Bill Dahl » social justice

At Canaan’s Edge by Taylor Branch

bill — Tue, 17 May 2011 22:25:50 +0000

Encouraged by author and acquaintance Andrew Himes new book, The Sword of the Lord – The Roots of Fundamentalism in an American Family, I began reading Taylor Branch’s At Canaan’s Edge – America in the King Years 1965-1968.

This 771 page epic is the final in a trilogy from Taylor Branch ( Pilliar of Fire: America in the King Years 1963-65 and Parting The Waters: America in the King Years 1954-1963 (Pulitzer Prize Winner for Non-fiction).

I find that a reading of history is incredibly informative regarding the issues and challenges currently faced by one’s country and our world.

This book truly captures the essence of an ongoing struggle in each and every society. As stated by President Lyndon Johnson (p.230): “But wantin’ to do what’s right and doing’s what’s right’s two different things – and sometimes, it’s a long hill to climb in between.”

In reading this book, you re-live this era. Your heart breaks. Your soul is shattered. You’re shocked and appalled. You become baptized in the depth of the sacrifices made and lives that were lost. You see the faces and voices of hate, bigotry and prejudice – deeply ingrained in the human equation. Yet, you see what progress can and must be made when the immorality within the day-to-day of human existence is confronted with a movement of moral determination.

Consider the following excerpt from President Johnson(pp.112-113):

“Rarely are we met with a challenge, not to our growth and abundance, or our welfare or our security, but rather to the values and purpose and the meaning of our beloved nation….we have already waited a hundred years and more and the time for waiting is gone.”

As I read the book, I couldn’t help but contemplate ongoing, unresolved issues of social inequity and injustice where America has “waited over 200 years and the time for waiting is gone.“

In what Robert Kennedy called “a moral issue — as old as the Scriptures…as clear as the constitution.” (p. 474) – segregation, in it’s many forms, remains an ongoing, unresolved challenge in America today. As I read Taylor Branch’s book, I could hear current day voices and the faces and places of the immorality of prejudice, bigotry and segregation the continue to inhabit the heart of this great nation. Essential U.S. immigration reform kept coming to mind. The most segregated social institution in America remains the church.

That’s why books like Andrew Himes The Sword of the Lord are so darn important. They remind us that the life’s work of Dr. King, Taylor Branch — and all those who have preceded us as citizens of this great country — that we have much more to do where the time for waiting is gone.

Immipartheid

bill — Fri, 14 Nov 2008 19:50:11 +0000

The Disease Without a Name

“Words are the bugles of social change,” [i] wrote London Business School professor Charles Handy.

Whatever symptoms you might experience, there’s a word somebody has created to capture the essence of what seems to be ailing you. If a friend says they have symptoms like fever, the chills, nausea, diarrhea, upset stomach and headache for example, what’s the first thing that comes to your mind? “You’ve come down with the flu!”

It seems as if the ability to name a disease is dependent upon identifying a certain set of symptoms that alert ourselves and our physicians to the distinct possibility that we are unhealthy. When the sheer numbers of people afflicted become large enough, somebody, somewhere seems to step up and begin looking for a cure. Epidemics have a tendency to get people’s attention. Where do these breakthroughs come from?

Take the New York born (October 28, 1914) son of Russian-Jewish immigrants, for example. The first in his family to go to college, he enrolled at the medical school of New York University, researching influenza. The existence of the flu virus had recently been documented by others. This young student was eager to determine if the virus could be deprived of its ability to infect, while preserving the basis for immunity to the illness. He succeeded in this effort, continuing his research endeavors over the next decade. On April 12, 1955, the discovery of the polio vaccine was announced to the world. Dr. Jonas Salk became a household name. Salk never patented the vaccine nor had any desire to profit from its deployment.

Throughout history, cultures develop symptoms that evidence broader, societal ills. Yes, countries can become afflicted with maladies just like individuals unfortunate enough to contract the flu or polio. Who typically alerts the broader public to these sorts of social ills and the need for their eradication? Madleine L’Engle suggests, The first people that a dictator puts in jail are the writers and the teachers because these are the people who have vocabulary. Artists are dangerous people because they are called to work with human clay, with the heart and the soul.”[ii]

On June 24, 1901 a boy was born in a town in eastern Poland. He arrived in the United States on April 18, 1941 as a Jewish, immigrant-refugee. Raphael Lemkin has been characterized as one who belonged to a virtual community of frustrated, grief-stricken witnesses.[iii]

Lemkin’s distress was attributable to the evil he observed evolving in Europe. He focused on developing a readily recognizable term that captured the essence of the malady. He studied semantic theory and linguistics. He discarded terms like barbarism and mass murder. In November 1944, Columbia University Press released his book entitled Axis Rule in Occupied Europe. The word that he created to populate the discourse about the reality of Hitler’s horrors was unleashed. ‘Genocide,‘ the crime without a name had been born. Shortly after his death on August 28, 1959, approximately 70 countries had ratified a treaty criminalizing genocide. His funeral was attended by seven people.

Daniel Malaan became Prime Minister of South Africa in May 1948. He mis-diagnosed the ills of South Africa and was a central architect in the deployment of the prescribed treatment: apartheid. According to the dictionary, apartheid is defined as, the policy or practice of political, legal, economic, or social discrimination, as against the members of a minority group. The apartheid prescription developed by South Africa included the molecular components for the preservation of white supremacy, separation of the races and a retribalization of Africans. By 1991, a period of forty-three years, the final vestiges of apartheid legislation were repealed and free elections were held in 1994. Making a poor diagnosis and prescribing the wrong treatment can eviscerate the soul of a nation.

Today in the United States, we are not immune to the insidious maladies that come to infect the souls of our people and the heart of our nation. The symptoms are evident, the malady is pervasive, and the integrity of our country is at stake. There are a myriad of diagnostic opinions, yet no congressional consensus and federal approval for the components of the cure. This disease has no name.

Epidemiology

There will be no magic pill we can swallow, no miraculous antibiotic we can inject, no patch we can affix to our epidermis, no secret lotion we can apply. When the heart of a nation becomes afflicted with cardiovascular infarction, we’ve all come down with the malady, whether we recognize it individually or not. Today, the U.S. has become infected with the disease of immipartheid. To prepare yourself to ingest what I’m about to say, gird yourself with the counter-intuitive curiosity of Salk, the compassionate persistence of Lemkin, and the distinct potential for living the consequences from disastrous errors in judgment embraced by the nation of South Africa. Let me explain.

