Public Liturgies

Post Inaugural Shadows: The Two-Headed Dragon, Part I

                A multitude found President Obama’s Second Inauguration on January 21st an exhilarating moment of relief from ominous shadows nearby.   Even without counting the ceaseless efforts of Republicans to block the President’s initiatives, the ground is shifting under everyone’s feet.    

It starts with the growing global disillusionment among young adults and families with children who find themselves facing a new technological economy that offers fewer jobs to support themselves or the families many cannot start because of the absence of meaningful work. 

Retired ecumenical executive, Hugh Wire who with his wife, Anne (a retired professor at San Francisco Theological Seminary), has periodically taught at colleges in China over the past decade. He sent an email over Christmas describing the growing disillusionment among young men and women passing through China’s college system.

The simple patriotism of the young people we taught 7 years ago who were first in their families to get to college (and whose families survived the cultural revolution)…has been frustrated by the lack of jobs for them related to their dreams.  Bureaucracy and the harsh realities of getting ahead in industrial cities has gotten to them.

“We could see,” he said, “that their trust in the benevolence of the community were old values that would be worn away by the radical individualism of modern, urban capitalist China.”

The NY Times confirmed this picture last week (1/25/13) with a full page devoted to career grid lock in China.  Factory jobs producing everything from shirts to I-pads are increasingly recognized as dead ends by China’s growing millions of freshly educated young people. The problem is there are few alternatives.

China’s labor force is, of course, the cheap labor that made Silicon Valley rich, and the rest of the tech world with it.  Now the picture is changing. The Economist reports (1/21) that the working-age Chinese workforce (ages 15-64) actually shrank by 3.54 million last year. The massive factories with hundreds of thousands of workers are increasingly desperate for a fresh supply of the younger workers who have become deeply disillusioned, therefore harder to find and more expensive to hire.  

A two-headed dragon is emerging in the global economy. The developed world mines the poor nations for cheap workers but both worlds face a technology boomerang.  In rich and poor nations around the world the recessionary cycles are of increasing duration and the growing gap between labor’s productivity gains and labor’s real wages pictures the shape of this two-headed dragon that is devouring youthful hopes, as the graph on the right shows. 

The new film, Zero Dark 30, is set in this rapidly growing global caste system of inequality and job shortage that is planting seedbeds of individual desperation and disillusion.  These are turning into the startling Al Qaeda raids in Algerian gas and oil fields and the suicide bombers in Afghanistan and Iraq. Suddenly today’s papers tell us Afghanistan has moved to North Africa.   While Dark Zero is a dramatic reenactment of the search for and killing of Osama bin Laden—and has triggered a fresh critique of U. S. use of torture—it also demonstrates that the context for terrorism is the fierce difference between Western affluence and Central Asian under-development.

At the Global Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland that ended this past Sunday, the Global Agenda Council on Values describes the profile of this dragon

At the end of the 19th Century, the ratio of the richest 20% in the world to the poorest 20% was approximately 7:1.  At the end of the 20th Century, it was 75:1.  80% of the real increase in wealth in the USA between 1980 and 2005 went to only 1% of the population. Now in the USA, the richest 400 people have as much wealth as the poorest 155 million people.

An Oxfam Media Briefing in advance of the Davos meeting noted that “The top 100 billionaires added $240 billion to their wealth in 2012—enough to end world poverty four times over.” 

The U. S. version of the Central Asian and young Chinese’ disillusionment is the growth of mindless acts of violence, such as Newtown, and our growing suicide rate.  In the U. S. military during and after their service in Iraq and Afghanistan suicide rates are greater than the combat casualties. At mid-year in 2012 it was one per day in the combat zones. [More recent data has not been released]

Veterans returning from the wars discover there are few civilian jobs available for them. Many had enlisted in the first place because other job alternatives did not exist. According to the Veterans Administration, suicide rates among all veterans of all ages is a staggering eighteen per day.

While Zero Dark 30 has revived a much-needed critique of torture, it is the difference it displays between the world of the western powers and the Middle Asian world of underdevelopment that screams even more loudly at us.  The tragic events of 9/11 have become the rich man’s sorrow:

Al Qaeda spent roughly half a million dollars to destroy the World Trade Center and cripple the Pentagon. What has been the cost to the United States? In a survey of estimates by The New York Times, the answer is $3.3 trillion, or about $7 million for every dollar Al Qaeda spent planning and executing the attacks…this total equals one-fifth of the current national debt. (All figures are shown in today’s dollars.) [NY Times, 9/11/11]

The two heads of this dragon kill both at home and abroad.  Here at home, crazed young men with assault weapons slaughter children. Overseas, suicide bombers destroy hundreds of people at a single stroke.

Who will slay this two headed dragon and how?  Part Two of this blog will pursue this question further next week.