The Majority

This is Nusrat; she's just 8 years old.  Her family is homeless in Mumbai, so she does her studies
on a sidewalk in the city, and she supplements the family income by rag picking.  Her family's
circumstances are not of their choosing; such inequality is done to you. Where she lives,
she is guaranteed a more difficult path, but still, she wants so badly to learn.

                                     Equality is not yet.  Nor is justice. 

We've been unable to locate the family.
Photograph: Arko Datta/Reuters 20070831

Worldwide, about 31 million girls of
primary school age aren't in school,
and about half the world's children
(about 1 billion) live in poverty.

White.  That's the only majority with which I've been affiliated, and we've had our moments.

I was walking on the beach with a staffer from the embassy in western Africa, and I was ruminating aloud on the problems associated with being white.  Meetings are awkward, relationships can be clumsy, and a straight answer is hard to get.  I said something like I wished I was black for such occasions.  My friend fell to the sand, laughing so hard he had difficulty breathing.  "You have no idea," he finally managed to say, laughing and wiping away tears, "how many times I've wished I was white, and for much the same reasons."

Don't get me wrong, I wouldn't survive long in this world as one against whom discrimination is the daily norm. I don't think I could endure it. And I couldn't face a life where my children were guaranteed a more difficult path and where opportunity was bent in favor of some privileged group in which they weren't welcome.

But I would gladly live in a world where justice is real, especially for the children's sake.  Dear Father, especially for their sake.

Wouldn't you? So then, what might we do to make a difference?

Curious what life might be like in the real world?

2013 - Our friends were evicted again.  They were living on lands their tribe had owned and occupied for more than a century when the government sold it out from under them and bulldozed their homes.  They moved further into the tribal region and rebuilt their simple homes.  After a couple of years, the government did it again.  They'd sold the land to some wealthy folks.  Ethiopia did better; our friends there were relocated from their tribal lands but they were provided new apartments at low cost.

2014 - Our friend needed his secondary school transcript so he could go to trade school, but the official wouldn't give it unless he was paid a bribe.  He held out for awhile.  A local pastor, a reputable bishop, went to the office and firmly explained to the agent that he was to provide the transcript, which he finally did. (Kenya)  According to survey, the average Kenyan household pays 17 bribes per month for everything from getting their children a seat in school to getting a building permit.

2016 - A young fellow whom we've known since he was a kid found himself in a bind.  He and his partner had been granted 4 hectares (about 10 acres) of land to develop agriculturally.  After they had invested time and money for equipment and cleared the land, the new government minister rescinded the grant and confiscated their equipment.  They lost a couple of years work and all their savings. It's devastating for the extended family, and moving on is difficult.  (western Africa)

In America, if you're poor, you're probably trapped in it, but it's a different framework.  Minimum wage is about half of what it was intended to be, education is required but difficult to complete if you're poor, and advanced education is likely to indenture you for a decade or more.

Any ideas?

The price of independence

Source: This image was created for netivist.org.

Consider the important issues with which the nation has grappled since the beginning of this presidency and administration. 

• the economy:  When the administration proposed to tackle deteriorating conditions in the economy by an infusion of federal spending, virtually no Democrats found the proposal unacceptable and virtually no Republicans found it acceptable. 
• crooked finance:  When Democratic Senators Dodd and Frank drafted a plan to increase oversight of financial institutions, Republicans were united against, and Democrats for. 
• health care:  Plans to reframe the government's role in health care produced a solid wall of Republicans against an equally solid group of Democrats. 
• budget:  Budget deliberations fell apart because Democrats were almost uniformly lined up in supporting higher tax rates for citizens who earn more than $250,000 annually per couple and Republicans were equally unified against. 
• the court:  The president's nominations for the Supreme Court faced the same polarization. 

In a sane world,  the men and women we elect to Congress would apply their own research and intelligence to the important decisions that confront them.  Some number of Republicans would vote with Democrats and vice versa.  Today, on the issues that matter most, solid blocs face other solid blocs, unmovable, unflinching in their commitment to the party "team." Party loyalty appears to be more important than progress.

Party leaders control important committee assignments, provide or withhold money for reelection campaigns, and advance or block team members' legislative priorities; in our political system, one often pays a significant price for exercising independent judgment despite the fact that it is supposed to work that way.  If you don't toe the line, however, you won't get a place in the game.

Such polarization and inability to negotiate are indicative of a nonfunctional system.  Only the uninformed would continue on that path going nowhere.

Time for change.

Harsh History

Despite the best of intentions ... history is harsh.

It doesn't matter to those who died how good our intentions might have been. It doesn't matter to those left behind how we explained the decisions. When innocents die by our hand, the cost cannot be adequately justified.

There's defense of family, of community, of nation. Then there's war for empire, for ideology, for oil, for control of influence in a region.  National policy can blur ethical boundaries and drag both soldiers and citizens down into the pit.  

