is, has a hill to climb to overcome that?
BOEHNER: No. The American people don't want to vote for a loser. They don't want to vote for someone that hasn't been successful.

Of course, Boehner may be speaking the truth, technically-speaking. The American people tend to get duped pretty easily and tend to think that being successful in the private sector (regardless of how he got successful in the first place *Ahem* Daddy's big bucks lead him to a vulture capital system where he takes over the acquisitions of businesses, bleeds them dry, lays off thousands of people, robs them of their severance and retirement funds, and has the government bail out those same retirements, while scoring big profits) means that one knows how to handle public sector money well, too - regardless of the fact that much of their private sector wealth was built from the public sector.

If the American people believe this, and believe that not being financially successful makes the vast majority of Americans losers, well, it's because we have our priorities f***ed the f*** up.

And by "we" I mean specifically "we American Christians". We still believe in the god of mammon rather than the God of Compassion. We still follow the path of The American Dream more so than the Way of the Cross. We still think in terms of failures and winners and losers in terms of how much money, how many children, how big a house, how much education.

But Jesus is for "losers." So should we be.


Steve Taylor, "Jesus Is for Losers"

For more, here is Catholic Moral Theology: Missing the Point on Poverty.

In her reflection on Matthew 16:15 “Who do you say that I am?” Mother Teresa offers a powerful answer, beginning with the standard theological statements from the creed (You are the Second person of the Blessed Trinity, etc) and concludes:

Jesus is the Hungry – to be fed.
Jesus is the Thirsty – to be satiated.
Jesus is the Homeless – to be taken in
Jesus is the Sick – to be healed.
Jesus is the lonely – to be loved.
Jesus is the Unwanted – to be wanted.

Jesus is not like the poor. Jesus is the poor. Jesus is not like the unemployed father who cannot find work and for whom food stamps are the only thing preventing his children from going to bed hungry. Christ is not like single mother working two low-paying part time jobs surviving only through access to housing and child care subsidies. Jesus Christ is that father. Jesus Christ is that mother.

Scrape Goatin'

Ancient societies often chose an animal to burden all of their sins upon, all of the grievances of that society, the wrongs they have done. They would symbolically load their guilt onto a goat or a sheep as a valve to untie themselves from their own blunders, miscues, crimes. All their societal evil.

We still practice this. In my city, fans of the dreadful Northside baseball team have literally blamed a goat for the last hundred years of championship drought.

"Severed goat head hung from Harry Carey Statue at Wrigley Field", by  guano via Flickr
(This is the goat who, according to myth, was denied a seat at the 1945 Championship game. The man to the right cursed the Cubs and that's been more powerful than years and tears and reverse curses, apparently)

One year last decade the Chicago Cubs got awfully close, but choked under pressure. Being the team of choice of yuppies and douchebags they couldn't deal with the ensuing existential angst, so they blamed a goofy looking dude wearing a walkman and a baseball cap. Steve Bartman.

Despite the fact that his reaching out for a ball - while everybody else in the stands was also reaching for that ball - cost the Cubs an easy out, Bartman's not to blame for what followed afterwards. Which is to say, the Cubs, with a comfortable lead in the series, sucked. And lost. And haven't recovered and boo-hoo-hoo. Despite the fact that Bartman was just another goofy Cubs fan doing what goofy Cubs fans do - looking for souvenirs and saint relics wherever they may be found - the Cubs' general ineptitude and suckiness was placed solely upon his shoulders; it became his cross to bear. And many were all-too-eager to place him on it.

I'm not sure if he ever suffered physically, but there were threats, and there was plenty of reputation-marring. Cubs fans, being the douchebags that they are, don't care about others' feelings or lives (remember, they're also yuppies), so they were free to get carried away, placing all of their frustrations on Bartman's back. He became the sacrifice guy.*

But scapegoats aren't always so naive, goofy, or innocent. In some cases, they can be guilty of the crimes they are being accused of, with the added bonus that in punishing the scapegoats, we are trying to free ourselves of our own guilt for our collective crimes - but without actually ever resolving the crimes themselves.

