Readings for 5th Sunday of Lent: Is. 43:16-21; Ps. 126:1-6; Phil. 3: 8-14; Jn. 8: 1-11.
Not long ago, Catholic journalist and historian, Gary Wills coined an insightful phrase, “The Big Crazy.” Yes, he was talking about the pedophilia scandal. But his point was more general than that. Wills was referring to the Church’s insane obsession with a long list of cringe-worthy and curious topics that for him included “masturbation, artificial insemination, contraception, sex before marriage, oral sex, vasectomy, homosexuality, gender choice, abortion, divorce, priestly celibacy, male-only priests.”
The list is curious because today’s Gospel reading shows that Jesus didn’t share such prudish concern. And this despite the fact that the religious leaders of his day leaned in that direction – at least regarding women and adultery. Consequently, in the eyes of the priests and scribes of his day, Jesus would have been far too liberal, understanding and forgiving of sexual frailty – far too feminist. His attitude seemed to be: “What’s good for the goose is good for the gander.”
Here’s what I mean: Jewish law punished adultery with death by stoning. That was a biblical requirement. However, the Jewish patriarchy applied that law differently to men and women. A man, they said, committed adultery only when he slept with a married woman. But if he slept with a single woman, a widow, a divorced woman, a prostitute or a slave, he remained innocent. A woman, on the other hand committed adultery if she slept with anyone other than her husband.
Jesus calls attention to such hypocrisy and double standards in
today’s gospel episode. All the elements of last week’s very long parable of
the Prodigal Son are here. Jesus is teaching in the temple surrounded by “the
people” – the same outcasts, we presume, that habitually hung on his every
word.
Meanwhile, the Scribes and Pharisees are standing on the crowd’s
edge wondering how to incriminate such a man?
As if ordained by heaven, an answer comes to them out of the
blue. A woman is hustled into the temple. She’s just been caught in flagrante –
in the very act of adultery. What luck for Jesus’ opponents!
“Master,” they say, “This woman has just been caught in the act
of adultery. As you know, the Bible says we should stone her. But what do you
say?” Here Jesus’ enemies suspect he will incriminate himself by recommending
disobedience of the Bible’s clear injunction. After all, he is the Compassionate
One. He is especially known for his kindness towards women – and others among
his culture’s most vulnerable. He is the friend of prostitutes and drunkards.
But instead of falling into their trap, Jesus simply preaches a
silent parable. He first scribbles on the ground. Only subsequently does he
speak — but only 18 words, “Let the one among you who is without sin be the
first to throw a stone at her.”
A wordless parable . . .
What do you suppose Jesus was scribbling on the ground? Was he
writing the names of the guilty hypocrites who had cheated on their wives? Was
he writing the laws the Scribes and Pharisees were violating? Some say he was
simply drawing figures in the dust while considering how to reply to his
opponents?
The first two possibilities seem unlikely. How would this poor
country peasant from Galilee know the names of the learned and citified Scribes
and Pharisees? It is even unlikely that Jesus knew how to write at all. That
too was the province of the Scribes. The third possibility – that Jesus was
absent-mindedly drawing figures in the dust – is probably closer to the mark.
However, it seems likely that there was more to it than that. It
seems Jesus was performing some kind of symbolic action – that mimed parable I
mentioned. By scribbling in the dust, he was wordlessly bringing his
questioners down to earth. He was reminding them of the common origin of men
and women?
Both came from the dust, Jesus seems to say without words. The
creation stories in Genesis say both men and women were created from dust and
in God’s image – equal in the eyes of God. “In God’s image God created them.
Man and woman created he them,” says the first creation account (Genesis 1:27).
By scribbling in the dust, Jesus was symbolically moving the earth under the
feet of the Scribes and Pharisees. He was asserting that they had no ground to
stand on. They were hypocrites.
Then his 18-word pronouncement offers Jesus’ own standard for
judging the guilt of others even in the fraught field of sexuality. According
to that standard, one may judge and execute only if he himself is without sin.
This, of course, means that no one may judge and execute another.
And that brings us back to Gary Will’s “Big Crazy.” Jesus’ silent rearranging of “ground” along with his 18 words seem to call into question the very foundation of the bishops’ right to authoritatively pronounce on any sexual matters. They, after all, are the guilty ones who denied, covered-up, and excused sexual deviance on the part of the clergy they were responsible for overseeing – and whose overriding (public) concern has centered on sexual purity. Does that not dictate that the bishops and their priests have no ground to stand upon in the field of sexual morality? Isn’t it time for them to silently slink away along with their Scribe and Pharisee counterparts, and to replace judgmentalism with Jesus’ relative silence, forgiveness and compassion?
Jesus’ mime also directs all of us to reconsider our double
standards and preconceptions about men and women in general. It reverses a
prayer every first century Jewish man was to recite each morning. The prayer
went, “Blessed are you, Lord, for making me a Jew and not a Gentile, for making
me free and not a slave, and for making me a man and not a woman.”
Certainly, Jesus was taught that prayer by his pious father,
Joseph. Perhaps for most of his life, Jesus recited that prayer on a daily
basis. But something must have happened to him to change his faith. We’ll never
know what that “something” or someone was.
After all, if Jesus thought like the Catholic bishops I
mentioned, he would have thrown the first stone. He alone in that group was
without sin. He would have thought, “Forgiving this woman will seem like
condoning adultery. And condoning adultery might lead to abortions of the
pregnancies that result. Not throwing the first stone will also lessen the
authority of the Bible which clearly justifies punishing women for adultery.
I’ve got to do it.”
Luckily for the woman taken in adultery (and for the rest of
us), Jesus wasn’t a fundamentalist – or a Roman Catholic bishop. He recognized
the equality of men and women. He recognized that what’s good for the goose is
good for the gander.
That proverb has incredibly wide application, doesn’t it?
With everybody finally talking about the Green New Deal,
progressives should make sure that remains in the national spotlight. They
should focus their efforts on improving and promoting the proposal which is now
in early draft mode.
However, many seem reluctant to do so. Apparently
intimidated by establishment nay-sayers, liberals have instead more often
conceded to the shop-worn tropes of climate-change deniers and neo-liberal
advocates of trickle-down economic theory. President Trump has characterized
the proposal as “socialist.” House Speaker, Nancy Pelosi dismissed it “the
green dream or whatever.”
Such dismissiveness has some progressives repeating the right-wing
canard that GND provisions like the following have no connection with fighting
climate change:
Family-sustaining wage guarantees, especially
for displaced workers
Enhanced Social Security for the elderly
Free higher education and the cancelling of
student debt
Universal health care with adequate family
medical leave
Affordable, energy-efficient housing for all
Remedies for systemic injustices among the poor,
elderly, and people of color
In dismissing those provisions as “irrelevant to climate change,”
“unrealistic” and “only aspirational,” liberals and progressives have been
apparently cowed by climate-change deniers or at least to those whose remedies
would principally benefit corporations, politicians, lawyers, and the infamous
1% instead of our country’s majority. Rather than fully commit to wind, solar,
and geo-thermal technologies, the former would prefer retaining present
economic arrangements while taxing, sequestering, and trading carbon
pollutants.
Despite such diversions, the argument here is that the GND
represents the best available response to the climate-change crisis. It
deserves the full support of progressives because:
It’s already prominently “on the table;” everyone’s talking about it.
It boldly confronts the failed neoliberal economic model at its root – capitalism-as-we-know-it – supplying a green jobs-program-with-benefits that, in the past, have normally been associated with decent employment.
Far from being off the wall, its provisions are intimately connected with the inevitable dislocations produced by adoption of a carbon-neutral economy.
It has successful historical precedent.
The funding for its implementation is readily available.
The GND Is on the
Table
I recently attended a meeting of climate change activists where some participants spoke as if we are still searching for some means of getting people to recognize and respond to the problem of climate change. Participants wondered, should we endorse the recommendations of the Sierra Club, or perhaps of 350.Org, or maybe the Environmental Defense Fund? It was suggested that we take the best recommendations from such NGOs and select the ones we’d like to endorse.
It was even proposed that our group author a “manifesto” in hopes that a celebrity like Oprah Winfrey might get behind it.
All such approaches fail to recognize that the problem of
climate change is already very much on the table and has huge popular support. It’s
there because we all know about the unprecedented multi-billion-dollar
disasters like hurricane Maria and
the uncontrollable California wildfires that have afflicted us in recent
months.
And just since the beginning of the new year, a whole series
of dispiriting reports have emerged from the scientific community to underline
the point. The studies have scientists warning us that our window for response
is closing rapidly. Current estimates are that we have no more than a dozen
years before we reach the point of no return on a run-away train headed for a
disastrous precipice. That’s the crisis staring us in the face as our train’s
engineer commands: “Full speed ahead.”
All of that has already elicited massive support for the Green New Deal proposed by Senator Markey (D-MA) and Representative Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY). Unlike any alternatives, the GND now has scores of co-sponsors in Congress. Every Senate Democrat running for president has endorsed it. The easy-to-understand proposal has 80% of Americans supporting its provisions.
GND and Capitalism
Perhaps the real reason for progressives’ fears about the
Green New Deal is that its proponents dare to identify the elephant in the room
– capitalism-as-we-know-it. Understandably intimidated by McCarthyism along
with 75 years of pro-capitalist propaganda, liberals have a hard time following
suit. They shy away from any positions that might be caricatured as critical of
capitalism. They bend over backwards to assure debate-opponents that they are
not (as one member of our activist group put it) “crazy socialists.”
Progressives need to put those fears aside. We need to
follow the bold example of the youngest and most dynamic member of the House of
Representatives and that of one of our most senior senators; neither ever backs
down in the face of such epithets. In that, both AOC and Bernie Sanders are
increasingly joined by Americans under the age of 35. According to Gallup
polls, the majority of them prefer socialism over capitalism.
In any case, the Green New Deal is not socialist. Instead, it
is merely a green jobs program with the kind of benefits that used to go along
with every decent job. In fact, those benefits are what every employer and
government official demands for himself or herself – including health care,
sound retirement, and remuneration sufficient to buy a house and send their
children to college without incurring life-long debt.
