Against the odds

One against many is not uncommon, nor are the results predictable.

"Are you in over your head, son?" The judge smiled as the young lawyer answered, "Absolutely." ~The Rainmaker -- Danny Glover, Matt Damon, 1997

One against many is not uncommon, nor are the results predictable.

'Pick your battles', we're told.  Does that mean pick the ones where the odds are in our favor?  Or perhaps it means we should choose the important ones; the ones where the issue is life-significant.

Should we battle over which tv show to watch?  Or perhaps it would be more appropriate to invest our personal efforts in serving well, ethically well, good-conscience well for the sake of others.

It's sometimes difficult to see clearly what has perhaps been obscured by time and competing concerns.  Sometimes, important issues finally emerge, and you see that you can do something.

So you decide.  You're going at risk, but this is important enough to justify action.  You've picked your battle.  Now, how do you go forward?

Ideally, you'll graciously unveil the problem (and a reasonable solution), and others will immediately agree and change.  More likely, you may stand alone against the inertia of things as they are; most folks dislike change and the associated effort.

It was like that with slavery.  Pro-slavery advocates claimed that enslaved Africans were lesser human beings who benefited from their bondage.  In England, William Wilberforce and others campaigned for years against the slave trade.  They won in 1833.  In America, the abolitionist John Brown led a violent insurrection in 1859 that got him tried for treason and hung.  He's credited with triggering the Civil War.  Brown's actions prior to the Civil War as an abolitionist, and the tactics he chose, still make him a controversial figure today. He is sometimes memorialized as a heroic martyr and a visionary and sometimes vilified as a madman and a terrorist. Historians are divided on whether it is accurate to refer to Brown as "America's first domestic terrorist".

Today, economic inequality is a worldwide epidemic brought to us by the business world.  The by-products -- social and racial discrimination, constrained opportunity, and class oppression, all are increasing rapidly in both developed and developing countries.  Occupy Wall Street, the Arab Spring, and protests in Ferguson all point to the same inequity.  While some recognize that all are created equal, not all are treated equally.  

So, is the issue of equality big enough, life-significant enough to warrant our involvement?  Or to at least have a clear opinion?

You might also appreciate:  The GAP or Poverty is a Weapon of Mass Destruction

Fighting Persistent Discrimination

In the beginning, conquerors just killed or drove out the inhabitants of the land.  They justified their behavior, saying the natives were lesser creatures, sub-human, and owed no particular consideration.  Humanity has improved somewhat.

Social change through the centuries ...

slaughter

 slavery and indenture

  segregation and violent separation

   social and class isolation, discrimination, regulatory exclusion
     economic inequality and immobility

One common element remains unchanged through it all; the belief that 'they' are less worthy, somehow.  Such thinking persists across the centuries and continues today to produce new problems for 'them'.  The 'upper' person looks at the 'lower' and says things like, "they don't deserve," or, "not my problem."   The trigger might be race or ethnicity, economic status, or even manner of dress.  

Such thinking gives us 'shopping while black' and QOL policing practices, racial profiling and violent response problems, all of which are deeply troubling.  It goes on to provoke crime and gang cultures, rebellions against inequality and today's thinly veiled oppression. 

There's much more underlying criminal activity, of course, but the science is established.  Inequality and discrimination provoke protest, resistance, and violence.  Such was the root of the French revolution and dozens more in the 18th century.  It was the root of the women's rights movement,  the civil rights movements, and modern feminism.  There's more happening even now.  

So, either ...
 there are some who are 'above' others by virtue of race or culture or status ...
  those 'above' deserve greater freedom, power, wealth, opportunity ...
   their children deserve better food and care, better education and jobs and pay ...
Or ...
 all are indeed created equal ...
  all are equally deserving of respect, of opportunity, of a place ...

We can't have it both ways.  Either we will serve ourselves at the expense of others, or we will accept and make a place for others and treat them like we treat ourselves.


Economic inequality (the GAP) is today's most visible expression of that which plagues humankind.  It too can be conquered.

The GAP.   It's only one piece of the puzzle, but it needs to be acknowledged, understood, and addressed.

Monday, January 18, Martin Luther King, Jr. Day, 2016

Nobel Prize-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz has spent a career thinking about how to address income inequality. One major reason: Dr. Martin Luther King.   Stiglitz says King saw the struggle for social justice as a battle not just against racial segregation and discrimination, but also as one for greater economic equality and justice for all Americans. 

In a recent book, Stiglitz examines the causes and consequences of an unequal society and offers solutions for what we can do about it. For this Martin Luther King Day, a conversation with Joseph Stiglitz on “The Great Divide” in America.  ~ on NPR Today

Ethanol

... and food for the table

In 2015, the U.S. used about 5 billion bushels of corn to produce over 13 billion gallons of ethanol fuel. 

The grain required to fill a 25-gallon gas tank with ethanol just once can feed one person for a year, so the amount of corn used to make that 13 billion gallons of ethanol will not feed the almost 500 million people that it might have served. That is more than the population of North America.

Seventy percent of all corn imports worldwide come from the U.S.

Food price spikes affect the poor immediately.  In the run up to 2007, the global price of corn doubled as a result of an explosion in ethanol production in the U.S. coupled with the Great Recession.  In eastern Africa alone, 400,000 died as a result according to the World Health Organization.  