Take Charles Graner and Lynddie England and the 320th Military Police Battalion at the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq. Americans were shocked when we learned of and certainly when we saw the horrible, debasing, degrading, and lethal human rights abuses of prisoners and alleged terrorists at this and other prisons. The people who committed the acts of torture were punished, but those who led them to those acts in the first place and sanctioned them went off scot-free. By this, I don't just mean the Dark Sith Lord VP Cheney. I do mean him, but I also mean to extend the nets.

I mean those of us that were so set for vengeance that we cleared the way for the Afghanistan and Iraq Wars in the first place. I mean Republicans and Democrats. I mean the blood-thirsty news watchers. I mean myself, at the time, hungry to retaliate, to see not only blood-for-blood, but a hundred times as much if not more.

While guilty of disgusting and atrocious national and international crimes against humanity and humankind themselves, Graner and England were fall guys for both the military-industrial complex that drives on fear and debasement and racism and xenophobia, but also for an American society that runs on those fears and allows us to serve our most base, our most disgusting, our most heinous selves with the slightest push.

The very-public punishment of the 320th did not eradicate this from ourselves, but it did make us feel better about ourselves - even as we continue our wars against Third World nations, Muslims, Arabs (and now Iranians) - even within the US.

This shouldn't be a complete shocker to those who have studied our legacies of the Trail of Tears, Slavery, Japanese Internment Camps, Tuskegee, Jim Crow Laws, or the New Jim Crow. But then, we like to pretend that we've evolved past racism, which brings us to our next point.

This year has witnessed a new guilty scapegoat, George Zimmerman. The difference is tremendous, of course. Nobody died when Bartman reached his gloves out, but someone did when Zimmerman pulled out his gun.

What I've noticed from the right shortly after Trayvon Martin's death was hand-wringing followed by a lot of, "Well, let's not rush to judgment" statements. I thought these were overkill. The point is that there was no judgment. That's why we were and are so angry. That a murder had happened, a white man had gone free and a black, unarmed youth had been hunted down and killed. It was a little late to say, "Let's not rush to judgment."

Beyond, of course, the alleged (and close-to-home) hate crimes allegedly committed by black youth to older white men, the ignorant and destructive address-publishing, and posturing by silly hate groups like the New Black Panther Party and the Whiteheads of Tallahassee, or whatever they're called, beyond the Who-Struck-Who-First/Who Screamed/How Bloody Was Zimmerman? arguments, beyond the calls for Zimmerman's head on a platter when he was released on bail (Seriously? Do you have any idea how much danger he was in while locked up? Is that what fellow progressives want, revenge? I don't think so and I hope not), we should recognize that something's happening here and we may not know what it is.**

What Zimmerman did was awful and evil and bloody and ignorant and reckless. And it ended a life that he most likely hunted under the false pretense of protecting his own. This is no stupid game of stupid baseball. But it captured our national attention because it was symbolic of a much larger, much more systemic evil. There are millions of Trayvon Martins in our country right now, young men and women relegated to the outskirts of acceptability, an overzealous wannabe (or real) cop's trigger pull away from breath, bordering on the fists of fury and lethal energy simply because laws and policies have made their existence inconvenient as a way to make life as convenient for the White Upper Class Male Higherarchy (TM) as possible.

They want us to fight over the whether or not we could possibly qualify the second amendment, without considering that they've already vastly curtailed our first and fourth, fifth, sixth, seventh, and eighth amendment rights. They want us to ignore that incarceration rates for black males are seven times the incarceration rates for white males, while Latino males are incarcerated 2.5 times as highly.

Those numbers are largely indicative not of crime innate to each race (that's racist thinking along the lines of The Bell Curve and David Duke, but it's unspoken among perhaps a majority of white Americans), but of wider systemic sins of violence and racial oppression against people of color as a means of class oppression, turning white brother against black sister to distract us from the work of the upper 0.1% who control and hoard the vast wealth of the land and leave the rest of us to fight over the scraps. With bloody consequences.

