How Can We Keep Going?

I am beginning to wonder how we can possibly keep going in this world.  Whether anything is worth it.  Whether it makes any sense to care anymore.  Watching a Simon and Garfunkle special on PBS recently reminded me of how messed up the world was back in the 1960s, the decade in which I came of age.  It really was.  The insanity of Vietnam.  The insanity of racial discrimination.  So many other insanities.  Opposition to the movement for the rights of migrant workers.  Opposition to the rights of women.  Old white men in Washington making insane decisions and a majority of American voters electing the deeply flawed Richard Nixon president in a year we remember as the epitome of the Sixties, the decade that was supposed to change everything.  Change everything?  Hardly.  We young people wanted to change the world, but the country elected Richard Nixon.  We should have known then that change wasn't going to happen.  It took a lot longer than that for us to figure it out.

And today?  Not significantly better.  An insane war in Afghanistan and nearly a billion dollars spent to build a fortress that masquerades as an embassy in Baghdad, a city we have supposedly liberated and pacified.  Or at least that's what they tell us our illegal war of aggression against Iraq accomplished.  Mad politicians on the right lying to the people by telling them government is their enemy when in fact the wealthy individuals and corporations that fund those politicians’ campaigns are the people’s real enemies.  Mad politicians that the corporate media treat as legitimate alternatives for the American voter denying the science of global warming, denying the equal rights of gay and lesbian people, denying the rights of women to make decisions about their own bodies.  Major politicians on the right denying the science of evolution because of an utterly untenable biblical literalism.  And the Democrats?  Not significantly better.  A president who promised change but who is so timid and/or so naïve that he thinks he can get cooperation out of congressional Republicans who only want to destroy him.  Who pursues military policies that are indistinguishable from those of the war criminal George W. Bush.  After all, he retained Bush’s Secretary of Defense.  We should have known. 

One out of six Americans living in poverty—and that with an artificially low definition of poverty adopted to keep the statistics from looking as bad as things really are.  Unemployment actually so much worse than the official statistics indicate.  The social safety net, such as it ever was, being shredded so that rich people don’t have to pay anything close to a fair share of the cost maintaining a decent society.  A governor who is running for President claiming a job creation miracle in his state when the truth is that almost all of the jobs he talks about don’t pay a living wage and much of what was accomplished was done with federal stimulus dollars that this governor says should never have been spent and never will be spent again if he has anything to say about it. (And that same governor saying with a straight face that he will always be for life when as of this writing he has presided over 234 executions during his time as governor.)

Churches endorsing American militarism.  No politician of any note who is even raising a question about why we spend nearly as much on the military as the rest of the world combined.  An increasing militarization of American life.  A culture that calls everyone who wears an American military uniform a hero just because he or she wears that uniform, thereby making it all the more difficult to question the way the powers use the military.  Violent popular entertainment in the movies and video games that makes violence seem normative and redemptive.  A culture in which the one sure thing a president can do to drive up his favorability ratings is to go to war.  A culture in which even supposedly progressive Christian declarations like the Phoenix Affirmations, the 8 Points of the Center for Progressive Christianity, and my own denomination’s declaration on being a “just peace church” that refuse to claim nonviolence as a core value.

Then there’s the environmental degradation to which we all contribute.  And the politicians who oppose meaningful environmental regulation because it might cost their wealthy patrons at whose beck and call they serve some money.  They lie to the people saying that environmental regulation will cost jobs, and even our Democratic President gives in.  And all the while the truth is that there is great potential for job creation and economic renewal in creating and building the technologies of environmental cleanup and clean energy.

And so much more madness.  So much every day that you can’t even keep track of it.  So much that it overwhelms.  So much that sometimes I cry out Why aren’t we out in the streets in our tens of millions demanding some sanity?  But I’m not out in the street demanding some sanity, so who am I to blame others?  It seems impossible not to feel hopeless.  Not to feel that there is truly nothing that can be done.  The money is too strong.  The anti-intellecttualism and political ignorance and naiveté of the American people are too strong.

Yes, there are some voices of reason and decency.  Bernie Sanders.  Jim Hightower.  Keith Olbermann.  Thom Hartmann.  Bill Moyers.  Walter Wink.  John Dominic Crossan.  You may know of others.  Some people speak the truth, but not many.  Not enough, but some.  Most of the time they’re whistling into the wind.  Few hear.  Fewer listen.  Perhaps their true significance is that when history looks back on these times they will see that not everyone was mad.  Some saw clearly.  Not many, but some.
And yes, some things have gotten better.  Racial discrimination is now illegal everywhere in our country, although of course that doesn't mean it is no longer part of our reality.  Many people are more environmentally aware than we used to be.  Some states, not many but a few, recognize the equal rights and dignity of same gender couples by allowing them to marry, and more states have included sexual orientation and perhaps even gender identity in their anti-discrimination laws.  Some things have gotten better, but not enough things have gotten enough better to counter all of the glaring shortcomings in our reality today.

Yes, I know that the picture of American reality today that I paint is bleak.  It’s discouraging.  It’s even depressing.  I don’t see, however, how anyone can demonstrate that anything I have said about our current reality is untrue.  There’s a saying that’s been going around for years.  I’ve seen it on bumper stickers and elsewhere.  It’s become a bit trite, but it’s still true.  "If you aren’t completely appalled you haven’t been paying attention."  Our current reality simply is that bleak.