Moreover, all the benefits in question are associated
with the severe dislocations associated with transition to a carbon-neutral
economy: universal health care to remediate problems caused by the fossil fuel
economy; universal post-secondary education to equip workers to participate
productively in the new high-tech culture; low-cost energy-efficient housing that
will accommodate those forced to move from old fossil-fuel-related jobs to new
green employment opportunities perhaps far from their current homes; and
reparation for the long-standing practice of locating polluting industries in
poor and minority communities.
None of that is off the wall or disassociated from
combatting climate change effectively.
New Deal Precedent
All the controversy is like what happened with Roosevelt’s
original New Deal.
Back then, with their focus fixed firmly on Wall Street, Republicans
objected to the apparent overreach of FDR’s proposals. What, they asked, do
Social Security, legalized unions, unemployment insurance, minimum wages, and
the “alphabet soup” of programs like the WPA (Works Progress Administration)
with its FMP (Federal Music Project) and FTP (Federal Theater Project) have to
do with reviving the Stock Market? To them such enactments seemed completely
off-the-wall. They wanted top-down solutions that would focus on Wall Street – bail-outs,
tax breaks, and government subsidies.
However, for Roosevelt and his constituencies none of the
New Deal programs were far-fetched. What Republicans failed to acknowledge (but
what Roosevelt saw clearly) was that those living on Main Street needed to
believe that response to the national crisis of depression would take them into
account as well as the rich who had little need of government assistance.
Wage-earners needed jobs with benefits. They needed laws to improve their
living standards. They needed a tax code benefitting them rather than the
already wealthy. Enactment of programs based on those convictions got FDR
elected four times in a row. After Lincoln, he’s generally remembered as the
greatest American president.
Funding the GND
But how will we pay for the Green New Deal?
In short, it should be financed in the same way FDR paid for
his original program – by drastically increasing taxes on those most able to
afford them. In Roosevelt’s time (and up until the 1960s) the highest tax
bracket was 91% on incomes over $400,000. AOC has suggested a 70% tax on
incomes over $10 million.
The truth is that enactment of some version of the GND with
its transition away from carbon-based energy provides another rich
income-source as well. The Green New Deal promises to make wars-for-oil obsolete.
The elimination of such adventures will also go a long way towards eliminating
blow-back in the form of international terrorism. As a result, our government should
be able to shrink its military budget by at least 50% and to reinvest the
resulting resources in GND programs.
Conclusion
Yes, we’ve finally arrived at a point where Americans have a
proposal before them that they can both understand and whose provisions they
overwhelmingly support. It’s got the public’s attention. So, progressives should
make it their business to support its general direction and to take part in
refining its provisions. Everybody needs to get involved in that project: wage
earners, mothers, fathers, children, the unemployed and homeless, and not
merely the usual suspects, viz. politicians, lawyers, economists, and business
leaders.
Widespread citizen involvement should have progressives
pushing for hearings on the GND throughout the country and well before the
Democratic presidential debates. Then the suggestions of local meetings should
be collated and processed into a final form that the majority can get behind.
To reiterate: this is not merely or even principally the job
of professional politicians, but of our national community. After all, the
Green New Deal is by no means a finished product.
The bottom line is that progressives should not be intimidated by gas-lighting nay-sayers, technocrats, politicians and lobbyists. Remember, their precise point is to discourage as unrealistic what the world needs to effectively meet the unprecedented emergency presented by climate change.
The Green New Deal is best understood as a green jobs program with benefits. It’s what we all need; it’s what we all deserve.
At last, the Green New Deal (GND) has our country debating climate change in an urgent and understandable way. Though the topic of environmental chaos was totally ignored in the 2016 election cycle, that definitely won’t be the case during the coming election season. We have Alexandria Ocasio Cortez (D-NY), and Ed Markey (D-MS) to thank for that.
With everybody finally talking about the Green New Deal, progressives should make sure that the conversation continues. Unlike its alternatives, the GND is easy to understand, and 80% of Americans support its provisions.
For that combination of reasons, scores of Democrats have already co-sponsored the Cortez-Markey proposal. Editors at the New York Times (NYT) have cautiously supported the GND proposal as “better than our climate nightmare.” The AFL/CIO has demanded inclusion in discussions about the scheme’s final shape. Republicans, of course, are generally ridiculing the proposal as too expensive and based on “fake science.”
This is what a national debate looks like. The Green New
Deal has finally given climate change the attention it deserves.
Objections to the
Green New Deal
None of this is to deny that the debate has often been contentious
even among those with unquestionable commitment to solving the problem of
climate change. Some have characterized the GND’s general proposals as
“off-the-wall.” They ask: what do issues like universal health care, free
post-secondary education, fair housing, paid vacations, state-sponsored childcare,
enhanced retirement, and increased minimum wage have to do with climate change?
For their part, union representatives have expressed fears that the proposal
will adversely impact the good-paying jobs of their rank and file.
Perhaps the NYT editors best expressed the currently prevailing skeptical approach when they asked, “Is the Green New Deal aimed at addressing the climate crisis? Or is addressing the climate crisis merely a cover for a wish-list of progressive policies and a not-so-subtle effort to move the Democratic Party to the left?”
In summary, contrarian assessment so far seems to be that
the Cortez-Markey proposition is just too ambitious and disconnected from the
actual issue of climate change.
My argument here will be that it is neither. To get what I mean, first of all consider the natural threat posed by climate chaos and then how the Green New Deal ingeniously attempts to meet that threat in ways that surpass any of its alternatives.
The Climate Change
Threat
Never in history has the human race faced such peril. We all know about the unprecedented multi-billion-dollar disasters, like hurricane Maria and the uncontrollable California wildfires that have afflicted us in recent months. In January, the Rhodium Group identified unbridled economic growth and factory emissions as the main causes of such disasters.
Then, just since the beginning of the new year, two other dispiriting reports have emerged from the scientific community to underline the point. A study in the journal Science pointed out that the planet’s oceans are warming 40-50% faster than previous UN estimates. The result, we’re told, will be even more virulent hurricanes and other weather events (like tsunamis) in the near future. Meanwhile, the proceedings of the National Academy of Science warned that Antarctica’s huge ice reserves are melting much faster than predicted. As a result, ocean levels are about to swell and swallow up huge areas of coastal plain along with entire island-nations creating possibly billions of climate refugees in the process.
Alarmingly, scientists are warning that our window for response is closing rapidly. Current estimates are that we have no more than a dozen years before we reach the point of no return on a run-away train headed for a disastrous precipice. That’s the crisis staring us in the face as our train’s engineer commands: “Full speed ahead.”
Despite all of that, however, we shouldn’t be discouraged. After all, crises have two aspects. As President Kennedy reminded us 60 years ago, emergencies even like the one before us present a danger, but also an opportunity. I’ve just referred to the dangers; they are obvious to all but the willfully blind.
Incentives
to Wall Street
The genius of the Green New Deal is that it highlights the
opportunities. Instead of waving the banner of austerity, it upholds the flag
of all-inclusive prosperity. It points out unprecedented prospects for
improving life on our planet. Yes, it underlines astounding benefits for Wall
Street. However, its main beneficiaries live on Main Street. They include our
grandchildren yet-to-be-born.
The benefits for Wall Street are surprising but logical at least according to prevailing economic theory. Changing from a carbon-based economy to one based on wind, solar, and geo-thermal energy, promises to create opportunities for innumerable new businesses and entrepreneurs. The UN estimates that the transition will add $26 trillion to the global economy by 2030. Twenty-six trillion dollars! That’s good news for investors.
And they’re beginning to embrace the prospects. Nonetheless,
the unaided market gives little indication of mobilizing fast enough or of
being focused enough to avoid the impending train wreck. Inducing Wall Street
to apply breaks, lay new track and change direction will take time.
Conventional wisdom holds that Wall Street’s market-based
solutions will also require hard-to-understand, top-down remedies such as
carbon taxes with rebates, carbon sequestration, and carbon trading. None of those have much hope of gaining the popular
understanding or traction needed to inspire the mass mobilization required to
address climate change effectively.
Additionally, market-based solutions necessitate powerful
incentives from the government in the form of tax breaks, deregulation, and outright
subsidies to corporations. While virtually no one has trouble with the logic of
providing such incentives, the crisis at hand requires immediate action that cannot
wait for stimulants to kick in any more than it might wait for market solutions
to provide timely response to attack by a foreign enemy.
Incentives
to Main Street
And that brings us back to the genius of the Green New Deal. The latter recognizes that government must step in to meet a threat much larger and overwhelming than any attack ever experienced in American history or the history of the world. Doing so necessitates government-directed restructuring the economy from the bottom-up. Washington must take charge just as it would during war time – just as it did during World War II. It means DC’s becoming the employer-of-last-resort in new enterprises that Wall Street has proven incapable of sponsoring or even identifying in timely fashion.
The GND also extends to Main Street the incentives that conventional
wisdom routinely offers businesses but is unwilling to distribute to wage-earners.
GND proponents understand that responding effectively to the crisis of climate
change will require an unprecedented mass mobilization of a population that as
yet has exhibited little awareness of the problem’s immediacy. Moreover, the
public has been subject to mind-numbing propaganda on the part of powerful
climate-change-deniers funded by the fossil fuel industry and by politicians
bankrolled by those interests.
GND advocates understand the impossibility of mobilizing an
audience like that under the banner of austerity and reduction in living
standards. Instead mobilization requires convincing ordinary citizens that
responding to climate change will improve their lives and make them more
prosperous. It entails providing incentives for them to get on-board just as we
saw it might for Wall Street investors.
And no one should object to that. It’s like what happened with Roosevelt’s original New Deal.
Back then, with their focus fixed firmly on Wall Street, Republicans objected to the overreach of FDR’s proposals. What, they asked, do Social Security, legalized unions, unemployment insurance, minimum wages, and the “alphabet soup” of programs like the WPA (Works Progress Administration) with its FMP (Federal Music Project) and FTP (Federal Theater Project) have to do with reviving the Stock Market? To them such enactments seemed completely off-the-wall. They wanted top-down solutions – bail-outs, tax breaks, and government subsidies.
However, for Roosevelt and his constituencies none of the
New Deal programs were far-fetched. What Republican cognitive dissonance failed
to acknowledge (but what Roosevelt saw clearly) was that those living on Main
Street needed incentives too. They needed to believe that response to the
national crisis of depression would take them into account as well as the rich
who had little need of government assistance. Wage-earners needed subsidies
too. They needed laws to improve their living standards. They needed a tax code
benefitting them rather than the already wealthy. Enactment of programs based
on those convictions got FDR elected four times in a row. After Lincoln, he’s generally
remembered as the greatest American president.