Whether or not he's convicted of it, Zimmerman is guilty of recklessly and needlessly ending the life of a young black man for the mere fact that this young man was a black male and therefore deemed a threat. And yes, I hope we find justice. But justice is different from revenge. Justice causes us to seek out the problems, the wrongs, the immoralities, the sins of our entire society and correct them. Not just push them off on someone else and edge her toward the crevice or hang him on a tree in order to continue to believe that we live in a post-racial, color-blind society. Because we don't.

We're gonna have to ask, In what ways are we actively allowing the deaths of thousands of Trayvon Martins every year? The answers may surprise us...

---------
*See what I did there? Huh?
**Bob Dylan's birth name? Robert Zimmerman. See what I did there?

Repentance and the Rich

“Teacher,” he declared, “all these I have kept since I was a boy.”

Jesus looked at him and loved him. “One thing you lack,” he said. “Go, sell everything you have and give to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven. Then come, follow me.”

At this the man’s face fell. He went away sad, because he had great wealth.

Jesus looked around and said to his disciples, “How hard it is for the rich to enter the kingdom of God!”

The disciples were amazed at his words. But Jesus said again, “Children, how hard it is to enter the kingdom of God! It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for someone who is rich to enter the kingdom of God.”

- Mark 10:20-25 (NIV)

The story of the Rich Young Ruler is one of the premiere examples of repentance for Evangelicals. We stress a change in lifestyle as a requisite for truly following Jesus, for truly loving God, for truly being welcome into the Kingdom of God.

But they'll usually put an asterisk around this story.

Evangelical preachers tend to say, "Jesus didn't mean that you should really give up all your wealth." "There's nothing wrong with being rich." "Wealth can be a false god, but only if..."

This is a means of ignoring much of the rest of the text, as well as the socio-cultural context. Jesus and most of his people were poor. They did not own land. They lived on it. They worked on it. But for others, always owing them. Always in danger of debtor's prison. That's the socio-cultural-economic situation that Jesus and much of his crowd found themselves in. But others lived among the better off, and they wanted to be have their cake and eat it too - in a sort of Marie Antoinette way. Pharisees, scribes, tax collectors, they wanted to either follow Jesus or have some of what he had. Some of them, like Levi/Matthew, gave it all away and made good on their promises to follow God rather than follow money. Wealth, they understand, isn't just a possible god, it is a god.

I tell you, use worldly wealth to gain friends for yourselves, so that when it is gone, you will be welcomed into eternal dwellings.
“Whoever can be trusted with very little can also be trusted with much, and whoever is dishonest with very little will also be dishonest with much. So if you have not been trustworthy in handling worldly wealth, who will trust you with true riches? And if you have not been trustworthy with someone else’s property, who will give you property of your own?
“No one can serve two masters. Either you will hate the one and love the other, or you will be devoted to the one and despise the other. You cannot serve both God and money.”
The Pharisees, who loved money, heard all this and were sneering at Jesus. He said to them, “You are the ones who justify yourselves in the eyes of others, but God knows your hearts. What people value highly is detestable in God’s sight."

Luke 16:9-15

I'm noticing a few things here.

One) Typically when this passage, the parable of the harsh landowner, is preached, the emphasis is on the talents as being gifts or money that doesn't belong to the person possessing it, but ultimately belongs to God. While this has an element of theological truth to it, it puts the handling of the property as a private affair between the property holder and God. But Jesus says to use it to "gain friends". And he says here - like he did to the Rich Young Ruler, give it away so you may be welcomed into the Kingdom. Not manage it. Give it away to earn friends.

Two) "True riches" is distinct here from "worldly wealth". Why is that? I propose that he's talking about the Coming Age, the Kingdom that his hearers were expecting, the eschalon. To the landed, those who thought that their property belonged to them, he says it doesn't - it belongs to someone else, they won't receive actual riches until the Next Age, if they do at all.

