Citizenship, Part II

The point of the previous entry is not that I think there is no hope for my country. The point is that Obama, as wise and good as I believe him to be (especially as politicians go), is not the Messiah. The point is also that along with this changing of the guard We the People need to do some serious soul-searching and changing of our own attitudes and patterns of behavior.

Looking to any human elected official to revolutionize the world, keep us free from all dangers, provide for all our needs, and eradicate all evil is naively Utopian. It is also idolatry. Similarly, blaming our political leaders for all tragedies and chronic social ills is lazy and childish, no matter how incompetent and corrupt those leaders turned out to be. Who elected them? Who looked the other way during the weeks, years, or decades leading up to the crisis of the hour? Who swallowed their lines whole and bought what they were selling and joined their crusade because it felt shiny and happy and warm and fuzzy and safe and easy and righteous and glorious at the time?

Who abdicated responsibility for the world to Uncle Sam? More than a handful of us have been mentally and physically atrophying in front of the TV, sitting holed up in the academic ivory tower knowing too much and doing too little, partying the night away in pursuit of ersatz happiness (stimulation or numbness), maxing out credit cards with fashion and gadget addictions, obsessing over image and spending hundreds of hours and thousands of dollars each year trying to 'look healthy' when we're not, succeeding in business while failing at human decency, and confusing the idyllic white picket fence and weed-free lawn with goodness.

We the People have somehow degenerated into a kind of collective Emo brat. We smugly or sulkily assert our deservingness, demonize or ostracize anyone who won't coddle us while we lick our wounds, and resent the suggestion that we take any responsibility for our own character or lack thereof. Instead of reveling in chronic adolescence, whining about how rough we've got it, and running to the pharmacy whenever something isn't working right, Americans need to be growing up and showing up in their own lives by putting their money where their mouth is, reading news that might (gasp!) make them think or tell them something they don't want to hear, writing letters to their senators, getting their hands dirty cleaning up their own mess or someone else's, and otherwise doing real work (not just pushing paper and buttons) to make the world a better place for their neighbors and children.

Yeah, we were all born into a broken system and we've all been lied to, but we've also gone along with it when we've know better and chosen comfort and ignorance over conscience and effort time and time again. Nobody's clean.

One can't say with any integrity that one 'values' something unless it is reflected in the way one lives and the possibilities that one extends to others. Politics is, or should be, so much more than cheering or sneering the pre-formulated soundbytes of one's ideological camp. Politics means everything about the ordering and governance of human society. Citizenship is so much more than voting. It is the way one occupies the world to which one belongs and carries out one's responsibilities in that world.

A good way to start is to take a hard look at our place in human history and proceed with more humility--and, where appropriate, repentance--when we speak about where we come from, what we are doing, and where we are headed. U.S. citizenship is not proof of superior humanity, license to indulge oneself at others' expense, or grounds for preferential entitlement to peace, prosperity, and security. It is quite possible, the best efforts of Obama and friends notwithstanding, that in a few years U.S. citizenship will not be an asset at all.

Someday the sun will set on the Almighty Dollar, which for anyone currently on the winning side of the stars and stripes is an inconvenient truth to say the least. Get used to it, darlin'. Empires fall. And lots of people are out of luck. And there is considerable misery and chaos for awhile. And lots of other people are better off. And life goes on.

So choose this day whom you will serve. Choose this day where you will place your hope.

Forgive us, Father, for we know not what we do. God bless everyone. God have mercy on America.

Quotable: Citizenship

By Jay Phelan, President of North Park Theological Seminary in Chicago, in his weekly letter to the community:

"Christians live between Romans 13 and Revelation 13—between the powers that be, ordained of God, and the beast rising out of the sea—between the state punishing evildoers and the state persecuting the saints. Christians neither wholly affirm nor wholly condemn the state. We can and should love our countries and cultures for the good they can offer the world. But we are also called to prophetic witness when the state is oppressive and destructive and when it claims loyalties that it is not due. And we are always called to a loyalty to the community composed of every nation, tribe, and tongue—the Church of Jesus Christ. We live as outposts of God’s kingdom, sacraments of that coming new heavens and new earth. As much as we can we live out that kingdom life, that Kingdom of God, in the midst of a brittle human community. In all of this we seek the good of all God’s people, all God’s creation and every nation of the world."

Tuesday's inauguration ceremony was beautiful, marking a triumph of love, courage, solidarity, and justice over not just 8 years but centuries of hatred, fear, alienation, and oppression. A redemption, indeed, but not the Resurrection and not the Restoration in which we as citizens of God's kingdom place our hope.

