My Heart is Breaking

There was an episode yesterday, and I want to talk about it. I've been up half the night, crying and remembering. My heart is breaking, and I'm not entirely sure why.

I may have mentioned some time ago that I became enraged by a co-worker, an elderly, fat, Germanic bigot who used to work with me at Costco. His racist, hateful remarks had for a long time been the source of unending aggravation to me, and I was not at all sorry to see him fired several months ago.

It may have been as much as a year ago when one of his remarks occurred that I will tell you about. There is a couple who frequented Costco who were of some other nationality. That's all it took for Ted. They dress in what I guess is traditional Pakistani garb. The man wore a fez of sorts, and carried a cane. She wore a sari of some kind. They were always together, inseparable. I was friendly to them, offering them samples, and they were friendly back, although the man did most of the talking.

On one particular day, they strolled by, and I was standing near Ted, the racist. He looked at me, then looked at the floor, shook his head, and lamented, "What is this country coming to?" His demeanor was one of disgust.

I took this episode, in combination with several similar episodes, as reason to take a thorough dislike to Ted. My positive reaction was to make it my business to be especially warm to this couple whenever they came thru the store.

She was in yesterday with her son (a stunningly beautiful man in his 30s. Breathtaking.) I almost didn't recognize her without her husband. Her son approached and I gave him a sample. She followed him over to me. She came very close to me and said, "You know my husband." It wasn't a question.

I nodded.

"Well, he died. His heart." Her English was limited, but she curled her hand up near her own heart. The look on her face was heartbreaking.

I was very stunned and quite upset. Abruptly, I was flooded with memories of the loss of my husband and the pain I went through. I saw in my mind's eye what this poor woman was going through and what she had yet to go through. I wept and hugged her. She wept, too.

I think the beautiful son (she has at least 2 sons, both handsome) was quite taken aback by my response. I explained that my husband died from his heart also, and I am so very, very sorry for her loss.

She walked away with the son eventually, but he came back in a few minutes to ask me where we keep something or other. I quizzed him. His father passed about six weeks ago (her wound is open) during an operation to replace a heart valve. The surgery went badly, and he died on the table. He had been married for 57 years. The son told me that his parents never left the house separately. They were together every day for 57 years, deeply in love.

He told me he is sorry for my loss. He wanted to know how long ago my husband passed. I told him six years. He asked me how long it took before the pain calmed down. I told him I'd let him know if that ever happens.

He told me he would pray for me, this Muslim man. How sweet. I am praying for his family, too, that their wounds would close.

I asked what his father's profession was. He was a college professor, very educated, very well read, very knowledgeable. The opposite of Ted, who reviled him for his ethnicity.

I suppose I am selfish and it is just the flood of emotions from my own loss that has me so upset. I've been crying since 3 this morning, and finally got up. I hardly know these people. I don't know their names at all. But the misery on that woman's face when she told me of her loss was so much that it all came back on me.

Why Christians Should be Liberals

I have to give the conservative Republican Party some serious kudos for the way it has seduced and exploited the religious citizens among us. Based on one solitary issue that got started in the 70s — the belief that fetuses have a soul at conception — the lovely GOP has courted and played the fundamentalist Christians like a fast-talking carny.

Good work. You have managed to parlay that one issue into a political platform that completely subverts almost all of the principles that Christians are supposed to embrace. What efficacious grifters you are.

Now the Tea Party comes along. This is a group that I think of as Xtreme Republicans. The main idea here is to cut taxes and get government out of our day-to-day lives. Sounds good, doesn’t it? Sounds like a trumpeted fanfare for religious freedom. Sounds like economic freedom too, huh?

But then wait a minute. We go on to cut these taxes by cutting social programs to those who need them most: poor people. We also fight valiantly the notion of increasing taxes on the wealthy. We attain economic freedom for ourselves — and by “ourselves,” I mean rich white people — by referring to these social programs pejoratively as “entitlements” with a sneer of sarcastic contempt. Rich people, it is pontificated, pay their own way and carry their own weight, and should be left to enjoy the fruits of their labors. Or investments. Or inheritances. Or whatever. To hell with those who can’t get hired, can’t get educated to get hired, or carry some offensive attribute like melanin that limits their potential for economic success. They deserve no pity, and we’re all sick of them.

Sound just like something Jesus would say, doesn’t it? Why, that sentiment is nearly a direct quote from the Beatitudes.

Not.

Even conservative economist Frederick Hayek some years ago advocated a sort of social insurance to guard less wealthy citizens against what he called “the hazards of life,” including health crises. But that was then. Today’s conservatives, while claiming to be followers of Jesus, eschew the cries of the poor and the weak while genuflecting to the rich and the powerful.

At a Tea Party debate recently, audience members cheered and yelled, “Yeah!” at the suggestion that an uninsured sick man should be left to die of his illness and the government should do nothing to help him. It was, after all, his own fault for not buying insurance. Stupid, lazy cretin should get what he has coming, I suppose. The nerve of this hypothetical guy, opting to buy improvident luxuries like food and electricity instead of health insurance.