Three) That someone else are the neighbors. The poor, those with disabilities, the outcasts, the working man, the hungry child, the nursing mother, the woman forced into prostitution. The property doesn't really belong to the rich young ruler. It belongs to the community, via God. You're just watching over it.

Four) We must choose between two gods. Jesus' God and the god of wealth are at odds with each other. If, Jesus makes clear here, you love wealth/mammon/riches, then you hate God. It's that simple. There is very little room for capitalism in God's Kingdom, according to Jesus. He, in fact, doesn't seem to think very highly of the systems that concentrate wealth. Especially at the expense of the poor.

Five) This wasn't the first or only time the gospels show Jesus contrasting God with wealth. Meditate on what the darkness and evil is in this passage in Matthew 6.

Six) Notice who was tsk-tsking Jesus here? "Oh, that's not really what you mean, is it? That's so simple. You're being a communist, Jesus. How can you reward laziness and punish success?" Yeah, the Pharisees. But at least they were honest about their disdain for Jesus. Now, they proclaim the Name of Jesus, but they don't care for his message. But they are similar in that they both justify their evil in the sight of others.

Seven) This wealth hoarding is detestable to God. Why? Because it's stealing from God by stealing from the community - from the poor, which Jesus was, and from the outcasts, whom Jesus actively worked to include into full community participation (which, oddly, many Christians still seem to actively oppose).

With all that, and with so much more biblical evidence (for example) against greed and envy (it's not what you think), you'd think that Evangelicals would be the first in line to protest tax cuts for the rich at the cost of food for poor children.

House Republicans recently proposed cuts to nutrition assistance that will kick 280,000 low-income children off automatic enrollment in the Free School Lunch and Breakfast Program. Those same kids and 1.5 million other people will also lose their Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (formerly food stamp benefits) that help them afford food at home.
Ten years’ worth of these nutrition cuts could be prevented for the price of one year of tax cuts on 3,340 multimillion dollar estates that House Republicans are protecting in their budget.

Yeah, so Christians have to decide which god they're going to follow. And then repent.

Daddy Warbangs and Mars

Prominent Evangelical and figurehead within the Southern Baptist Convention, Richard Land has recently protested against protesting against militant racism. In a sense, it shouldn't have been such a surprise, since several years ago he came out for other acts of violent racism and militantism in supporting the Iraqi War as being "Just".

As head of the SBC's panel on Ethics and Religion, Land gave his sanctioning and blessing to the most obvious case of an unjust war in recent memory:

How do you reflect on the war as a Christian?
I believe in just-war theory, and the first item in just-war criteria is that it has to be a just cause. I believe our cause in Iraq was just; I think it was one of the more noble things we've done. We went to liberate a country that was in the grip of a terrible dictator who had perpetrated horrible atrocities and crimes against humanity, against his own people, as well as his neighbors...
The idea of American exceptionalism is not a doctrine of empire, it's not a doctrine of domination, it's a doctrine of responsibility and obligation. We have a responsibility and an obligation based upon the blessings that have been showered upon us as a nation and as a people to help others when we can.

While highlighting the atrocities of Hussein, he ignores the atrocities his own government committed on the entire populace of Iraq. But it's apparently okay for Americans to murder - we have a moral obligation from god (as we know based upon his financial blessings upon us), so bombing a few (quarter million at the least directly died from military action, mostly civilians) and displacing millions more is worth it to deliver American-style democracy to the grateful and expectant.

Of course, that good ol' American-style democracy is best when bloodily forced upon the people - not when they do it themselves, or speak up or demand their own fates on their own. They can't possibly be smart and civil enough for that. They are, after all, an inferior people, right Richard Land?

You're welcome, Iraq! And for that privilege, we just expect a little payment, a moment of generosity for our hard work on your behalf. We'll just take some of your oil. Thanks!

Brown people, according to the Christian War Patriarchs, can't fend for themselves 'cuz they're like little children. Better let the White Man do it. This is why Land was so upset when all this noise was happening on behalf of Trayvon Martin. Stop making a fuss; Let the White Man take care of this issue on our time. Just trust us.

