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Economic Inequality: The increasing divide between the Monied Elite and the Middle Class and Working Poor  

"Surveys of the very wealthy have, however, shown that they — unlike the general public — consider budget deficits a crucial issue and favor big cuts in safety-net programs. And sure enough, those elite priorities took over our policy discourse."

The above quote is a portion of the article below by Paul Krugman. As the title of the article indicates he talks about the inequality that has been and continues to develop between the monied elite and the middle and working class of the population. He and other pundits speak of the damage that has been done to the middle class; and they are correct about this damage. What is often not spoken of, however, is the suffering (that is not to strong a word) that has been inflected on the people at the very bottom of the economy. Cutting SNAP (food stamps) and unemployment insurance for the long term unemployed has exacerbated the problem. One proof of this can be seen in the increased pressure that has been put on food banks across the country.

The balance of the article that the above quote comes from can be read at: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/12/16/opinion/krugman-why-inequality-matters.html?partner=rssnyt&emc=rss

Below is the next to last paragraph from this blog post on The Episcopal Cafe'. Part 1 was posted yesterday. To read all of part 2 go to: http://www.episcopalcafe.com/daily/politics/faith_and_politics/by_doug_fisher_part_2.php

Part 2: A little child shall lead them: a year after Sandy Hook

by Doug Fisher
Part 2 of 2

The time has come for the fallen children of Newtown to rise again, and to lead us. The time has come to allow their terrible deaths to be redeemed by a new life together. The time has come for us all to be gathered in God’s arms – just as these children were gathered by their teachers – to know the way of God is the way of sacrifice that ultimately transforms even death.

This was originally posted on The Episcopal Cafe' one day prior to the one year anniversary of the Sandy Hook massacre. The original posting can be found at: http://www.episcopalcafe.com/daily/politics/faith_and_politics/reflections_a_year_after_sandy.php#more

Part 1: A little child shall lead them: a year after Sandy Hook

by Doug Fisher

Part 1 of 2

Introduction:

Since the tragedy in Newtown, Connecticut, many have written passionately and well about the need to stop gun violence in our country in editorials and pastoral letters from religious leaders. I felt, however, there was a need for something more thorough as we consider theologically and socially how to respond to an ever growing gun culture. For the past several months The Rev. Chris Carlisle and I have worked on a “reflection” document. It is not a definitive study by any means. It is a reflection that invites more reflection from its readers. And hopefully actions for a safer and sane society.

As long as this document has been in the works, I hesitated releasing it this week- the week of the first anniversary of the awful events at Sandy Hook. But then I took to heart the statement made by the group “Moms Demand Action for Gun Sense in America.” They said, “On December 14, we’ll have a moment of silence for Newtown, but with all the gun violence that has happened since that day, is more silence what we need?"

I invite you to read “Reflections.” And to offer your own thoughts on this blog. May all who follow the Prince of Peace offer an alternative to a culture of violence. 

+Doug

The first unified response to the tragedy in Newtown – after the breathless shock – was the tolling of church bells across the nation one week after the shootings. Whatever our particular religious convictions, a sudden need welled within us to resonate with our fellow human beings, and give voice to our sense of helplessness. Before taking conscious account of our faith, we seemed instinctually moved to take some kind of action, if only to speak our unutterable, corporate grief.

Perhaps it is uniquely in the depth of despair that Christians learn a truth about their faith: that for the God that they profess to be the God that they profess, it is a God that must be rung for everyone. As convincing as may be the walls that divide us by institutional tradition, in moments like Newtown, people of all faiths are inexorably drawn together. There seems to be spare room for rarified distinctions or expansive claims about their God when together we must face the specter of evil by which innocent people die.

For Christians, the diabolical nature of violence returns to the Cross, where, beginning with a handful of women, Jews, and outcasts, it was astonishingly redeemed. For two thousand years, this Roman tool of execution has been finding its miraculous redemption by the startling recognition that even death does not escape the reach of God’s unqualified embrace. Yet for all their passing glories, Christians still must face their inevitable condition of “sin” – a word that finds its origin in an archer’s term that literally means, “to miss the mark.”