Paralleling FDR’s response to the Great Depression, proponents of the Green New Deal recognize that climate chaos “changes everything.” It impacts our standard of living; it threatens our family life, our health and longevity; it makes irrelevant old kinds of jobs (e.g. in fossil-fuel-related industries); it calls for new kinds of homes adapted to new weather patterns. It calls for massive re-education, and for reparations to those victimized by the old fossil fuel order.
With that in mind, the GND provides new kinds of jobs to do work that the private sector has proven unable or unwilling to provide. It offers massive re-education that will emphasize not only science and technology, but the arts, literature, philosophy, and theology (where the wisdom and moral roots of human civilization are to be found). More specifically, to meet the severe dislocations related to understanding our changed world, to health problems caused by the fossil fuel economy, to energy-inefficient housing, to declining living standards caused by job-loss in a more traditional economy, and to the practice of locating polluting industries in poor and minority communities, the GND demands:
Free higher education and the cancelling of
student debt
Universal health care
Affordable, energy-efficient housing for all
Family-sustaining wage guarantees, especially
for displaced workers
Paid vacations for all workers
Adequate family medical leave
Retirement security for everybody
Remedies for systemic injustices among the poor,
elderly, and people of color
Grandchildren as
Overriding Incentive
As already indicated, all of that is easy to understand and
far more likely to secure popular buy-in than cap-and-trade explanations or complex
discussions of carbon sequestration or carbon taxes with mathematically calculated
rebates for the poor. Everyone can understand higher wages.
However, what’s easiest of all to understand are the
benefits such buy-in, popular mobilization, and rapid response will secure for
our grandchildren whose very lives are threatened by the inaction rendered
likely by those more arcane measures.
To begin with, the Green New Deal will secure for those younger ones we love not only a healthier planet, but longer lives less threatened by war and terrorism. That point is by no means trivial and even goes a long way towards answering the question: How will you pay for it all?
Certainly, the Green New Deal will have to be financed in the same way FDR paid for his original program – by drastically increasing taxes on those most able to afford them. In Roosevelt’s time (and up until the 1960s) the highest tax bracket was 91% on incomes over $400,000. AOC has suggested a 70% tax on incomes over $10 million.
The truth is that enactment of some version of the GND with
its transition away from carbon-based energy provides another rich income-source
that will benefit our grandchildren. The Green New Deal promises to make
wars-for-oil obsolete. So, our descendants will not have to fight such wars or
worry so much about the blow-back from “terrorists” created by those foreign
adventures. That in turn will enable our government to shrink its military
budget by at least 50% and to reinvest the resulting resources in GND programs.
To put a finer point on it: what we’re talking about here is
a kind of inverted thinking about military spending. That is, to meet the
challenge to national security represented by climate change, we must reduce and
redirect rather than increase our bloated military budget.
Meeting the financial challenges presented by an alienated and angry
Mother Nature calls for a drastic disinvestment from the military and
reinvestment in the provisions of a GND – precisely on national security
grounds.
Conclusion
Yes, we’ve finally arrived at a point where Americans have a
proposal before them that they can both understand and whose provisions they
overwhelmingly support. It’s got the public’s attention. So, progressives
should make it their business to support its general direction and to take part
in refining its provisions. Everybody needs to get involved in that project:
wage earners, mothers, fathers, children, the unemployed and homeless, and not
merely the usual suspects, viz. politicians, lawyers, economists, and business
leaders.
Widespread citizen involvement should have progressives
pushing for hearings on the GND throughout the country and well before the Democratic
presidential debates. Then the suggestions of local meetings should be collated
and processed into final form. To reiterate: this is not merely or even
principally the job of professional politicians, but of our national community.
After all, the Green New Deal is by no means a finished product.
In short, our unprecedented climate crisis calls for New Beginnings – for a fresh start. That’s what the “New Deal” meant historically. It’s what the Green New Deal should embody today. None of its general provisions are “off the wall.” Each is connected to an actual dislocation caused by the switch to a non-carbon-based economy.
So, progressives should not be intimidated by gas-lighting nay-sayers,
technocrats, politicians and lobbyists. Remember, their precise point is to
discourage as unrealistic what the world needs to effectively meet the
unprecedented emergency presented by climate change.
Last Sunday, The New York Times published an editorial on the Green New Deal (GND). It was called “The Green New Deal Is Better than Our Climate Nightmare.”
Though its title purports to second the GND proposal sponsored by Representative Alexandria Ocasio Cortez (D NY) and Senator Ed Markey (D MA), the article actually damns the measure with faint praise. It also endorses remedies for the climate crisis much less comprehensive and closer to what corporate America favors than to the broad worker-friendly recommendations of the Markey-Cortez proposal.
By doing so, the authors obscure the proposal’s historical connections to FDR’s daring New Deal as well as those between climate change and a failed capitalist system itself. Finally, the article’s half-measures imply an unexpressed reservation about paying for the GND that shows little appreciation of the problem’s gravity and of the fundamental socio-economic changes necessarily connected with transition to a truly non-fossil fuel economy.
Faint Praise
Begin with the article’s faint praise. True, the Times editors rightly chastise the Trump
administration’s policies as “boneheaded,” including its denial of the problem,
rolling back of Obama-era limits on emissions, opening more lands to oil and
gas exploration, weakening of fuel economy standards, and its formation of a
special committee bent on debunking the climate crisis.
Granted: all of that reflects the thinking of GND advocates.
So far, so good.
But then, the Times
editors criticize the proposal first because its initial draft was poorly
written by Ms. Cortez’s staff and, secondly, because the proposal is too extensive.
As one respondent in the editorial’s “Comments” section
observed, the Times editorial devoted
twice as much space (150 words) to critiquing the proposal’s initial “poorly
written talking points” as it did to describing the actual resolution (72
words).
Comprehensive
Solutions
And what about the Times’
disagreement with the broad character of the Green New Deal?
To answer, consider the (in progress) proposal so far . . .
It suggests nothing less than a complete overhaul of capitalism-as-we-know-it.
In doing so, it purposely parallels the measures implemented by Franklin Delano
Roosevelt in his original New Deal.
Following the Great Stock Market Crash of ’29, the latter
didn’t content itself with bailing out banks and Wall Street. Instead it more
comprehensively addressed the concerns of Main Street providing minimum wage
legislation, unemployment benefits, government-funded jobs for the unemployed,
and a Social Security retirement plan for all. It also legalized labor unions.
By adopting that strategy, FDR not only addressed the
deep-seated problems of capitalism such as widespread unemployment, low wages
and huge wealth-disparities. He also met the genuine needs of the country’s
majority and secured their buy-in to the New Deal despite pressure by the elite
to reduce the great depression to a technical matter solvable by the monied
classes. The working class was won over; its members’ anger against the system
was mollified; they put down their pitchforks, Roosevelt was elected four times
in a row, and capitalism was saved.
This time around, the green version of the New Deal does something similar. It includes not merely a transition to a renewable energy economy powered by wind and sun, but rejection of any nuclear power options, of technology allowing fossil fuel plants to capture and store their own emissions, and of market-based solutions such as carbon taxes and cap and trade policies. As described by the New York Times, and in the spirit of FDR’s program, the GND proposal suggests:
Free higher education
Universal health care
Affordable housing for all
Remedies for “systemic injustices” among the poor, elderly
and people of color
Family-sustaining wage guarantees
Adequate family medical leave
Paid vacations for all workers
Retirement security for everybody
Like Roosevelt’s measures, these provisions are aimed at securing
the required support of the country’s majority who might otherwise be persuaded
to continue ignoring the problem by the propaganda of elite climate-change
deniers and by the forbidding specter of austerity measures. The generous GND
provisions are intended to acquire buy-in on the part of those who also might otherwise
be too distracted by simply trying to make ends meet than to comprehend and face
up to the very real threats posed by climate chaos.
Failing to see all of that, the Times editorial board asks in effect, what do the social goals
listed above have to do with meeting the climate change crisis? Wouldn’t it
would be better, the authors imply, to be less radical and more focused on setting
a national electricity standard, including the nuclear and carbon capture
options along with wind and solar alternatives, providing tax incentives for
electrical vehicles, improving the efficiency of buildings and the electrical
grid, and intensifying efforts at carbon sequestration?
More specifically, the editors ask, “Is the Green New Deal aimed at addressing
the climate crisis? Or is addressing the climate crisis merely a cover for a
wish-list of progressive policies and a not-so-subtle effort to move the
Democratic Party to the left?”
(See what I meant by “faint praise?”)
In other words, the Newspaper of Record, wants readers to
focus narrowly on remediating climate change while overlooking what GND
advocates identify as the root cause of the catastrophe. It wants its readers
to ignore what Green New Dealers consider the
indissoluble link between capitalism-as-we-know-it on the one hand and worker
exploitation along with environmental destruction on the other.
The Capitalism
Connection
Think about the
connections first with workers and then with the environment. (Sorry: but doing
so might evoke painful memories of ECON 101.)
With both workers
and the environment, capitalists are forced by the logic of market competition
to adopt exploitative practices whether they want to or not. That’s because,
for one thing, wage workers in particular are compelled to enter a labor market
whose compensation level is set by rivalry among laborers seeking the same job.
As a result, each
prospective employee will bid his competitors down until what economists have
called the “natural” wage level is attained. Marx for one, found this “natural”
level below what workers and their families need to sustain themselves in ways
worthy of human beings. In other words, wage competition represents nothing less
than a race to the bottom. Capitalism’s unregulated labor market assures an
inadequate wage for the working class.
Similarly (and
this is the major point in the context of climate change) the capitalist system
also necessarily devastates the
environment. That is, the market’s reliance on competition all but eliminates
the presence of environmental conscience on the part of producers.
Thus, for
example, environmentally sensitive entrepreneurs might be moved to put
scrubbers on the smokestacks of their factories, and filters on the sewage
pipes to purify liquid effluents entering nearby rivers, streams and oceans.
Doing so would, of course raise the costs of production, Meanwhile, however,
competitors who lack environmental conscience will continue spewing unmitigated
smoke into the atmosphere and pouring unfiltered toxins into nearby bodies of
water. Their lowered costs will enable them to undersell the conscientious
producers, and eventually drive the latter out of business. In this way, the
market rewards absence of environmental conscience.
