No trumpet sounded. No voice of an archangel was heard. Jesus did not ride down from Heaven on a bank of clouds.
Sadly for millions of misguided people, the world did not end in apocalyptic grandeur on May 21st as predicted by religious huckster Harold Camping.
After the 6:00 p.m. deadline passed, Camping, who runs the 66-station Family Radio network, double-checked his math, discovered an error and extended his Death Watch. The End-of-Times is rescheduled for October 21st.
We should consider ourselves lucky. Very lucky indeed to have a little more time to make the necessary corrections to our lives. I do not claim to be a religious or pious man. So what I’m about to say shouldn’t be taken as coming from a “holier than thou” source. This piece is intended to hold a mirror up to the politicians (who know better) and mainstream Americans who think we're a “Christian nation”, and explain why I don't think we are.
Had the cataclysmic End come on May 21st there would have been hell to pay (no pun intended) for legions of us.
According to the American Religious Identification Survey, 76% of us indentify ourselves as Christians. We all know that even if we don’t go to church very often or not at all, we still call ourselves Christians. It’s a loose religious affiliation, one we don’t want to give up because we believe in the core teachings of Jesus as spread across the pages of the Gospel. We just find it tiring, a little annoying and financially inconvenient to practice what Jesus taught.
Jesus distilled his religious philosophy into a single maxim:
A new commandment I give unto you, That ye love one another; as I have loved you, that ye also love one another.
By this shall all men know that ye are my disciples, if ye have love one to another.
John 13:34-35
The trouble with America is that for a country where so many profess to be Christians and believe they really are, our public discourse, politics, and the national debate say just the opposite about us.
As I’ve said many times, this is the greatest country that has ever been. Common sense tells me that there is absolutely no reason why, in the richest country in the world, every citizen isn’t entitled to food, shelter, healthcare, education and security from falling through the cracks if he becomes physically or mentally disabled or too old to make it on his own. These convictions have nothing to do with my religious beliefs: They are the foundation of my political philosophy.
Providing all people access to fundamental needs doesn’t turn our country into a communist or socialist state or a “welfare society.” It is a way of guaranteeing what generations of Americans have worked hard for, sacrificed, fought and died for—an opportunity to live a fulfilling life—a promise we were implicitly led to believe was part of the social contract between citizen and country. It is also what Jesus admonished his believers to do.
Given the sacrifices made by millions of our ancestors to build this nation, most of them believing they were making a better future for us, shouldn’t we have a right to expect, if not demand:
1. That none of us, regardless of race, color, creed, age, sex or social status, should go to bed hungry.
2. No American should be without a safe and secure roof over his head.
3. Money should never separate anyone from the right to medical care, prescription drugs and other medical and psychological services.
4. Every American should have the right to a solid basic education: effective public schools, vocational schools and a chance to rise as high as they can academically, vocationally and professionally.
5. No one, due to age or misfortune, should be abandoned to live in poverty or be denied life’s necessities.
I’ve heard it before: “Are you crazy! We can’t afford it, the country’s broke.” That is the weakest argument of all.
Since 2001, we’ve spent over $1.2 trillion on wars. We’ve squandered lives of thousands of our servicemen and women and tens of thousands of innocent civilians as we ignorantly claimed to be “bringing democracy”, as President Bush put it, to peoples who have no idea what a democracy is, don’t care to know, and have long histories of resisting invaders such as the powerful Russian army that was mercilessly pounded then pushed out after ten bloody years in Afghanistan.
The past decade proves we learned nothing at all from our experience in Vietnam (58,209 dead, 153,303 wounded). Democracy is not an export item, even when delivered with overwhelming military might. It is embraced but only after it is understood.
We can’t recover lost lives or money, but we can cut our losses. We should get out of Iraq and Afghanistan immediately, not fourteen months from now, but tomorrow morning. No residual forces left behind to be picked off one by one by snipers, or in clusters by suicide bombers or IEDs. Ten years from now both countries will be right back to where they were before we attempted to bring them freedom and liberty.
The tax money we’re using to pump bullets into people and blow up their homes, can be better used here this very minute. Think of how many lives can be saved or improved with the $200 billion we waste annually warring in distant countries that want no part of us. Our federal budget is proof of how far we live from the words of Christ.
Our federal spending today is about 24% of the GDP. The budget for 2012 has $1.2 trillion allocated for Social Security and Medicare—programs that help not just seniors but the disabled and children and spouses of deceased workers. Under the government label of “national defense” it’s argued that the military portion is only 20% of the budget. That number, however, doesn’t include foreign military grants, other military assistance or other military-related dollars. Add those and the number is 36%.
U.S. military spending is $515 billion a year which equals the spending of the next 15 countries’ combined. We spend $390 billion more than China and $465 billion more than Russia who are number two and three behind us.
How much money must we pour into our War Machine before this Christian nation feels safe?
In this time of scrawny tax revenues Democrats and Republicans are considering cutting most, if not all, Medicaid funds, a move that would snatch vital medical services away from 68 million people. Medicaid provides federally funded health care to low income people at risk due to disability, age, chronic illness or other circumstances. In 1997 it was expanded to cover children through low cost government medical insurance, an expense shared by the states.