And it is so hard to keep going.  It is so hard to keep preaching the Gospel.  It is so hard to keep putting up blog posts that so few people read.  To write another book when so pitifully few have read the first one.  It all seems so pointless.  Some days I am tempted to stop paying attention, to retreat into a little world of work, family, and personal acquaintances.  Sometimes I get why the followers of monastic spiritual paths withdraw from the world.  Sometimes I get it why people in the Soviet Union, with which I have considerable familiarity, considered matters of state to be none of their business since they had no way to influence them.  Sometimes I try to be satisfied going small, caring only about those who cross my path in life immediately, in person. 

I try to be satisfied with small concerns, but so far I haven’t managed it.  You see, there’s a problem with narrowing the realm of our concern to those in our immediate sphere.  The problem is God.  The problem is God, and God can be very annoying because God won’t let us give up on the world, as messed up as it is and as hopeless as it seems.  God has this crazy idea that we’re all prophets.  Moses said “would that all of God’s people were prophets.”  Bruce Chilton tells us that the Hebrew original that is translated that way actually means that all of God’s people are prophets.  At the very least we have to admit that God calls all of us to be prophets.

OK, we’re all called to be prophets; but what is a prophet?  The word prophet is so often taken to mean someone who can foretell the future.  That, however, is not what prophet means in the Bible.  Yes, the prophets of ancient Israel talked about what would happen if the rulers of the Hebrew kingdoms of their time didn’t hear and heed the word of God; but predicting the future wasn’t what they were primarily about.  What they were primarily about was proclaiming that word of God and demanding that the rulers of their time hear and heed it.  Mostly what the prophets of ancient Israel did was demand justice from the rulers, demand that the ruling elites of their societies treat the poor and the marginalized justly.  Demand that those with the means to do so take care of those who are in need.  Their usual way of putting it was to demand justice for the widow, the orphan, and the alien in their midst.  Those were the most vulnerable people in those societies, and they were the ones for whom the prophets demanded justice.

Jesus was a prophet.  Mostly what he was about as an historical matter was reviving the ancient Hebrew prophetic tradition that had gotten displaced by the Pharisees’ focus on purity and sacrificial worship as the way of faith.  He too demanded justice, meaning by justice what the ancient prophets had meant.  Not due process.  Not that all get what they deserve in the eyes of the world.  Rather, that everyone receive enough to live on.  That everyone be treated as a beloved child of God.  To that ancient Hebrew prophetic message Jesus added a call to radical nonviolence.  To the love of enemies.  To active, creative, assertive but always nonviolent resistance to evil. 

God calls us all to be prophets, and the prophetic message that God calls us to proclaim is the prophetic message of Jesus.  Not to proclaim that Jesus is some sort of magic get out of jail free card with regard to sin, although there is a sense in which he is that.  That message is not, however, what Jesus proclaimed, the Gospel of John seemingly at least to the contrary notwithstanding.  He proclaimed the Kingdom of God.  That was the phrase he used to sum up the prophetic message he came to deliver.  There are many aspects of the Kingdom, but chief among them are distributive justice and nonviolence.  Those things God calls us to proclaim just as Jesus did.

And we’d so much rather not.  It seems so pointless.  The message seems to have so little effect in the world.  It’s so hard to find ways to speak that can reach anyone.  Beyond that, being a prophet is dangerous.  Jesus called Jerusalem the city that kills the prophets, and it’s not just Jerusalem.  It’s the world, all of it.  Even when the world doesn’t kill a prophet it can turn on the prophet with a vengeance.  Certainly it is true in our country that nothing will get you in trouble faster than speaking the truth.  In my line of work we hear time and time again of pastors who lost their pulpits because they spoke the truth about justice and peace more than their congregations could stand.  No politician can speak the truth about how America acts in the world or about the gross inadequacy of our social security programs and have much of a hope of reelection.  No politician can call on voters to be more concerned with what is good for the poor than with what is good for themselves and have much of a hope of reelection.  Being a prophet seems mostly like a really good way to become very unpopular at best and dead at worst.  In my line of work it can be a really good way to get yourself fired.

We want to do what the biblical prophets so often did when they discerned a call from God.  We want to say no.  We want to board a ship for Tarshish as we flee a call to go to Nineveh, that great city.  But when we do we’ve got the same problem Jonah had.  We’ve got God, and God doesn’t give up as easily as we do.  Jonah ended up on a beach in a pool of whale vomit.  That’s unlikely to happen to us, at least not literally.  Still, we know what God wants.  God wants us to go to Nineveh.  God wants us to be prophets, and God isn’t going to stop calling us to be prophets.

So what are we to do?  Is there in all of these considerations an answer to the question the title of this essay poses, the question of how we can keep going?  I think that there is, although it’s not an easy answer.  The answer is that for all of our call to be prophets it isn’t up to us to transform the world.  At least, it isn’t up to us to transform the world all by ourselves.  A prophet realizes that God calls us to the work of transformation, but the prophet also knows that the world belongs to God not to us.  Our call is to work, yes; but we do not work alone.  We are God’s partners in the work of transformation, and that partnership makes all the difference.  It makes all the difference because we can work while leaving outcomes to God, something that can substantially reduce our stress and frustration..  It makes all the difference because when we feel hopeless, when we feel helpless, when we start to burn out we can turn to God in prayer and worship and find renewal.  We can find strength.  We can find hope in God when we can find none in the world.  So how can we keep going?  The answer is the same as the problem we have when we want to quit.  The problem is God, and the answer is God.  That’s how we can keep going.  It’s the only possible answer.  There is no answer to be found in the world, except to the extent that we can find God in the world.  God is the answer.  God is how we can keep going.