Apartheid has been diagnosed as possessing the following elements:

A policy of racial segregation involving political, legal, and economic discrimination against nonwhites.
A principle or practice of separating or setting apart groups of people.
The legal circumstance of being separated from others; segregation.

According to the U.S. census[iv] in 1860, the population of the U.S. was 31,443,321. Of that total, 3,953,760 were identified as non-white slaves. In 2007, the estimates range from 10 to 30 million undocumented, resident immigrants living in the U.S., the vast majority of which are non-white and of Hispanic descent. The percentages of non-white slaves in this nation 150 years ago and undocumented immigrant residing among us today are comparable. The parallels continue.

The non-white South Africans subjected to apartheid, former non-white slaves in the U.S. and present day undocumented immigrants residing in the U.S., have the following in common:

Voting rights were restricted or non-existent.
Access to public services such as education and medical care were restricted and often of inferior quality vs. those afforded their white counterparts.
Forms of identification emerged that designated the person as a member of a segregated class. ( consular cards, discussion about the implementation of a national ID card).
Movement within the country was restricted. (try getting on an airplane today without a valid ID).
Permits authorizing one to labor in certain occupations and/or certain geographic areas emerged. Oftentimes, these permits did not include the spouse or other members of one’s own family.
The legal ownership of land was tightly regulated, precluding segregated persons from participation.

The parallels are clear: A disenfranchised class of people, numbering in the millions, was formed and sustained in South Africa. Of course, in the case of U.S. slaves and non-whites in South Africa, the creation and maintenance of this social structure of legalized oppression was intentional. Allow me to politely characterize the genesis of the situation of resident, undocumented immigrants in the U.S. today as inadvertent. Yet, the reality of the situation we find ourselves in here in the U.S. is clearly a mutant form of apartheid. We’ve contracted immipartheid; a condition that possesses a distinctly similar syndrome of outcomes for the afflicted as apartheid.

You may contract disease either inadvertently or intentionally. The intentionality of willingly, or deliberately infecting another person with an infectious disease, shocks the global human conscience (take for example, knowingly transferring an HIV infection to another person). In fact, in some cultures, this act is criminal. No matter how one contracts an infection, you must desire to return to a state of health. It requires treatment. The unwillingness to admit that one is ill, or agree upon the proper course of treatment, serves only to advance the seriousness of one’s condition. This is the state of the patient today in U.S. society: unwilling to admit we are soul-sick, and loath to muster the courage to immerse ourselves in the essential therapeutic milieu, we maintain the immipartheid infection, spreading it to others, allowing it to grow in complexity, advance in seriousness, posing an ever greater threat to the present health and welfare of our entire nation, our prospects for a full recovery, and a healthy, vibrant future.

This is not the first time in U.S. history we have succumbed to the insufferable angst of determining what to do with ourselves in a predicament like this. In the collected essays of America’s revered James Baldwin, Baldwin recorded and characterized the plight the American Negro (to use his words), as he wrestled with the issues of democracy, race and the American identity. The parallels to our current quandary are obvious:

“This is why his history and his progress, his relationship to all other Americans, has been kept in the social arena. He is a social and not a personal or a human problem; to think of him is to think of statistics, slums, rapes, injustices, remote violence; it is to be confronted with an endless cataloguing of losses, gains, skirmishes; it is to feel virtuous, outraged, helpless, as though his continuing status among us were somehow analogous to disease – cancer, perhaps, or even tuberculosis – which must be checked even though it cannot be cured. In this arena, the black man acquires quite another aspect from that which he has in life. We do not know what to do with him in life….Our dehumanization of the Negro then is indivisible from our dehumanization of ourselves: the loss of our own identity is the price we pay for the annulment of his.”[v]

The immunity we thought we had developed to being susceptible to this form of societal malady appears to have broken through again – or did we ever really have immunity?

Triggering the Immune Response

Most diseases are contracted inadvertently. When you become ill, you don’t go around looking for the source of the bug do you? Yet, in the case of immipartheid, we, once again, focus our attention on identifying a scapegoat; someone to blame. No issue (other than abortion) seems to lance the American under-belly like the issue of U.S. immigration reform. The venom and puss that ooze out of this polarized tirade about the appropriate treatment for our malady are toxic, shameful, and a stench to those around us. Our vitriolic stubbornness and closed-mindedness serve only to forestall the development and implementation of the required consensus for initiating the treatment regimen. Our outbursts ricochet around the planet, causing the global community to pause and reassess their view of the American identity. In the United States today, we need a new dose of reality, as characterized by former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright:

“I regret that we have fostered a political culture that rewards the extremes, a culture in which dogmatic belief is deemed a virtue and open-mindedness a weakness, and sarcasm and slanderous attacks frequently drown out intelligent discussion. Haven’t we had enough of this? We need a dose of unity.”[vi]

In his inauguration speech on January 10, 2001 President George W. Bush proclaimed to the Nation: America, at its best, is compassionate. In the quiet of American conscience, we know that deep, persistent poverty is unworthy of our nation’s promise. And whatever our views of its cause, we can agree that children at risk are not at fault. Abandonment and abuse are not acts of God, they are failures of love.[vii]

Perhaps Albright’s prescription for a dose of unity and Bush’s measure of love are just what the doctor ordered. It just might be the place to start. Yet, these elements seem foreign to the vast majority of the diagnoses being bantered about today.

Triggering the essential immune system response is fundamental to developing a vaccine to effectively address the immipartheid outbreak. However, it’s counter-intuitive. Salk essentially killed the poliovirus, yet kept it intact just enough to activate the necessary immune response. An immune response is basically the way our body recognizes and defends itself against bacteria, viruses, and substances that appear foreign and harmful to the body. Essentially, the vaccine is literally sourced from the virus that is ailing you. However, you need to be able to accurately establish the identity of the virus or you run the disastrous risks of creating the horrific consequences of a misdiagnosis as Malaan and his cohorts did in South Africa.

The testing of the hypotheses based upon shouting slogans, slurring others, scalping scapegoats, and fear-mongering are in: they do not trigger the desired immune response. It’s time to develop and test new hypotheses, using true and time-tested methods. Perhaps it’s time to reach deeply into our souls and emerge with the perseverance of Lemkin.

Maybe, a simple word might galvanize unity, guided by a love for the past, present and future of this nation-patient.