In other words,
fighting climate change and protecting workers’ rights are intimately
connected. They are both aspects of resistance to the destructive logic of
capitalist competition.
According to proponents of the Green New Deal, such
realizations uncover the failure of the market system itself. That system has
proved incapable not only of addressing climate change. It has also failed to
provide a living wage for its unskilled workers, jobs for those displaced by
technology, affordable housing to the working class, and inexpensive health
care – not to mention repair of the country’s crumbling infrastructure. That
array of problems calls for remedies far beyond the band-aid solutions suggested
by the Times board. It also requires
extensive buy-in from the affected majority including those who work for wages.
The GND achieves both ends.
Paying for the Green
New Deal
Not far in the background of almost any criticism of the Green New Deal is the question unspoken or emphasized, how are we going to pay for such “generous provisions?” The incredible and ironic implication here is not only that it makes sense to do a cost-benefit analysis about saving the planet and the lives of our grandchildren. The implication is also that some price might be too high or some social change (like abandonment of capitalism-as-we-know-it) too drastic!
But overlooked in such mystifying thought processes are the considerations
that, among other benefits, abandoning a fossil-fuel-dependent economy will:
In the end provide very low-cost energy to consumers
Save government subsidies currently extended to the fossil fuel industry
Make unnecessary the resource wars currently waged against countries in the Middle East and threatened in Venezuela
Therefore, render unnecessary the tremendous expenditures such wars entail
And remove a major stimulus to terrorism
In summary, necessitate a basic restructuring of our economy including precisely the provisions sought by GND advocates
Conclusion
It’s that fundamental restructuring of everything that the
Green New Deal anticipates. The proposal of Alexandria Ocasio Cortez and Ed
Markey recognizes that necessity far better than the editorial board of the New York Times.
As Naomi Klein has put it, the climate crisis “changes everything.” It calls for a comprehensive New Deal – for a new start beyond business as usual. It requires recognizing the intrinsic weaknesses of capitalism-as-we-know-it and remediating those weaknesses by incentivizing and including the working class in any solution that has the slightest hope of success.
How are we to think about the crisis in Venezuela when the main proponents of U.S. policy are known liars and war criminals? Specifically, of course, I’m thinking about Donald Trump and Elliot Abrams — not to mention John Bolton. That, for me is the question.
It seems to me in such tragic circumstances, our attitude towards the crisis (regardless of our judgments about Nicolas Maduro and socialism) should be governed by principle.
In fact, the current policy of the United States violates at least half a dozen principles. They include:
National Sovereignty: Venezuela’s political and economic problems should be of no concern to our government.
Self-Determination: Venezuela has the right to choose its own form of government and economy.
Anti-Imperialism: Revealingly, most of the countries aligned with the Trump administration are either charter members of Europe’s Axis of Colonialism or representatives of Euro-American client states. Meanwhile those opposing Trump’s policy are former colonies of the U.S. and Europe and/or have been invaded by the military forces of those inveterate imperialists. The latter include Russia, China, India, South Africa, and Mexico along with countries such as Ecuador, Bolivia, and Nicaragua. All of those countries know a thing or two about European and U.S. imperialist tyranny.
Nuremberg (forbidding the punishment of civilian populations)
Skepticism about the statements of proven liars
Consistency
For starters, let me focus here on consistency. This
principle dictates that:
If we’re worried about foreign interference in our own electoral process, we should stay out of Venezuela’s.
If Maduro’s jailing of political opponents concerns us, the same should be true relative to Brazil and Bolsonaro’s jailing of Luiz Ignacio Lula da Silva, the country’s most popular politician. (And yet, our government had no hesitation in recognizing Bolsonaro’s legitimacy.)
If we worry about humanitarian crises, we should stop cooperating with Saudi Arabia and its war against Yemen, the poorest country in the Middle East. That war has caused the worst humanitarian crisis in the world.
If crooked elections are cause for delegitimizing governments, we shouldn’t recognize the current government of Honduras, whose election of Juan Orlando Hernandez was certified as unfree and unfair by the OAS. It called for new elections. (But, of course, both the Obama and Trump administrations have recognized Hernandez as a legitimate head of state.)
If we’re outraged by police violence against demonstrators, we should cut off all aid to Israel for killing hundreds of unarmed demonstrators (including women and children) at the Gaza border and wounding thousands of others.
But none of these issues matter at all to the Trump
administration. They care not a bit about humanitarian crises, fair elections, the
right to protest or the jailing of political opponents. As both Trump and John
Bolton have said openly, their concern is Venezuelan oil, controlling it and
profiting from that control. That’s imperialism.
Moreover, the so-called “humanitarian aid” at the country’s borders in Brazil and Colombia is a pittance worth some millions of dollars, while the profits frozen from the country’s sale of oil and its access to its own gold reserves are worth billions – as are the mercantile transactions with other countries now prevented by the U.S. embargo. According to the Red Cross and the U.N. (both of whom refuse to participate in its distribution) the disputed humanitarian aid is nothing more than a political ploy. In other words, if the U.S. truly cared about the welfare of the people of Venezuela, it would stop its embargo and allow Venezuela access to its money and markets so the country itself could buy food and medicine on the open market.
The appointment of Elliot Abrams as the Trump’s point man for Venezuela speaks volumes about the administration’s criminal intentions. Abrams, of course, is a convicted felon. He was the U.S. brains behind the genocidal policy of Rios Montt in Guatemala during the 1980s, when more than 200,000 Guatemalans (mostly indigenous) were slaughtered by Montt and his generals. Elliot Abrams is a war criminal. And his selection by Mr. Trump to run his show in Venezuela indicates an embrace of the old CIA playbook used again and again in its more than 68 regime-changes operations since World War II – with most of the removed officials having been democratically elected.
The playbook runs like this:
Any country attempting to establish an economy
that serves the interests of its poor majority
Is routinely accused of being run by a dictatorship
It is subject to regime change by direct U.S.
invasion
Or by right wing (often terrorist) elements
within the local population
To keep said country within the capitalist
system
So that the U.S. might once again use the
country’s resources for its own enrichment
And for that of the local elite.
Standardly, the strategy is to use a combination of
terrorism, sanctions, embargoes to make civilians within the country so
miserable that even the poor will rise up and join forces with the elite to remove
the so-called “dictator” from office. That’s what’s happening in Venezuela at this
very moment. To repeat: it’s a violation of the Nuremberg Principles forbidding
punishment of civilian populations.
Perhaps the most surprising thing about Venezuela is how we believe our politicians on the subject of regime change. You’d think that at least after Iraq and Libya (not to mention Panama and Grenada) we’d show some skepticism. What was it that Great Man tried to say a few years ago? “Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me”? I mean, how many times do we have to be fooled before we’re shamed out of our minds by our collective stupidity?
After all, these people (the Trumpists) are proven liars.
Everybody knows that. It’s the subject of jokes every night on Colbert and on
Saturday Night Live. Trump is a laughing stock. And yet when he speaks about
his compassion for the Venezuelan people, about the lies of its government (!!),
his concern for democracy and the integrity of elections, or about Maduro’s
corruption (!!) the press actually takes him seriously. Give me a break,
please!
Let me say it clearly, Donald Trump and his administration
have not a shred of credibility. Period! Not a shred! Whatever he says
(whatever they say) should be taken as an outright lie unless proven otherwise
by absolutely unimpeachable sources.
And by the way, let me conclude by saying that it’s clearly
wrong to blame Venezuela’s problems on socialism. First of all, Venezuela is
not a socialist country. It’s governed by a socialist party, but its economy is
dominated by private corporations. So is its news media.
France is more socialist than Venezuela. And besides, under Hugo Chavez, the economy thrived (largely because oil prices remained high). And just six years ago (after 14 years of so-called Bolivarian Socialism), polls determined that Venezuela was the happiest country in South America. As a matter of fact, it won that distinction two years in a row – in 2012 and 2013. Worldwide, in those years, its happiness index came out ahead of France, Spain, Italy, and Germany.
Right now, of course, it is not a happy place. Its condition is roughly the same as when Chavez took over in 1999 after decades of governance by its white elite creols. And, it’s true, the current unhappiness is surely due to mismanagement and corruption on the part of the Maduro administration. But it also has a lot to do with the fall of oil prices on the world market, but especially with the U.S. embargo and sanctions against Venezuela.
Bottom line: Please realize that we are being lied to about
Venezuela! Our government is the main criminal there. Whatever we might think
of Maduro or of socialism, the principles articulated at Nuremberg, as well as
those of national sovereignty, self-determination, anti-imperialism,
consistency, and common-sense skepticism before liars should be our guides.
Tell the president, your senators and congressional
representatives: Yankee go home! Get out of Venezuela!
Readings for 5th Sunday in Ordinary Time: IS 6:1-2A, 3-8; PS 138: 1-8; ICOR 15: 1-11; LK 5: 1-8
In today’s Gospel reading, we encounter Jesus’ radical message of social justice and of the abundance-for-all that results from accepting his insights. Significantly for this series on the presidential candidacy of Marianne Williamson, her program parallels that of the Master whose miraculous teaching has constituted the center of her own career for the last 30 years and more.
Before I get to that, however, allow me a word about miracles and Marianne’s presidential campaign.
For starters, she herself is very clear about one thing: without a miracle, our country (and the world) is doomed. But that doesn’t mean her thinking is negative or pessimistic.
That’s because (and this is crucial) Marianne’s use of the term “miracle” does not reference marvels contrary to the laws of nature. Instead, her understanding of the word is something more significant even than the “miraculous” catch of fish reported in today’s Gospel reading. By miracle she means a profound change in consciousness. It’s a change in attitude from one governed by fear and guilt to an outlook inspired by love and forgiveness. As I said, without that change, we’re all finished.
Think about it. Isn’t it true that fear and guilt absolutely
govern our lives? We’re taught to be very afraid of the Russians, Iranians, the
Taliban, ISIS, Muslims, immigrants, climate change, nuclear holocaust, poverty,
the police, gun violence, and death. And standard answers to such threats
always include denial and violence in the form of war, more guns, sanctions,
walls, prisons, weapons-modernization-programs, and an unlimited consumerism
that has us drowning in our own waste.