Stretched between the gravity of earthly life and the possibility of God, Christians are called into the kingdom of the world, by which to reach the kingdom of heaven. Just as the gravity of Jesus’ human body suffocated under its own weight, so must we submit to the ways of the world that cause us suffocating grief. And just as Jesus was revealed as God in human flesh, he would be given to the evil of a world whereby he overcame the darkest ways of human life in the light of a divine embrace.

If no one had gone to the tomb, suffocation may have been the last word of Christ. Yet when the women went, what they found in their midst was not death, but resurrected life. According to Luke’s gospel – however we ascribe the nature of their startling appearance – two men in ‘dazzling clothes’ ask the question: “Why do you look for the living among the dead?”

For Christians, resurrection is not to be reduced to a single act two thousand years ago. Nor is it confined to the person of Jesus, who laid bare God’s resurrecting life. Resurrection marks the nature of God’s life as revealed in Christ’s self-sacrificing love – sweeping up God’s children in a holy, willful wind, by which even death could be redeemed.

Six-year-old Ana Grace Marquez-Greene, described as “a blur of joyful energy who loved singing, dancing, floral headbands and the Bible,” died at Sandy Hook Elementary School almost a year ago. Only a month after her death, Ana Grace’s father, Jimmy Greene, was able to rise up and claim the need to “come together on issues that are not political but that are, above all, human issues that affect us all as human beings.”[1] And in the words of Alex Haller, an uncle of Noah Pozner who was also killed, “We have to make something positive come of this, and I feel a need to advocate for change right away… To me, this is now a lifelong mission, to make children safer and to stop mass shootings.”[2]

If the resurrected life of the Sandy Hook children is being borne by their families and friends, it must be borne by us all, as implored in the last State of the Union Address. Alluding to the hundreds children who have been killed before and since the Newtown tragedy, President Obama referred to America’s families, “torn apart by gun violence.” “Gabby Giffords deserves a vote,” beseeched the President. “The families of Newtown deserve a vote. The families of Aurora deserve a vote. The families of Oak Creek, and Tucson, and Blacksburg, and the countless other communities ripped open by gun violence – they deserve a simple vote.”[3]

But still we are faced with the obscenity of the continuing fallout: gun sales soared the week immediately following the shootings in Newtown. The next time they spiked was following the President’s announcement of gun reform measures. In the innocent face of our fallen children, the insanity continues in a tacit acceptance of the National Rifle Association’s Wayne LaPierre: “The only thing that stops a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun.”[4]

One wonders if Esquire blogger, Charles Pierce, is right when he reflected on the nearby killing of a TSA security guard at Los Angeles International Airport. “There is nothing ‘random’ about how we have armed ourselves, and there is nothing ‘random’ about the filigree of high-flown rhetoric with which we justify arming ourselves, and there is nothing ‘random’ about how we learn nothing every time someone who could be anyone decides to exercise his Second Amendment rights by opening fire. There is nothing random about how we got where we are today, here in Terminal 7, where people have sought refuge from the bloodshed, four terminals over. There is nothing ‘random’ at all. We have chosen insanity over reason. We have done it with our eyes open.”[5]

Yet those who insist on extreme “solutions” leave us with no solution at all. In the hope of bringing order out of chaos it is natural to want to ban every kind of gun. However we may feel that outright interdiction is the ultimate solution, at the present moment such a prohibition marks a time that is yet to come.

There are gun advocates – and fellow human beings – who engage in the debate reasonably. Many appeal to the Second Amendment as the rationale for “bearing arms,” perceiving this right as fundamental to their own individual freedom. Others identify the right to hunt as a “pursuit of happiness” which has nothing to do with heinous acts like the one committed in Newtown.

The Second Amendment is frequently invoked in the context of the debate. “Constitutional Originalists” – typically branded, “political conservatives” – perceive the Constitution as a document that must be “literally” interpreted. Its meaning is unchanging, and has to hearken back to the Founders’ original intent: in the case of gun control, that the right to bear a gun is no less than “an inalienable right.”