Competition in the marketplace is troublesome, sometimes.  Because corn is the most common animal feed and has many other uses in the food industry, the price of milk, cheese, eggs, meat, corn-based sweeteners and cereals increased as well.  World grain reserves dwindled to less than two months, the lowest level in over 30 years.

Globalization is more complicated than we expected; it's not going to be easy to avoid doing harm.

Persecution is ancient history (NC-17)

... and persecution continues today.  It spreads broadly, and note the persecution of Christians and Shiites by ISIS.  Adults and children have been abducted, raped, beheaded, crucified, and worse because they didn't profess the right religion.  

The Obama administration has formally recognized the genocide.  

(CNN)  Secretary of State John Kerry said on April 15th that the United States has determined ISIS' action against the Yazidis and other minority groups in Iraq and Syria constitutes genocide.  "My purpose here today is to assert in my judgment, (ISIS) is responsible for genocide against groups in areas under its control including Yazidis, Christians and Shiite Muslims," he said, during a news conference at the State Department.

Kerry said that in 2014, ISIS trapped Yazidis, killed them, enslaved thousands of Yazidi women and girls, "selling them at auction, raping them at will and destroying the communities in which they had lived for countless generations," executed Christians "solely for their faith" and also "forced Christian women and girls into slavery."

'Hundreds' of Yazidi women killing themselves in ISIS captivity

ISIS 'forced pregnant Yazidi women to have abortions'

Persecution in practice is an extraordinary wickedness that permeates today's world.  It must not be confused with simple crime or conflict. It is inhumanly perverse and requires an appropriate response.  

A woman's beauty

There is a singular feature that men notice in a woman.

Although the curves get a lot of attention in the media and perhaps in juvenile conversation as well, there's more. There are eyes and ankles, and everything in between, all part of the picture and scoring on the scale of visual beauty.  Surprisingly, a man won't fall in love if that is all there is, even if she's a 10.

But he might fall in love if he sees that one feature that every man admires, ... and that's backbone.

She may or may not be a classic or modern beauty, a runway beauty, or a high school 'most beautiful', but if there's depth to her character, if there's courage of conviction, if there's substance to her as a person, he's impressed.  And maybe even stunned.  So much time and effort is spent on appearance and perhaps not so much on who they are, what they value, what they're willing to tackle in order to live up to their principles.

One of the more stunning young ladies I know has that quality.  She's pretty, wonderfully engaging and open, smart; okay, she's really attractive, but I don't think she knows or cares much.  What you notice when you talk with her is that she's a person of substance.  She's fought her way through school and college and graduate school, and she's on her way to Africa with the Peace Corps for two years.  She's scared, but she's going.  She wants to do something that makes a difference.  She's smart enough and has the credentials for big business and commensurate salary, but she wants substance and meaning in her life,  She's off on her adventure today.  I'm so impressed and almost jealous.  Only almost, because the next two years aren't going to be easy.    She's off to see the real world, knowing that everything she holds dear will be challenged, and she will be radically changed by her experience.

I'd tell my daughter's story which is similar, but I'm understandably prejudiced.  She was a talented ballerina, a comfortable scholar all the way through graduate school, and gorgeous, of course.  She also picked a path for her life where she could attend to things that mattered.  I remember her telling me, "I'm going to pour out my life on something, it might as well be something that makes a difference."

Crossing paths with such a person is refreshingly uplifting, encouraging in so many ways,

Women of substance, the ones who are genuinely admired, the ones who are truly beautiful people, they probably won't show up in Hollywood or on reality shows.  They live in a real world that is far above and beyond such things.  Of course.





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Memory Banda’s life took a divergent path from her sister’s. When her sister reached puberty, she was sent to a traditional “initiation camp” that teaches girls “how to sexually please a man.” She got pregnant there - at age 11.  Banda, however, refused to go. Instead, she organized others and asked her community's leader to issue a bylaw that no girl should be forced to marry before turning 18. She pushed on to the national level … with incredible results.

Reinforce for strength

This is the fun part of being a genuine person.  We build our own identity and character over a lifetime.


Self-construction starts with ideas and concepts we get during our formative years, usually from parents and others.  Those are templates and perhaps a foundation upon which we will build.

Every element of personality,

identity, and character must

be built up and prepared

for the battle to come,

or it will fail at the

critical moment

of specific

need.

Morals, ethics, theology, philosophy, and worldview before age twelve or so are usually simple and comfortable.  If left unrefined, they'll settle in as part of who we are but in a perhaps insubstantial way.

That can be a problem when real life intrudes.  If we don't have the depth and strength we need, we can do harm to ourselves and others when the day comes.

Deal with it!  One way is a deliberate disassembly, validation, and reassembly of each aspect of our identity and character, of every value we hold.  Opportunities for such honesty aren't offered by quiet times and pointless days, however.

Honesty hears a differing opinion without anger, a contradictory analysis without judgement, an alternative solution without criticism, and in so doing you have opportunity to know what you believe and why.  Often, we'll learn more from folks who don't think like we do, those who see things differently.

(If you can't have a comfortable discussion as an outsider, you don't know why you endorse the values you hold.  An angry response in such a conversation comes from insecurity and fear, does it not?)

Reinforce for strength.  Study to know and live the truth, and in so doing, you'll find you need not be ashamed, rightly handling truth as it is offered.