Middle East Passion Texts

       A small similarity can be found between our tawdry presidential campaigns and the West's inability to stop the horror in the Mediterranean, Yemen and Aleppo.  Amid absurd candidate claims about Americans being "good" or "great again," lie hundreds of victims who will never be counted and have never counted:  

                     [courtesy of the NY Times 10/6/16]

       The dozens of innocent victims in this photo were either trampled to death or died of asphyxiation below decks.  "Many of these people had never seen an ocean, did not know what an ocean was" said one refugee worker.  It's a passion play without transcendent ending.  

        These mass crucifixions are happening night and day every day. The one redeeming response could be conversion to a new convergence for the common good among faith and human rights communities around the world. 

        The November election politics suggest little or no hope for such a convergence in Washington.  Under the best of circumstances the possibility of escaping polarization seems low as Trump's shocking success demonstrates.  In a Hillary Clinton victory she may face an ungovernable congress and nation.

        A new diagnostic list toward a cure for our cultures of death and for the common good would include:

(1) Radical desegregation in faith communities, especially among Christian congregations, the imaginary exceptionalism endemic among faith communities set the tone for America's segregated social structure since slavery days.  More about this in a minute. 

(2) Also needed is urgent treatment of "Silo Disease", a habit of nearly everyone that tolerates, permits, and promotes community as a gathering of their personal favorite club. Churches, labor unions, and academics with advanced degrees-among many others--are common practitioners of this in-breeding that weakens the body politic's capacity to meet unforeseen challenges of justice, like inequality.  It's  a sign of human species decline that most people live in silos that separate them from the world.  

(3) Demilitarization. The Middle East has taught us we're not strong  enough, not wise enough to drop our weapons and sue for peacemaking. More about demilitarization in the next Public Liturgies.

On Radical Desegregation:

        Racism and its conflicts in the 1950's and 60's are repeated in the 2010's conflicts and have come to seem irremediable by the comfortable classes.  Earlier remedies such as police-community relations training, inner city job training and access to jobs and housing  often fell short.  These failures have seldom been critically evaluated and are reiterated today in every city where violence breaks out.  It's actually the social stratification and inequality-the disappeared jobs-that guarantees the violence. This stratification and its segregating effect is as rigidly in place today as in the time in 1964 when Martin Luther King described Sunday morning as the most segregated hour in the country. If this does not change, the conflicts and violence are guaranteed and will remain tied to the faith-based segregated culture that has shaped the web of public sentiment since slavery days. 

Churches as the Hinge.

        When  they prioritize justice religious organizations can be the hinge of change.  Every denomination  and diocese could require that each congregation integrate itself by both class and race according to its neighborhood's demographic  profile.  Any non-conforming congregation could be given a few years to change and offered resource to help it do so. Without such change they ought to lose their official denominational designation as church.  It would take several years of study, constructive cross-neighborhood development, but if it's not done the church is not the church, it's an instrument of segregation. "Every tree that does not bear good fruit, is cast into the fire."  [Matthew 7:1]

Silo Disease

 Silo Disease represents a dilution of the communal gene stream by isolating groups of people from one another. We can take it for granted that most labor unions, most community organizing forces, most faith groups and their leaders are running manifold programs of social service, education and confrontation with oppressors, but are not yet skilled at creating a larger social justice movement with many alliances and allies.  Most silo leaders and their followers know terrible things are happening all around them. Their silos have the ironic effect of trapping people by conferring on them a "silo" security that makes them blind to what is outside; and blind to their own sensibilities. The effect is to declaw them at the very moment when they feel called to action in a world tumbling like their candidates without a compass.      

                                      [Photo of Aleppo today by Yahoo.com 10/11/16]

The Year of Thinking Critically for the Common Good

       A mission transfer toward the larger common good begins with a critical evaluation of our own role in the unintended consequence of  a world at war. Everyone needs to be an outsider somewhere, with some dissimilar group. It's already happening in local areas: like the stand at Cannonball River by the Sioux and other Native Americans tribes and growing numbers of supporters who are blocking completion of the Dakota Access pipeline.Or in the PICO uprising against mass incarceration; or alliances between SEIU, Teachers unions and the Teamsters with local clergy and city governments over diesel pollution at the Ports of Newark, Oakland and Los Angele that is poisoning  the air children breathe.