Heralding Healing:

Like any other malady, the contraction of the disease of immipartheid has been a process. One theologian suggests; “The use of others begins slowly and then, over time, becomes the habit that not only dehumanizes the other, it dehumanizes ourselves as well.”[viii] Resolving the U.S. immipartheid epidemic contains the genetic code essential to begin restoring a fundamental dimension of our national integrity. The matter of the destructive duplicity exposed by the infection of immipartheid provides us with the opportunity to begin prioritizing our actions above hollow, time-honored, well-worn slogans. There is pertinent wisdom in the following: “We can’t change what we are known for unless we change how we live.”[ix]

What does that look like? Maybe it contains an element of a new tone that guides our political deliberations today, as the essence of the following has characterized our more lucid moments for national public policy development, since the birth of this nation:

“A new political message is therefore called for. It must begin with the age-old assumption that we are only as strong as our weakest link. It asserts that the judgment of a society will depend not on how it treats its most powerful, privileged, and wealthy, but rather on how it treats its most vulnerable.”[x]

Perhaps, the genetic code of the immipartheid virus contains important strains of a moral configuration that we are just now beginning to explore and unravel. My sense is that this is the arena where we must now re-focus our efforts. Maybe it’s the simple, time-tested, fundamental truths that we must learn to return to, in times as rapidly changing and complex as ours. Allow the simplicity of the following to speak to your senses.

“We gain something profound when we stand up for our beliefs, just as part of us dies when we know something is wrong, yet do nothing. We would call this radical dignity – if we remain silent in the face of cruelty, injustice and oppression, we sacrifice part of our soul.”[xi]

My prayer is that the soul of the body politic and the citizenry of the U.S. will begin to appreciate the term immipartheid for what it really is. I hope that this appreciation may birth a new posture that requires a reorientation in our attitudes, discussion and actions that respect the lessons of our Nation’s history. Just as we have identified anti-semitism and other racially-based slurs as a scourge, my hope is that we will apply this same fervor to the elimination of anti-immitism. The history of this nation reveals that we are capable of rising up and exterminating the social diseases we have somehow contracted. Our zeal to heal the infirmities of the world is presently hampered by our untreated condition here at home. Listen to the following:

“America is unlikely to play a different role in the world until it is a different America — until it finds ways once again realize the values of equality, liberty, democracy, and, one day, perhaps even of community in our own land. Efforts to alter the excesses of America’s international stance and to persuade the United States to respond more humanely to global problems are both essential and laudable. If we Americans truly hope to help others around the world, however, we have much hard work to do, first and foremost, here at home (emphasis is mine).”[xii]

Let’s not overlook the riveting insights of Baldwin, the counter-intuitive curiosity of Salk, the passionate persistence of Lemkin, as we prepare to assume a new posture, kneeling before the words, the language, of those who have gone before us. May we be reminded that we are the one’s called to work with human clay, with the heart and the soul.[xiii] Hearts that beat. Souls that hope. People just like us.

“When our language changes, behavior will not be far behind.”[xiv] I certainly hope so.

It’s the immoral part of our dilemma we cannot hide.

Somebody call 911.

About The Author:

Bill is a freelance writer. Bill is published in numerous professional publications, magazines, websites, journals, newspapers and newsletters. You can enjoy Bill’s writing on his website at http://billdahl.net/ For reprint permission, Contact Bill at wsdahl(at)bendbroadband(dot)com. All Rights Reserved.

NOTES

[iv] : http://www.census.gov/population/documentation/twps0056/tab01.xls

[v] Baldwin, James James Balwin – Collected Essays – Edited by Toni Morrison – Published by The Library of America, Copyright © 1998 by Literary Classics of the United States, Inc. NY,NY excerpt from Notes of a Native Son pp. 19.

[vii] http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/inaugural-address.html

[ix] Kinnaman, David and Lyons, Gabe UNChristian – What a New Generation Really Thinks About Christianity and Why It Matters, Baker Books – Grand Rapids, Michigan, Copyright © 2007 by David Kinnaman and The Fermi Project, p. P. 231.

[xi] Rogat Loeb, Paul The Impossible Will Take A While – A Citizen’s Guide to Hope in a Time of Fear, Basic Books – A Member of the Perseus Books Group NY,NY Copyright © 2004 by Paul Rogat Loeb, p. 12

Victimmigration

bill — Sun, 02 Nov 2008 19:39:24 +0000

“What’s that?”

Each time I drive to or from San Diego, CA on Interstate 5 with a first time visitor to the area, they always exclaim, “What’s that?” They are pointing out the window to an upcoming sign posted distinctly at the side of the freeway. These bright yellow signs contain the contrasting dark image of an adult, holding hands with two children, one on each side. They are running.

“What’s that?” is indicative of the level of awareness and involvement of the Christian community regarding our existing immigration policy that systematically oppresses God’s children. The purpose of this expose is to change the posture of the Christian community in the U.S. from a position of “What’s that?” to “That’s what!”

The Call:

As I read my Bible, I am continually reassured by the penchant of our God to see what is going on down here, and His ability to direct His attention to the voices that seem to be drowned out by the chatter of man.

In Exodus Chapter 3, God appears to Moses out of a heartfelt concern for the plight of His people. ”I have indeed seen the misery of my people in Egypt. I have heard them crying out because of their slave drivers, and I am concerned about their suffering. 8So I have come down to rescue them from the hand of the Egyptians and to bring them up out of that land into a good and spacious land, a land flowing with milk and honey – the home of the Canaanites, Hittites, Amorites, Perizzites, Hivites and Jebusites. 9And now the cry of the Israelites has reached me, and I have seen the way the Egyptians are oppressing them.[i]

Public policy that oppressed a certain segment of God’s children had become acceptable practice by the people of Egypt. It is interesting to note how often the Bible illustrates that which becomes ‘acceptable public policy’ in the eyes of man, is actually a distinct abomination in the sight of our God.

Today in the United States, we are modern day witnesses and participants in supporting a public policy that currently oppresses millions of God’s children. Pundits have even boldly advanced the following argument, as written in Exodus: 8Then a new king, who did not know about Joseph, came to power in Egypt. 9″Look,” he said to his people, “the Israelites have become much too numerous for us. 10Come, we must deal shrewdly with them or they will become even more numerous and, if war breaks out, will join our enemies, fight against us and leave the country.” [ii] In other words, rather than viewing the oppression of His people as something the Christian must act against, many of us have become caught up in the “threat argument” that these aliens pose to us, tacitly supporting the oppression of existing public policy, contrary to the heart of God. Other Christians simply stand around with their hands in their pockets, whistling in an attempt to ignore the situation.