But the Christian War Patriarchy is nothing if not resourceful. Not only is it abundantly racist, it's also overwhelmingly sexist. Not only is it defending and upholding war, it's glorifying it in church, making it the normative process of worshiping our new god, Mars.

A Pastor After God's Own Heart!

Equating love of God with having a hard-on for war are apparently also essential elements of Sunday morning worship (via iMonk). Douglas Wilson starts with the presuppositions (like his colleagues in homophobia and patriarchialism, Mark Driscoll and John Piper) that contemporary American churches are effeminate and that being inadequately testosterone-run is bad. Rather than suggest that both female and male voices need to be listened to, appreciated and welcomed within the church (well, it is a gender Apartheid after all), rather than suggesting that women would feel most appreciated if they were actually included in the decisions and leadership and direction of the church, Wilson believes they would be best if they would just let the Man decide.

[I]t includes them, brings them along, and makes them feel safe. If you reach the men, you will reach the women.

Those women-folk will appreciate it if we tell them what they need to hear. They'll be safe if only men, and men alone, were running the show. Little girls can't fend for themselves! Better let the menfolk handle this! Gird yourselves, men, we are preparing for war! And if she disagrees with this aspect of seeking for god and being protected, well she wasn't worth our attention in the first place. Only hot, confused, scared girls for the True Christian Church!

Moreover, you will find yourself reaching the worthiest of women, the true mothers in Israel.

Oh, I'm terribly sorry. Folks, we've been reaching the wrong kind of women. The kind that apparently, aren't worthy of the love of Jesus and our good protection. Being subversive and having an opinion automatically disqualifies the ladyfolks. As if having ladybits wasn't bad enough, when you have a vagina AND you talk out of turn, you're clearly unworthy.

But you know you're going to a sissy-ass church when...

2. Your music minister is more concerned that the choir trills their r's correctly than that they fill the sanctuary with loud sounds of battle.

Yeah. Real men, the type of men who subdue and subjugate women like property or little children or animals or something else they obviously don't respect protect their womens, are the type who love them so much that they're willing to kill unnecessarily for them. They love their women so much, that it's impossible to imagine anything else but killing and maybe even being kilt - I mean, of course, silly me, kilts.

7. The minister wears a robe, but the effect is not that of being robed for battle. If that same minister were to wear a kilt, everybody would think it was a skirt from a nearby all-girls private school. But, contrariwise, if the minister were able to wear a kilt in such a way as to terrify sinners with the imagined sound of skirling bagpipes, and the sounds of a small version of Armageddon across the misty moors, and the sermon text were a claymore whistling over their heads, then that kind of man could think about a robe if he wanted;

Wearing a robe is girly and femminy and queer. If you're going to wear a robe, it should be made out of leather and be in camouflage, or it should be an homage to Braveheart, the most Jesus-y of all the godly movies every made.

Trust us, it is. Don't worry about why. That should be obvious, silly girls...

Two-Tiered Fight

Like I said the other day, the GOP is acting so abysmally, they're gonna make this man right here personally knock on doors for the Democrats. In Chicago. Progressives in Chicago - let alone those of us to the left of progressives - don't tend to trust Democrats. We've seen enough of the Daleys, the Emanuels, the Berrios...

Yeah. Many of these Republican leaders are that bad. Really, really horrible people. I'm not saying this as a political thing. I'm not saying this to volley shots in the game of presidential year politics. I'm saying this because what they are doing affects negatively the lives of millions upon millions of people already living on the edges in American society. The most vulnerable are daily offered as sacrifices for their head-games.

It's just. Not. Funny.

Their main man is a vulture capitalist who made his multi-millions buying companies, pushing them into bankruptcy, laying off their workers, having the government bail out their pensions (for millions of dollars), and cheating the workers out of severance packages before netting hundreds of millions of dollars in profit for their investments.

