blessed/cursed ... blessed?

How do you like the 21st century so far?  

Everything on an even keel?

Which is it????

Sometimes we're told that those blessed with house and car and food and happiness are the ones favored by God.

And by extension, those without such blessings are perhaps without the same favor.  Or maybe they have  been robbed by the devil.

Can we make sense of that?

Wealth equals blessing and favor from God, the best of life ...

And ...
Poverty equals the worst ... it's where none of the blessings show up.

The favored of God have all these blessings; they don't need to pray 'daily bread' prayers.  They have no occasion of begging for help or crying out for justice.  They won't need to take a stand against the world.

Their children, those of these 'favored folks'; they have everything they need and more.  They're blessed with free schools and lots of television shows and places to go with their friends.  They have no worries about whether they'll go to high school and maybe college too.  They have little need to participate in feeding themselves or the rest of the family.  They don't need to tend a garden or understand why a crop might succeed.  They're the favored of God, they are.  For sure.

How's our world doing?
Right-side up?  Or not.

Dad grew up on an Oklahoma farm during the
Depression.  His perspective on pigs was from
first-hand experience.  'Happiness is for pigs',
he'd say and smile.  'Joy, however,

is divine!'

Realistically, quality of life as viewed from inside a western perspective seems to be a blessing in direct relationship to the level of wealth and luxury involved.  Is freedom from hardship truly a blessing?  Does a biblical worldview offer more information?

Can I give myself to a western lifestyle and be a true believer at the same time?  Where are the conflicts?  Can I invest most of my days for most of my life in accumulating possessions and net worth?  Is there a conflict between that and some other purpose or calling?

We wonder why faith might be ridiculed.  Perhaps it's because what's visible is, like much of western thinking, just a bit upside-down.

Is there a right-side up perspective?  What might the foundation pieces be?

Curious where the money went?

The great recession, or so the period has been called, has had a price tag.  It equates to the loss of about ten years economic progress for the working classes.  They've lost ground, and it will take about a decade to break even, more or less, for those who have the time and income available.  The poor lost more.

Not everybody lost out, though.  The rich actually continued to increase in annual income, further widening the gap between the wealthy and everyone else.

Prince Bandar Bin Sultan sells his luxurious 

Aspen, Colorado estate to Hedge Fund billionaire

Then there are the heavy hitters in hedge-fund and private equity businesses. Along with the investment bankers, these are the very people who have been blamed for the current financial woe’s of the world.  Of the world!  These very few people have become super rich, and while the global economy is in turmoil around us, they get to sail off into the sunset with bulging pockets, to lay back and wait for the next set of opportunities that will come along.

There are men and women in the finance industry who have made millions or hundreds of millions while delivering a deadly blow to the world. They did so knowingly without conscience or remorse, as best we've been able to determine. None have even begun to acknowledge the losses for which they are responsible.  Or the deaths.

In Africa, the number of chronically hungry people rose by 1 million a year in 2000-05 and by more than 6 million a year beginning in 2007-12.  That doesn't mean they're hungry because they missed a meal; it means they are starving.  With most of family income spent on corn meal, when prices doubled in 07, 400,000 deaths are attributable to Wall Street for the first recession year in eastern Africa alone.

Karma is only a killer if you are, someone said, intending to be humorous.  You wonder though, what it will be like for the greed-players after living a life of wealth and luxury, to realize that they are among the most loathsome of all of mankind, that they were selfish and brutal beyond measure, that their arrogance and hubris were visible through it all, and that they were the deceivers and murderers of innocent children and families. 

We hope for better.

It isn't news!

It isn't news.  It isn't even factual.  It is, however, a humorous illustration of media editorial practices.

The CNN Health article suggests that husbands who share household chores have sex less frequently than husbands who stick with the traditional role. 

In fact, they say that there are three categories regarding husbands, chores, and sex.

• Husbands who don't do chores.  Most sex.
• Husbands who don't do girly chores.  Middle.
• Husbands who share doing chores.  Least sex.

