If you are one of the out of state businesses Rick Perry is inviting to move to Texas, be sure to bring good tires. The Texas Tribune reports that our state is shifting more and more to gravel roads as a cost cutting measure. One of the reasons the Texas economy seemed to be doing so well is that we are selling our public sector to hide the devastation of Republican economic policies. So if you have a business that would benefit from the freedom from worker safety regulations, if you long for the liberty to dump poisons into the environment, if you have a business that will not require a middle class consumer and you don’t mind crappy roads, Texas is the perfect place for you.
http://www.texastribune.org/2013/08/19/conversion-of-roads-to-gravel-met-with-concern/
Don’t tell me God doesn’t have a sense of humor. Senator Ted Cruz, who has made a living bashing undocumented immigrants and refusing them a path to citizenship, has supposedly just realized he is a Canadian citizen and must wait eight months to renounce that citizenship.
It turns out flag waving Senator Cruz was born in Canada and is actually a dual citizen. It should be fun to watch tea party supporters, who have spent the last eight year questioning Obama’s right to be president because they believe he was born in another country, rally around one of their own who was born in Canada but wants to run for president.
http://mobilebeta.reuters.com/senator-cruz-may-have-to-wait-eight-months-to-stop
When we picture Christ as a white male heterosexual Christian we have projected our culture’s hierarchy of dominance upon the whole universe. Historically, the church has then moved from that image to discrimination against women, persecution of non-Christians, defense of slavery, attacking gay people and service to whatever empire it happened to belong to.
When St. Paul taught that, in Christ there is neither male nor female, slave nor free, Jew nor gentile, he was calling us to a new kind of religion and a new kind of language for humankind. St. Paul was calling us to be bigger than our culture’s gender roles, its race or class distinctions and even beyond sectarian religion itself.
As long as we use the language of domination in our creeds and liturgy we should not be surprised when the church persecutes. The white male leadership of the church is trying to judge fairly, but we cannot be fair because we are unconsciously using ourselves as the measuring rod.
For Christianity to answer Christ’s call to love we must surrender the idea that we are better if we are male, better if we are white, better if we are heterosexual and even that we are better if we are Christian. When the church does not purge its liturgy of sexism, classism and racism, then our worship hypnotizes us (and our children) into our culture’s hierarchy of dominance.
I will admit it. Westboro Baptist punches my buttons. When I see them at a funeral of a gay man chanting, “God hates fags!” This morning I was taught a lesson by a hip hop artist who was being protested by Westboro Baptist. They took her song “We R who we R” and changing the lyrics to “God hates who U R.” Apparently the folks at Westboro were a bit stunned when the groups dancers came out and danced to the song as a way of reclaiming it.
When mystics have told us to turn the other cheek, I always assumed it simply meant not becoming reactive to hate and violence. This morning I was taken to school by a hip hop artist. Perhaps, more profoundly, “turning the other cheek” means not letting the hate of others rob us of our own song.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/08/19/westboro-baptists-kesha-dancers_n_3782051.html
One of the best gifts ever given to me was that of making me uncomfortable with my own prejudice. As long as I believed in patriarchy I was incapable of the intimacy only possible in relationships that are equal. As long as I believed in capitalism I could not know that my true human value cannot be measured by possessions or status. As long as I believed in history as taught by my own white culture, I could not hear the voices from outside that circle awakening me to who I am as a citizen of the world.
