Paying attention

"Did you notice?  You have to look back just a bit.  For nearly 50 years, as our country got richer, our families got richer -- and as our families got richer, our country got richer.

And then about 30 years ago, our country moved in a different direction. New leadership attacked wages. They attacked pensions. They attacked health care. They attacked unions. And now we find ourselves in a very different world from the one our parents and grandparents built. We are now in a world in which the rich skim more off the top in taxes and special deals, and they leave less and less for our schools, for roads and bridges, for medical and scientific research -- less to build a future." Elizabeth Warren

While I don't share Senator Warren's political leanings, she's correct.  Do your own research on changes in wealth, income, inequality, family, etc.  Take a look at The century's deadliest idea.

And yes, J.P.Morgan is one of the players responsible for the economic difficulties that plague
most of the world.  They received billions from government bailout programs so they could
stay in business. They spend millions each year on political contributions (purchasing
legislation) and millions more on lobbying. They have a voice in our government
while the typical citizen (non-billionaire) does not.

Real income, inflation adjusted        

Inequality in the U.S. in both income and total wealth is higher than most developed countries.  The effects of such disproportion are now visible as change in both the economy and in the culture.

What might those effects be?

• A decline of the middle class
• A decline of economic mobility
• Stagnant wages for the bottom 90%
• Persistent poverty in the lowest quintile
• An accelerating gap between the top quintile and all the rest
• Increase in corruption and white collar crime
• Increase in urban crime and incarceration 
• Increase in wage and benefit theft by employers
• Decline in integrity in the financial sector
• Decline in fiscal stability for middle class communities and urban regions
• Economic abuse of the working poor
• Increased impediments to economic advancement by minorities
• Widening quality gap between the top decile and the rest for quality of services available; e.g., education, healthcare, security, representation

So how might we minimize the damage and correct our course forward?

Suffer through it

Rembrandt - St. Paul in Prison

So how long did the apostle Paul spend in prison?  Maybe six years or so.

But why?

Well for one thing, that's how he had the time to write the prison letters; e.g., the letters to the church in Galatia, in Ephesus, in Colossae, in Philippi; he had a lot of time on his hands, so he wrote and it changed the world.

Was it worth it?  In the end, it did cost him his life.  We each have to make our own decision about that, I suppose.

So is there perhaps more purpose to our lives.  Might we find opportunity to serve well while we're in this less than ideal place, less than pleasant job, less than perfect city, country, world????  Of course.



Thanks and a hat tip to OFH for the reminder.

ISIS, atheists, and others

There's always more,
 perhaps infinitely
 more ...
   

It never occurred to me as a kid that the world might be limited to the size of my understanding. We always knew there was more. Perhaps our father taught us that.

Later in life, when I encountered angry atheists, and similarly angry religious folks, I didn't understand the anger. If we think differently, must we be mad about it?

Then I saw that anger tends to spring up and perhaps violence as well between any groups that disagree about anything.  Are we supposed to hate those who are working from some different starting point than we?  Brawling soccer fans come to mind.

A quick look at ideological violence (from a somewhat objective distance):

ISIS (and Al Qaeda before them) have horrified the world with their violent extremes.  The public face of Islam they offer (their extremist version) is inhumanly brutal, and murderous.  It's minimally related to religion and is more decipherable as a narrowed response to the diversity and ambiguity of the world's cultures.  It's much like the Crusades a thousand years ago.  In fact, it's virtually identical, but more about that in a moment.

I spent a couple of years corresponding with ex-Christians.  Most were furiously anti-church, anti-religion, anti-bible, etc.  Each, it appeared, had been badly treated by fundamentalist religion. Demanding and judgemental, criticism and condemnation, and destructive exclusion, these were common in their various personal stories.  They had been expected to listen and agree and comply with the teachings without question.  Christianity makes no provision for such practice.  Of course.

The question for us all, are we supposed to hate each other if we don't agree?  Do we have a choice in the matter of how we respond?

We could just continue killing and hating and justifying it, I suppose.   Did you know that killing someone* is morally neutral, as long as your intentions are good?  Not true, of course, but that was the published and accepted rationale in the early years of so called 'Christian warfare'.

• 400 A.D.  Augustine gave us a narrow definition for a 'just war'.  Later, Thomas Aquinas further explained, it must be a war with good intent, expressing the love of God, and without desire for gain.  Despite their attempts at reason and restraint ...

The definition of holy war went downhill.  Leadership of 'the church' became national authority and corrupt, indistinguishable from secular government and empire.  A couple of interesting doctrinal changes they made:

• 1) Violence in holy war is morally neutral rather than evil, leaders decided. The offered analogy is to a surgeon, who cuts into the body, thus injuring it, in order to make it better and healthier.

• 2) Christ is concerned with the political order of man, and intends for his agents on earth, kings, popes, bishops, to establish on earth a Christian Republic that is a 'single, universal, transcendental state’ ruled by Christ through the magistrates he endowed with authority.**  That was the offered propaganda.

Defending that Christian Republic against God’s enemies, whether foreign infidel or domestic heretics and Jews became a moral imperative.  A Crusade became a holy war fought for the recovery of Christian property or defense of the Church or the Christian people. It could be waged against Turks in Palestine, Muslims in Spain, pagan Slavs in the Baltic, or heretics in southern France, all of whom were enemies or rebels against God.