       A debauched congressional process and foreign alliances based on special interests all require a new congress of the people. Not people defined in 19th century terms as a rabid mass, but people in the range from hotel workers to the PhD crowd at Stanford and Harvard.

A New Rising

         Bertold Brecht's heroine in his 1939 play, Mother Courage and Her Children, connived to keep the Thirty Years War going in the 17th century because selling food to the soldiers was the way she would survive. In the end Mother Courage loses her three children to the war. Comparisons are inviting. During the twelve year Iraq War voluntary enlistment has been a route for underemployed or jobless younger Americans to access paid work and some training for the future.  It cost 4,424 of them their lives but made lots of money for the top one percent.

        King Hussein of Jordan, a U. S. ally claims we are already engaged in WW III and Pope Francis has said as much. Evidence is not hard to find: indeterminate borders, war crimes on a growing scale every day in Aleppo with hospitals destroyed and hundreds of children slaughtered; elsewhere scores upon scores of Afghan and Iraqi civilians and soldiers are killed by terrorist attacks when they are not being killed by U. S. friendly fire. Add the fleeing refugees sometimes drowning at sea and women who survive landing in Italy but are then forced into prostitution.

        These tragic events are not being discussed at all by the presidential candidates preoccupied as they are with their personal futures.  The drowning refugees make a mockery of such politics. 

        The real possibility of a Trump presidency cannot be dismissed in spite of recent polls because it is tangibly growing from a different set of priorities that Americans barely understand; priorities with affinities to the sharp razor wire wall Hungary has spread across its Southern border to block further refugee entrance. It includes affinities with the defeat last week of Columbia's peace agreement with the FARC guerilla faction which pollsters didn't predict; and involves affinities with Brexit, Vladimir Putin, and the peril Germany's Angela Merkel faces as the nationalist Right grows across most of Europe.

         Economic stress is now so wide and deep in the U. S. that tactile connection with it has become intangible to the thriving tech and engineering castes from Silicon Valley to Mumbai.  Political writer, Thomas Frank, [Listen Liberal (2016), What's the Matter with Kansas? (2005)], points in scalding terms to what he calls the Democrats who have become"limousine liberals," live among the top 10 percent, claiming for themselves the honorific of being concerned about the bottom 90 percent.  It is their party not their candidate that blocked Bernie Sanders campaign. 

    

        Frank cites the Democratic Leadership Council which "thanks to the deeds of Bill Clinton" now knows how to reduce inequality

Fiscal discipline, global competition, flexible labor markets, transparent capital markets, deregulated business, rapid communications, and limited government interference in markets.   

       This essentially Wall Street agenda intends to drown out the reality of Mike Griffin, a union activist at Caterpillar in Decatur, Iowa-where jobs have been disappearing.  Franks tells what's really happening. "His workers, if they still work

understand that they're working two or three jobs just to get by, and a lot of them can't own anything, and they understand seeing mom and dad forced into retirement or forced out of their job, now they're working at Hardee's or McDonalds to make ends meet so they can retire in poverty. People understand that. They see that."  

       Hence the turn to Trump and to the political Right even with little evidence that Trump will serve their self-interests. 

       While the bad news is that it is possible to attend religious services in many traditions and places these days and never hear a word or a prayer about saving people from inequality or ending the horrible warfare in Syria and Iraq, there is this good news:  that perhaps helped by the prospect of dismal election outcomes a new day of radical, drastic social justice reform is tangible and dawning.   A modern rising never before seen in U. S. history is happening.  Traditionally inactive Christians,  evangelical Christians, radical Black Christians, White intellectuals, Black Lives Matter, radical Jewish groups like Jewish Voices for Peace, GLBTQ and Women's rights groups and many others are beginning to express solidarity and participate with each other along with secular groups who are organizing  new labor movements across the country; environmentalists blocking fossil fuels, and the list goes on.

Mother Courage could grow out of fashion.