In fact, it’s precisely that fearful thinking that continues
to inform the candidacies of our country’s political classes (Democrats as well
as Republicans). All of them except Marianne Williamson are imprisoned in old
thought patterns. All of them are locked into political group think which
typically dismisses Marianne’s approach as “unrealistic,” “impractical,”
“inexperienced,” too idealistic.
Ignored is the fact that their own “realistic” thinking has
brought us to the brink of extinction. Their “practical” consciousness has
given us the war in Iraq and at least six other countries, the resulting uptick
in terrorism, a planet on fire, world hunger in the face of enormous food
waste, homeless populations freezing to death outside abandoned buildings, huge
wealth disparities, the threat of nuclear war, more prisoners than anywhere
else in the word, and a whole host of other problems.
All of those catastrophes, Marianne tells us, will remain
without solution absent the miracle – absent the change in consciousness – that
her campaign represents. She’s fond of quoting Einstein who said that the same
kind of thinking that brought us into a crisis cannot extricate us from its
predicament.
Now get ready: For Marianne, the answer to all those perceived threats is love and forgiveness. Yes, she actually dares to say that – to say what Jesus said! But for Williamson, both love and forgiveness are understood in terms of realizing the unity of all human beings. In other words, only a switch in consciousness from seeing others as separate to envisioning humankind’s underlying unity can save us.
Can you imagine seeing ISIS, the Taliban, Muslims,
immigrants, refugees, people of all races, religions and skin colors – and
Mother Earth Herself – as truly related to us at an intimate level?
Actually, it’s more than that. As Marianne tells us
repeatedly, “There is really only one of us here.” All those demonized groups are us. That’s the meaning of Jesus’
teaching about loving our neighbor as ourselves. Our neighbor is our self. When we hate and kill him
or her, we’re hating ourselves. We’re committing suicide!
Radicality like Marianne’s is precisely what today’s
liturgical readings call us to. They remind us that followers of Jesus (and
about 75% of Americans claim to be that) should not shy away from love and forgiveness
in the form of wealth redistribution and reparations to exploited classes. No,
it’s the heart of our faith. It’s the only realistic solution to our problems,
both personal and political.
Consider today’s Gospel story. According to Luke, the crowds
of those following Jesus are so thick that he has to get into a boat, a little
bit from shore to address the people.
Thanks to what we read from Luke two weeks ago, we know who was in the crowd and why they were so enthusiastic. They were poor people responding to Jesus’ proclamation of a Jubilee Year. (For Jews, Jubilee, “the year of the Lord’s favor,” was good news for the poor. That’s because every 50 years it called for radical wealth redistribution in Israel. Debts were forgiven, slaves were set free, harvests were left un-gleaned and land was returned to its original owners.)
Recall that using the words of Isaiah, Luke had Jesus summarize his Jubilee message like this: “The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he has anointed me to bring good news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim release to the captives and recovery of sight to the blind, to let the oppressed go free, and to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor.”
Yes,
Jubilee represented biblical law. But it was honored more in the breach than in
the observance. Astoundingly, Jesus was calling for its revival. Hence the overwhelming crowd.
Not accidentally, Isaiah’s words are a description not only of Jesus’ highly popular program, but of Marianne Williamson’s presidential agenda. It embodies Jubilee Spirit by advocating:
Concern for our society’s and the world’s dispossessed (Good News to the poor)
Prison reform (Release of captives)
Health care (Recovery of sight to the blind)
An end to neocolonial wars (Letting the oppressed go free)
Reparations to descendants of African slaves (Jubilee)
Wealth redistribution that has the rich paying their fair share (Jubilee)
Forgiveness of student loans (Jubilee)
Next Jesus demonstrates the counter-intuitive abundance-for-all
that inevitably results when his program is implemented. He tells his friends
to go out into deeper waters and cast their nets despite the fact that their
previous efforts had yielded no results. [Marianne constantly stresses the need
for us to “go deeper” if we’re ever to go about Healing the Soul of America (the title of the 20th
anniversary edition of her 1997 book.)]
Following Jesus’ instruction, the fishermen net a catch so
great that it threatens to tear their nets apart and sink both of their boats.
The message: abundance is the result of following Jesus’ program prioritizing
“good news to the poor.” Abundance doesn’t trickle down from the elite; it
percolates up from the poor.
And, of course, that latter point is underlined by Jesus’ final words in today’s reading, “Do not be afraid. From now on you will be catching men.” In other words, Jesus confirms his “preferential option for the poor” by selecting working class fishermen – not the rich and elite – as his first disciples.
Like Marianne Williamson (and all who miraculously overcome
the fear Jesus references), Peter, James, and John leave everything (including
evidently the fish they’ve just caught) and follow Jesus into the unknown.
Their audacious act, their detachment from fear, possessions, the past, and the relative wealth they’ve just attained all demonstrate their readiness for further expansions of consciousness – for further miracles.
In our own day, Marianne Williamson’s unusual presidential
candidacy summons us to similar changes – to similar miracles.
Yes, it’s true: it may take a miracle to get her elected. But that’s her point. It will also take a profound change in consciousness to save our world.
Let’s work for both wonders. Let’s expect both. We desperately need to change our minds. We
desperately need a woman like Marianne Williams as president.
Readings for 4th Sunday in Ordinary Time: JER 1:4-5, 17-19; PS 7:1-6, 15-17; I COR 12:31-13:13; LK 4:21-30
Last week, the bishop of Lexington, Kentucky, profoundly sharpened the recent controversy involving a student from Covington Catholic High School who confronted a Native American elder after this year’s pro-life march in Washington, D.C.
Writing an op-ed in the Lexington Herald-Leader, Bishop John Stowe attempted to deepen the entire conversation. He suggested changing it from superficial wrangling about the apparent disrespect the student displayed to a discussion of whether or not Catholics can support the current occupant of the White House and still be true to their faith.
Bishop Stowe said “no.” It’s a matter of faith, he said.
By taking that position, the Lexington bishop created what I would call a much-needed Dietrich Bonhoeffer moment for the church at a time when Mr. Trump exhibits traits and policies reminiscent of Adolf Hitler during his rise to power in the 1930s. (In the name of their faith, Bonhoeffer and members of his Confessing Church separated themselves from German Christians who supported der Fuhrer.)
The bishop’s words also incurred the wrath of Catholic Trump
supporters much as Jesus in today’s Gospel selection sparked anger in his own
hometown when he called his neighbors’ faith into question.
Let me explain.
First, recall the context of the bishop’s words. Then connect
them to our reading and finally to Bonhoeffer and his church of resistance.
As for context, a video of the stand-off between the high school student, Nick Sandman and the Native American, Nathan Phillips, had just gone viral. Initial viewings led many to condemn the student’s apparent disrespect.
Then, Sandman’s parents hired a P.R. firm to spin his side of the story. As a result, public commentary quickly changed from blaming the adolescent for his apparently offensive smirk. It centered instead on whose version of the story was correct. Was the student (as the PR firm put it) merely smiling in an attempt to deescalate a threatening situation? Or was he making fun of the Native elder by placing his grin inches from the old man’s face?
In an op-ed published in the Lexington
Herald-Leader, Bishop Stowe reframed the debate by adopting the prophetic
tack I just mentioned. He focused on the fact that the young student and many
of his companions were wearing red “Make America Great Again” hats. That’s what the bishop found
incompatible with Catholic faith and its comprehensive approach to life-issues.
He wrote:
“Without engaging the discussion about the context of the viral
video or placing the blame entirely on these adolescents, it astonishes me that
any students participating in a pro-life activity on behalf of their school and
their Catholic faith could be wearing apparel sporting the slogans of a
president who denigrates the lives of immigrants, refugees and people from
countries that he describes with indecent words and haphazardly endangers with
life-threatening policies.”
In other words, Bishop
Stowe was broadening the concept of being “pro-life” – the reason many
Catholics back President Trump – to question that support itself. Catholic faith,
the bishop implied, cannot tolerate Trump’s policies on immigration, refugees or
other words or actions that disrespect Global South countries and endanger life
(think capital punishment, drone assassinations, bombings, and illegal wars).
Such behavior offends core Catholic beliefs about the inviolable sanctity of
human life.
Specifically in
reference to abortion, the Lexington bishop added:
“As the leader of the
Catholic Church in the 50 counties of Central and Eastern Kentucky . . . I
believe that U.S. Catholics must take a look at how our support of the
fundamental right to life has become separated from the even more basic truth
of the dignity of each human person. . . While the church’s opposition to abortion has
been steadfast, it has become a stand-alone issue for many and has become
disconnected to other issues of human dignity.”
Still referencing the abortion issue, Bishop
Stowe concluded:
“The pro-life movement
claims that it wants more than the policy change of making abortion illegal but
aims to make it unthinkable. That would require deep changes in society and
policies that would support those who find it difficult to afford children. The
association of our young people with racist acts and a politics of hate must
also become unthinkable.”
Notice how these words
unabashedly connect President Trump with racism and policies that embody
hatred. They also recognize that many women are driven to abortion by
government policies that make unplanned pregnancies problematic.
Now, that brings me to this Sunday’s Gospel reading and to Jesus’ words that “No prophet is accepted in his hometown.” I make the connection because dozens of people chose to comment very harshly on the bishop’s op-ed. Instead of dealing with the more comprehensive understanding of the phrase “pro-life,” they called Bishop Stowe vile names, brought up the pedophilia issue, and defended Donald Trump as God’s servant. I was surprised that some of the on-line language was actually permitted by the Herald-Leader’s editors.
It was like what happened to Jesus in today’s reading. There the
Master himself is pilloried by his neighbors in Nazareth for challenging (like
Bishop Stowe) their narrow religious prejudices. When Jesus reminds the people
from Nazareth that God cares as much about Syrians and Lebanese as about Jews,
they actually try to murder him.
As I said, that proved the truth of his saying that “No prophet
is accepted in his hometown.” After all, prophets are those who speak for God.
They connect God’s word to events of the day. And that’s what John Stowe did in
his op-ed. He made the connection not only between the teaching of Jesus on the
one hand and the event in Washington on the other. Echoing Dietrich Bonhoeffer
and his Confessing Church, he also used the occasion to denounce Catholic
support for latter-day fascism.
In similar circumstances 85 years ago, Bonhoeffer and the German Confessing Church courageously published their famous Barmen Declaration. It held that no one professing to follow Jesus could possibly accept Hitler as their Fuhrer; only Christ could hold that position.