Christianity makes no provision for such behavior, just the corrupted, propagandized version.

• So, in 1099 A.D.   The First Crusade deploys around 20,000 combatants and captures Jerusalem, massacring its inhabitants, Muslims, Jews, and Christians alike. The Crusaders divide up their new territories, and Godfrey of Bouillon is named “defender of the Holy Sepulcher” and ruler of Jerusalem.

And that brings us to ISIS today.  And to polarized politics, polarized religion and anti-religion, and to conflict in modern life.  From mild to vicious and deadly, conflict persists today for reasonless reasons, killing and hating and justifying it.  It is perhaps the easy response to fear and perceived threat.***

Might God have a different opinion on the subject, and can we understand?  If we have any choice in the matter, that would be information worth pursuing, even if it took a lifetime ... or we can just exist, crippled by fear and anger and hatred as so many apparently do.

Beyond ourselves, we must introduce our children to the good path since they'll face the same world every day.  If we don't teach them well, they'll spend a lifetime fighting their own way out, won't they.  :)




If you have other thoughts on any of this, feel free to offer a critique.
*** Here is some info on why conflict happens and how it works.
**   The Crusades: a history by Jonathan Riley-Smith, Professor of Ecclesiastical History, University of Cambridge
*     Thanks and a hat tip to Dr. Richard Abels, U.S. Naval Academy, Annapolis.

Micro or Macro Society

Where we live affects who we are and how we think.

Case 1:  Bigger is not necessarily better.  The larger the social context in which we live, the greater the risk of isolation and impersonal relationships. Large scale social institutions replace traditional community involvement, and they remove our personal investment in social efforts.  Things that used to be handled by neighbors or by a local committee are now relegated to some impersonal government office and program.

The larger the social context, the more we tend to be observers, untouched by the lives we see and by the things that happen.  We tend to spend our lives walking by on the other side of the street.

Mass society, mass media, mass market, massive mindlessness.

As the mass media ramps up, our personal involvement in the public forum is generally seen as of little value.  You can't really speak louder than the talking heads.  There's no venue where your voice matters much these days unless you're mega-wealthy.

Case 2:  The greater the social and economic inequality, the less voice most individuals will have in their own lives and country.  The problem is not being poor, although that is deadly enough.  The problem is having no voice or power to affect any change for yourself or your family.  Your children are in the forefront of your mind as the priceless treasure they are and for whom you cannot do anything no matter how hard or how long you work to make a difference.  That's the brutality of persistent inequality.

How hard can it be?

So among those things which disengage, demoralize, and demotivate a culture ... we find western norms. Mass media, mass programs, and massive economic inequality, all are common in post-industrial developed economies.

Normal life less than a century ago included deeply connected neighbors, communities, families, towns and villages ...  even states were cohesive and culturally distinguishable...



... but not so much anymore, and now we perhaps understand; that's why we fight being thoughtlessly conformed to the world.*






So how might we adjust our focus to improve our own thinking and for the good of others?


*It's a relatively controversial phenomenon called mass society.  Much useful conversation while the academics debate the processes.

____________________________________

Carl Jung stressed the importance of individual rights in a person's relation to the state and society. He saw that the state was treated as "a quasi-animate personality from whom everything is expected" but that this personality was "only camouflage for those individuals who know how to manipulate it",^[a] and referred to the state as a form of slavery.^[1][2][3][4]  He also thought that the state "swallowed up [people's] religious forces",^[b] and therefore that the state had "taken the place of God" -- making it comparable to a religion in which "state slavery is a form of worship".^[c]  Jung observed that "stage acts of [the] state" are comparable to religious displays: "Brass bands, flags, banners, parades and monster demonstrations are no different in principle from ecclesiastical processions, cannonades and fire to scare off demons".^[d] From Jung's perspective, this replacement of God with the state in a mass society led to the dislocation of the religious drive and resulted in the same fanaticism of the church-states of the Dark Ages -- wherein the more the state is 'worshipped', the more freedom and morality are suppressed;^[5] this ultimately leaves the individual psychically undeveloped with extreme feelings of marginalization.^[6]

Was he right?

Leave me alone

The multi-billion dollar advertising industry is aggressive, persistent, conscienceless, and apparently impervious to reality.

Targeted advertising aims to sexualize our teens and tweens.  It aims to make folks obese and materialistic.  It insists that merchandise is immediately perishable and needs to be replaced regularly. They're somewhat successful, since they're getting paid.  A lot.  But they're lagging behind reality.

They haven't noticed that direct mailings have produced a less favorable response for twelve consecutive years.  The USPS total is approaching 140 billion pieces sent per year, almost half of which will go straight to the trash. They've missed the fact that no one wants to get their marketing emails or robo-calls.  They haven't a clue why TV ads are ignored or skipped.  Catch a customer on a bad day, and they'll report you to the FTC and the Better Business Bureau.

The second most destructive industry in America after the financial corporations, they are the enemy of health, reason, and meaningful life. Fortunately, most in the emerging generation have figured it out.  They're smarter than their parents; annoyance is apparently instructive.

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?