On the Legal System and Capital Punishment

Yesterday I posted an essay on Christianity and capital punishment.  That post is written from my perspective as a Christian, indeed as a professional Christian, one trained and ordained in the Christian ministry.  But for many years before I became an ordained Christian pastor I was a lawyer.  I didn't practice criminal law, but I tried many civil cases and experienced the workings of the American judicial system from the inside in the context of personal injury and professional liability cases.  I certainly don't have as much experience trying cases to juries as many lawyers do, but I have a lot of such experience.  Putting aside for the moment, and for purposes of argument only, the foundational moral objection to capital punishment that I expressed in yesterday's post, today I want to explain how I do not see how anyone with any experience at all with the American legal system can support capital punishment.  I do not see how anyone with any experience at all with the American legal system can support capital punishment because the undeniable truth is that courts get it wrong.

Two fundamental truths about the legal system lead to the conclusion that courts get it wrong and cannot guarantee infallible results.  The first is that in a trial the court's primary concern is not with a proper outcome, that is, not with a verdict that accurately reflects what actually happened in the matter before the court.  The court's concern is with the proper functioning of the system, not with the result.  The legal system defines justice not as a result that reflects what actually happened but as a result, whatever it may be, arrived at through the proper functioning of the legal system.  In the legal system justice isn't about guilt or innocence.  It is about due process.  The court's concern is that the procedures established for the conduct of cases be correctly understood and applied.  The court's concern is that the parties, in a criminal case the defendant in particular, receive due process.  Due process doesn't mean that any particular result be reached.  It means that the defendants right established by law are respected.  It means that the law is properly interpreted and applied.  This concern once lead some of the conservative justices on the US Supreme Court to say that factual innocence is not a reason to grant habeas corpus relief to a defendant sentenced to death.  Some justices said that the execution of an innocent person is a constitutionally unacceptable result, but the statement by the conservatives that the court's concern is not innocence or guilt but the proper working of the system reflects, albeit perhaps in extreme form, a fundamental truth about our legal system.  In that system justice is not primarily about factual truth.  It is about process.  Thus, it is quite possible for the system to accept the execution of an innocent person, as the system in Georgia may have done last night.  It's concern is not primarily guilt or innocence in any objective sense.  It is the proper functioning of the system.  The legal system in fact defines justice as the proper working of the system.

The second truth about the legal system that results in results that are simply wrong is that juries get it wrong.  They don't always get it wrong.  They may not get it wrong most of the time, but they get it wrong often enough.  I was once told by a very experienced trial lawyer that you can't call yourself a real trial lawyer until you've won a case you should have lost and lost a case you should have won.  Anyone who has tried more than a handful of cases has had that experience of winning cases that should have been lost and losing cases that should have been won.  I certainly have, especially perhaps in my case the experience of losing cases I should have won.  Juries get it wrong.  They misunderstand the evidence.  They misunderstand the law that the judge gives them.  They are swayed by emotional arguments.  They are swayed by passion and prejudice.  This is not particularly to condemn the citizens who serve on juries or to say that they are flawed human beings.  It is only to say that they are human beings.  They are human beings who are trained neither in the law nor in the psychological dynamics at work whenever another human being gives testimony in court.  I often had the sense that jurors--and sometimes judges and attorneys for that matter--check their common sense at the courthouse door.  The atmosphere of a trial is so artificial and so foreign to most jurors that it is easy to start thinking and evaluating people and facts in ways that are different from the way we think and evaluate matters in everyday life.  For all of these reasons, and I suppose for many others besides, jurors get it wrong.  I am convinced that any trial lawyer who claims that juries always get it right is simply deluding herself.

In the kinds of cases I tried the court's lack of concern with determining what actually happened in a case and the juries getting it wrong had no truly catastrophic consequences.  Most of those cases were only about money, and none of them was about life and death.  Perhaps a defendant had to pay money he shouldn't have had to pay; but in most of my cases that meant an insurance company had to pay, so the result was hardly disastrous.  Maybe an injured person didn't get money she was entitled to, but still we're only talking about money.  We were never talking about a person losing his or her life.

In capital cases of course we are talking precisely about a person losing his or her life.  In that context the fact that juries get it wrong even when all of the proper legal procedures are followed is simply intolerable.  An execution can't be undone.  No one other than perhaps a conservative judicial extremist like the conservatives on the US Supreme Court, can accept the execution of an innocent person even if they can accept the execution of an guilty one.  Our legal system, no legal system, can guarantee that it's results are always correct.  I therefore fail to see how our legal system, how any legal system, can tolerate capital punishment.