In response, both Protestants and Catholics denounced Bonhoeffer and the others as traitors. Pope Pius XII would even persist in endorsing Hitler as “an indispensable bulwark against the Russians.”
The words of Bishop Stowe seem intent on preventing Catholics in
his diocese from recommitting a similar error.
As a long-time Kentuckian and member of the loyal opposition
within the Catholic Church, I’m proud of his courage. It’s time for Catholics
and the rest of us to take Bishop Stowe’s words seriously.
Simply put, people of faith cannot support Donald Trump and
still be authentic followers of Jesus. We must do all we can to frustrate Trump’s
policies and see that he is not elected to a second term.
Yes, Bishop Stowe is correct: it’s a matter of faith!
As I reported recently, I spent my Christmas vacation tracking down and studying France’s “Yellow Vest” movement. In December, New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman did something similar. However, as expressed in his piece, “The End of Europe,” his conclusions mirror old threadbare thinking about social transformation. Most tellingly, while honoring the voices of the Yellow Vests as grassroots activists, Friedman’s responses exclude the very democratic input the Yellow Vests demand. Instead, he looks to government and business leaders to save what he termed “the idea of Europe.”
My own
conclusions are the reverse. I see the Yellow Vests as advocating a democratically
radical, comprehensive and bottom-up approach to what distresses our world. In
fact, the issues and demands of the Yellow Vests suggest proven reforms that
are clearly feasible, since they’ve worked in the past. The economic and
political restructurings implicit in their working-class demands could save our
planet and create the other world that all progressives sense is possible. Consciously
or unconsciously, the Yellow vests propose a program worthy of support by us
all.
Friedman & the Yellow Vests
According to Friedman, France represents the last barrier against the disintegration of Europe itself. Across the European Union (EU), England is committing collective suicide (because of Brexit), Germany is turning inward, and Italy (along with Greece) is in full rebellion against EU austerity measures. Meanwhile, the United States incipient withdrawal from the world increasingly leaves the continent without its traditional life insurance policy against “predatory threats from the East.” That insurance is needed now more than ever in a world where Russia is again asserting its power, and where China promises to become the center of the world.
However, Friedman
says, the Yellow Vest Movement reveals that France itself is in danger of
disintegration. The movement has arisen because the country’s working poor and
anxious middle class have not benefitted from the liberal order of
political-economy characterized by globalization, technological development,
and mass migration of workers from the former Soviet Union and from France’s colonial
empire. In the face of such developments, the poor have been completely
marginalized, while robotics, artificial intelligence, outsourcing and
competition from Chinese imports have made it increasingly difficult for middle
class wage-earners to sustain accustomed life styles.
For France, all of this has been complicated by the ineptitude of its president Emmanuel Macron. On Friedman’s analysis, Macron has done the right things, but in an arrogant top-down, “let them eat cake” manner. The right things have included giving tax breaks to the rich, while imposing austerity (and job re-training programs) on workers. Austerity has meant raising taxes on diesel fuel, reducing pensions, and making it easier for employers to fire their workers.
In other
words, Friedman approves of the very policies that have given rise to the
“Yellow Vests” in the first place. For him, it’s just that austerity’s
necessarily bitter pill wasn’t administered with the proper bedside manner.
And,
according to the New York Times
columnist, there is no apparent alternative. In the face of globalization, he
holds that old solutions (simply cutting or raising taxes) cannot work.
Instead, he vaguely calls for cities and local leaders to become “more nimble.”
In his words, that means forming coalitions of business leaders, educators, and
small entrepreneurs who can compete locally, regionally, nationally and
globally.
That’s it.
That’s Friedman’s analysis and solution.
Entirely
absent from his considerations is any mention of “Yellow Vests” (i.e. working
class) involvement in the solutions he finds so elusive. That is, Friedman’s own approach, like that
of Macron is entirely top-down. Like Macron he seems tone deaf to the “Yellow
Vest” demand for inclusion in decision-making processes.
Necessary Changes in Consciousness
But what
would such inclusion entail?
It would
first of all necessitate changes in the very consciousness exhibited in the
Friedman piece. These changes would include recognition of:
The Fundamental Failure of Capitalism: Friedman begins his article by celebrating capitalism. He writes “Ever since World War II, the liberal global order. . . has spread more freedom and prosperity around the world than at any other time in history. . .” Granted, such triumphalism might have been defensible (for those ignoring, for example, U.S. interventions in the Global South) before the dawn of the climate and immigration crises. However, today its uncritical hubris is embarrassing as the system’s train of destruction stretching back to capitalism’s dawning are seen as threatening the very continuation of human life as we know it. We can now see that capitalism has not really been successful. Quite the opposite. Persisting in lionizing the system while ignoring its run-away destruction prevents serious analysts from imagining the fundamental changes necessary to address the system’s basic failure. Apparently, it prevented Friedman from doing so.
Yellow Vest Criticism of Neo-liberalism: What consciously or unconsciously irks the international working class about neo-liberal globalization is the fact that the reigning economic model accords rights to capital that it steadfastly denies or severely restricts in the case of labor. It grants capital the right to cross borders wherever it will in pursuit of low wages and high profits. Meanwhile, it insists that labor, an equally important element of the capitalist equation, respect borders and/or severe restrictions on its mobility. Evidently, this is because the authors of the system (politicians, corporate boards, and lawyers) realize that freer movement of labor especially from the East or Global South would outrage constituents and consumers within industrialized countries in the developed world. The “Yellow Vests” prove that such outrage has taken hold in France and threatens to spread across the continent as workers from Europe’s former colonies extend and appropriate for themselves the logic of “free trade” heretofore acted upon only by capitalists and denied to labor. The immigration crisis is the result.
Necessary Reforms
As noted
earlier, the Friedman article throws up its hands in surrender before the
changes he describes as perhaps signaling the end of Europe. He writes, “Here is what’s really scary, though. I don’t
think there are national solutions to this problem — simply cut taxes or raise
taxes — in the way there were in the past.” So (to repeat) our author is left
with the standard neo-liberal policies earlier described – trickle-down tax
cuts for corporations and austerity for workers – implemented by the usual
suspects with no mention of worker input.
None of that will work for
the Yellow Vests. They want their voices heard. They want democracy at all
levels. Such democratic ideal suggests changes far beyond the tired nostrums
offered by Friedman – or perhaps even imagined by the French protestors
themselves. These might include:
Democratized International Trade Agreements: Trade agreements like the European Union or NAFTA for that matter need to be negotiated with workers taking part. That means that the real EU question isn’t whether or not Great Britain should renegotiate its Brexit. The real issue is the reformulation of the EU Charter itself. The whole thing has to be rethought with the circle of negotiators widened to include all stakeholders. This means going beyond politicians, corporate heads, and lawyers to include trade unionists, environmentalists, indigenous peoples, educators, social workers, women, and representatives of children. In the process, each stake-holding group must have equal votes to complement their intellectual input. The same holds true for NAFTA.
Democracy at Work: Workers like the Yellow Vests spend most of their lives at work. Hence, their demands for democracy suggest, that any concept of self-governance must be broadened from the exercise of voting franchise every few years to include democracy at work. In its most effective form, democracy there takes the form of worker-owned cooperatives, where workers decide what to produce, where to produce it, and what to do with the profits. Enterprises of this type would never elect to pollute their neighborhoods, to pay outlandish salaries to administrators, to move their firm to a foreign country, or to lay off workers because of technological advance (all Yellow Vest complaints). Introducing such change is entirely possible. For instance, since 1985 Italy has taken steps to favor cooperative ownership. According to the country’s Marcora Law any company going out of business must extend to workers the right of first refusal in the case of a firm’s transfer of ownership.
Democratization of the New Technology: Democratic movements like the Yellow Vests need not be Luddite vis a vis the introduction of new technology. Instead, they might welcome any “labor saving” technologies. However, the point of such introduction would not be to down-size the labor force, but to shrink time spent on-the-job. For too long computers and artificial intelligence have been used by employers to cut labor costs and increase profits rather than to expand worker free time. By contrast, worker-friendly technological policies could make widespread job-sharing possible to eliminate unemployment. Four-hour workdays could replace present overwork. It could become possible to work only 6 months per year, or to take sabbaticals every few years without any reduction in pay.
A Green New Deal: Part of eliminating unemployment entails implementation of a Green New Deal (GND) to address climate chaos in ways that mirror Roosevelt’s original New Deal to combat the disastrous effects of the Great Depression. Prominent among the GND’s provisions must be the contemporary equivalent of the old Civilian Conservation Corps – this time to accomplish the environmental ends that the economy’s private sector is unwilling or unable to achieve.
A Marshall Plan for the Former Colonies: To reverse the influx of immigrant workers, the former colonial powers must stop the wars and environmental policies that end up creating refugees and migrants in the first place. This means, first of all, ending their resource-wars and the failed war-on-terrorism. Secondly, however, the old colonists need to implement a New Marshall Plan in Latin America, Africa, and South Asia, where centuries-long resource-extraction policies have created the very poverty, hunger, and unemployment that has transformed the Global South from a natural paradise to a cauldron of social inequities. Besides being a remedy for the migration crisis, a grand Marshal Plan for the Global South is a matter of reparations.
Implementation of the NIEO: Specifically, reparations should entail something like the implementation of the New International Economic Order (NIEO) demanded by the Group of 77 within the United Nations in 1974. The New Order would grant Global South countries the power to control multinational investments within their borders. Recognizing that no country has ever achieved “development” as a mere supplier of raw materials to already industrialized countries, the order would require the latter to make large transfers of capital to the former colonies in the form of money and technology. It would also guarantee stable prices for raw materials from previously colonized nations in exchange for finished products (like tractors and computers), with the prices for the latter indexed to the established value of the raw materials.
Implementation of A New World Information and Communication Order (NWICO): As recognized by the UNESCO McBride Report in 1980, the former colonies need not only a new economic order, but one in which special attention is given to the international flow of information. The Global South needs a world information system that gives its inhabitants themselves the ability to portray and understand their own reality rather than being dependent on their former keepers for information about their lives, cultures and politics.
Deep Cuts in Military Spending: All of this would be financed by higher taxes on the world’s 1% and by developed world cuts in military spending. Such increases and cuts would (1) recognize that the present war on terror is an utter failure, and (2) divert money now spent on attacking countries in the less developed world to constructive projects there such as rebuilding homes, schools, hospitals, power plants and water purification systems. Arguably, this would do more to combat terrorism than wars and bombing campaigns which many see as aggravating the problem of global terror. Again, this is a question of reparations.