The present danger is that many states want out of funding Medicaid, period. If they get their way, and they are pushing Congress really hard on this issue, Medicaid could become a shadow of itself for people who must rely on it.
If it happens, the demise of Medicaid won’t be a surprise. After a firestorm of a summer ignited by the ruckus over healthcare reform, America turned its back on 38 million uninsured people in voting down the public option. We let a timid and unscrupulous Congress get away with caving in to health insurance companies.
Elected officials, many of whom use Christianity as a springboard to office, arrogantly defy their constituents, cutting healthcare and retirement benefits for public employees, spending for disadvantaged or mentally and physically handicapped children and adults. Saying “No” to families living on annual income of about $43,000.00, they curry favor with millionaires and billionaires who dump hundreds of thousands of dollars into their election campaigns.
Homeless people flood our streets. In many cities they aren’t permitted to sit on downtown sidewalks because business owners worry about their panhandling and offending customers. They are rousted from public parks and charitable organizations in some places are forbidden from feeding them there. Many of the homeless are mentally ill, drug addicts or alcoholics whose appearance and erratic outbursts can be scary. Among them are beached war veterans (some dating back to Vietnam), the perennially unemployed and unemployable and a few are just lost souls.
Their encampments are a junk collector’s dream—a jumble of red, yellow, green, blue and camouflage tarps. Grocery carts, wheelchairs—motorized and not—bicycles, shopping carts, small wagons, handcarts and homemade rickshaws. Blankets, sleeping bags and clothing hang everywhere. There are giant cardboard boxes for shelter, impromptu lean-tos, tents of all sizes. Peppered throughout and closely guarded, are old tools, cookware, pots and pans, glassware, bottles and eating utensils.
They try to carry everything they own on their backs, in trash bags, handcarts or, if necessary, a grocery cart. If they’re arrested or a squad of police officers are sent out to break up their illegal camps, what little they have often disappears.
There are ways we can help them—practical, creative, innumerable ways. But we’re told that we don’t have money.
On May 23rd the Supreme Court handed down a 5-4 decision ordering California to release tens of thousands of inmates from overcrowded prisons. The court took action because the living conditions—including lethally inadequate healthcare—were so intolerable as to constitute “cruel and unusual punishment” under the 8th Amendment. The day before this ruling, four prisoners were seriously injured in a dining hall riot at San Quentin.
The event was foreseeable. In 2008 NPR reported on massive overcrowding at San Quentin where it was discovered that 360 men were caged in what was previously a gymnasium. “Most of these men,” NPR said, [spent] 24 hours a day, seven days a week in [lockup].”
Gang fights, stabbings, random beatings, sexual violence and extortion are widespread throughout America’s prisons. The brutality of prison life is nothing new to the Supreme Court or any judicial body, lawyers, state and federal legislators and prison officials. Violence and fear permeate jails and prisons leaving little room for rehabilitation or personal safety.
For years the attitude has been, “Forget wasting money on rehabilitation. Keep them locked up as long as possible and build more prisons.” That has gotten us nowhere other than to create an atmosphere where recidivism is a given. Released inmates are restricted from living in such an array of places that affordable housing is hard to find. Moreover, the vast majority have no vocational skills, making it difficult find a job, stay off the streets or resist the temptation to resort to criminal activity for money.
The absence of sympathy for criminal offenders (both men and women) keeps them locked up whether they’re in or out of prison. We’ve created a model for persistent failure and ostracism and then blame them for bad outcomes. It’s convenient to forgive our hardheartedness towards them by hiding behind the dearth of funds argument.
Point to the poor, the elderly, people without healthcare, the homeless, the unemployed; study the ecological and environmental warnings, our crumbling cities, bridges and highways; read about our defective public school systems, the absence of vocational training for non-college bound students, our shameful national illiteracy rate. There are dozens if not hundreds of pressing needs we can ignore simply by using what I call the “Money Rationale.”
International corporations whose annual profits exceed hundreds of millions—even billions—of dollars pay not a penny of corporate income tax and have no remorse about coming up short as “corporate citizens.” They keep their lack of contribution to the national revenue “legal” through lobbying that leaves the tax code opaque and full of holes at the same time.
Many of their CEOs and other executive officers are, no doubt, among the 76% of Americans who identify themselves as Christians but tap dance behind legalities to escape social duties that encompass Christian values. So do lobbyists, businessmen, professionals, politicians, elected officials and ordinary citizens. The “Money Rationale” is their escape hatch from societal obligations.
Similarly, the super rich keep the tax collector away from the gates of their mansions with amazingly generous contributions to members of Congress. As the country teeters between deep Recession and Depression, they want Congress to extend and increase their tax cuts. Certainly many of them are Christians who, with clear consciences, pray that Congress kills the new healthcare law, eliminates Medicaid, privatizes or shreds Medicare and trims Social Security mightily. The “Money Rationale” convinces them they’re all ready paying too much in taxes.
We have an epidemic of icy indifference, intolerance, hate, deceit and selfishness in our nation. It flows from Rampaging Capitalism that has spawned a pervasive everyman for himself attitude which we all are tacitly approving by failing not only to stand up for those who can’t stand up for themselves, but failing to stand up for our country.
There are mobs of Christians out there, millions of them. But I don’t see much of Jesus.
Anthony P. Mario
Copyright June 25, 2011