Something must change. Scripture clearly indicates that God is not going to change His heart with regard to the oppression of His people. Public policy won’t change until the Christian community comes together to provide the voice for the muffled cries of His children. These cries are currently drowned out by the media manufactured, secular agenda of mainstream priorities in the U.S. that invade our ears, eyes and minds on a daily basis.

Unfortunately, as it was for Moses, such is our lot today. It is through our obedient compliance to His Word that things will change. Yet, we must be the ones’ to heed His call. It is a call to become involved in the fray where victims of oppression are created by public policy that creates and condones “man’s inhumanity to man,” as characterized in the following by Francis Schaeffer:

“If it is true that evil is evil, that God hates it to the point of the cross, and that there is a moral law fixed in what God is in Himself, then Christians should be the first into the field against what is wrong—including man’s inhumanity to man.”[iii]

The Mexodus:

According to the U.S. Census Bureau, Hispanics have outnumbered African Americans residing in the U.S. since of July 1, 2002.[iv] This is a 58% increase in the figure reported for the 1990 census. Less than 60% of all Mexican-Americans hold a U.S. passport.[v] Hispanic families are reported to average more than three children per family while the remainder of U.S. families average under two. According to one author, “Anyway you look at it, the future of the United States is a Hispanic one. The Latino wave is unstoppable.”[vi]

Every 100 minutes, an illegal immigrant from Mexico or Latin America successfully crosses the border into United States. The issue of oppression is rampant within The Mexodus: The plight of millions of Mexican citizens fleeing to the United States motivated solely by the hope of a better life. This reality is created by the improbability and hopelessness of providing their families with a better future, escaping the certainty of subsistence level poverty in their country of origin. This is our modern day Exodus I am referring to as The Mexodus.

Through June 30, 2004, there have been a reported 880,000 arrests of illegal immigrants attempting to cross the U.S./Mexican border (versus 932,000 “total illegal entrants” at all 317 U.S. entry points and borders in fiscal 2003.[vii] (Period October 1, 2002 to September 30, 2003). The “estimate” is that 2 – 3 times as many persons successfully cross the border than are caught. Depending upon whose numbers you choose to select, there are an estimated 9-15 million undocumented Mexican citizens presently residing in the United States.[viii]

Chillegals:

One critically important dimension of the Mexodus issue is the well-being of the children of illegal Mexican immigrants living in the U.S.. I will refer these innocent children here as ‘Chillegals.’ Most of these children began their journey to our country as infants, wrapped in blankets, and coddled in the arms of their parents as they made their way across the border. As infants and children, they did not give their consent to the decision of their parents. In fact, they were victimized by their parents. Victimization is defined as “adversity resulting from being made a victim.”

Most Christians would agree that prostitution, the use of illegal drugs and illicit gambling are crimes. Although “crimes” in the legal sense of the word and proscribed by Scripture, our society has labeled these acts as “victimless crimes” because “nobody other than those consenting to the act are harmed.” I think we can all agree that this “victimless” stuff is nonsense can’t we? When it comes to victimless crimes, we know that prostitution, drug abuse and gambling cause harm to others, well beyond those involved “in the act.” All “victimless crimes” contain the element of “one consenting adult engaging in illicit behavior.”

Victimmigration:

As it relates to the plight of the millions of Chillegals residing in the U.S., these infants and children never had the capacity to consent or dissent to the actions taken by their parents. Yet, we hold them responsible and oppress them, based upon the immoral treatment afforded them under current public policy. This is Victimmigration: The ongoing oppression of infants and children of illegal Mexican immigrants in the U.S.

We oppress them in the following ways:

No social security cards
No drivers licenses
No air travel
Limit the opportunities for qualified candidates to pursue higher education.
No opportunity to work legally
We prevent them from participating in and contributing to our society…the only home they have ever known.
We perpetuate oppression: A vicious, immoral, unnecessary cycle.
We encourage the proliferation of poverty-ravaged subcultures within the U.S.

The Christian Call To Arms:

The Call To Arms for the Christian Community in the United States is to reach out and embrace these infants and children who have become non-consenting victims of U.S. Victimmigration policy. Their innocent voices cannot be heard by bureaucrats and the politicians in power in Washington D.C. Francis Schaeffer encourages us to speak up and act on behalf of the oppressed, as summarized in the following:

“The Christian should be in the front line, fighting the results of man’s cruelty, for we know it is not what God has made. We are able to be angry at the results of man’s cruelty without being angry at God or being angry at what is normal.”[ix]

Consider the following inspiration from our Holy Bible:

Numbers 15: 15The community is to have the same rules for you and for the alien living among you; this is a lasting ordinance for the generations to come. You and the alien shall be the same before the LORD: 16The same laws and regulations will apply both to you and to the alien living among you.’ ” [x]

Jeremiah 7: ” 5If you really change your ways and your actions and deal with each other justly, 6if you do not oppress the alien, the fatherless or the widow and do not shed innocent blood in this place, and if you do not follow other gods to your own harm, 7then I will let you live in this place, in the land I gave your forefathers for ever and ever. 8But look, you are trusting in deceptive words that are worthless. [xi]

Ezekiel 47: 21″You are to distribute this land among yourselves according to the tribes of Israel. 22You are to allot it as an inheritance for yourselves and for the aliens who have settled among you and who have children. You are to consider them as native-born Israelites; along with you they are to be allotted an inheritance among the tribes of Israel. 23In whatever tribe the alien settles, there you are to give him his inheritance,” declares the Sovereign LORD. [xii]

Zechariah 7: 8And the word of the LORD came again to Zechariah: 9″This is what the LORD Almighty says: `Administer true justice; show mercy and compassion to one another. 10Do not oppress the widow or the fatherless, the alien or the poor. In your hearts do not think evil of each other.’ 11″But they refused to pay attention; stubbornly they turned their backs and stopped up their ears. 12They made their hearts as hard as flint and would not listen to the law or to the words that the LORD Almighty had sent by his Spirit through the earlier prophets. So the LORD Almighty was very angry. 13″ `When I called, they did not listen; so when they called, I would not listen,’ says the LORD Almighty. 14`I scattered them with a whirlwind among all the nations, where they were strangers. The land was left so desolate behind them that no one could come or go. This is how they made the pleasant land desolate.’ “[xiii]

Conclusion:

It is my prayer that your soul shall hear the voice of our Lord Jesus as He speaks in Luke Chapter 4:

18″The Spirit of the Lord is on me,

because he has anointed me

to preach good news to the poor.