Conclusion
The elegance of the just-listed responses to France’s Yellow Vests and to the crisis of the neo-liberal order the protestors are rebelling against is that they are not new. In the cases of the New Deal and Marshall Plan, they enjoy a proven track record. At the same time, the prescriptions are much more detailed than the abstract cliches reflected in Thomas Friedman’s endorsements of neo-liberal austerity and “more nimble” decision-makers drawn from the professional classes.
Instead, the suggestions just listed have been with us since the 1930s (in the case of the New Deal), since the 1940s with the Marshall Plan, and since the mid’70s and early ‘80s with the proposed NIEO and NWICO. For their part, as Richard Wolff points out, worker co-ops have been hugely successful, for instance in the Mondragon Corporation in Spain and throughout the world, including France and the United States. Across the globe, worker cooperatives already employ 250 million people and in 2013 represented $3 trillion in revenue. Meanwhile, a huge body of literature from the 1960s and early ‘70s described a world in which computers and robotics would be used not to one-sidedly increase corporate profits, but to provide lives of leisure and enjoyment for ordinary people.
None of this is unrealistic, dreamy or impractical.
In other words, we have the Yellow Vests to thank for
helping us recall that another world is not only possible, but that we’ve
already experienced it!
Over Christmas, my daughter and son-in-law took us all on a ski vacation in the French Alps followed by a full week in Paris. Since at my stage of life, skiing is no longer advisable, I decided to focus instead on looking into the country’s Gilet Jaune (GJ) protest movement that’s shaken France to the core.
So, for several months before leaving the U.S., I studied French each day trying to recover the little I retained from 7 years (!) of extended formal French study 3 in high school and 4 in college.
And then, once in France, while my sons, son-in-law, and 4 grandchildren were on the slopes, I studied up on the Gilet Jaunes themselves . I read about them in French newspapers, watched TV coverage of their demonstrations,and tried to join them in Albertville my first Saturday in the country, in the Champs Elysee on New Year’s Eve, and in front of the Hotel de Ville my final day in Paris.
As an activist and student of the left, my point was to become a kind of accidental reporter covering a phenomenon that has seen hundreds of thousands of political protestors in the streets across a country whose history since 1789 has given it quasi-ownership rights to the word “revolution.”
Dressed in the yellow safety vests that French drivers are required to wear in case of highway emergencies, the GJs are stopping traffic on busy roadways. They’re occupying toll booths to allow travelers escape from burdensome fees. Some see them as suggesting a “Frexit” that may mirror the UK’s recent Brexit withdrawal from the European Union.
Interviewing those protestors, some U.S. ex-patriots, teachers, and small businesspeople, as well as reading those newspapers and attending GJ protests have all made it clear to me that the Yellow Vests have valuable lessons to teach Americans about overcoming our current political fragmentation. The GJs suggest that it’s possible for both left and right extremes of our own political spectrum to cooperate for mutual benefit regardless of positions even on divisive issues like abortion, gun control, immigration, violence and terrorism.
The Yellow Vest Phenomenon
In the U.S. the GJ movement is typically reported by the Fox News right and even by “progressives” in terms of identity politics. It’s a rebellion, we’re told, against an “eco-tax” on diesel fuel. According to this view, the Yellow Vest rebels are part of a culture war pitting climate skeptics against a government whose vision has been captured by environmental extremists.
Such identification of the GJs with right-wing politics is adopted with good reason. French President Emmanuel Macron lent it credence in his annual New Year’s Eve address. There, he identified the Yellow Vests as “hateful” enemies of the state, of Jews, the media, homosexuals, and of law and order itself.
A more comprehensive view however, was inadvertently suggested by an American ex-pat living in Paris. At first, she described the Yellow Vests as “exactly the same as the U.S. Occupy Movement.” By the end of the interview, however, she portrayed it as mimicking the Republican Tea Party.
In my assessment, both evaluations are accurate. That is, far from being either predominantly conservative, liberal or radical, the Yellow Vest Movement is an all-sides rebellion against neo-liberal globalism itself. It has brought together forces on both the left and right extremes of the French political spectrum. Le Monde describes them as “retirees, the unemployed, poor workers, small businesspeople, and the self-employed within the gig economy.” It’s as if the Occupy Movement had united with Tea Partiers.
In terms understandable to Americans, yellow in France has become the new purple with each shade contributing from its corresponding degree of political consciousness. Right wingers like Marine Le Pen see the Yellow Vests as a protest against open borders that allow foreigners to corrupt French culture. Left wingers see it more broadly as a rejection of a globalism that accords free mobility to capital, while forbidding such movement to labor from France’s former colonies.
All sides see GJs as repudiating the status quo. And they’re working together to overthrow it. Therein lies the lesson for Americans. The lesson is that recognizing broad class interests as opposed to narrow and exclusionary identity-politics can unite normally fragmented citizens against a tyrannous plutocracy that is crushing us all.
The Real Yellow Vest Issues
Yes, a fuel tax purporting to address climate change was the precipitating “last straw.” But the tax was galling not because the French are climate-change deniers, but because it regressively impacted low-income workers living outside of the country’s big cities and dependent on auto commutes to get to work. It’s those people from the French countryside who constitute the majority within the Yellow Vest movement.
That’s because the government had persuaded commuters in France to switch to diesel cars as cheaper and more environmentally-friendly than gas guzzlers. Then, as diesel fuel became more expensive, the government reversed course on diesel cars. Suddenly, the vehicles were a major part of the climate problem.
Additionally, the revenue gathered by the fuel tax was never intended to advance the cause of alternative energy sources. Instead, it would revert to the general fund and end up in bank coffers as loan repayment. In other words, the bankers and their rich cronies who have recently been awarded huge tax reductions, would actually benefit from the fuel tax. Meanwhile, its pain would be felt by those already suffering from austerity measures imposed by the European Union following capitalism’s world-wide recession in 2008.
There’s also concern here about immigration. Open borders across the E.U. are changing the nation’s identity. Additionally, the creation of immigrants and refugees by climate chaos, poverty, and the post-2008 economic depression in France’s former colonies are all contributing to the identity-crisis syndrome decried by the French right-wing.
Nonetheless, ever class-conscious, and with their traditionally strong socialist and communist historical ties, the French (with 80% public approval) have apparently drawn conclusions about root systemic causes. And they’ve taken to the streets. To repeat, this is class struggle that transcends identity politics. Across the political spectrum, those on the left and those on the right are upset about:
· The emerging perception that the E.U. (like free-trade agreements everywhere) is geared towards disempowering the working class while enriching transnational corporations
· The rich not paying their fair share
· Resulting wealth inequality
· Wages that have not kept up with living-costs
· Austerity measures that threaten social programs like universal health care, public education, government-sponsored child care, and month-long worker vacations
· An educational system that devalues teachers, overloads their classrooms, and pays them poorly
Yellow Vest Lessons for Americans
As I said, all of this contains lessons for Americans fragmented into political siloes where the working class (those whose income is dependent on wages) are schooled to identify other workers as our enemies rather than our wealthy bosses, corporatists and financiers. Rightists tell us that our enemies are immigrants and people of color. Leftists say they are patriarchs, gun-rights advocates, and pro-lifers. Gilet Jaunes disagree. They say that the real enemy is what the Occupy Movement identified as the richest 1%; they are the corporate elite, our employers. The GJs would instruct us to get out into the streets and embrace what unifies the working class rather than what divides us on issues such as:
· Abortion: It’s time for grass-roots pro-choice and anti-abortion activists to join forces on the shared terrain of respect for human life. On that score, we are not each other’s enemies. Accordingly, the Gilets Jaunes implicitly invite us all to provisionally bracket the contentious issue on which we’ve been led to disagree so strongly. It’s time, they imply, to join forces to oppose the military-industrial concerns that spend billions to destroy human life for vaguely-defined and questionably-achievable purposes. Their bombings and drone attacks liquidate human life in the wombs of bombing victims as well as in homes, schools, churches, mosques, temples, hospitals, restaurants, and on farms where other wage-earners like the rest of us gather for peaceful domestic purposes. All of us share those purposes. In that sense, we are all pro-life.
· Gun Control: On New Year’s Eve, I attended what I thought would be a GJ protest in the Champs Elysees. The police were out in force on behalf of a government seen as coddling the rich at the expense of the working class. The heavily-armed gendarmes frisked us all before entering the Parisian equivalent of Times Square. In another demonstration (the day I left the country) the police tear gassed everyone as more than 5000 of us rallied outside the French President’s offices in the Hotel de Ville. The Robocop’s menacing presence made me wonder (along with Chris Hedges and Paul Craig Roberts) why we working-people and pensioners allow such service “dogs” (as the rich characterize their own police) to routinely beat and otherwise abuse us without response-in-kind. I found myself ruminating about the historical wisdom of gun-rights advocates. They embrace the history lesson that nothing usually changes until the battered have risen up and retaliated against police goons and strung politicians from the lampposts. Without advocating such violence, the over-the-top response of police in the Champs Elysees and before the Hotel de Ville represented for me another GJ invitation. It was to recognize common ground with those previously seen by leftists as enemies and nothing more. It may be time, the Yellow Vests imply, for gun-control advocates to enter serious and respectful dialog with those they’ve previously seen only as deplorable enemies. Perhaps there’s more wisdom than pacifists have been willing to recognize in Thomas Jefferson’s dictum that the tree of liberty must periodically watered with the blood of tyrants.
· Violence: Relatedly, I found it interesting how opponents of the Yellow Vests routinely attempt to discredit them by characterizing GJ demonstrators as “violent.” Ignored in the accusation is the critical point that any violent attacks by demonstrators on property or on the police is only one form of violence. More accurately, the GJ acts in question are often likely the work of agents provocateurs. But even if not, they certainly represent a reaction to a first act of violence in the form of the structural arrangements that precipitated the Yellow Vest movement in the first place. As described to me by a Paris university professor, those structures underpay workers and make it impossible for their children to attain the classic “French Dream” of liberty, equality, and fraternity. They impose austerity measures that deprive pensioners of a decent living and give rise to the widespread homelessness I witnessed on Paris streets and under the city’s bridges. All such inherently violent arrangements dwarf the broken store windows that the GJs are blamed for. And then there’s the third level of violence that critics routinely fail to recognize the outrageous police response to the Gilet Jaunes mentioned above. (I can still smell the tear gas.) The bottom line here is that the state, not the protestors, represents the most prominent purveyor of violence in this French context. Insisting on recognizing this habitually overlooked fact can go a long way towards defusing disagreements between leftists and their right-wing counterparts sparked by a one-dimensional approach to the divisive issue of “violence.”