Most Americans say murderers should be executed, but most Americans are unaware of the difficulties and uncertainties involved in every case of trying to determine if a defendant is truly a murderer or not.  They are unaware of the nature of the legal system and its concern with process over substance.  Those of us who have worked in the legal system, even if we've never come close to a capital case, know what the public does not know.  In the legal system there simply is no absolute safeguard against wrong results.

There's a famous story about how new law school students so often come to law school saying they are going to go out into the world and work for justice and how some crusty old law professor will say to them:  This is a law school.  If you want justice, go to seminary!  Some of us did.  That crusty old professor's statement may be a bit extreme, but it is not fundamentally untrue.  The legal system is a human institution, and as such it simply cannot promise just, infallible results.  For that reason alone, even if for no other, we simply must stop executing people.

On Christianity and Capital Punishment

There has been a lot of new lately about executions in the United States.  I can't read that news without getting sick to my stomach.  The death penalty is murder by the state.  Capital punishment is morally indefensible.  Period.  I fail to see how any Christian can support it.  The one we call Lord and Savior was executed by the state authorities of his time.  He taught us the way of nonviolence.  He wouldn't even let his followers use violence to prevent his own unjust execution.  He said love your enemies and turn the other cheek, which at the very least means do not repay violence with violence.  Matthew 5:38-39  His great Apostle Paul said do not repay anyone evil for evil and never avenge yourselves.  Romans 12:17, 19  Christianity came to accept capital punishment only after it became the established religion of the Roman Empire.  Accepting capital punishment is one of the many ways in which our faith abandoned its core principles in order to accommodate itself to empire and become powerful in the world.  That our faith accepted capital punishment is something of which we must repent.

So much of the discussion around capital punishment in our country misses the point.  We hear much talk about whether or not a particular prisoner is guilty.  For the Christian it doesn't matter.  Guilty or not every condemned person is a child of God.  That's all that matters.  We hear a lot of talk about the effect of race in capital sentencing.  The statistics prove that our juries are much more likely to condemn a Black man to death than a white one, but that's irrelevant.  Black or white, all people are children of God.  That's all that matters.  We hear a lot of talk about whether it is more expensive to keep a person alive in prison for many years than to execute him.  That's irrelevant.  How can a matter of mere money ever be a consideration in whether or not it is moral to kill someone?  We hear a lot about the deterrent effect of capital punishment.  The statistics prove that it has none, but that's irrelevant.  Every condemned person is a child of God and cannot morally be used as a tool to influence the behavior of others.

There is only one point that is relevant in any discussion of capital punishment.  It's murder.  It's the killing of a human being.  It is the killing of a child of God.  Whatever the victim of our state murder may have done, he or she is still a child of God.  Killing is still wrong.  Killing can never justify more killing.  Capital punishment is immoral.  Capital punishment is a sin committed by the society that sanctions it and the people who carry it out.  All of those other considerations that get discussed at such length in the little public debate that takes place over capital punishment in our country may be helpful in convincing people who don't oppose all capital punishment on moral grounds to oppose it on other grounds, but all of those considerations are morally irrelevant.  The only thing that's relevant is that capital punishment is murder.  It is immoral.  Period.

Every other supposedly advanced country in the world gets it about capital punishment.  We claim to be the most Christian of nations, and we don't get it.  Our commitment to state murder belies our claim to be Christian.  Capital punishment betrays Christ, the most famous victim of capital punishment.  I fail to see how any Christian can support capital punishment.  May Jesus Christ forgive us that we just don't understand.

Reflections on the Tenth Anniversary of September 11, 2001

Tomorrow we will mark the tenth anniversary of the terror attacks on the United States of September 11, 2001.  That day is, apart from many days during the Civil War, one of the most tragic days in American history.  Those of us who were old enough to be aware will never forget where we were and what we were doing when we first heard, read, or saw what happened.  The film images of the airliners crashing into the towers of the World Trade Center are seared into our memories like few others.  Nearly three thousand people, mostly although not exclusively Americans, died in the explosive events of that day.  September 11, 2001, is a painful wound in the American psyche that will be with us for a long time to come.

The aftermath of September 11 is at least as important as the events of that day themselves.  The political leaders of the United States responded by invading Afghanistan (a nation that at least apparently had some connection to the planning and execution of the September 11 attacks), by starting an illegal war of aggression against Iraq (a nation that had nothing whatsoever to do with the September 11 attacks), by a massive expansion of our country’s security institutions, and by passing an abominable and at least partially unconstitutional piece of legislation called the Patriot Act that attacks America’s core values in a way the terrorists never could.  Far more people have died as a result of the actions the United States took in response to September 11 than died in the attacks of that day.  We are still engaged in warfare ten years later on.  A great many American people responded with an irrational hatred of all Muslims, a hatred some of us are working to overcome but which remains a tragic dynamic in the lives of many peaceful Muslim Americans.  Given the enormity of events that unfolded on September 11 ten years ago, of the massive American military response, and of the assault on Americans’ civil liberties that ensued it is necessary that we consider the meaning of these events.

Tomorrow I will do that in a short sermon that I will give as part of a special worship service marking the ten year anniversary of 9/11.  I don’t usually design worship services around secular events and commemorations, but the coincidence of the tenth anniversary of the September 11 attacks falling on a Sunday led me to do our worship service that day as a September 11 commemorative service.  Here is that sermon.  It expresses my thoughts on the matter as well as I am able to express them.