Such contention, inherent in all textual interpretation, is familiar to the Church. Conflict between Biblical literalists and those who stress “the spirit of the law” continue to divide us in our common search for an authentic understanding of God. However different may be the authority to which the Church ultimately appeals, the challenge is the same: how to faithfully discern the meaning of our sacred texts.

Those who assume that a literal reading of the Constitution’s Second Amendment grants gun owners the right to bear any kind of weapon should reconsider “literalism.” During the Revolutionary War, the likes of an “arm” was the inaccurate flintlock musket whose required thirteen steps before being fired allowed a shot every twenty seconds. The AR-15 assault weapon used at Sandy Hook Elementary School – whose high capacity magazine is capable of firing forty-five rounds a minute[6] – is a far cry from the literal arms the Founders only could have sanctioned, giving us at least to reconsider the complexities of all interpretation.

The very nature of language, whether spoken in church sanctuaries or the halls of government, requires that meaning – conveyed by either Jesus or the Founders – bears an inevitable spirit. Even most Biblical literalists seek such a “spirit” in the Scriptures. The words of the Declaration of Independence similarly resonate: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness.”

In both cases such a spirit is necessarily borne in relation to other human beings: to neighbors, fellow citizens, and – as known to both Jesus and the Founders – to our enemies. The tragedy at Sandy Hook not only meant the death of our own beloved children. With it came a threat to our common hope for the pursuit of this greater “Happiness.”

President of The Children’s Defense Fund, Marian Edelman, asserts, “Sandy Hook was no fluke. In 2010, a child or teen was killed by guns every three hours and fifteen minutes – that’s more than 21 lost lives every three days from gun homicides, suicides, and accidents. A child or youth was killed or injured by a gun every half hour. Between 1963 and 2010, an estimated 166,500 children and teens aged 0-19 lost their lives to gun violence – the equivalent of over 8,328 classrooms of 20 children, and an average of 3,470 deaths a year for 48 years or 174 classrooms of 20 children and teens every year.”[7]

The truth is that we live in a culture of violence – generated by video games, Hollywood, and even by the way we have come to speak to each other. From expressions like, “I have you in my cross hairs,” to “I’ll take a shot at that,” violence is so much a part of our lives that most often we don’t notice it. Rather than viewing language as a neutral means of communication, we need to understand the power of language as a vehicle for good, and for evil.

Research increasingly reveals how the media itself perpetuates this culture of violence by making spectacles of violent acts, and their attention-starved perpetrators.[8] Rather than allowing itself to be used to aimlessly destructive ends, it is incumbent on the media to stand up and accept its responsibility to the culture. If freedom of the press demands that the truth be brought to light in a democracy, it equally demands the recognition that the truth cannot be truth in the service of delusion.

To the extent that mental illness is a threat to our shared life, we must commit ourselves to our common health. “Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness” depend upon our mutual well being – both physical and mental – as a requisite condition of our corporate life together. In the same way it would be dishonest to ignore mental health in gun control discussions, so it would be dishonest to conclude the threats it poses demand armament.

What would it mean to become “our brothers’ keepers,” whose welfare was no different from our own? What would it mean to know our health as a nation is but the health of the sickest among us? Indeed, what would it mean not only to effectively protect against the threats such illness poses – but to care for the mentally ill in the selfsame ways that we care for ourselves?

In the words of Ana Grace’s mother – who is a licensed therapist – it may begin with a stunningly counterintuitive spirit of generosity. When asked in a television interview if she was able to feel sympathy for the mother of Aaron Alexis, the Navy Yard gunman who killed twelve people on September 16th, Nelba Marquez-Greene replied: "Of course. She's a victim herself. And it's time in America that we start looking at mental illness with compassion, and helping people who need it. This was a family that needed help, an individual that needed help and didn't get it. And what better can come of this, of this time in America, than if we can get help to people who really need it?"[9]

