From MLK to BHO

We've still got quite a ways to go. Pardon my pessimism, but it seems to me that there are a lot of people who are looking to the inauguration of Barack Obama as the realization in Dr. King's dream, and don't get me wrong, I think it shows we've made great strides, but we're not "there".

A lot of people are talking about the inauguration as though it's this moment in time that is an inflection point between the past and the future, but I don't think it's really so. I think the inauguration is symbolic of the transformation our country has undergone since the days of Dr. King, but it's not as though this day could have come unless we were ready for it, and our readiness as a nation is the real transformation, but it didn't happen suddenly one Tuesday in November, nor will it on a Tuesday in January. It happened slowly and steadily over the course of something like a century and a half.

Some people wonder why it's considered such a big deal, which has a couple of interesting facets to it. On the one hand, there's something almost heartening that a generation should come to pass where people don't see the inauguration of a President not of purely northern European ancestry as a big deal. It shows acceptance, and of a kind that indicates our minds have changed, and gone beyond mere acceptance. On the other hand, the pessimistic one, it may show a kind of ignorance of history. After all, if it's no big deal, why did it take over two hundred years to go from slavery to this? It may be great that we've come as far as we have as a nation, but at the same time, did it need to take so long?

Actually, I think it could have been a little bit sooner. There's a part of me that thinks the national attitude could have managed to elect an African-American President as early as the late '70s, if only there had been the right candidate. If true, this also has (at least) two facets. Maybe it's just easier for me to accept the idea since I was born in the early '70s, and therefore past the most intense turmoil of the civil rights movement, but I don't think the country has suddenly accepted black people; the seeds for the 2008 election results were beginning to sprout towards the end of the '60s. I think on the negative side, it shows some of the reason that mere acceptance is not quite enough for equality. A sufficiently qualified African-American could possibly have been elected in, say, 1980, but there was no such thing yet. Actually, some might argue (and many have) that Obama is not it either, having largely gotten elected on personality rather than an impressive record; after all, he hasn't been in politics very long. The thing is, since African-Americans were kept out of politics for so long, it's hard for them to have a viable candidate since we (rightly) expect our politicians to work their way up from the bottom. White and wealthy George W. Bush, in contrast, is a good example of someone who was never at the bottom. Not that it's his own fault, but there's a certain shame for our society that there really aren't any African-Americans of equivalent status to Bush.

It's unfortunate that we will always have to be performing a balancing act between remembering the tragedies of the past and working to put them behind us. It would be wrong to forget the injustice done--not just to African-Americans, but to various social groups in our history--and yet at the same time, one wonders if we are unable to put the past behind us, how can we let go of bitterness and move into the future? Think about how profound it can be: in some sense, the troubles in the Middle East are the result of a 3,000-year-old case of sibling rivalry. How long will we in America have to keep fighting the civil war? I suppose at least until we're truly the united states.

I sometimes wonder if we'll ever be "there". It seems sometimes like racism in particular, and prejudice in general are simply a part of human nature. Actually, it's pretty natural. When two people meet for the first time, the only thing they have to evaluate the other person is their physical appearance. We like to try to get a handle on other people, so until we get to know them better, most of what we know about them is what color and shape they are. In itself, that's not so bad, so long as we can eventually let go of our preconceived notions and see who we all are on the inside where it counts.

The book of exodus

So I got fired. Actually, it was about a week ago, and I considered writing about it. I actually even considered blogging about it fully in a new, separate blog chronicling my experience with unemployment, something I've been lucky enough to go about ten years without having to experience. I'm not sure I really understand the blog concept, though, even after having my own for some time. Really there's no real need that society has to know what goes on in the minutiae of my daily life, despite the fact that that's what technology has allowed us to experience in so many ways lately.

It's funny, although it's not so much a coincidence as an end result of my earlier rantings about Darwin that I ended up buying a copy of Marx & Engels' Communist Manifesto yesterday. (These are the names that one doesn't tend to bring up in church, but I do at times.) See, I was looking for a copy of Origin of Species but couldn't find one (to buy, they probably had one at the library to check out, but I was perusing the bargain books in the bin at the front of the library) and ended up settling for what was probably nearly as embarrassing a book as the other would be, at least were I to be seen reading it by a fellow evangelical fundamentalist. I'd always wanted to read Marx in his own words, so to speak.

I've gotten about halfway through it, and so far the only surprise has been the double-takes at how modern the concepts seem to be. This book was written 160 years ago, but you could pop into the text and make a minor change like substituting "Internet" for "telegraph" and it would read like it was written yesterday. The world hasn't changed so much from the time of Marx after all it seems, even with the rise and fall of Soviet-style Communism. Perhaps he's even still right, as I suspect he's on track in saying that the number-one product created by the bourgeoisie is their own gravediggers.