And they say they're going to tell you why!  They don't.  If you'd like, you can read the article and draw your own conclusions, but you'll want to note a couple of things.

(1) the article is written to attract and perhaps hold an audience, not inform, and (2) the report behind their article doesn't actually support the headline.  There are conflicting studies, conflicting interpretations of the data, and a variety of unaddressed influences.

Much of what we're offered in these venues isn't news.  Often, it seems headlines and soundbites are not journalism, and they (the legitimate journalists themselves) may be disappearing.


Simplistic presentations of semi-sensational information (it's about SEX!) are perhaps revealing about news media in general.  The major players appear more concerned with ratings than with relevance or accuracy.  Entertainment rules.  Attempts at objectivity and balance are short-lived.

The media (and the administration, interestingly)  responded to the recent school mass shooting by joining the popular focus on gun control.  They do know better.  After Columbine, the father of two victims addressed a congressional subcommittee on the cause and solution.

Darrell Scott, father of 2 Columbine victims, speaks to Congress
May 27. 1999
Mr. Scott lost his daughter, his son is recovering.

"Since the dawn of creation, there has been both good and evil in the hearts of men and women, and we all contain those seeds: We contain the seeds of kindness and we contain the seeds of violence. And the death of my wonderful daughter, Rachel Joyce Scott, and the deaths of that heroic teacher, and the other 11 children who died, must not be in vain. Their blood cries out for answers. 

The first recorded act of violence was when Cain slew his brother Abel out in the field. The villain was not the club he used ... the true killer was Cain, and the reason for the murder could only be found in his heart. In the days that followed the Columbine tragedy, I was amazed at how quickly fingers began to be pointed at groups such as the NRA. I am not a member of the NRA, I am not a hunter, I do not even own a gun, I'm not here to represent or to defend the NRA, because I don't believe they are responsible for my daughter's death, therefore I don't believe they need to be defended by me. If I believed that they had anything to do with Rachel's murder, I would be their strongest opponent. I am here today to declare that Columbine was not just a  tragedy; it was a spiritual event which should be forcing us to look at where the real blame lies. Much of that blame lies here in this room - much of that blame lies behind the pointing fingers of the accusers themselves."

Mr. Scott goes on to say with clarity that guns are not the problem and gun control is not the solution.  The problem is a heart problem, not a law problem.   Neither the media nor the administration have yet risen to the larger issues or to acknowledged their shortsightedness.  Joe Biden admitted yesterday, "Nothing we're going to do is going to fundamentally alter or eliminate the possibility of another mass shooting ...," Biden told reporters.   We all knew that.  It's strangely quiet on the real issues.

Addressing the root causes remains 'out of bounds' for both the administration and the media.  There are no headlines about our cultural departure from character and grace, from fairness and honesty, from love and compassion.  From godliness, perhaps.  So who's left?  You, me, and perhaps the church, I suppose.  Meanwhile in the media ...  the debate over 'not the problem' gun control.

When they tell you it's 'THE NEWS', it probably isn't.  Just diversions.

A child's heart

Teach your children well ...

It's been awhile since we talked in the public forum about teaching character to our children. Recent decades are marked by the absence of critical focus on the issue.

Character development has perhaps not been adequately addressed at the family and community levels for more than a generation, with attendant outcomes including a progressive tendency to violence at the fringes and dishonesty in the marketplace. The nuclear family and inter-connected community have declined in cultural relevance.

New in our culture, many schools, school districts, and even states are now requiring that character education be addressed in the classroom.  Some are stipulating the traits to be taught.  Is their list a good one?

Government has again stepped in to pick up what the community has been unable or perhaps inadequately aware to address. It's a beginning, I suppose. Government does a number of large-scale things well. Is this one that government should handle on our behalf?

What might be the differences be if this is done by family, by community, or by government? Can government serve as an extension of community?

Interestingly, there are variations among nations and communities when it comes to the character of their children. The wealthiest aren't the most gracious, the most hospitable, or the most generous. Or the most noble. Not by an extraordinary margin.