On the Love of Enemies

A September 11 Meditation

Rev. Tom Sorenson, Pastor

September 11, 2011

Scripture:  Romans 12:20-21; Matthew 5:38-48

On September 11, 2001, extremists who claimed to be acting in the name of Islam but who were actually betraying several core principles of Islam attacked the United States of America.  They brought down the two skyscrapers of the World Trade Center in New York.  They crashed an airplane into the Pentagon in Washington, DC.  Another plane they had hijacked, that they apparently intended to crash into either the Capitol Building or the White House, crashed in Pennsylvania when passengers overpowered the terrorists.  The United States responded with a massive military invasion of Afghanistan, the country whose Islamist government we believed (with some but not solid justification) had harbored the terrorists as they planned and trained for their breathtaking act of terrorism.  The United States then responded further with a massive military invasion of Iraq, a country that had nothing to do with the September 11 terrorists attacks.  Today, ten years later, American troops are still engaged in combat in those two countries, especially in Afghanistan, where we are bogged down in an unwinnable war that has no end in sight.  The United States responded by passing laws and adopting supposed security measures that severely restrict the valued civil liberties of all Americans.

On July 22, 2011, a crazed terrorist set off a bomb outside the office of the Prime Minister in Oslo, the capital of Norway.  A few hours later he opened fire and killed 69 people at a youth camp run by the ruling political party of Norway.  The Norwegian Prime Minister responded by saying that Norway would react to the attack by being more loving and more democratic.  He apparently meant that strengthening the values that the terrorist hated would be the surest way to punish that terrorist.

St. Paul said “If your enemies are hungry, feed them; if they are thirsty, give them something to drink; for by doing this you will heap burning coals on their heads.  Do not be overcome by evil, but overcome evil with good.”  Romans 12:20-21  By saying we would heap burning coals on the heads of our enemies by loving them he surely meant that returning good for evil is the surest way to lead the evildoers to repentance.  Jesus said “Do not resist an evil doer.  But if anyone strikes you on the right cheek, turn the other also; and if anyone wants to sue you and take your coat, give your cloak as well; and if anyone forces you to go one miles, go also the second mile.”  Matthew 5:38-42  He also said “Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you.”  Matthew 5:44  He meant do not resist evil with more evil.  Do not resist evil with violence, but resist evil with creative, assertive measures of nonviolence. 

Our country suffered a terrible wrong on September 11, 2001.  Of that there is no doubt.  Nothing we say here today is intended in any way to excuse what those terrorists did.  They committed a monstrous crime against humanity for which there is no conceivable justification.  That truth is undeniable.  Yet here’s another undeniable truth.  We had no control over what people filled with hate and bad theology did.  We did have, and we do have, control over how we respond to what they do.  And, my friends, we responded very badly to what they did.  We repaid violence with violence.  We repaid hatred with hatred.  We responded to an attack on our way of life by making changes to that way of life through measures like the so-called Patriot Act and in other ways that have diminished our freedom and handed the terrorists a victory they could never win on their own.  Our invasions of two Muslim countries fed the terrorists’ cause of fanning hatred of our country and created more terrorists that it eliminated.

I don’t know if the Prime Minister of Norway is a Christian, but his response to the terrorist attack on his country was far more Christian than was, and is, our response to the terrorist attack on ours.  Yes, the attack on us killed a lot more people than the attack in Norway, but then we’re a much bigger country than Norway.  Jesus calls us to respond to hatred with love.  We didn’t do that.  Jesus calls us to love our enemies.  We don’t do that.  The Church of the Brethren puts out a bumper sticker that reads:  “When Jesus said love your enemies, I think he probably meant don’t kill them.”  It seems such an obvious truth, but it is one we Americans have never learned. 

Today we remember the terrible events of ten years ago.  We remember the pain, the fear, and the anger that we felt.  We remember the lives that were lost, and we grieve with the families whose innocent loved ones died simply because they were in the wrong place at the wrong time.  We remember and give thanks for the countless acts of heroism of that day.  We remember and give thanks especially for the members of the New York City Fire and Police Departments who rushed into those blazing buildings trying to save lives and who lost their lives because they did.  We remember and give thanks for the heroism of the airplane passengers whose bravery prevented another completed attack on another symbol of our nation.  We remember and give thanks for the service of the American men and women who chose to respond to the terrible events of that day by serving in the American military.  The decisions on how to use them were not theirs, and so many of them serve out of a true sense of loyalty to their country. 

As we remember the terrible events of that day we remember the power of forgiveness.  That day so demonstrates the need for forgiveness.  Forgiveness for those whose hearts are so filled with hatred that they would do such terrible things.  Forgiveness for ourselves and our nation for the ways in which our actions contributed to and created not a justification but at least a pretense or a rationalization for that hatred.  Forgiveness for the ways in which we have perpetuated violence in the years since that violent day. 

On that terrible day we suffered an act of extreme violence.  And we responded to that violence with more violence.  Far more people have died in the violent aftermath of 9/11 than died on that dreadful day.  More Americans.  More Iraqis.  More Afghanis.  Our violence has not made us safer.  It has merely perpetuated the hatred that led to those acts of terrorism.  Our great faith tradition teaches that nonviolence is God’s way and must be our way.  God’s dream is of that day when we shall beat our swords into plowshares and our spears into pruning hooks, when nation shall not lift up arms against nation, and we shall learn war no more.  If that day is ever to come someone must break the cycle of violence.  Someone must respond to hatred with love.