We are the Empire, my friends. The United States of America was founded not purely on ideals of human equality (at the time 'men created equal' applied only to white European males who could afford/invade and defend land) but on the genocide of Native Americans and the slavery of millions of Africans. Obama moves into a mansion built by the hands of slaves, children of God kidnapped from their homes, reduced to property in the eyes of their 'owners', and forced to sweat and bleed so that others could live in luxury and idleness. No Northern smugness, please; Yankee factory owners got rich on cheap cotton from the South and many of our ancestors dressed much better than they could have if the shirts on their backs had not been subsidized by stolen human lives.

Let's not forget that it took the stubborn, blind, anemic hearts of this nation's privileged class a whole century to get from abolishing the legal 'right' to buy and sell people to establishing some basic laws asserting that all people ought to be treated as such. And fifty years later we have quite a long way to go. A few years ago at camp, I was giving a little girl a piggyback ride and she said, "You don't act like white folks. I like you." After only 8 or 9 years of life in this world (specifically the unofficial apartheid of inner city Gary, Indiana) she understood already that she is less welcome here due to the color of her skin. What kind of a childhood is that? 'Created equal' remains a noble but hollow sentiment as long as pigmentation and birthplace (neighborhood or nation) stack the deck against most of the residents of this planet. For every disadvantaged child who beats the odds and makes it big, there are millions who barely get by (no matter how hard they work) and thousands who don't make it at all.

Let's also not forget that 2,000 years ago the cross was an instrument of torture and the ultimate symbol of imperial oppression. Rome has the final say on life and death, y'all. Don't mess with Texas. Caesar is Lord, it doesn't get better than the Pax Romana, and anybody who begs to differ has an ugly, slow, painful death waiting for them, right in public view.

But the tomb was empty, Life had the last word, and the cross became a symbol of hope instead!

However, human history stayed messy and somewhere between Constantine and Christopher Columbus the cross started being used in ugly ways again. Christendom's global expansion agenda has hardly been an unqualified good. Gold and glory for us; grief and poverty for you. Jesus loves you, but our guns are bigger and we have our nation's treasury and our own wallets to think about. Business is business. And besides, who needs neighbors when they're taking up space on perfectly good land that could be put to much better use dismembered as raw materials for factories and paved with sugarcane, bananas, coffee, cattle, and tobacco for the good, more deserving Christian white folks to buy? It doesn't get better than the Pax Americana.

(This story, too, is far from over. Open an atlas sometime and look at all the cute, tidy little symbols depicting what each country 'exports'. Then wonder to yourself what that land looks like now, who used to live there, what happened to them, and whether they were entirely willing and eager to part with what the Invisible Hand in its infinite wisdom has taken away. Next, wonder how many pieces of someone else's broken world are sitting in your refrigerator and closets or buried in a landfill somewhere, never to move through the Circle of Life again.)

Homeless? Hungry? Overworked? Underpaid? What are you complaining about? You should be grateful that we tried to 'save' you at all. God helps those who help themselves, so we help ourselves to as much as we can get our hands on. The sun never sets on the Almighty Dollar. The truth will probably get you in trouble; the Marketplace will set you free.

Quotable: History Lesson

“When the missionaries came to Africa they had the Bible and we had the land. They said, 'Let us pray.' We closed our eyes. When we opened them we had the Bible and they had the land.”

- Archbishop Desmond Tutu of South Africa

Song: Empire

By Dar Williams on My Better Self (2005):

Who's afraid of the sun
Who would question the goodness of the mighty
We who banish the threat
When your little ones all go nighty nighty

Well there's no time for doubt right now
And less time to explain
So get back on your horses
Kiss my ring and join our next campaign

And the Empire grows
With the news that we're winning
With more fear to conquer
And more gold thread for spinning
Till it's bright as the sun
Shining on every one

Some would say we've forced our words
And we find that ingeniously churlish
Words are just words
Don't be so pessimistic, weak and girlish

We like strong, happy people
Who don't think there's something wrong with pride
Work makes them free
And we spread that freedom far and wide

And the Empire grows the seeds of its glory
For every five tanks
Plant a sentimental story
Till they worship the sun
Even Christ-loving ones

And we'll kill the terrorizers
And a million of their races
But when our people torture you
That's a few random cases
Don't question the sun
It doesn't help anyone

But the journalists cried out
When it was too late to stop us
Everyone had awakened
To the dream they could enter our colossus
And now I'm right, yeah, you said I'm right
There's nothing that can harm me
Cause the sun never sets on my dungeons or my army

And the Empire fell on its own splintered axis
And the Emperor wanes as the silver moon waxes
And the farmers will find old coins
In their strawberry fields
While somebody somewhere twists his ring
And someone kneels

Oh, where is the sun shining for everyone?
Where is the sun shining for everyone?