Perhaps there's a lesson here for the current generation of parents.  And churches.  As busy as life is these days, this is just a small step below breathing in terms of importance.  It shapes the future for our child and what kind of person they might become.

Decisions based on evidence

Government serves the rich.  Not exclusively, but primarily. 

Business serves its own interests, the bottom line.  It does whatever is necessary to accomplish the goal.

The rich and their corporate counterparts exercise their not insignificant influence in favor of their continued success, of course.  All at the expense of the working class.

We've been told that reducing tax rates on the wealthiest would encourage the economy, but the evidence is otherwise.

Historical evidence demonstrates the United States has had some of its strongest periods of economic growth while taxes were high. As the graph shows, some of our most robust periods of growth in gross domestic product (GDP) actually occurred while taxes were very high:

During the 1950s the USA experienced some of the sharpest periods of economic growth with the top marginal tax rates for the richest Americans above 90 percent! Marginal tax rates were adjusted upward in the 1990s, again with strong economic growth.

If tax cuts worked, Bush should have had a great economic record.  The tax cuts never trickled down.

It was not a plan.  It was a play for the advantage of wealth.  It worked quite well; the gap between rich and poor in America has widened impressively.

That's the productivity of individuals being converted into wealth for the few.  The working individuals received none of the benefit, and in fact, lost ground financially.

have been disenfranchised by the wealthy, by the corporate, by the political; at least the evidence suggests that to be the case.  What decisions remain to us?

The touch ...

It's a simple world for many folks.  

We did that. 

Without a second thought, Wall Street plunged the world into the Great Recession, and along with the ethanol industry, pushed people across the line to starvation the following year.  The U.S. and U.K are complicit as is the E.U. in activities with similar unmitigated risk and impact.

This is globalization.  We didn't mean to, but we've connected this father in Africa and billions more to the world marketplace.  When our Wall Street marketplace hiccups, prices respond around the world sometimes, and our African friends suffer.  For them, the fluctuating price of a commodity like corn meal can have a significant impact.  They spend perhaps half of their budget on corn meal.  If the price changes, they have little capacity to adjust.

For an actual case example, a family with 6 members has an aggregate income of about $95 per month; $45 is dedicated to corn meal, the staple for everyone here.  When the price rises as it did, they can't afford to eat.  The dilemma leaves the family undernourished for more than a year before they can adjust.  They cannot afford school fees, so the children lose another year. 

In the lowest quintile for income, they were coping; they were balanced however precariously on the good side of the survival line.  Then the developed world reached over and touched their community ever so slightly, and people went hungry and began to die.  The economic recovery for the poor in their part of the world will take perhaps a decade, but you don't recover the years lost.

Now, in the west, we're not terribly afraid of such things, of what the economy will do; annoyed, perhaps, but not afraid.  Perhaps we didn't really want to retire anyway.

Similarly, we're not overly fearful of climate change, government upheaval, political flailing, ...

Westerners are not particularly afraid because they live up in the rarefied atmosphere of the developed world where they're insulated from the worst of such things.  Not that they deserved having it easier than others might, and certainly not that there was any superior worth in their lineage while another fell short.  They're fortunate, extraordinarily blessed.  And protected from minor changes.

Our friends in Africa have no such protection, no such defense.  They're more wary than I of big government, big marketplaces, of big countries with good intentions.  Their experience so far is mixed.

Welcome to the 21st century and the reality of globalization.   Either we'll refine the way we'll do things globally or "bull in a china shop" will take on a whole new meaning.

While many aspects of the global market are beneficial, it's still a moderately risky and volatile process.  Much of the world has benefited from globalization with notable reductions in area poverty, but sub-Saharan Africa has not.  International discussions with such concerns in mind are barely begun.  Theories abound but for the moment, facts remain scant, and everything we touch carries a measure of risk for others.

A Sovereign Fiscal Responsibility Index

The Global Village: Connect World Drives Economic Shift

The World Bank: Data and Research



Meanwhile, dozens of organizations try to fill in the gaps.

World Vision is at the top of my list.