Never mind about being a Christian. If you are a Muslim or a Hindu or an atheist, that sentiment — let people die if they’re poor— is just plain uncivilized in any worldview.

One school of thought says that God rewards those who please him with prosperity. Conversely, poor people must have done something to displease God, and poverty is their punishment. It’s just another variation on the old “everyone should be just like me” sanctimony that we have too much of already, don’t we? It also seems to ignore the parable about the poor widow who gave her last little bit of money to God. She was not rewarded with copious wealth. But she was held up as an icon of virtue, which should count for a lot.

I won’t belabor the camel and the eye of the needle.

I see Jesus telling His followers that we will always have the poor with us. He did not go on to say that we should ignore them, mistreat them, withhold help from them, or dismiss them as worthy of death because they lack resources. Quite the opposite. I see that the first century Christians pooled all that they had and shared it equally — a rudimentary form of socialism that flies right into the face of the Tea Party and its mandate to protect the wealth of the wealthy at the expense of the poor.

Let’s get this straight. The Tea Party and its friends in the GOP do not represent the philosophy of life Jesus set out for us. The timbre of these political groups is to keep everything for the “haves” and withhold from the “have-nots.” Don’t share. Don’t act with charity or generosity. If you do opt for generosity, do it through a church so that it is entirely volunteerism. Don’t tolerate it as a function of government. That way there is no danger of helping people on a mass scale, even though poverty has hit this nation on a mass scale. Protect rich people from all of that nasty noblesse oblige.

Why are Christians listening to this hatefulness? Why are they giving their money to support candidates of this ilk?

Statisticians report that in America today 80 percent of the wealth is concentrated in the hands of two percent of the population. The poverty line has now overtaken 15.1 percent of the American population — up four percent in less than a decade. There is something deeply wrong with that. It may remind the more cosmopolitan among us of the writings of Karl Marx who outlined long ago that Capital intends to drive down wages and funnel wealth to the top of the economic ladder. I regret to tell Mr. Marx that we are no longer funneling wealth upward. We are, in fact, shoveling it.

As the middle class disappears, enlarging the poverty-riddled class, and the chasm between very rich and very poor widens, Christians ought to be asking themselves: Is this what Jesus would do?

I don’t happen to believe the party line that suggests that the trumpeting Christians in the GOP actually want a theocracy. But it’s highly quotable from the pulpit. Church leaders who stand on pulpits and endorse the hateful, ugly, xenophobic, intolerant, uncharitable words of the Becks and the Limbaughs seem to think that a theocracy would be the way to go. Let’s return our country to Christian values. However, the disconnect between those Christian values and the intolerance of the Tea Party is glossed over with nary a thought.

Journalist and pundit Eugene Robinson wrote recently that “government is an expression of our collective values.” If our collective values are to be Christian ones, it is incumbent upon us to have compassion for those in need — especially as their numbers swell. Such values are clearly inconsistent with the extreme GOP who wants to write off the entire body of struggling Americans.

The conservative side of the aisle is well-named. Conservatives seem to want to conserve everything for themselves. Witness Mr. Behner who recently declared that he would oppose any debt reduction plan that increases taxes on wealthy Americans.

Mr. Behner needs to take note that as the funneling becomes shoveling and more American’s are forced to the poverty line, more public assistance will be necessary and more taxes will be required to meet the demand.

The craven fear that someone might receive something he didn’t (or couldn’t) work for has reached an alarming temperature. I hear conservatives loudly declaring their faith in Jesus Christ in one breath while they oppose every Christian principle with the next breath. A great strategy: we can get the religious right to put us in office while we simultaneously act in our own best interest and against the basic tenets of Christianity. And the church-going faithful have fallen for this malarkey hook, line and sermon.

Christians should fight this sentiment body and soul. Don’t, Mr. Preacherman, tell me we need to return to Christian values in our government, and then in the next sentence tell me that welfare recipients are lazy, feckless, and an unfair burden on the taxpayer. You can’t have it both ways. You can’t want a Christ-centered government without a Christ-centered view of the poor. Doesn’t track.

Christians should be liberals. They should be liberal in charity, in care for the disadvantaged, in love for all people regardless of their skin color, their sexual orientation, or the heft of their bank account.

Christians should be liberal in tolerance and understanding of folks who are made less successful by their culture, ethnicity, circumstances, medical needs, and intellectual equity.

I call on Christians in every church in America to get it right. The Republican platform is as far from the Jesus platform as it can get. We’ve been made into mindless flunkies by the likes of the Christ-proclaiming politicians and pundits who advocate every anti-Christian principle. They are a walking, talking obscenity. For many of them, the rhetoric is transparent. There is an inclusiveness that is exclusive. The message is to support values that protect those who are just like us while abandoning those who are different — those who don’t have the "right" values.

What??

Christians should reject this us-vs.-them philosophy that has taken over religious thinking — the notion that those who suffer present a threat to the rest of us. There is one race — human. There is one Lord, faith and baptism. It applies to everyone. There is no “those people.” We are all us, and we need to act the part. I don’t see that in the Tea Party, and I don’t see it in any political ideology that shores up the rich against the poor.