He has sent me to proclaim freedom for the prisoners

and recovery of sight for the blind,

to release the oppressed,

19 to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor.”[xiv]

Our choice is no different today than the one that confronted Moses a few thousand years ago. Will we continue to attempt to reply to Him, as Moses did, saying, 13″O Lord, please send someone else to do it?”[xv] Can we hear him responding to our apathy and feeble attempts to avoid acting upon His commands as He shouts: 11″Who gave man his mouth? Who makes him deaf or mute? Who gives him sight or makes him blind? Is it not I, the LORD? 12Now go; I will help you speak and will teach you what to say.” [xvi]

Our Call to Arms as Christian’s regarding the Victimmigration issue in the United States, is clearly captured in the following words from Jesus Christ that continue to ricochet through the corridors of time:

Mark 10: 13People were bringing little children to Jesus to have him touch them, but the disciples rebuked them. 14When Jesus saw this, he was indignant. He said to them, “Let the little children come to me, and do not hinder them, for the kingdom of God belongs to such as these. 15I tell you the truth, anyone who will not receive the kingdom of God like a little child will never enter it.” 16And He took the children in his arms, put His hands on them and blessed them. [xvii]

As you lift your arms to worship and embrace Jesus, be reminded to bow down and embrace the cause of His Children who have become victims of immoral, modern day public policy in the United States…the children of Victimmigration. This is the Christian Call to Arms.

He won’t “send somebody else” to accomplish His work on this Earth. He’s counting on you. So are His children.

Bow down. Embrace this cause today. Allow your “What’s that?” to become a “That’s what I am called to do as a disciple of Jesus Christ?”

NOTES:

[iv] U.S. Bureau of the Census. June 18, 2003.

[v] The Latino Electorate- 2002 National Survey of Latinos, Pew Hispanic Center/Kaiser Family Foundation, October 2002.

[vii] Performance and Annual Report – Fiscal Year 2003 – U.S. Customs and Border Protection – U.S. Department of Homeland Security,

[viii] Performance and Annual Report – Fiscal Year 2003 – U.S. Customs and Border Protection – U.S. Department of Homeland Security, p. 68… NOTE: As indicated in a memorandum from the Commissioner of U.S. Customs and Border Protection in 2003,[viii] the overall accuracy of the numbers reported by Border Patrol and Customs/Immigration Enforcement remain in doubt. The Commissioner states: “Customs had four outstanding material weaknesses at the beginning of FY 2003. Although we are well on our way to resolving a number of these weaknesses, until they are closed the existing deficiencies in the quality and adequacy of data provided by Customs financial accounting and reporting systems prevent me from providing reasonable assurance as of September 30, 2003, that Customs overall controls and financial management systems were in conformance with standards prescribed by the Comptroller General of the United States.”

Immythgration

bill — Sun, 02 Nov 2008 19:09:25 +0000

Immythgration

Myths Mashed in the Midst of the U.S. Immigration Policy Reform Debate

The First Batch:

Everybody has at least one opportunity in life to sample the first batch of cookies your little sister, brother, nephew, niece or neighbor kid cooks up. I can distinctly remember the day my little sister proudly presented me with three cookies that she had created. They were awful! I mean terrible. I could have choked to death if she hadn’t brought me a glass of milk with those darn things.

However, my reaction was probably like yours. I didn’t make a face, scream “YUCK!” or spit the mouthful out in my hand. I smiled politely, made “Yummy” sounds, chewed, swallowed and devoured all three of those damn things. Why? Because I didn’t want the little cook to feel bad.

Little cooks seem to grow up into adult chefs charged with cooking up socio-economic policy in this country. As it relates to the current U.S. immigration policy reform debate, the fare being served up from the state and federal test kitchens all over this country continues to be filled with artificial ingredients that make the entrée distasteful. Let me explain.

Following Instructions:

Why do we have recipes? My grandma had her recipes memorized, until my dad asked her to write them down on paper. My mom had recipe books all over the kitchen. My wife has hers filed away in the cupboard above the refrigerator…she gets most of her recipes on-line today.

We have recipes so someone other than the original person who created the dish is able to replicate the form, flavor and taste. My wife can follow the recipe that my grandma had for chocolate chip cookies with walnuts and produce the same, exact cookie. If my wife alters that recipe in any way, I can tell…immediately. Every once in a while, my wife will alter my mom or grandma’s recipes when she is out of a particular ingredient, decides to alter the proportions of required ingredients, or succumbs to the overwhelming urge to be creative.

Original recipe means original recipe. The only way to replicate original is to follow the original instructions. It is a myth to think that one can alter the original recipe in any way and produce a tasteful, current day replica. The recipe for cooking up present day original recipe U.S. immigration policy is no different. However, what we are presently sampling in this debate is fast-food fare that is filled with myths that alter the flavor of the enduring truths that have formed and sustained the soul of this nation.

Myth # 1 – Everything has changed since 9/11: Bull! My grandma didn’t change her recipe for chocolate chip cookies when Pearl Harbor, World War II, The Korean War, Vietnam, or Woodstock occurred. (She didn’t alter it when we landed a man on the moon). All this nonsense about everything changing since 9/11 is only political fodder to legitimize the fear and outrage agenda of those who want to capture an opportunity in our nation’s history to further preserve what they already have. This is done by redirecting their self-righteous revenge, veiled beneath a misguided sense of patriotic fervor. It is then served up as a new form of truth. This is not truth. It is myth, fabricated for the purposes of changing the original recipe. It is a lie. A quote from Princeton University’s Professor of Philosophy Emeritus Henry G. Frankfurt, captures the essence of this matter in the following: “The liar is inescapably concerned with truth-values. In order to invent a lie at all, he must think he knows what is true. And in order to invent an effective lie, he must design his falsehood under the guidance of that truth.”[i]

The truth about this myth is that there were the same number of undocumented Latino immigrants piloting those hijacked airplanes on 9/11 as the number of weapons of mass destruction the U.S. military uncovered after invading Iraq…Nada. Zero.

The truth of the matter is that when one begins to alter the original recipe of truth, the results are distasteful for all concerned.