Whether you've been on the front line or the back line, whether you've been for or against national decisions, there's a price. Some things that touch your soul inevitably leave a wound.  For some of us, visiting the Vietnam Memorial is a blinding horror, a wound that reopens with each reminder of our brothers who served.  Even if your personal issues have been resolved, the national heart has not, and it weighs heavily on many. National recognition and acknowledgement of wrongdoing remain unaddressed.

Those who served did so nobly and deserve our respect.  Those who sent them, sometimes not so much.  Only a few people remember, Ho Chi Minh was our ally during the war in the Pacific. After the war, he asked America for help many times.  Many times.  The public wasn't told.

The French had abandoned their colony and handed it over to the Japanese early in WWII. After the war, we could have helped, but we chose to back the French colonial return to the region. We ignored the Vietnamese people and their desire to be free of colonial rule. They had declared their independence, deliberately following our example and offering to join us and the other democracies. We should have been friends and supporters. There was no public discussion, just propaganda.. More than two million Vietnamese died in the war that followed, but they needn't have.  

The following are collected at a single site, ordered by timeline.

Vietnamese Declaration of Independence, September 2, 1945

Letter to President Harry Truman, October 17, 1945 

Letter to U.S. Secretary of State, October 18, 1945 

Letter to U.S. Secretary of State, October 22, 1945 

Letter to Secretary of State James Byrnes, November 1, 1945 

Letter to President Truman, November 8, 1945 

Letter to Secretary of State James Byrnes, November 23, 1945 

Telegram to Secretary of State James Byrnes, November 26, 1945 

Letter to U.S. President Truman, January 18, 1946 

Letter to President Harry Truman, February 16, 1946 

To the Governments of China, United States Of America, Union of Socialist Soviet Republics and Great-Britain. February 18, 1946 

Telegram to President Truman, February 28, 1946 

Memorandum of Discussion with Ho Chi Minh, September 12, 1946

Message to the American People, December 23, 1966

Exchange of Letters with U.S. President Lyndon B. Johnson

Exchange of Letters with U.S. President Richard Nixon

Or do your own research at the U.S. National Archive

Remember the draft?  Our young men were required by law to register and serve.  You could have strong convictions against the war in Vietnam, but you could be sent there to kill and die anyway.  If, like most of us back then, you couldn't escape the draft, there were a few opportunities to choose where and how you might serve, but you had to obligate yourself for years and take your chances.

I was adamantly opposed to the war, enlisted to stay ahead of the draft, and I managed to pursue a military career that didn't take me to Vietnam. My willingness to serve was derived from the Cold War, and when the Berlin Wall came down, in my heart I was released.  I'd done my part for my country and satisfied my conscience, however imperfectly.  The Vietnam Veterans Memorial was opened in 1982, and even though I live just an hour away, it took me 30 years to gather the strength to visit there. There are 58,195 names on that wall, but fifty times that number died in the war.

We are still engaged in foreign conflict; civilians and soldiers still die. The greater war effort today is economic, however. Military strength is tied to national economic strength, and power in the world is tied to power in the marketplace. While not openly discussed in the public forum, competition for wealth from other countries has become the goal of national economic policy.  Is this the freedom and justice for which our fathers fought?

Memorial Day is a remembrance, not a celebration.  We remember.  As always, there are deep issues to acknowledge; issues of life and loss, of justice, and of responsibility before God for our actions as a nation.  As veterans from the Vietnam War era tell us, we each bear the burden.

At some point ...

INEQUALITY is growing.  The GAP is increasing - between the rich and poor in every country and between countries.  Some say that inequality doesn’t matter as long as markets are working well.  Others argue that inequality hinders growth, or that only so much is ethically acceptable.

At some point, the death and deprivation must be attributed to more than chance.  Justice calls clearly across the years, echoed by each child denied a life of meaning, by each father unable to provide for his own family, and by each grandfather who weeps as his children's children endure the same poverty into which he was himself born.

They neither choose nor deserve the abuse they endure.  Persistent poverty is done to them.

You can change things; you really can.

Did you know that one child in five lives in poverty in the U.S.?

Did you know that an undernourished child will have health issues for the rest of their life?

Under height for age and under weight for height, signs of an inadequate diet scare the hell out of parents who are doing their best to just keep their family alive.

Change takes time and effort.  It means the whole community needs help and change, investment and assistance.  And leadership.  It means more than just sponsoring a kid for $25 a month.  :)  Do the research and get involved, get your family involved.  World Vision tops my list for effective work in communities both internationally and in the U.S.

Or you could (1) go (2) see (3) for yourself!

Persistent poverty - reference (1) (2) (3) (4)

The American Dream

So how might we have arrived at this difficult juncture?  Note the change over time.

For generations, we've worked to make a place for everyone and to provide a way forward for every family to rise up and achieve the American Dream.  We've talked about it a lot.  What happened?