Getting back to my original point of being fired--which I was planning on writing about anyway long before the Manifesto crossed my path--I was actually quite happy with it, to my slight surprise. I think it may come down to my being in many ways a communist at heart. I'm not likely to be the sort of person to rise up and start a revolution to destroy those who create in me an unhappiness with my lot in life, so it's actually quite nice to have them simply toss me out.

The fact is that there are concepts that have come from Marx and the like that are surprisingly very Christian, albeit the Christian response to the situation is different in so many ways. So often I hear nonbelievers rail on and on about how awful it is that the Bible doesn't come right out and condemn slavery. There's an interesting thing about slavery that so many Christians accept as a fact of life that's not often stated, however. No, I'm not talking about the party line that I also often take that "Biblical slavery [is] very different from our modern understanding of the practice." What I'm talking about is that "slavery" and "employment" are just different words for something that is in many ways the same at its heart.

We are fortunate in this day and age in a way that looks different but is surprisingly similar to the ancient Israelite culture. Slavery in ancient Israel was a matter of personal choice: if you had no way to support yourself independently, you could choose to sell yourself into servitude to your neighbor. Really, this was like taking a job with a six-year contract, as you would be paid, and you would be released in the seventh year. In our society, we really aren't that different, besides the fact that we don't get six-year contracts. (Most of us get something more like a six-month contract, twice a year coming together with your master boss to decide whether you continue to be happy with the arrangement you have.) We get to choose who we're going to be slaves to, and our servitude is not spent bound in chains of iron, but in chains of dollars.

Sure, so few of us would actually willingly sit at our desks doing what we do day in and day out if there was not a paycheck tying us to our employer. There are exceptions, but it seems that 99% of us would drop what we're doing at a moment's notice for a chance at more money, and also we dream of the day when we'll be free of our wage slavery and get to RETIRE! Free at last, free at last!!!!

So anyway, I've escaped from slavery, and come to the promised land of freedom, but I know it's temporary, and I dream daily of finding a new master with larger, stronger chains to bind me to a new desk: it's the American way of life. Higher income doesn't make for more freedom, but less. How many opportunities do I have to potentially walk away from an $8/hour job flipping burgers, vs. say a $50k/year job sitting at a desk processing pointless paperwork? Believe me, I'd rather be flipping burgers or washing dishes; it's tangible and feels meaningful to feed people and protect people from food-borne pathogens than shuffle a pile of papers designed to tell some CEO that their pointless business could profit greatly from joining forces with our pointless business for more efficient pointlessness!

But we all end up this way, don't we? And the Christian belief is this: we're all slaves, some of us just have more obvious chains. The question is, all of us have a certain amount of control over who we choose to be our master. I assure you that while I have worked for many companies that do things I consider meaningful on different levels, and I always strive for a job that will make me feel that I'm making a difference in the world, the only way to consistently find meaning is to not let my job be master over me, not let the almighty dollar be my god and my chains of oppression.

Communists suggest the way to be free is to cast off the chains that bind you from the outside, and there's wisdom to that to some degree. For the Christian however, (and we are not the only idealists to feel this way--it's part of why I always say I admire Buddhism that they take this concept even farther) the solution is to cast off the chains from within. Whether I truly may be a slave with literal chains on my body or a symbolic slave with monetary chains lashing me to my desk in an office, in my heart, I know who I really serve as master. Yes, I look for financial prosperity, but I don't seek money for money's sake, nor even for my sake. Yes, even though I have a wife and kids, and financial responsibility to them that society and God smiles upon when I fulfill that responsibility, I don't even serve that master at heart. No, as a Christian, my master is, and must always be, Christ Himself. I choose freely to subjugate myself to the "easy yoke" of a Master who I believe will protect me and love me in a way that no other master will, or even possibly can.

As a Christian, that's the closest to complete freedom (a mythological concept) that one can ever get, and I am content in that alone.

Hindsight is 20/20 and color-blind

Sometimes when I write these posts, I mull over a subject for a few days, and then commit my thoughts to the blogosphere, where surely few will read them, but at least they're out of my brain for a while. Today, I'd like to rant on something that either has occupied my mind for less than an hour (I was sparked into considering this subject by something I caught on television less than an hour before I started typing) or for most of my life (this subject has interested me since I was a kid; I guess I've always been a bit of a cynic).