Missing Ingredients:

I can remember the day I was helping my grandma bake cookies. They didn’t have timers in those days so grandma always kept a keen eye on the kitchen clock. This particular day, grandma got distracted and forgot when we had placed the batch in the oven. She grabbed her mitten and pulled the tray out of the oven. “Not yet Billy. They’re half baked,” she said.

Myth # 2 – Control the Border and Solve the Problem. Proponents of immigration reform who focus solely on controlling the border with Mexico as the solution to this matter, are serving up solutions that are at best, half-baked. These people would lead us to believe that we should devour their half-baked fare because “it looks like a cookie.” The point is that we need to put this sort of thinking back in the oven to allow the other ingredients in the recipe to fully integrate with each other. There’s nothing worse than a half-baked cookie, no matter how hungry you are for a solution. You don’t take a batch of chocolate chip-walnut cookies out of the oven just because the chocolate chips on the exterior of the cookies look good. Proper baking is an essential ingredient to every successful recipe.

One day, my wife decided to use pecans instead of walnuts in a batch of grandma’s cookies. Her thought was that I would never know the difference. Wrong!

Myth # 3 – Guest Worker Programs Are a Proper Substitute for a Path to Citizenship. Yeah, right! This is akin to substituting pecans for walnuts. The assumption is that undocumented immigrants come to the U.S. solely for the purpose of getting a job. Furthermore, if we provide a way for them to register, we will be better able to control the flow and keep track of their whereabouts. The fact of history is that the hopeless migrate to that land that is hopeful. Undocumented immigrants desire far more than just a job. They want to be participants in this society and enhance the hope for a brighter future for their families. By the way, the federal government wants you to believe that a guest worker program (pecan) is a proper substitute for a path to citizenship (walnut). However, when this fare gets served up in this country, we’re all going to recognize the fact that there’s something essential missing here.

Proper Proportions:

One day, Grandma made a mistake. After the first batch had cooled and she had poured two glasses of milk for us, we smiled at one another and grandma nodded, giving me the green light to grab the first warm cookie. She did the same. It took grandma all of ten seconds to figure out that there was something wrong. The vanilla was stale. She looked at me and said, “Well Billy, it’s back to square one.” With that, she tossed the first batch of cookies on the sheet and the entire bowl of cookie dough in the garbage. The vanilla we had used had been in grandma’s cupboard far too long. She gave me the empty chip package and a few bucks to go to the store and get a new bottle.

Myth # 4 – They will go back – I am amused at the recipes for U.S. immigration reform that suggest the undocumented immigrants presently in the U.S. will simply return to their country of origin, as long as we create policy here that maintains their existence as less flavorful than it can be. There is absolutely no factual basis for such a claim. There’s no way that you can pluck the vanilla out that is already baked in the recipe. The vast majority of undocumented immigrants who reside in the U.S. are here to stay. Face it. Perhaps we should focus on the truth that our responsibility is to create a more fruitful nation by virtue of their addition to our national recipe. Their addition should be viewed as refreshing, essential ingredient rather than an element that makes the whole batch bad. That’s how the U.S. treated my grandma when she came here via Ellis Island. Maybe we should stick with the original recipe?

Myth # 5 – Ignore Them and They’ll Go Away – Grandma taught me that if you make a less than satisfactory batch of cookies, the best thing to do is start over rather than cook up the whole batch and hope enough people stomach the bad batch to make your effort worthwhile. Recipes for U.S. immigration policy reform must be mindful of the same. Bad, piecemeal policy does not contribute to a palatable solution for all concerned. Besides, it damages the reputation of the cook. Ignoring the need for a comprehensive solution is the only recipe for a tasteful, enduring solution.

Myth # 6 – Round em up and send em back – This is a position taken by the neo-con Center for Immigration Studies in a May 2005 report.[ii] Imagine me and my grandma attempting to extract the vanilla in the dough and bring it back to the store for a refund. It’s ridiculous. There’s no way you can do this. Particularly when you’re talking about human beings and a moral approach to this matter. The recipe for the soul of this nation is comprised of a multiplicity of ingredients that have been passed down from generation to generation. There are shameful periods of history in this country when we have attempted to discard certain ingredients; the Japanese-American internment camps in WWII, segregation, the right to vote and dissent during Vietnam and Watergate. Let’s not repeat the same, historical, shameful mistakes of this country that many would like to forget. Let’s step up to our responsibility that we have left this essential ingredient in the cupboard far too long. It’s not the vanilla’s fault.

The Presentation:

Grandma was always proud when she would bring out her neatly arranged platter of cookies after we had finished our family’s Sunday supper together. She always whispered to me, “No matter how you package it, it’s what’s inside that counts Billy.”

Myth # 7– Package it Properly and It Will Sell – Come on America! Haven’t we tired of this myth yet? Let’s make sure that the fare we serve up in the U.S. immigration policy reform effort is one that is based upon tasteful substance, rather than a palatable appearance.

Summary

My grandma’s cookies warmed more hearts and put more smiles on faces in this nation than anything I can think of. Other than our family members, she usually brought them to folks who had been hit by some sort of trauma in life. Oftentimes, the people who enjoyed her fare didn’t even know her. Grandma didn’t know them either.

Grandma cooked up stuff because it was the right thing to do. Every batch was made with the same portions of loving care. Let’s follow grandma’s recipe shall we?

NOTES:

[ii] http://www.cis.org/articles/2005/back605.html

Hispurgatory

bill — Sun, 02 Nov 2008 18:30:30 +0000

From a purely historical standpoint, the plight of undocumented Hispanic immigrants residing in the U.S. can be accurately characterized by the term Hispurgatory: A moment in U.S. history when the resident, undocumented Latino immigrant population is caught in a state of legal limbo. Their standard of living is typically well below the official poverty level. Their daily existence is one of endurance and survival. They are motivated by the hope that their service to this country as upstanding, creative, contributing, law abiding residents will be rewarded someday with legitimate, official acceptance by the government of the Promised Land.

For these Latinos, the hope for citizenship in the U.S. is heaven. Visions of better jobs, education, healthcare, housing, protections against discrimination, racism, the ability to be all one can be, to contribute to the United States economy and culture on an equal footing…these are the elements of their hope. The country they departed was, at least, economically oppressive. If the prospects for a better life for their families in their country of origin was without hope, then, that is hell. Hope led them here. Hope keeps them here. They hope that we will awaken from our self-righteous indignation and accept them formally into this, the Promised Land. Until then, they remain among us, their lives suspended precariously between heaven and hell, in a state of Hispurgatory.