So when I was a kid, there was a class of folks that didn't really have a place in an otherwise viable culture.  For regular folks, the way forward and up was just a matter of hard work and time.  Savings and equity, skills and promotions, all those built up over time; slow but sure.  For some there at the bottom of the economic ladder, however, the door was closed from the start, and it has become progressively more difficult to escape over the years.

Today, inequality has returned to the horrific levels we last saw almost a century ago.

Is it racial?  Our early awareness of immobility and inequality was racially focused.  Blacks were paid less, hired less, offered less, promoted less, welcomed less.  Despite decades of simplistic explanation, there has always been more to the problem.  "It takes money to make money," we were told, and it turned out to be surprisingly true; if you aren't rich, you aren't welcome.

For the lower economic third of Americans, the collapse of marriage, the rise of divorce, the prevalence of single parenthood, and the increases in child poverty and deprivation, all point to a larger context,  and racial categorization is just one aspect of discrimination.  Disappointing news.  We thought we were fair minded and culturally noble.

The issue is dramatically less pronounced in Sweden, in Australia, even in Canada and Japan.  So what of the American Dream?  It is less accessible, a farther horizon than it used to be, and denied to many for no legitimate reason.  The dissatisfaction expressed by those of the bottom 90% is not acknowledged by the wealthy.  Those top 10% of wealthy Americans, by the way; they're living comfortably in isolation from the real world.  They spend none of their time or energy on things which 99.96% of humanity deal with all day, every day, for a lifetime.  And, they don't understand what they've become.





Time for change, perhaps.

NSA Scandal: Update -- Obama administration issues unaddressed

Why did Snowden go public?  Why didn't he follow the available whistleblower channels up to the Inspector General's office?  Isn't that the path any reasonable employee would have taken?

“Name one whistleblower from the intelligence community whose disclosures led to real change – overturning laws, ending policies – who didn’t face retaliation as a result. The protections just aren’t there,” Snowden told the Guardian this week (22MAY16). 


"The sad reality is that going to the inspector general with evidence of truly serious wrongdoing is often a mistake." -- Edward Snowden

If you want to know why Snowden did it, you have to know the stories of two other men.

The first is Thomas Drake, who blew the whistle on the very same NSA activities 10 years before Snowden did. Drake was a high-ranking NSA official, and he followed the whistleblower rules.  Forwarding his concerns through official channels, he got crushed.

Drake was fired, arrested at dawn by gun-wielding FBI agents, stripped of his security clearance, charged with crimes that could have sent him to prison for the rest of his life, and all but ruined financially and professionally. The only job he could find afterwards was working in an Apple store in suburban Washington. His warnings were valid but were largely ignored.

“The government spent many years trying to break me, and the more I resisted, the nastier they got,” Drake says of the ordeal.

Drake’s story has since been told – and it had an impact on Snowden.  He told an interviewer in 2015, “It’s fair to say that if there hadn’t been a Thomas Drake, there wouldn’t have been an Edward Snowden.”

Next is John Crane, a senior official in the Department of Defense who fought to provide fair treatment for whistleblowers such as Thomas Drake – until Crane himself was forced out of his job and became a whistleblower as well.

Crane's testimony reveals a chapter in the Snowden story – and Crane’s failed battle to protect earlier whistleblowers makes it clear that Snowden had good reasons to go public.

During dozens of hours of interviews, Crane narrated how senior Defense Department officials repeatedly broke the law to persecute Drake. First, he alleged, they revealed Drake’s identity to the Justice Department; then they withheld (and perhaps destroyed) evidence after Drake was indicted; finally, they lied about all this to a federal judge.

Snowden was unaware of the machinations inside the Pentagon, but Drake’s arrest, indictment and persecution promised trouble for any whistleblower.

“Name one whistleblower from the intelligence community whose disclosures led to real change – overturning laws, ending policies – who didn’t face retaliation as a result. The protections just aren’t there,” Snowden told the Guardian this week. “The sad reality of today’s policies is that going to the inspector general with evidence of truly serious wrongdoing is often a mistake. Going to the press involves serious risks, but at least you’ve got a chance.”

According to Thomas Devine, the legal director of the Government Accountability Project (GAP), was that he practised “civil disobedience” rather than “lawful” whistleblowing. (GAP, a non-profit group in Washington, DC, that defends whistleblowers, has represented Snowden, Drake and Crane.)

“None of the lawful whistleblowers who tried to expose the government’s warrantless surveillance – and Drake was far from the only one who tried – had any success,” Devine says. “They came forward and made their charges, but the government just said, ‘They’re lying, they’re paranoid, we’re not doing those things.’ And the whistleblowers couldn’t prove their case because the government had classified all the evidence. Snowden took the evidence with him, so when the government issued its usual denials, he produced document after document showing that they were lying.

The story of Snowden is much more complex and perhaps not worth too much attention, but the critical issue is the unlawful and unwarranted government surveillance of citizens.

The illegal activity continues generally unabated despite the administration's promise to establish oversight and appropriate constraints.