Quotable: Technical Obsession

From The Brothers K (1992) by David James Duncan, a description of the inner condition of the “One-Pointed Specialist,” one who attains excellence in one discipline at great cost to one’s humanity and perhaps that of others as well. The following is Duncan’s brilliant poetization of a phenomenon also identified by Wendell Berry. In Berry’s thought, the category ‘specialist’ is a pejorative term for someone who knows (and therefore effectively cares) way too much about one thing and not nearly enough about anything else, thereby wielding immense power without reference to context, and thereby performing work that is inherently meaningless and potentially disastrous.

“That an all-consuming focus on a single object of desire could achieve a quantitatively spectacular result was no surprise to any thinking person in the early Sixties: the mushroom cloud that accompanied J. Robert Oppenheimer’s dissection of the atom was an unforgettable* demonstration of the general principle. But that the same intensity of focus which made any great quantitative achievement possible might also render it qualitatively bankrupt—that a Golden Glove MVP could accomplish a fabulous feat and end up looking, feeling, and playing, the following year, like a battle-jagged vet just back from some interior front line—this was the ‘un-American’ surprise and bitter public lesson of Roger Maris’ life.

Technical obsession is like an unlit, ever-narrowing mine shaft leading straight down through the human mind. The deeper down one plunges, the more fabulous, and often the more remunerative, the gems or ore. But the deeper down one plunges, the more confined and conditioned one’s thoughts and movements become, and the greater the danger of permanently losing one’s way back to the surface of the planet. There also seems to be an overpowering, malignant magic that reigns deep down in these shafts. And those who journey too far down or stay too long become its minions without knowing it—become not so much human beings as human tools** wielded by whatever ideology, industry, force or idea happens to rule that particular mine. Another danger: because these mines are primarily mental, not physical, they do not necessarily mar or even mark the faces of those who have become utterly lost in them. A man or woman miles down, thrall to the magic, far beyond caring about anything still occurring on the planet’s surface, can sit down beside you on a park bench or bleacher seat, greet you in the street, shake your hand, look you in the eye, smile genially, say ‘How are you?’ or ‘Merry Christmas!’ or ‘How about those Yankees?’ And you will never suspect that you are in the presence not of a kindred spirit, but of a subterranean force.”

Editorial commentary:
*One might question whether it was sufficiently unforgettable. We don’t seem to have learned our lesson yet.
**’Human resources,’ perhaps? Or, as the new industry lingo would have it—I kid you not, I took a graduate course in HR—‘human capital’?

Quotable: Coauthorship and Affirmation of this Life

From Norman Wirzba's introduction to The Art of the Commonplace: The Agrarian Essays of Wendell Berry (2002):

"Though more of us than ever before live a life of luxury and ease, fewer of us can claim that our lives are permeated with peace and joy. The frantic, stressful striving going on all around us indicates that we are profoundly lost. We seem unable to ask with any seriousness or depth the question of what all our striving is ultimately for.

Where can we turn for help and direction? In the same essay ["A Native Hill" (1969)] Berry concluded that the source of help cannot come from within ourselves for 'it is not from ourselves that we will learn to be better than we are.' The path towards wholeness depends on our discovery and acknowledgement of, and then response to, a greater goodness that contextualizes us. Our fundamental mistake is that we have presumed to be the authors of ourselves and our destinies, and thus have forgotten or denied that we are part of 'a great coauthorship in which we are all collaborating with God and with nature in the making of ourselves and one another.' We can only become what we truly are by acknowledging that we do not exist by, from, and for ourselves. Our lives are always rooted in a natural and cultural community, so that to cut ourselves off from these roots, whether that be in the name of progress or human liberation, is to ensure the eventual withering and then death of life. Once we have forgotten or denied our biological kinship with the earth and its inhabitants, it is hardly an accident that so much of human spiritual life is premised on an escape from rather than an affirmation of this life."

P.S. Watch WALL-E. Like any good prophecy, it is a distressingly incisive but still hopeful portrayal of the threshold on which we stand, and a striking wake-up call to the choices and consequences we face--not 100 or 1,000 years in the future, but NOW. Much worse off and no better prepared than we were 40 years ago when "A Native Hill" was written, will we have the wisdom to look to the sources (esp. the Source) that can help us "learn to be better than we are" and the courage to respond in time to avert (or at least mitigate) the (un)natural logical outcomes of industrial globalization and 21st-century consumer culture?