· Immigration: What the left characterizes as xenophobia is really an implied, mostly unconscious, but highly accurate perception by the right that corporate globalization is totally impractical. It is founded on a fundamental contradiction. That inconsistency claims to champion “free market capitalism.” Yet such economic arrangement accords unrestricted freedom of movement across borders to only one element of the capitalist equation, viz. to capital itself. Meanwhile, labor, the other equally important factor in the system is forbidden such mobility (in the United States) and is restricted to other members of the E.U. on the continent. When the world’s labor force (in the former colonies) intuits the injustice of such double-standard when it votes with its feet to appropriate for itself the privileges routinely accorded capitalists all of us are made to recognize the unworkability of current forms of corporate globalization. The same is true of refugees caused by climate change and resource wars. Like free trade agreements, both are intimately connected with current forms of globalization. Such recognition in turn reveals a common struggle shared by both the political right and left. Following GJ partisans, our focus should correspondingly shift from villainizing fellow workers who happen to be immigrants to the corporatists who exploit both them and us by their destructive trade alliances. Invariably, those pacts benefit the 1% rather than those they (dis)employ. In other words, massive immigration should drive all of us to oppose reigning models of free trade and their destructive impact on workers everywhere as well as on human habitat.
· Terrorism: Something similar can be said of the war on terror. Those whom our leaders would have us fear as “terrorists” are arguably patriots desiring to “Make the Caliphate Great Again (MCGA). Often, they are partisans claiming ownership of their homelands. They’re Pan Arabs who envision an “Arabia for Arabs,” rather than for oil-thirsty westerners whose culture contradicts the values and monumental historical achievements of Islam in science and culture. At the very least, the so-called “terrorists” represent blowback against western aggression epitomized in the invasion of Iraq, the greatest war crime of the twenty-first century. Donald Trump’s MAGA supporters should be able to recognize such common ground both with MCGA enthusiasts and with anti-war activists in the United States. Once joined there, both the U.S. left and right could further cooperate in advocating reinvestment of what used to be called “the peace dividend” in a Green New Deal and its benefits for wage earners of every political stripe.
Conclusion
My accidental research project in France has given me hope. It’s helped me see as unnecessary the counter-productive divisions between descendants of Tea Party Activists and of their counterparts in the Occupy Movement. Actually, we have more in common than we might think. It’s the powers-that-be who want us fragmented and at each other’s throats!
If we could but recognize our points of unity, rather than the ideological fissures we’ve been schooled to cherish, we might well be as successful as today’s French Revolutionaries in making politicians more receptive to the real issues that unite wage earners across the country and throughout the world.
After all, polls across the political spectrum indicate we all want similar outcomes. We all want profound change that disempowers the world’s 1% and spreads around the wealth we’ve all produced, but that has instead been funneled upwards to the plutocrats.
Above all, adopting the cooperative spirit of the Gilet Jaunes means finding an alternative to the neo-liberal form of capitalism with its dreadful austerity measures. It’s destroying the planet and making paupers of us all.
I had an apparition the other day. I saw my recently deceased dear friend and mentor, Ruth Butwell. She spoke to me.
Her medium was a book we both contributed to in 1990. It was called Democracy Watch, Nicaragua: Five Central Kentuckians Observe the 1990 Nicaraguan Elections. The book recorded the journals of Ruth and four others of us who in 1990 officially observed the presidential elections in Nicaragua. Those elections had the U.S.-favored, Violetta Chamorro, defeating Daniel Ortega, the leader of the Sandinista National Liberation Front (FSLN). To this day, in some sense, I’m still reeling from the disappointment.
As I re-read Ruth’s sparkling diary and paged through the pictures in the book, vivid memories of her friendship and guidance came flooding in. There we were taking Spanish classes together, living with our working-class families, walking Managua’s dusty streets, visiting the offices of the Sandinistas and their opponents, touring farming co-ops and a prison, interviewing people on the streets, attending political rallies, talking with U.S. officials, and watching Nicaraguans vote in polling place after polling place. It was all as if she were there in the room with me as I read. And there was more. I recalled her not only as my traveling companion, but as my boss, the match-maker who brought me together with my bride of 40+ years, and as the dearest of friends.
I met Ruth Butwell in 1974, my first year at Berea College, where I ended up teaching for 40 years. Ruth was the Dean of Students at the college and therefore became my boss as I took a part-time job as the director of Dana Hall, a men’s residence there. (I also was hired to teach a section of a freshman course called “Issues and Values.”) Ruth played a big part in orienting me towards the Berea College ethos — “the Berea way.”
Very significantly, that same year, Peggy DuRivage also arrived on the Berea campus. Like Ruth, Peggy was a Michigander. The two of them hit it off immediately. In fact, the day that Ruth hired Peggy, she told her (with that twinkle in her eye) of this other Catholic who had just been hired – a former priest – whom Peggy might find interesting. (At the time, it was still unusual for Berea to hire Catholics – and even more so, a former priest.)
Of course, Peggy and I hit it off too. We got to know each other at the weekly meeting of residence hall directors chaired by Ruth in her office just off of Fairchild Hall. Ruth and her secretary and dear friend, Gloria Vanwinkle, saw what was developing between Peggy and me. (We both felt that they along with the rest of the residence hall faculty were watching us closely. Naturally, they were – and all smilingly cheering us on.)
And so, two years later, Ruth found herself generously hosting a wedding-day breakfast for Peggy and me and our guests at her home on Pinnacle Street. I remember that feast so well – a wonderful fruit salad, omelets, breads, sweet rolls, juices, coffee and teas. Ruth presided regally. Her mother was there too – and her children, John and Ann. (Then in 2016, Ruth reprised the event to help us celebrate our milestone 40th anniversary.)
But the wedding breakfast was only half the story. With the students gone in early June, Ruth allowed my mother and other members of my family, along with some friends to stay two nights free-of-charge in Dana Hall.
The night before the wedding, we threw a big party right there. The campus minister, Henry Parker, showed up. (He’d help us tie the knot the next day.) There was wine and homemade lasagna. My mother played the piano. Her signature rendition of “Bumble-Bee Boogie” was a big hit. Everybody was dancing. Peggy’s mom and dad showed everyone how to jitterbug.
No wonder Peggy and I remained close friends with Ruth even after she retired from the college around 1996. She was an important part of our life. To this day, we lovingly treasure her friendship.
All of that was great.
However, I got to know and love Ruth Butwell even more during our trip to Nicaragua. Throughout the 1980s, that tiny Central American country was in the news every day. President Reagan tried to persuade Americans that the FSLN was the incarnation of evil and and a direct agent of the Soviet Union. He said that Daniel Ortega and the Sandinistas in general were “Marxist-Leninist-totalitarian-Communist-dictators.” They were about to invade the United States through Harlingen, Texas. Reagan called the U.S.-supported counter-revolutionaries (the “Contras”) “the moral equivalent of our Founding Fathers.” Many of us who had already traveled to Nicaragua knew better. The Contras were terrorists pure and simple. The Sandinistas were champions of the country’s poor.
Ruth suspected all of that. So, when I asked her to join a fact-finding delegation that would double as election observers, she gave the invitation serious consideration. We would fund the trip, I said, by selling in advance copies of a book of the journals we’d keep during our 10-day stay in the country. And as soon as I could persuade her that the book would be of sufficiently high quality, she agreed to go. I was so grateful. Ruth enjoyed unquestioned credibility on campus as a smart, fair-minded, highly principled educator. Her contribution would help our book’s readers correct Reagan’s lies.
But those weren’t even Ruth’s main qualities. She was absolutely full of grace. She was extremely kind, optimistic, funny, and possessed of a wonderfully grounded sense of empathy and fairness – especially towards impoverished women like those we met at every turn in Nicaragua.
Her journal entries (nearly 50 pages in our book) also revealed her as a brilliant extremely perceptive writer with a gift for colorful description worthy of a wonderful novelist.
Here, for example, is the way she depicted buying a Coca-Cola on a Managua street:
“There are vendors of all kinds selling ice cream bars, Cokes, and water. We stop to get a Coke. Bottles are scarce, so the vendor is not going to part with the bottle. Instead, he has a large wooden wheelbarrow with a truck or box full of drinks perched above the wheel part. Down in the barrel is a 100-pound chunk of ice. The vendor has a metal shaving plane used at home in my dad’s shop for planning wood, but here used to shave up curls of ice from the big block. He scoops these curls up with his hand into a small plastic bag and pours a bottle of Coke or Pepsi (bottled in Nicaragua) into the bag. He deftly ties a knot in the plastic bag, collects 25,000 cordobas (about 50 cents) and hands me a brown balloon with two corners sticking up. Soon I see how to manage. I, like the others, bite off a corner of the bag with my teeth and suck the Coke out of the hole. At the same time, I push the liquid with my hands – sort of a liquid bagpipe. In the process, quite a bit escapes and trickles down my chin and shoots up my nose. Never mind. I am hot and dry and the stuff is cold and wet.”
After the Nicaragua trip, my bond with Ruth deepened through her daughter, Ann, and her son-in-law John Wright-Rios. During her sophomore year, Ann, was an outstanding student in my section of a “Great Books” course required of all second-year students. It was called “Religious and Historical Perspectives.” Subsequently, I asked Ann to be my teaching associate in the same course. And, again she excelled in that role.
Ann’s sense of social justice and the deeply-informed “preferential option” for the world’s poor are themselves testimonies to Ruth’s own global awareness, sense of justice, and commitment to on-going growth and development. Ruth was a wonderful mother.
Yes, my life (like the lives of countless others) has been and continues to be blessed by Ruth Butwell. Again, I consider her a mentor and shining example of the best traditions Berea College has to offer the world. Neither Peggy nor I will ever forget her brightness, intelligence, sense of humor, rock-solid integrity, and deep commitment to justice and peace.
I am so grateful for her apparition in my life — and in my memory.
About Things That Matter 