For all the hatred surrounding the gun control debate, it appears that the most deeply affected are the ones leading the way with wisdom and compassion into our difficult future. “Sandy Hook Promise” – a Newtown organization founded by those who lost children and friends – asks its website visitors to make two simple promises: “I Promise to honor the 26 lives lost at Sandy Hook Elementary School,” and, “I Promise to do everything I can to encourage and support common sense solutions that make my community and our country safer from similar acts of violence.” Proclaiming, “Our hearts are broken; Our spirit is not,” Sandy Hook Promise pledges to have “conversations where even those with the most opposing views can debate in good will.”[10]

It should not be a surprise that the Christian promise of mercy, compassion, and hope may come not by way of “the wisdom of the world,” but by the wisdom of its vulnerable children. Almost three millennia before the shooting in Newtown, the prophet Isaiah stood in a violent, war-torn land – against impossible odds – to set forth a renewed vision of God. The promise of peace, Isaiah proclaims, would not be fulfilled by politicians, but by the startling, unpredicted, holy, prophetic, paradoxical power of the child: “The wolf shall dwell with the lamb, and the leopard shall lie down with the young goat, and the calf and the lion and the fattened calf together; and a little child shall lead them.”

Given the current political climate surrounding gun regulation – in which the NRA has identified gun control supporters by an online “enemies list” – such conversations won’t be easy. Those who argue for gun control in the name of nonviolence and peace must recognize such peace has to begin at home, and in relation to those who oppose them. So Saint Francis of Assisi was moved to say, “While you are proclaiming peace with your lips, be careful to have it even more fully in your heart.”

If there is polarizing conflict over gun control, there is widespread commitment to change: from the call of the Catholic Jesuit weekly, “America” to repeal the Second Amendment,[11] to that of a United States Army General who “spent a career carrying typically either an M16, and later an M4 carbine.” On the strength of his experience on the battlefield, General Stanley McChrystal said, “We’ve got to take a serious look—I understand everyone’s desire to have whatever they want—but we’ve got to protect our children, we’ve got to protect our police, we’ve got to protect our population… Serious action is necessary. Sometimes we talk about very limited actions on the edges and I just don’t think that’s enough.”[12]

The Most Reverend Katharine Jefferts-Schori, the Presiding Bishop of the Episcopal Church in the United States, recently released a statement calling on its members to express their concern to Federal legislators that gun violence be swiftly and specifically addressed. The Presiding Bishop asserts that “the necessary policy decisions are clear and widely supported: limits on sales of military-style weapons and high-capacity magazines, effective background checks for all gun purchases, better access to mental health services, and attention to gun trafficking.”[13]

Across religious traditions, the call for change resounds. Jewish, Muslim and Christian clergy from Newtown are urging reform. In a joint letter, hand-delivered to the offices of the one hundred US Senators who were about to vote on gun control measures, they wrote, "We pray that you will vote for meaningful gun violence prevention laws that include a ban on assault weapons and high capacity magazines, enforceable universal background checks, an end to gun trafficking, and prosecution of straw purchasers."[14]

To take “serious action” in the Christian tradition does not risk – or accommodate – hatred. It requires self-sacrifice in the name of truth, justice, and reconciliation. It finally requires our shared humanity, revealing the richness of a life which cannot be realized by polarized self-interests that deny the value of each other.


Footnotes
________________________________________
[1] Peter Applebome and Elizabeth Maker, “Private Pain and Public Debate Take Toll on Newtown Parents,” The New York Times, January 20, 2013 

[2] Ibid.

[3] President Barak Obama, “Remarks by the President in the State of the Union Address,” February 12, 2013,

[4] Eric Lichtblau and Motoko Rich, “N.R.A. Envisions ‘A Good Guy With a Gun’ in Every School”, The New York Times, December 12, 2013

[5] Charles P. Pierce, “There is Nothing Random About the Lax Shooting,” Esquire, November 1, 2013

[6] Bushmaster Operating Manual

[7] Krissah Thompson, “Marian Wright Edelman marks 40 years of advocacy at Children’s Defense Fund,” The Washington Post, September 29, 2013

[8] Ari Shulman, “What Mass Killers Want – and How to Stop Them,” The Wall Street Journal, November 8, 2013, 