Other leaders, like Eric "#2" Cantor are following a formula of F+(sUckers)(2) as evidenced by this clip:

CANTOR: We also know that over 45 percent of the people in this country don’t pay income taxes at all, and we have to question whether that’s fair. And should we broaden the base in a way that we can lower the rates for everybody that pays taxes. [...]
KARL: Just wondering, what do you do about that? Are you saying we need to have a tax increase on the 45 percent who right now pay no federal income tax?
CANTOR: I’m saying that, just in a macro way of looking at it, you’ve got to discuss that issue. … How do you deal with a shrinking pie and number of people and entities that support the operations of government, and how do you go about continuing to milk them more, if that’s what some want to do, but preserve their ability to provide the growth engine? … I’ve never believed that you go raise taxes on those that have been successful that are paying in, taking away from them, so that you just hand out and give to someone else.

Nevermind that these 45% - if they make any income at all - already pay a much larger percentage of their income (income that they can not really afford to give away when they are on the verge of losing their homes or barely eating) into payroll taxes than the Romneys or Cantors. As long as Cantor can continue to pretend that these scum-of-the-earth types are living off the fat of the land while the virtuous super-rich (like Romney, who paid a whopping 12% of his income back to Federal Income Taxes last year) are sacrificed on W2 crosses.

And then there's the War Against Women. Consecutive attacks against the rights, bodies, wages, and health care of women - some under the pretense of pro-life (though rarely ever thoughtfully pro-life), but many others are deliberately and purposefully and blatantly anti-woman.

Here are some highlights of anti-woman legislation from a list compiled by a friend*:

Attacks from the GOP's War on Women

1. Republicans not only want to reduce women's access to abortion care, they're actually trying to redefine rape. After a major backlash, they promised to stop. But they haven't yet. No bueno.
2. A state legislator in Georgia wants to change the legal term for victims of rape, stalking, and domestic violence to "accuser." But victims of other less gendered crimes, like burglary, would remain "victims."
3. In South Dakota, Republicans proposed a bill that could make it legal to murder a doctor who provides abortion care. (Yep, for real.)
4. Republicans want to cut nearly a billion dollars of food and other aid to low-income pregnant women, mothers, babies, and kids.
5. In Congress, Republicans have a bill that would let hospitals allow a woman to die rather than perform an abortion necessary to save her life.
6. Maryland Republicans ended all county money for a low-income kids' preschool program. Why? No need, they said. Women should really be home with the kids, not out working.
7.  And at the federal level, Republicans want to cut that same program, Head Start, by $1 billion. That means over 200,000 kids could lose their spots in preschool.
8. Two-thirds of the elderly poor are women, and Republicans are taking aim at them too. A spending bill would cut funding for employment services, meals, and housing for senior citizens.
9. Congress just voted for a Republican amendment to cut all federal funding from Planned Parenthood health centers, one of the most trusted providers of basic health care and family planning in our country.
10.  Republicans are pushing to eliminate all funds for the only federal family planning program. (For humans. But Republican Dan Burton has a bill to provide contraception for wild horses. You can't make this stuff up).
11. Reauthorization for the Violence Against Women Act is currently being debated in the Senate. In January of 2012, it passed through the Senate judiciary committee. Every Democrat on the committee voted yea, while every Republican voted nay. The act was to be extended to give protection to same sex couples as well as women on Indian Reservations.
12. Wisconsin state senator Glenn Grothman (R) said "unwanted or mistimed" pregnancies are the “choice of the women” who should learn "that this is a mistake." Grothman recently introduced Senate Bill 507, which would formally consider single parenthood a contributing factor to child abuse if passed into law.
13. The sweeping anti-abortion bill working its way through the Kansas legislature would levy a sales tax on women seeking abortions, including rape victims. Under the proposal, women who end up receiving abortions would not be able to deduct the cost of the abortion as a health care expense if they had not purchased special abortion insurance. Last year, Kansas enacted a law removing abortion coverage from health insurance plans in general. Women can purchase a special rider to cover the procedure in advance of a pregnancy.
14. Idaho GOP Lawmaker Suggests Women Use Rape As Excuse For Abortions
15. Arizona Senate Passes Bill Protecting Doctors Who Withhold Information In Order To Prevent Abortions The Arizona Senate passed a bill Tuesday that will prohibit medical malpractice lawsuits against doctors who withhold information from a woman that could cause her to have an abortion.
16. Nebraska Republicans Aim To Pass Freedom Of Conscience Clause That Targets Women’s Health Nebraska Republicans have made it a priority to pass a freedom of conscience clause that would allow doctors to refuse to perform procedures they object to such as abortions and just about any other procedure they have a religious, ethical, or moral objection to.
17. Arizona Senate Committee Endorses ‘Tell Your Boss Why You’re On The Pill’ Bill Arizona has taken up yet another draconian law for women’s health – this time replicating but broadening the federal push to let employers deny women access to birth control. The bill stipulates that, unless a woman brings in a note proving she is not using it to avoid getting pregnant, an employer .
18. Tom Corbett, Pennsylvania Governor, On Ultrasound Mandate: Just 'Close Your Eyes' During a discussion of a far-reaching mandatory ultrasound bill, Pennsylvania Gov. Tom Corbett (R) on Wednesday dismissed off-handedly the insinuation that the measure goes too far, saying, "You just have to close your eyes."
19. A North Carolina county commission turned down about $9,000 in state money for contraception. The Commissioner says, "If these young women were responsible people and didn’t have the sex to begin with we wouldn’t be in this situation." 
20. Georgia Rep Wants To Force Women To Carry Stillborn Fetuses…Like Cows Do Georgia’s state representative Terry England wants to force us to carry stillborn fetuses to term–just like cows and pigs do, he says. Yet another expert on women.
21. Idaho Senate Passes Forced Ultrasound Bill Idaho Senator Chuck Winder proposed a bill which would force every woman to undergo a mandatory ultrasound prior to having an abortion. But it's a good thing the Transvaginal Rape bill isn't being pursued in Rhode Island. Amirite? Nope? Shoot...
22. New Hampshire House Republicans Pass Bill Forcing Doctors To Tell Women That Abortion Causes Breast Cancer. Republicans have successfully pushed an anti-abortion bill through the New Hampshire House of Representatives that would require doctors to lie to women in order to scare them from having an abortion. Yes, lie. Because there is no proof that doing so causes breast cancer.
23. Wisconsin State Senator says that women make less money than men because money is more important for men. Um... Yeah. This happened when Wisconsin "Governer" Scott Walker (R) quietly repealed his state’s equal pay law last week, a decision that will make it harder for victims of wage discrimination to sue for lost earnings and back wages. You know, that one discrimination that makes women get a whole freaking 75 cents for every dollar a man makes for equal work and equal seniority.

Now, granted, most of this mess is political parlour tricks. It's a way of ginnying up the base and sticking it to The Other Side (in this case, Democrats). In a bit, they'll grow weary of fighting and report to their fan base that they gave it the ol' college try but those rascally DemoNcrats blahblahblah... And we'll all think we're safe and go on supporting whoever it is we supported, but meanwhile they've let a couple of these elements in and they've moved the conversation further against equity and equality.

I think we should and we need to fight these political ploys. But notice what this is: It's a social, a personal, a community issue that affects the lives of millions and millions of innocents. And they have the gall to play games with it (much like they do with their other wars).

Game Over, by MarcXphotography found via Flickr

In a sense, reducing it to the level of games (of politics rather than policy) means that they win. The GOP can say they were just doing their job defending American liberties or patriots or freedoms or whatever other catachresis** they want to mean they're not very good people and they're afraid of extending the rights and access already guaranteed to a few to the many because they're a part of the few and they want to be in the good graces of the even-fewer.

And therein lies the rub. I've long wondered why some/many/most politicians and pundits have fought so hard to deny equal rights to everybody. Giving every person equal access could be scary for the uber-privileged few because it means they would have to share the stuff they stole. But then I discovered if we give equal rights to everybody, equal access follows.

