The Year of Living Dangerously: Renewing the King Vision

            Annual observances of MLK’s birthday can become impediments to historical memory where critical thinking is required. Only three years after his “I have a dream” speech, Dr. King and the civil rights movement stalled at the point where it encountered the toxic mixture of economic and class-based segregation and limited opportunities in northern cities like Chicago, Boston and Cleveland.

What they found in these highly segregated cities is a familiar story today: insufficient work and opportunity, hard-bitten wage earners fighting and clawing for foot holds on security for themselves and their families. They lived in those days in a world of union solidarity (or exclusion) that was a combination of standoff by dynamite, mounted police and the corruptions of political patronage. Today they work at jobs that do not pay enough to support a family.

In 1964 what had seemed a matter of moral courage and persuasion in the South had become  more like an encounter with the four horsemen of the apocalypse by 1967.  In Dr. King’s last months he and his movement partners found themselves deciding whether to march against the monstrous realities of the Vietnam War or launch a domestic war on poverty. It would be hell either way. King was still dreaming but the familiar ground had changed under his feet.  Moral appeal in northern cities had few ears for the hearing of it.  

This was a different kind of theological problem.  Abruptly King’s vision, his transcendent call, had become a dream of integration into a world that did not really exist.  The main elements of the toxic mix he encountered are still our current reality fifty years later, only much more dangerous.  Today it connects to Syria, Egypt, Central Africa, Afghanistan and all the rest. Growing global inequality is making 2014 the year of living dangerously. Those apocalyptic horsemen are riding hard (traditionally conquest, war, famine and death).

Faith communities have a call, if they can hear it, to renew Dr. King’s drive to create an alternative imagination. The problem is that most faith communities have become comfort zones. They can be heard on any given day praying for themselves, their babies, their growing kids, their elderly parents, but not for the forty people killed yesterday in a raid by Boko Haram on Kawuri in Nigeria. And they study not; perpetual bible study, maybe, but usually not a political or sociological analysis of the problems to which their biblical studies may direct them. Such as these:

“ General Electric’s decision to open its first new assembly line in 55 years in Louisville, Ky [will offer jobs] at just over $13.50 an hour. That’s less than $30,000 a year

“Volkswagen…. is bringing around 2,000 fresh auto jobs to America [with a] beginning wage for assembly line workers of  $14.50 per hour, about half of what traditional, unionized workers employed by General Motors or Ford received.

“[These Volkswagen jobs will] cost Volkswagen $27 per hour…..in Germany, the average autoworker earns $67 per hour.

“In effect….Volkswagen has moved production from a high-wage country (Germany) to a low-wage country (the United States).”

                                                  [Wall Street analyst Steve Ratner, N. Y. Times 1/26/14]     

Martin Luther King, Jr. did go symbolically to Kawuri, only its name was Memphis. If his dream is to live on it must be given new configurations if peace doves are to fly in Chicago or Kawuri.   Not to follow the path of the King dream is to stay comfortable. That’s why this is the year of living dangerously.  We must go to Kawuri. There’s little time left to pack.

Hitting the Right's Pitch

        It was many years, centuries in fact, before the Visigoths overwhelmed Rome.  First they became insiders fighting barbarian competitors alongside Roman troops on the northern frontier. Perceiving the growing weakness in the Empire, the Visigoths gradually congealed, overwhelming, looting and destroying whole Roman cities.   

        Detroit is not Rome, but a look at it makes one ask when it was that the Nazis or some other enemy swept  in with their bombers?  Much of the city is utterly destroyed from neighborhood streets to elegant train stations . It’s the same story in many other cities.   The enemy air raids on Detroit, Youngstown, Cleveland came, of course, from a capitalism that can be called “classic” only because it went on its way unchallenged. 

     

         Is it happening now? 

         

         The Financial Times (1/14/14) headlines “A productivity crisis is stalking the global economy as most countries last year failed to improve their overall efficiency for the first time in decades.”  That’s econo-speak for too many people could not go back to work. In between the lines it means that the true goal of efficiency is to reduce labor costs, by finding a way workers will double their productivity so no one will notice the bread lines.  

Last Friday’s monthly Jobs Report from the Department of Labor (DOL) shouts the same tragic story.  There are 1.2 million fewer jobs on nonfarm payrolls and 638,000 thousand fewer jobs on private payrolls in December than when the recession began in December 2007,” While Census Bureau data says the nation grew by another 11 million people. More people, fewer and fewer jobs.

         

            Chad Stone, Chief Economist at the Center for Budget and Policy Priorities(on 1/10/14):

 “The share of the population with a job, which plummeted in the recession from 62.7 percent in December 2007 to levels last seen in the mid-1980s and has remained below 60 percent since early 2009, was 58.6 percent.'

                

          The real danger now comes not from metaphorical air raids but from a Right wing take-over built on the ruins of millions of people’s empty pocketbooks and lost homes—thanks to the Great Recession—and from a revival or racial scapegoating.  

          With the Obama mystique severely damaged by the gross mishandling of its own Affordable Health Care Act,  we find at least thirteen states in play for possible Republican senate victories; this on top of thirty-six state governorships all in Republican hands now.  It’s not paranoia to imagine a worst case scenario in which the prejudices of wounded people come to be exploited and then used to dominate national attitudes amid even more tightening economic conditions.  Models for radical conservative takeovers of government are ready at hand in Wisconsin and North Carolina, ready for the copying.  

        Bill Moyer’s Report describes it this way in North Carolina:

“Now…Republicans hold the governor’s mansion and both houses of the legislature and they are steering North Carolina far to the right: slashing taxes on corporations and the wealthy, providing vouchers to private schools, cutting unemployment benefits, refusing to expand Medicaid and rolling back electoral reforms, including voting rights.'