We are the most powerful nation on earth by far, and that means that we are the ones who must break the cycle of violence.  We can’t leave it up to others.  So today let us remember.  Let us grieve.  Let us celebrate the heroes of that day.  But mostly let us learn.  Let us learn that violence only begets more violence.  Let us at long last learn the lesson that Jesus taught so long ago.  Love your enemies.  It is the only way to peace.  Amen.

Why I Probably Will Not Vote for Barack Obama in 2012

Many of my friends were very enthusiastic supporters of Barack Obama during the 2008 Presidential election.  Although I never thought he was as progressive as some of them did, I too was inspired by his soaring rhetoric, his promise of change, and the prospect of electing a man who self-identifies as African-American as President.  Some of my friends have already announced their intention to support President Obama for reelection in 2012.  I, however, am struggling mightily with the question of whether I will be able to bring myself to vote for him in 2012.  Because I respect my friends who will support the President for reelection, and because I respect even if I do not share their reasons for doing so, I want to state here as simply and plainly as I can why I probably will not vote for Barack Obama again.

The principal reason why I will not vote for Barack Obama again is thatI have become more committed than I have ever been to Jesus Christ’s message of nonviolence.  In recent times I have become more convinced than ever that nonviolence is the only legitimate way of the Christian.  I do not judge those who have reached other conclusions on this issue.  Judgment is not mine to render; but I know that Jesus taught and lived nonviolence, and I claim to be a follower of Jesus.  If we are truly to be his followers, I believe, we too must teach and live nonviolence.  Beyond that, I am convinced that a commitment to nonviolence must be a central part of any effort to save the earth from the destruction humans so inflict upon it.  A commitment to environmental justice and responsibility is also required; but we humans have the means to destroy the earth not only gradually through overpopulation and environmental degradation but suddenly through our weapons of war.  I have become convinced that only a radical commitment to nonviolence can save us from ourselves.  I have also become convinced that only a commitment to nonviolence by us Americans can save the rest of the world from American imperialism. 

Barack Obama has no commitment to nonviolence whatsoever.  More than two and a half years into his presidency we still have troops in Iraq.  He has conducted a “surge” of military forces in Afghanistan that is indistinguishable from the policy of former President George W. Bush in Iraq, Bush being the President whose policies we elected Obama to change.  President Obama has resorted to the use of violence in Libya.  Particularly hard for me to swallow is the President’s order to our military to murder Osama bin Ladn rather than capture him and bring him to trial.  I do not see how a true disciple of the nonviolence of Jesus Christ can vote for any politician who so readily resorts to violence, and I cannot see how I can do so with a clear conscience.

Beyond that, not only is President Obama not an advocate of nonviolence or even of a more restrained and defensive use of military force, he is as much a proponent of American exceptionalism as George W. Bush ever was.  His speeches ring with the echoes of American exceptionalism, the notion that what America does is right because it is America that does it.  There is no other possible justification for the violation of international law and the act of murder involved in the operation Obama ordered against bin Ladn.  The President is perfectly happy to perpetuate and perhaps even to increase America’s self-appointed status as policeman to the world.  As nearly as I can tell, when it comes to foreign and military policy there is no significant difference between Barack Obama and George W. Bush.

I also have profound issues with the way President Obama has handled domestic matters.  The things that he touts as great accomplishments are anything but great accomplishments.  The prime example is the health care reform law that Congress passed and President Obama signed last year.  That “reform” of our health care delivery system consists primarily of Republican ideas.  Some of them come from Richard Nixon from the 1960s and the 1970s.  Some of them come from Mitt Romney when he was Governor of Massachusetts.  Their primary effect is to deliver millions of new victims into the grasp of the for-profit health insurance companies.  Yes, there is some good in that law.  Insurance companies will be somewhat less able to deny insurance to applicants on the basis of preexisting conditions.  Still, the law is a lukewarm reform at best.  It is obvious and undeniable to any impartial observer that the only health care delivery system that makes any sense in a modern nation that truly cares about all of its people is a single payer, government-run system that covers everyone without exception and that eliminates the profit motive from the provision of health care benefits.  President Obama gave up on that, the only sensible option, before the battle over health care was even joined against the representatives of the private insurance industry who control Congress.  The joke of the Obama health care reform, that he touts as his major domestic achievement will do little or nothing to change the reality that the US spends more on health care than any other nation but gets health care outcomes in some areas no better than those of impoverished, underdeveloped countries.  It is another reason why I probably will not vote for him again.