And we can fight this game for a million years and gain the slightest bit of traction. Voting, calling, writing, marching, petitioning - these are all important, but they may do little more than protect the equality that we already have. I think we need to start thinking at a whole 'nother level as well. We need to be the change. We need to retake the property. We need to make sure every single person in our communities is fed, is clothed, is housed properly. That every grown man or woman has the opportunity to work and provide. That every child receives a proper and good and rewarding and relevant and self-actualizing education. Neither Washington nor our state capitals will provide those for us. Providing equal access goes against the political and social systems' nature. We can and must seek them for basic protection of basic human rights. But we're also gonna have to take this thing to a different tier.

----------------------------------------------------
*Thanks, Linda N!
**Thanks, Michele.

Homelessness, the Social Construction of: A Play

Looking for a higher quality PDF. But if you can make it, awesomesauce.

These Men Are Bastards, Symbolically Speaking

According to the New York Times:

A U.S. congressional panel approved about $33 billion in cuts over 10 years from food stamp benefits, in a largely symbolic... vote.

This symbolic vote symbolizes what, exactly?

The cuts are expected to die in the Democratic-controlled Senate. But the vote by voice underscored Republicans' preference for domestic spending cuts over defense cuts or tax hikes as they try to avoid automatic cuts that take effect in January.

Get this? They want to make it obvious that they would rather have war than feed children? They would rather keep multimillionaires taxes artificially low with the false lead that multimillionaires are supplying jobs than keeping families off the streets?

These men are bastards.

That is all.

Edit:
Except for this. I'm not a Democrat. They're indebted to corporations and warfare as well. But, man, the GOP is really trying to commit us to a GOTV campaign this year, eh? I'll start door-knocking for the Dems if I need to.

We All Shine On - Privilege 100

Earlier I wrote a post on the basics of Privilege. Let's call it "Intro to Privilege." But the last couple days I found myself having to break it down into even smaller tidbits. And it kind of reminded me of what John Lennon was doing in the 70's, taking this really radical and revolutionary concepts and turning them into bumper stickers phrases in these immensely catchy songs. I'm no Lennon - or Ringo for that matter, but I hope you find something useful in this smorgasbord, this Prep class...

- Being white in America comes with privileges, but being white is not a privilege. Nor is it a burden.

- Whites tend to think the solution to race is forgiveness and put the onus on People of Color. The solution is equity and respect.

- Privilege allows us to be dismissive and silence other voices in the public forum while patting ourselves on the back for being brave enough to "tell the truth", which is only a truth according to our privileged perspective.

- People of color need to speak truth-to-power without being accused of being divisive or trouble-making. The trouble-making and the division is happening to them, and it's not of their accord, and it's not their fault.

- The constant lie is, "If only Blacks would stop talking about being black, racism would end... If only Mexicans would stop speaking in accents... If only Muslims would stop flaunting their Muslimness... If only women would stop yapping about their ladybits..."

- Privilege allows us to tell others that they shouldn't bring up their differences, as those differences only divide us. Only in Privilege Land can difference be a negative thing.

- The best that can be said about the claim that color-blindness is a goal is that it's like claiming that we must strive for ignorance.

- It's usually white people who claim color-blindness because it's easier for us than having to acknowledge the problems of racism in the US. Just as it's often men who declare that women complain too much about their burdens, and middle and upper class who consider the poor to be undeserving.

- White people, like myself, have the privilege of being taken seriously simply because we were born White and male. Yet our roles as neighbors and citizens necessitate that we take the words and perspectives of others who are not like us seriously.

- When you say "color-blind", what I hear is, "I accept you on MY terms, rather than for who you are."

- The better position would be to listen to what people of color say and not presume that it means they hate you or that you have to lose your culture.

- We cannot presume to love our neighbors if we're not willing to walk in their shoes for a bit.

- I come from a mixed-race family, I grew up in multi-cultural/multinational/multi-racial neighborhoods, schools, and churches, but I always assumed that I was right and that Euro-American culture is indisputably best. Not because I was raised to be racist or was an arse. But it's part of how this country and its racist genes work their way into our schools, education, social conventions, etc.