[9] “Piers Morgan Live,” CNN, September 18, 2013

[10] Sandy Hook Promise website, http://www2.sandyhookpromise.org 

[11] Editors, “Repeal the Second Amendment,” America, February 25, 2013

[12] Luke Johnson, “Stanley McChrystal: Gun Control Requires ‘Serious Action',” The Huffington Post, January 8, 2013

[13] Episcopal New Service, “Presiding Bishop Issues ‘Call to Action’ on Gun Violence,” February 1, 2013

[14] “Newtown Rabbi Joins Muslim, Christian Clergy in Urging Gun Controls,” March 12, 2013, JewishJournal.com


The Rt Rev. Douglas Fisher is Bishop of the Diocese of Western Massachusetts

Posted by Ann Fontaine on December 13, 2013 7:05 AM | Permalink | Digg this

This is an article by Cynthia Tucker that appeared in The (Syracuse) Post-Standard and other publications on Sunday November 3, 2013. She accurately summerizes the situation that people in this country who are food insecure will face if even a modest cut is made in the SNAP (Food Stamp) program. She also correctly discribes the immoral / cavalear attitude of legislators who would cut SNAP funding and literally take food out of the mouths of children, the disabled, and others who need this assistance. The bill that passed the Senate cuts $4 billion from the program; the house version cuts almost $40 billion. The two branches are currently in discussion about this issue and if they follow form they will probably compromise somewhere between the two numbers. Any cut to this program is an obscenity.   

House GOP doesn’t care if children go hungry

NOVEMBER 4, 2013 BY CTUCKER LEAVE A COMMENT

For decades, I’ve proudly asserted that “nobody starves to death in America.” The comment has been addressed to acerbic critics of the American government, often foreign visitors, who insist that the United States is a mean-spirited place that casts aside its weak and fragile citizens.
I still contend that nobody starves to death here, but I’ve had to modify my claims about the country’s social safety net. Even if no one dies for lack of basic nutrition, plenty of people go to bed hungry every night. And if Congress’ harsh Republican caucus has its way, some may starve.
That’s because the band of ultra-conservatives who control the House are bent on deep cuts to the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, otherwise known as food stamps. They passed a farm bill laden with welfare for farmers, but they left out one of its biggest traditional components: food stamps. It was the first time since 1973 that the nutrition program had been left out of the farm bill.
Now, negotiations have started between the Senate and the House to try to reconcile the upper chamber’s more charitable version with the one the lower chamber put together. It will be a tough slog since the two bills are billions of dollars apart. The Senate wants to cut $4 billion from SNAP over ten years, while the House wants to cut nearly $40 billion.
Perhaps the most appalling thing about the farm bill presented by the ultra-conservatives in the House is that it makes little pretense of cutting spending by ferreting out wastefulness or fraud, no feint at an all-out assault on the deficit. Instead, this is just a base and ugly assault on the working poor.
Oh, conservatives claimed that their cuts to food stamps were in response to fraud, as their claque filled the airwaves with the same example of a carefree California surfer enjoying his “wonderful” life on food stamps. They neglected to point to government data which show that SNAP is among the most efficient of government programs, with fraudulent spending restricted to about two percent of its budget.
Meanwhile, the same conservatives have said nothing — nothing — about the millions of dollars in fraud related to farm subsidies. A June audit by the Government Accountability Office found that millions of dollars in subsidies have been sent to farmers who’ve been dead for at least a year. That’s just the illegal stuff.
That doesn’t touch the entirely legal fraud: The entire network of agricultural subsidies is a massive boondoggle, welfare to people who hardly need it. While conservatives hector the working poor about their alleged laziness, some agricultural programs pay farmers not to plant. Why don’t Fox News and Rush Limbaugh ever talk about that?
Farmers hardly need the money. (Forget about the struggling family farmer of lore. He has largely disappeared.) Earlier this year, the Agriculture Department projected that farm income in 2013 would be $128.2 billion, the highest since 1973.
One of the more egregious examples of the sheer hypocrisy surrounding the debate over the farm bill was revealed by The New York Times, which wrote about U.S. Rep. Stephen Fincher (R-Tenn.). He voted for the bill that eviscerates SNAP, but he received nearly $3.5 million in farm subsidies from the government between 1999 and 2012, according to the Times.
“We have to remember there is not a big printing press in Washington that continually prints money over and over,” he said, apparently without irony.
Conservatives claim to be alarmed by the dramatic increase in food stamp outlays, up 77 percent since 2007 to a record high of $78.5 billion in fiscal year 2012. (The SNAP program is already scheduled for a five percent cut as a provision related to the 2009 stimulus bill lapses.) But that’s because so many more people are struggling to make ends meet.
The Great Recession accelerated a trend that has hollowed out the middle class, leaving many Americans without college degrees in a downward spiral. The U.S. Department of Agricultural estimates that nearly 49 million Americans are “food insecure” — bureaucratese that means they don’t have enough to eat.
If we aren’t willing to see to it that they have basic nutrition, I’ll have to reconsider what I believe about my country.