The way President Obama handled the health care reform issue is characteristic of how he has approached the political process in Washington, D.C., generally, and that approach is another reason why I probably will not vote for him again.  He has put “bipartisanship” above principle at every turn.  He has tried to work in a bipartisan manner with the Congressional Republicans, apparently oblivious to the fact that the Congressional Republicans have no interest in working in a bipartisan manner with him at all.  His devotion to bipartisanship with people whose only goal is to destroy him and his presidency has produced compromise after compromise that is really nothing but Obama and the Congressional Democrats caving in to the demands of the Republicans, demands which work to the benefit of the wealthy not of the people in every instance.  The best example is the extension of the Bush tax cuts for the wealthiest Americans.  Those tax cuts are perhaps the worst piece of domestic legislation in recent history.  They are largely responsible for our huge budget deficits.  They are a primary engine of the massive transfer of wealth from the middle class to the rich that has been going on in America since the disastrous presidency of Ronald Reagan.  Candidate Obama promised to repeal them or at least to let them expire, but when, as President, he was faced with a refusal by the Republicans even to compromise on them, much less repeal them, he caved; and those disastrous tax cuts remain law.  Yes, there is a new expiration date; but we have no reason to believe that the Republicans will be any more reasonable and decent with regard to them down the line than they are now, and we have every reason to believe that Obama and the Democrats will cave in on them again in the future.  President Obama’s muddle-headed commitment to bipartisanship with the Republicans has produced nothing good for the American people, and it has made him weak and ineffective. 

It is a legitimate question whether President Obama would have gotten anything more, and better, done if he had stood up for Democratic principles and the American people and refused to cave in to the destructive demands of the Republicans.  It seems probable that he would not have, but that fact does not, in my opinion, justify his repeated giving in to the Republicans.  The Republican Party has swung so far to the right that its policies truly threaten to destroy our country.  If we are ever again to be (assuming that we ever were, which may be assuming facts not in evidence) a country that truly cares for what matters—for people, for justice, for peace, for the environment—the Republicans simply must be not just defeated but must be routed at every level of government; but they must be routed by candidates who stand for what’s right, not candidates like President Obama who are functionally if not ideologically Republican light.  That is never going to happen as long as the American people continue to see the Republicans as a legitimate political alternative.  It is never going to happen as long as progressive Americans continue to vote for conservative and ineffective Democrats out of fear of the Republicans, however justified that fear may be.  President Obama could have shown the Republicans up for the tools of the wealthy and the corporate special interests that they truly are by refusing to cave in to their outrageous demands.  He could have made it the mission of his presidency to lay bare the hypocrisy and the lies of the Republicans so that the American people might wake up and stop voting for them.  He could have made himself a true progressive alternative.  He chose not to, so I will probably choose not to vote for his reelection.

Yet you have probably noted my repeated use of the word “probably” when I say I will not vote again for President Obama.  There is one, and only one, reason for that qualification.  I can state it in three words—the Supreme Court.  The appointments to the Supreme court by the two Presidents Bush (especially bush II) have been unmitigated disasters for our country.  They are corporatist ideologues posing as judges who practice legitimate jurisprudence.  They do not practice legitimate jurisprudence.  Their decision in the Citizens United case that overturned decades of settled precedent and opened the floodgates for corporate money to corrupt our political system even more than it already did is all the proof of that truth that we need, although there is a lot more proof available to anyone who goes looking for it.  The question of whether or not to vote for President Obama next year comes down to this for me:  Is taking a stand against the Republicans having the power again to nominate justices for the Supreme Court, given the fact that the Democrats in the Senate routinely cave in and refuse to block those nominations, enough to justify a vote for someone I consider to be guilty of crimes abroad, who is an abject failure at home, and who shares virtually none of my core values? 

I don’t yet have an answer to that question.  I don’t know who I will vote for, or even if I will vote for President in the 2012 election at all.  I lean toward refusing to vote for President Obama reluctantly.  He remains personally appealing.  He remains one of the best orators ever to occupy the White House.  His family is beautiful, and the symbolism of a Black man as President of the United States remains powerful.  We had so much hope when we elected him in 2008.  Yet, for all that, my deeply held personal convictions probably will not let me vote for him again.

Kto Kogo

It is of course always dangerous to quote Vladimir Lenin as an authority on any political question, not quite as dangerous perhaps as quoting Hitler but dangerous nonetheless.  After all, Lenin led the Bolshevik coup that brought the Communists to power in Russia.  He then instituted a reign of terror to effect Communist control over the former Russian Empire.  Lenin is not a hero in my book.  He is in fact a real villain for the way he ushered in Communist totalitarianism in Russia.  That being said, however, it is nonetheless true that Lenin had some valid political insights.  The same can be said of Karl Marx, whose political philosophy Lenin claimed to be implementing.  That Marx was profoundly wrong at the most fundamental level of his thinking, at the level of his dialectical materialism, does not negate the valuable insights that he had regarding the operation of domination based on economic class.  That Lenin created a system that was not only brutally flawed in its own right but led the way to the much worse catastrophe of Stalinism does not negate the validity of those political insights of his that were actually correct.

Lenin expressed one of his most valuable political insights with the nearly untranslatable Russian phrase “kto kogo?”  Pronounced kto kovó despite being spelled with a g in the second word, it is a question that literally means “who whom?”  It was for Lenin the foundational question to ask of any political agenda or policy.  He meant that in evaluating any such political agenda or policy we are to ask “In that agenda or policy, who does what to whom?”  That is, we are to ask who gains and who loses?  Who comes out on top and who suffers?  Who gains wealth or power and who loses wealth or power if this policy or agenda is implemented?  It is a question that unmasks policies and agendas that claim to be for the common good, or for the good of the people, that actually operate only to benefit a particular group within the society.  Lenin, being a Marxist, understood the question in terms of economic class.  He would ask what class benefits from any political action, the bourgeoisie or the proletariat?  We are not so given to rigid class analyses in this country, but it is nonetheless a useful question for us to ask “who whom” of any proposed course of political action.

