The Prevailing Ethic of the King Days

The Prevailing Ethic of the King Days

In last week’s blog we wondered (in so many words) if the new political danger was that voters, candidates, and their supportive communities (churches, synagogues, mosques, temples) had surrendered to a deliberate preference for blindness.  No one can have missed the chronic aversion to a reality-based problem statement  by the candidates now working South Carolina.  “Don’t let Obama turn America into a European-style entitlement society;”   “Learn to prefer a paycheck to food stamps;”  “Restore capitalist principles – competition and creative destruction – to our financial sector.”

Not to be left out, one national church journal came out for blindness, instructing its editors last week to publish only positive letters from readers about Israel/Palestine. Sure.

Even with eyes closed the negative news hasn’t gone away.  Post holiday optimism about December retail sales were dashed by Commerce Department reports (1/12/12) that retail sales were  down in December, reaching the weakest pace in seven months; and  jobless claims rose sharply—with unemployment claims reaching 399,000, the highest in six weeks.

 The mindless discourse of the candidates tooling through South Carolina suggests at the least a practiced disrespect for the voters. Like British soldiers at the Somme, citizens often are fodder for other people’s ambitions.

The Global Economic Forum—itself not without such ambitions—in advance of its January 25^th meetings in Davos, Switzerland has reported growing evidence of a “Dystopia,” a term (the opposite of utopia) describing a world descending into a chaos that will be “full of hardship and devoid of hope. A world

where a large youth population contends with chronic, high levels of unemployment, while concurrently, the largest population of retirees in history becomes dependent upon already heavily indebted governments. Both young and old could face an income gap, as well as a skills gap so wide as to threaten social and political stability.

Yes, truly, and you can study the evidence in their sophisticated interactive graphs at http://reports.weforum.org/global-risks-2012/#ol=data-explorer

All these fantasies, visions and premonitions reflect an eerie similarity. Instead of a focus on a hugely unbalanced global economy and its affected people, one quickly develops the impression that political rhetoric, theological sophistry, and Davos summit conferences may really be for the preservation of the one percent.

As for the rest of us, we would do well on this anniversary weekend to remember the prevailing ethic in the days of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., the days of SCLC, SNCC and CORE. There was an old saw then that compared southern de jure racial segregation to de facto segregation in northern U. S. cities. Pundits found the answer: the Negro is segregated but nobody did it.”

That’s still the prevailing ethic.  Consequences, which often are compared to a natural law, must be kept carefully separate from their real causes.