Getting In

I don’t know about you, but I’ve always wanted to speak to somebody who has actually lived in either heaven or hell. I haven’t met either yet (although I’ve met people in both categories that, in my opinion, belong in one or the other). However, I have met a vast number of people who presently reside in Hispurgatory. Let me tell you about one.

Juan (not his real name) lives in Santa Ana, CA. He came to the U.S. when he was 8 years old along with his 3 year old sister in 1991. He can remember the squalor they lived in the Saravia Michoacan region of Mexico, some two hours inland from Guadalajara. The family inhabited a one-room shack. The windows were just uncovered holes in the wall. The room had a dirt floor. There was no plumbing. Juan’s mom stayed home to care for the 5 children. Dad worked from sun up to sundown. The family would wait for dad to get home at night so they could eat dinner together. Most nights, dinner consisted of one tortilla each. Juan recalls the nights, too numerous to count, that his father gave his tortilla to his baby sister who crawled onto dad’s lap at suppertime.

Juan’s mother and father have been married for 30 years. His father entered the U.S. 28 years ago, living with his older brother in Santa Ana, working as a landscaper. Dad sent money to the family in Mexico every month from the U.S. Mom would visit dad in the U.S. once a year or so and shortly thereafter, would give birth to a new child in Mexico.

The first time Juan met his father in-person, he was 8 years old. Mom and dad decided that they wanted their children to have a better future by obtaining an education in the U.S. Dad had returned to Mexico with U.S. birth certificates from Juan’s uncle’s two children that matched the ages for Juan and his 3 year old sister. Juan distinctly recalls the horrific screams and crying from his other brothers and sisters when they realized they would have to remain with mom in Mexico, rather than accompanying dad, Juan and his baby sister back to the U.S. Dad and mom promised the family that they would all be together in the U.S. within two years. It took four. The coyotes had raised their prices to U.S. $1,500.00 per person and it took the family two extra years to save the ransom.

Today, Juan is 22 years old. He remembers holding his father’s hand as they walked through U.S. customs in Tijuana when he was 8. He recalls his mother carrying his three-year old sister in her arms in front of him. This sister is 17 now. Nobody ever asked Juan or his sister to consent to this action. They were too young to argue with mom or dad. Juan lives with his parents and three sisters in an apartment in Santa Ana. Their rent is $950 per month. Mom continues to care for the children. His dad still works in landscaping where he brings home $320 per week (weather permitting…do the math). They have moved only once within Santa Ana since arriving in the U.S. The motivation to move occurred when Juan’s brother was shot four times while standing on the balcony of their apartment, in a random, drive-by shooting. Juan’s father missed filing for citizenship prior to the 1986 cut-off. Dad has a work-permit today, sponsored by his employer. They don’t have any medical insurance. Juan’s 5-year old sister has suffered from heart problems requiring 2 major surgeries. She needs another one but they just don’t have the money.

The Awakening – Liberty and Justice For All

Juan completed all his education in the Santa Ana school district. He is the first person in his family ever to graduate from high school. During high school, Juan received numerous academic awards as the top student in his class in Spanish, Planning and Compter Graphic Design and an award for perfect high school attendance. (Noteworthy as the drop-out rate for Latinos in Santa Ana high schools is about 50%). He graduated from high school with honors. He graduated early.

He has never been arrested and doesn’t have a fake Driver’s license, social security card or birth certificate. He takes the bus everywhere he needs to go. He has never driven a car. He has made money distributing flyers, doing odd jobs and babysitting for neighbors and doing some filing a few hours a week at a law office.

It was reciting the pledge of allegiance one morning for the umpteenth time in high school that Juan realized that something was wrong. “When I said, ‘with liberty and justice for all,’ it dawned on me; all my efforts in school might be for nothing if something doesn’t happen to change my situation. I became confused, angry and depressed. Liberty and justice were for some.” Shortly after this awakening, Juan was unable to join his classmates on a field trip to Ensenada. He couldn’t join a friend and his family on a vacation trip to another state by airplane. He couldn’t take the test to get a permit to drive. He couldn’t get a real job like many of his high school classmates. He was in Hispurgatory.

This spring, Juan will receive his Bachelor’s degree from a four-year university in southern California. Most of the financial support he received for college was donated by a local church, as he does not qualify for federally funded student financial aid programs. Once again, he is graduating with honors. Juan wants to be an elementary school teacher. He completed his student teaching with first graders in a local elementary school. “It’s what I was created to do,” he says. He recently tried to sign-up to take the California teachers exam. They wouldn’t let him. He doesn’t have a social security number.

Now What?

“I want my younger sisters to continue to see me as a role-model.” Juan’s 17 year-old sister has a 3.8 GPA and is ready to graduate from high school. She faces the same challenges as Juan. “I need to be here for her; to encourage her to press on in the face of the hopelessness and confusion of it all. My biggest fears are that I won’t be able to teach here in the U.S., I won’t get the opportunity for citizenship here and that I will be deported. The U.S. Government should allow people like me and my sister to become citizens. We’ve earned. They should allow us to serve in the U.S. military too. I wish Latino celebrities like Jennifer Lopez, Arte Moreno (owner of the Los Angeles Angels of Anaheim major league baseball team), Ricki Martin, Dahlia and Alex Rodriguez (New York Yankees) would get together and advocate for the resolution of all this. I would, if I were in their position. This is my country.”

Juan is considering the continuing his education, obtaining his Master’s degree. He doesn’t know who would help him out financially. His life, his future are suspended in a state of legal limbo. This is Hispurgatory.

So What?

There are millions of Juan’s in the United States today. As I read my Bible, it is the plight of the Juan’s of the world where the rubber of good news of the Gospel must meet the road. As theologian Thomas Merton wrote, “We must never overlook the fact that the message of the Bible is above all a message preached to the poor, the burdened, the oppressed, the underprivileged.“(1)

For those living in Hispurgatory in the United States today, they are people occupying space where there seems to be no room. As Merton says: “Into this world, this demented inn, in which there is absolutely no room for Him at all, Christ has come uninvited. But because He cannot be at home in it, because He is out of place in it, and yet He must be in it. His place is with those others for whom there is no room. His place is with those who do not belong, who are rejected by power because they are regarded as weak, those who are discredited, who are denied the status of persons, tortured, or exterminated. With those for whom there is no room, Christ is present in this world.” (3)

Yes, we do have a moral crisis in the United States today. Part of this crisis is caused and perpetuated by those who claim the name of Christ, sit on the sidelines, and shout at the Juan’s in this country. “The moral crisis that we are facing in this country is crying out for spiritual leadership. It offers evangelicals the opportunity to put our faith to work-to roll up our sleeves and become players instead of sitting on the sidelines.” (3)

“It is time that we demand more of ourselves as Christians. We are the hands and feet of Jesus Christ, and if the world is going to see, feel, and touch him, it will have to be through us.”(4) It’s time that the Christian community repents, takes the leadership role and opens the door to the cell of those imprisoned within Hispurgatory in the United States.