         The American Prospect writers, Kriss Kromm and Sue Sturgis describe the new policy strategy on the Right:

“…photo ID at the polls, slash the number of early-voting days, eliminate same-day registration during early voting, and delay by five years the time it takes for former felons to regain their voting rights…. ban parents from claiming their college children as dependents on their state taxes if those children vote on campus (as most students do)….[prohibit] the “mentally incompetent” from voting. “

         William Kristol, editor of The Weekly Standard, writes in Politico describing his version of good news in 2014:

“an Obamacare-inspired Republican wave…that will not only sweep out red-state Democrats, but will also produce a gaggle of Republicans coming to the Senate to represent states Obama carried, including New Hampshire, Iowa, Michigan … and Virginia."

        Then there is Wisconsin’s Republican governor, Scott Walker, who shows another Right wing plank: successfully pushing his campaign to deprive public workers of collective bargaining rights and increase their share of payments for pensions and health care. He’s winning against Union-driven recall efforts.

        After the Fall months of good cheer about the recovering economy the December unemployment report demonstrates the nation has been drinking too much of the cool aide stuff.  Economist Stone continues: 

“December’s job growth (even with the revisions to earlier months) was well below the sustained job growth of 200,000 to 300,000 a month that would mark a robust jobs recovery…The unemployment rate was 6.7 percent in December, and 10.4 million people were unemployed….  The unemployment rate was 5.9 percent for whites (1.5 percentage points higher than at the start of the recession), 11.9 percent for African Americans (2.9 percentage points higher than at the start of the recession), and 8.3 percent for Hispanics or Latinos (2.0 percentage points higher than at the start of the recession)."

          Faith communities have missed many a pitch over the last several hundred years: remaining silent during the era of slavery; remaining silent (mostly) during the Jim Crow period; missing the call to support anti-war movements against the slaughter of several wars.  Since the time of Caesar Chavez and the massacres of Central America they've done better, especially in advocacy for refugees.  Now they need to hit the Right wing's ball that is polarizing government and deepening the growing open wound of inequality. 

The Sharon Syndrome

Secretary of State John Kerry’s peace talks have much in common with Ariel Sharon, the former Prime Minister of Israel.  The wheezing peace talks roughly parallel Sharon’s last breaths, reported to be imminent.    Both have been kept alive artificially and both have actually been dead for years. Sharon became the author of Israel’s settlement movement while he was Housing Minister, a post he was forced into after he was held responsible as Israel’s General for the slaughter of Palestinians in the refugee camps at Shabra and Shatila in 1982.  His will still prevails.

           The familiar peace formula sponsored for years by the U. S. always asks the Palestinians to again compromise a little more over their borders in order to accept most of Israel’s settlement growth, now somewhere near 450,000 and counting. This is a familiar bad joke in the Middle East.  Every Israeli prime minister since Ben Gurion has approved new settlement construction.   

Heaping insult on injury in this very first week of 2014 the Israelis are insisting on protecting their security by requiring an agreement to its felt need to occupy a wide zone along the banks of the Jordan River from Jericho to the Galilee.  This is a low point  in dark humor since the Israelis for decades have occupied that western side of the Jordan with hundreds of thousands of acres of date palm plantations.

While many of the violent fires raging in the Middle East from Southern Sudan to Pakistan cannot be laid at the feet of Israel and its U. S. partner, the sheer hypocrisy, the affectation of moral legitimacy, of the U. S. posturing as honest peace broker, is like gasoline poured on the fires of abject poverty, illiteracy, and inequality and is feeding the growth of terrorism across North Africa all the way to Pakistan.  The fires are growing worse every day.

Behind these fires is a Britannica of theological material.  A guilt-ridden compact tied to the origins of the Holocaust has existed between Christians and Jews since WW II and has led both to a fresh purchase on Western triumphalism. The franchise lives on today in the form of a global imperialism of the wealthy in a framework of growing inequality. 

Generations of modern Christians and their denominations have no experience at all with the historic dogmas on which Anti-Semitism was based, but dutifully and periodically confess a symbolic complicity with the Holocaust. The result pulls the teeth on constructive criticism and dialogue and amounts to reality denial as generations of modern Jews continue to suffer from Holocaust fear in much the same way that pharmaceuticals advertise their cancer medications. It could happen to you.

These are theological chains that imprison everyone with their specious versions of history.  Jews adhere to an Israeli secular theology that uses biblical narratives about the land with little historical validity or meaning, preening for political support from their extreme Orthodox factions.   Christians, terrified of possible conviction for an anti-Semitism that is entirely foreign to them, support an Israeli right to land that takes priority over the Palestinians and Arab peoples in general.  Both faiths then buy into a compact that holds them to be both exceptional and morally superior to those around them.  It’s a compact that drives the U. S. Congress and Israel’s worst angels to guarantee fresh supplies of gasoline for the terrorist fires.

There is an alternative.   Here are great world religious traditions that could stand for something so drastically different—they could even stand together—and cut the tangled chains that imprison their better angels.   Christians, with their transcendent symbols of God without tribal allegiance who is aligned with the poor and outcast; the Jews with their high moral tradition of ethics rooted in righteousness, justice and equity. Islam, linked with Jews and Christians as people of the same book but with their own tradition expressed in capacious Mosques into which the most humble camel herder may come as one of God’s own.  (It is worth noting that the Christian-convened Councils of Nicaea included no camel herders.)

Advocacy for universal human dignity and equality, justice for all, genuine political righteousness, a just economic life—all are common themes among most world religions.  Such advocacy makes good New Year resolutions, and in case you’re interested they could be seen as a fresh epiphany.