After all, in a society as socially, economically, and demographically complex as the United States no political act is likely truly to benefit all Americans.  The interests of different groups and classifications of Americans are simply too disparate for that to be true.  At the risk of sounding perhaps more Marxist than I actually am, let me say that the interests of the wealthy financial mavens of Wall Street simply are not the same as the interests of most Americans.  The economic interests of the wealthiest one or two percent of Americans who control by far most of the wealth in this country simply are not the same as the interests of the other ninety-eight or ninety-nine percent of us who share what’s left.  This disparity of interests is particularly visible in regard to the question of tax policy.

The Republican Party has made it an iron rule of Republican orthodoxy that no taxes should be raised.  On anyone.  Ever.  For any reason.  The Republicans in Congress extorted from President Obama a commitment to extend the Bush tax cuts for the very wealthy as a condition for passing any legislation on economic issues.  They forced the Democrats to accept an appallingly bad law regarding reducing the national debt and the budget deficit in order to get an increase in the national borrowing limit that was necessary to avert a worldwide economic catastrophe, a law that deals with the deficit only through spending cuts with no tax increases even on the wealthiest Americans.  For many years now Grover Norquist’s group Americans for Tax Reform has required Republican politicians to pledge never to raise taxes on anyone in order to gain the group’s endorsement, and most Republican politicians have made that pledge.  Back when he was running for President George H. W. Bush famously said “Read my lips:  No new taxes!”, mouthing the Republican party line.  His subsequent reneging on that promise and proposing some tax increases was a major reason why he wasn’t reelected.  No tax increases, indeed extending tax reductions for the very wealthy that were enacted under President George W. Bush, has become the foundational economic policy of the Republican Party.

And no one asks of that policy “kto kogo?”  “Who whom?”  Whom does the policy benefit and whom does it burden?  Whose life does it make better and whose life does it make worse?  Who wins and who loses?  The Republicans have done a masterful job of getting a great many Americans never to ask that question by convincing people that all taxes are bad and that everyone should want themselves and everyone else to pay as little in taxes as possible.  But what answer do we get when we do ask the question “kto kogo” of the Republican dogma of low taxes, or at least low taxes for the wealthy?

The answer that we get is undeniably that the anti-tax policy of the Republican Party benefits only the wealthiest Americans and burdens everyone else.  To see that effect of Republican tax policy all we need to do is to compare the tax structure of the 1950s with that in  effect for the last thirty years and its effect on the great American middle class, the vast majority of Americans.  Under President Eisenhower (a Republican who wouldn't even recognize today’s Republican party) the marginal tax rate for the wealthiest Americans was 91%.  Today it is 35%, just over one third of what it was under the Republican Eisenhower.  Even under the more conservative Richard Nixon that top marginal income tax rate was 70%, twice what it is today.  The 1950s and 60s, when the top marginal income tax rates for the wealthiest American were essentially confiscatory, were the decades of the growth and prosperity of the American middle class.  Working men and women could earn a living wage working only one job.  Unemployment, while it of course fluctuated some, was relatively low.  The federal budget wasn't balanced, but it wasn’t as badly out of balance as it is today.  Perhaps most significantly, while significant inequality in income distribution has always been a fact of American life, that inequality is at an all time high today.  It was much lower in the 1950s. 

I don’t mean to paint the 1950s as some kind of lost utopia.  We had lots of social problems back then, and some aspects of American life have improved since the 1950s.  Most significantly, although racism remains an issue among us, America was far more racist in the 1950s than it is today.  The civil rights movement was just getting going, and women’s liberation and gay liberation weren’t even much on our national radar.  Still, the 1950s prove that the policy of reducing taxes on the wealthiest Americans that every president since Ronald Reagan has pursued or at least tolerated benefits only the wealthy and greatly burdens most Americans.  It exacerbates our already grossly inadequate social safety net.  It pushes more and more Americans into poverty.  It makes the rich richer and even more politically powerful than they were before.  The 1950s prove that high marginal tax rates on the rich are not a drag on the economy, and low marginal tax rates on the rich do not create jobs, as the Republicans claim they do.  The Republican policy of lowering taxes on the rich, which Democratic presidents and Democratically controlled Congresses have done nothing to reverse, undeniably benefit the wealthy, burden average Americans, and do not lead to general prosperity and wellbeing in our country.

    So:  Kto kogo?  The rich the rest of us.  The process of concentrating more and more wealth and more and more political power in the hands of a very small number of very wealthy Americans that has been under way now for several decades has the wealthy doing it to the rest of us.  The level of inequality in the distribution of wealth, the levels of unemployment, the size of the federal budget deficit, and the size of the national debt are reaching unsustainable levels.  The massive disparity in wealth between the wealthiest Americans and the rest of us will, in the long run, produce social instability and unrest.  Yes, for now the Republicans have misled a significant number of Americans into believing that low taxes on the rich are good for everyone, but that lie cannot hold forever.  Sooner or later the American people will wake up.  We can only pray that they wake up before the inequality created by Republican policies produces a violent rather than a merely peaceful political upheaval.