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.
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