“The only way to break the hold of radical Islam is to give its followers a stake in the wider economy, the possibility of a life where the future is not dominated by grinding poverty, repression and hopelessness. If you live in the sprawling slums of Cairo or the refugee camps in Gaza or the concrete hovels in New Delhi, every avenue of escape is closed. You cannot get an education. You cannot get a job. You do not have the resources to marry. You cannot challenge the domination of the economy by the oligarchs and the generals. The only way left for you to affirm yourself is to become a martyr, or shahid. Then you will get what you cannot get in life—a brief moment of fame and glory. And while what will take place in Egypt will be defined as a religious war, and the acts of violence by the insurgents who will rise from the bloodied squares of Cairo will be defined as terrorism, the engine for this chaos is not religion but the collapsing economy of a world where the wretched of the earth are to be subjugated and starved or shot.” -Chris Hedges
http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/murdering_the_wretched_of_the_earth_20130814/
Abortion doctor George Tiller was shot down in his church by a pro-life assassin in Wichita, Kansas. When the clinic was re-opened Mark Gietzen, head of the Kansas Coalition for Life accused the director of the clinic of trying to provoke another shooting, saying,”I think she’s trying to provoke an incident so she can say, ‘Look, these pro-lifers did something,’ and people from California and New York and these other places will give her money.”
In other words, while we don’t officially condone shooting down pro-choice people in church, if you exercise your constitutional rights in a way we do not approve, you have brought the violence on yourself.
For the life of me, I do not understand why this kind of threat is not treated as domestic terrorism.
Is it possible that what Jesus experienced at resurrection was also what Buddha found under at Bodhi tree, Moses heard at the burning bush, and the prophet Mohammed experienced on his night journey?
Further, is it possible that Einstein’s experience of the formula E=Mc2 was an revelation of that same mystery, and that a life long atheist who is moved by reverence toward the universe has also drunk from the same fountain?
Could it be that to say “God is one” does not mean that one human conception of the mystery is correct and the others wrong, but they are all differing tongues of one flame? Is it possible that the heart of every religion is captured by any deep reverence, and that we have most fully lost the experience when we think we have it captured and are now custodians of the sacred flame?
It has been so depressing to hear my liberal friends defend domestic spying under Obama the exact same way my conservative friends defended that kind of thing under Bush. “I have nothing to hide” is easy to say when your not standing up for anyone, but it is a different matter when you feel the need to oppose something like an unjust war.
Is anyone really surprised that the National Security Agency has been caught overstepping its legal authority thousands of times according to the Washington Post?
“Most of the infractions involve unauthorized surveillance of Americans or foreign intelligence targets in the United States, both of which are restricted by law and executive order. They range from significant violations of law to typographical errors that resulted in unintended interception of U.S. emails and telephone calls, the Post said, citing an internal audit and other top-secret documents provided it earlier this summer from NSA leaker Edward Snowden, a former systems analyst with the agency.”
The report also claims that NSA agents were told to alter records when reporting to the Justice Department.
Here’s the thing. Humanity wasn’t born yesterday. The safeguards on our civil liberties that have been destroyed by Presidents Bush and Obama took thousands of years to win. Waving due process for arrests, and for trials and for invasions of privacy may seem safer in the short run, but history teaches it is a matter of time before unchecked governmental power loses every other value than its own preservation and expansion.
http://m.apnews.com/ap/db_289563/contentdetail.htm?contentguid=QQfNaeqz
Capitalism not only makes more money than any other economic system, it also concentrates it. Unfettered capitalism will make more and more money and funnel it to fewer and fewer hands. So in the US, profits have never been higher, but the middle class is disappearing. One of the reasons we are seeing more and more elements of a police state is that we will need domestic spying, private police forces and massive prisons to protect the handful of rich people from the masses of poor.
“A recent Urban Institutereport finds that the racial wealth gap — measured as the difference in wealth accumulated by white Americans and black and Latino Americans — is the largest it has ever been since the Federal Reserve started tracking it. In 1983, for every dollar held by the average black or Latino family, the average white family had five. In the aftermath of the financial meltdown and the Great Recession that figure today has increased to six dollars. The figures for the median post-recession family — a measure less skewed by America’s handful of superrich — are even further apart: in 2010, for every dollar held by the median black or Latino family, the median white family had eight.” -John Light, Moyers and Company
The irony is, it is willingness of mainstream white America’s to ignore the economic plight of people of color that will prepare them for the same fate. Capitalism has used racism to get poor whites to join in mistreating poor people of color for the whole of American history, but the only color capitalism really sees is green.
http://truth-out.org/news/item/18197-our-growing-racial-wealth-gap