Episcopal Diocese of Utah - Media Library - Paul Jones - A Feast Day for a Man of Peace

Episcopal Diocese of Utah - Media Library - Paul Jones - A Feast Day for a Man of Peace

A video about Bishop Paul Jones; a man of peace.

Memorization a path to church membership?

In today's (August 22, 2013) meditation on the Forward Movement Day by Day web site the  author choose the gospel for the day Mark 12:28-34 as the basis for the meditation. In the meditation he remembers the strict testing and menorization process needed before one could be confirmed in the Episcopal Church. The one thing that he retains now is the lesson about what is often referred to as the Greatest Commandment. When asked by his teacher what its meaning was he said, “If I obey the commandment, some day after I die, I will be allowed to get into the kingdom?” His teacher's replied, “Close, but a little off. ... Live the commandment, she said, and live in the kingdom.” (The complete meditation can be read here: http://prayer.forwardmovement.org/forward_day_by_day.php?d=22&m=8&y=2013).

Although the author does not expand on why, that one part of the lessons stayed with the him. I think that it is illustrative of something that several other Christian authors have been saying recently about why people seem to be leaving the church (read that as all churches). In her book Christianity Beyond Religion Diana Butler Bass says, in the chapter Belief, that " 'Belief' is the intellectual content of faith. Typically belief entails some sort of list - a rehearsal of ideas about God, Jesus, salvation, and the church." (107) She goes on to say later in the chapter, "It is not only the case that the Western world has grown weary of doctrine, but that Christianity itself is changing - shifting away from being a belief-centered religion toward an experiential faith." (108 - 109)  In the meditation that is exactly what the teacher was saying when she said, " ... Live the commandment ... and live in the kingdom." And this seems to be, according to a variety of authors (Diana Butler Bass, Phyllis Tickle and others) what people are looking for in Christian churches today and are not finding. They want to experience the faith and live it, but not be told what and who to condemn. In other words as Jesus is being quoted as saying in Mark as he answered a scribe who questioned him about, "Which is the first of all the commandments?" Jesus replied, " 'Hear, O Israel the lord our God is the one Lord, and you must love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, with all your mind, and with all your strength' and the second is this; ' You must love your neighbor as yourself.'  No other commandment is greater than these." (Mark 12: 28 b - 31 REB)  In a Belief Net blog from CNN Rachel Held Evans says that Evangelicals (and I think others) want a place to ask tough questions and wrestle with doubt. (1)  With Jesus' prescription to love God and love neighbor people are able to "question and wrestle" because they must find out, in a variety of situations, how to best love (i.e.. what constitutes loving in this instance?). Questions provide the opertunity to strengthen ones beliefs and can be more affirming than simply blindly accepting dogma. This may indeed be close to what Bonhoeffer was suggesting with his idea of Contextual Ethics. The teacher in the meditation at the beginning of this post seemed to understand that.

(1) http://religion.blogs.cnn.com/2013/07/27/why-millennials-are-leaving-the-church/