Racism and closely related topics are often difficult to talk about for a number of reasons. It's a sensitive subject obviously. It's something ugly that we would rather just go away. It's something that most of us harbor in some form, although we hate to admit it to ourselves. Let me come out and make an admission: I have a certain amount of irrational fear and hatred towards Germans. I think admitting it to myself helps me deal with it, but it's still there. Being raised Jewish, my older family members and people within the Jewish community talked a lot about Nazis. As a young man, I didn't really understand what the term meant, other than knowing that in my father's lifetime, a lot of Germans killed a lot of Jews. Thus I associated an (arguably) irrational fear of Germans, making an internal association due to a limited grasp of history that rationally I know to be false, in general, but still get the creeps about nonetheless. So there's that off my chest.

(For some people, it's not racism, but some other form of prejudice: I once knew a guy who had had a bad employee who had graduated from a certain college, and ever since had not liked anyone he met who was from that college. A lot of us have a certain degree of sexism as well that manifests in many differing ways.)

Maybe is just that I am a cynic, but I think if we are honest with ourselves, we won't look at racists and say, "I'm so much better than them," but rather,"There but for the grace of God..." The thing that sparked me this morning was a children's program talking about racism (I think; I only caught about a minute while channel-surfing). A young white girl was asked to imagine herself living in the early part of the 19th century, in a family that owned slaves; how would she feel? She responded, "I would feel really bad about it..."

Would you really, though? It seems more likely to me that you would take it in stride. Obviously most of the people who lived in what would later become the Confederate States of America took it as a given that slavery was acceptable, proper and even good. It was necessary for the thriving of the cotton plantations and other agriculture to have a constant supply of cheap labor, and so slavery continued. Tell me, do you feel bad for migrant workers in 21st-century agriculture who work all day in the hot sun for less than minimum wage to feed their families, knowing that they will probably never be accepted by mainstream culture? When you think about it, it's a lot like the early days after the abolition of slavery in the South, when many former slaves had to stay working on their old plantations without pay because it was the only way to make a living in a culture that didn't want you to get ahead, slavery or not.

Why do you suppose it is that it seems so obvious to us today that slavery is wrong, and yet there seems to have been few people who voluntarily gave up their slaves before abolition? In Santa Cruz, there was a local historical figure named London Nelson who was a freed slave. His first master died and left him to his eldest son, who continued to use him for cotton picking. Eventually, Nelson was set free when his new master decided to go west in the Gold Rush. The story interests me because it seems to illustrate the point that on the whole, the way we humans treat our other humans has less to do with what we feel to be morally right, and more to do with what will bring us economic prosperity.

I actually recently discovered that there is a shocking (but perhaps not surprising) strategy that some businesses use to dispose of wastes of certain kinds. Electronic equipment is recognized to be very dangerous and toxic, being filled with lead, mercury, cadmium and other deadly substances. It's illegal to put electronic waste in American landfills, so the preferred method is to break down old computers and extract the toxic substances, recycling them into new computers. That's difficult and costly to do, however, so many companies have found a cheap alternative: ship the stuff to India, where there are no laws about dumping these substances. Thus, our toxic chemicals end up in landfills sometimes literally in the back yards of impoverished Indians. I found myself thinking: the Nazis killed off millions of Jews out of hatred, but if Americans kill off millions of Indians out of mere convenience, who is worse? I don't know, but it really bothers me. If I am a person who stands by and lets this happen, am I any better than the average German citizen who didn't stand up to the Nazis? Heck, my life wouldn't even be put in danger to stand up to this sort of evil!

One of the unfortunate things about prejudice is the fact that most of us don't notice it or confront it unless it's directed at us. Remember the movie Philadelphia in 1993? Tom Hanks plays Andrew Beckett, a gay lawyer with AIDS who sues his firm for wrongful termination because he believes he lost his job in part because of homophobia. On what does he base his claim that his employers were homophobic? In a flashback, we see a group of lawyers together at a gym, swapping jokes as follows:

What do you call a woman who has PMS and ESP at the same time?

I don't know, Roger, what do you call her?

A bitch who knows everything.

Sounds like someone I know.

Hey Walter, how does a faggot fake an orgasm?

He throws a quart of hot yogurt on your back.

The thing that bothered me about this scene from the first time I saw it was the fact that Beckett is laughing along with the others when the sexist joke is being told, but the smile melts away when the gay joke is told. I wanted to step into that scene and ask him, "So Andrew, it sexism better than homophobia? If telling a joke about 'faggots' means they must hate you, does that imply telling a joke about 'bitches' mean they hate women? Why were you laughing before, and why did you stop now?"

I remember a time when I was at work alone with a co-worker who said, "Hey, all the women are gone, let's tell some politically-incorrect jokes." He proceeded to tell a black joke, a Polish joke, and a Chinese joke, laughing up a storm. I laughed too, then I told him an Italian joke. My (Italian) co-worker said, "Ouch..." and joke time was over.

Don't think you're better than anyone else just because you're not a Nazi. Most of us aren't Nazis, and most of us aren't particularly nice.