Let them in America! It’s God’s grace we are shutting out.

Bibliography & Notes

Christianimation

bill — Sun, 02 Nov 2008 00:08:18 +0000

Millions of Lives Remain Suspended in Mid-Air as the Christian Community Remains on the Sidelines

‘Christianimation‘

Movies are a welcome escape for me. When the lights come down and the big screen lights up in front of me, I am transported to an artificial place that provides a respite from the reality of it all. Have you ever noticed the one thing that is certain from one movie to the next? No matter where the movie has taken you, when they turn on the lights, everybody’s still in the same seat they were in when the lights went off. This state of suspended animation keeps us in our places and keeps us quiet. It’s unreal!

For the Eduardo and Lola Lopez family, as well as millions of other undocumented Hispanics residing in the U.S., their position in our society remains in a state of Hispanimation: Each night Eduardo dutifully turns out the lights after tucking in his family of six daughters and one son for the night. As he lies down next to Lola, Eduardo drifts off to sleep and dreams of the day when this country will awaken to our responsibility to bestow the dignity, liberty and equality his family has earned by residing in Santa Ana, CA over the past twelve years. As the morning dawns, Eduardo’s dreams are interrupted again. He rises from his bed to see four daughters sleeping in one bunk bed, while two daughters and his son share the other. Lola rolls onto her side on the mattress they share on the floor. Eduardo closes his eyes for a moment to wipe away the tears with the back of his right hand. Nothing’s changed. Everybody is in the same position they were in when the lights went off. It’s real!

The mainstream Christian witness in the U.S. has become vastly too comfortable sitting in their seats, watching the social policy debates rage across our television screens, newspapers and radios. As a group, the U.S. Christian community has delegated their voice to pulpits, special interest groups and media outlets who supposedly represent our interests. We have succumbed to a state of Christianimation: We have become comfortable as armchair spectators in U.S. public policy debates rather than the passionate activists on behalf of the oppressed, impoverished and marginalized in our world, as fully-devoted servants of our Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ. Although many social justice issues may garner our intellectual and heartfelt interest, we remain seated, watching the entertainment roll by. We are in a state of Christianimation.

On December 1, 1955 an African American woman named Rosa Parks refused to stand, give up her seat and move to the back of the bus in Montgomery, Alabama. She was arrested and jailed. However, “God comes into the picture even when the church won’t take a stand.”[i] This one act by a marginalized woman provided the catalyst for the Christian community in Montgomery to rise from the seat of tolerating the intolerable, to following a vision only our God could design.

God has a vision for the mainstream Christian community in the U.S. One author characterizes it as follows: “Let me be very clear about God’s vision: It is probably not what you expect. It typically is counterintuitive because God refuses to be limited be his creation. It is not based on human consensus; his vision will stir intense emotion and debate, causing some people to seek other places through which they can serve him more comfortably while energizing others. His vision comes at a high cost because it demands significant personal change, fulfilled only with great effort, produces results in the long term, and necessitates teams of people working together rather than individuals doing their thing in isolation. And his vision is not based on incremental improvement of other’s ideas; his organizing concept for you is fresh and customized to your situation. Humankind cannot fathom the depths of God; neither can his vision be minimized by our limitations.”[ii]

A New Vocabulary

Rosa Parks injected a new word into the vocabulary of the embryonic stage of the U.S. civil rights movement: “No, I won’t. I’m taking a stand.” Needless to say, the public policy pundits become quite animated over the issue of illegal immigration. The “revision” of U.S. immigration policy by the present administration has effectively kept everybody in the same seat. I am convinced that politicians use terms that most people cannot understand for the purposes of: a) pretending to understand things they really don’t have a clue about b) if we can’t spell a word they’re using to describe a situation, we are going to believe they know better than we do, in terms of what the heck is going on. Politicians are empowered by this. Joe and Sally Christian become bystanders. c) This creates a scenario whereby most Christians become unwittingly excluded from the dialogue altogether, thereby elevating the possibility that we will leave it up to public policy professionals to figure it out for us.

My point is our focus on doing the right thing is obfuscated by the vocabulary that populates U.S. public policy debates regarding immigration, and other social policy issues. Consider a few of the following terms presently in use; “geopolitical tilt, national security considerations, political capital, constituency, multi-national economic integration, systematic policy integration considerations, socio-economic equanimity analysis, supply-side labor dynamics, equanimity, international cooperation, multi-national strategic geo-political encumbrances and, of course, a coalition of the willing.” Do you really know what these terms mean? If so, in regard to the implications for resolving the present deficiencies in U.S. immigration policy, can you tell me how we can balance our national security concerns with the geo-political economic instability we might create for the Mexican government? Of course you can’t! Guess what? Nobody can. This debate just keeps going round and round and everybody stays in the same seat. It’s all part of Christianimation: the dialogue is entertaining and maintains your position as an uninvolved bystander; a spectator…just like at the movies.

The problem with all this is that Eduardo, Lola and their family are not characters in a movie. They can’t afford to go to a movie. We need a new vocabulary to inject into this debate that the everyday Christian can understand. Can you spell Eduardo? Can you pronounce Lola? Can you imagine waking up every morning as determined, heartbroken and hopeful that somehow, someway you can earn enough money today to feed your family tonight? Now imagine that you cannot talk about your plight for fear of being detained and deported back to a country that your children cannot even remember departing? You see, what we are talking about here are human beings, children of God, whose present status and future as legitimate, honorable citizens of this nation remains suspended in mid air.

It’s time to remove our heads from the cloud cover provided by the useless vocabulary of the public policy pundits. We need to develop and inject some meaningful language that captures the essence of the issues and allows you to identify who’s who in the debate. You can become a Christian who has regained his/her Spirit filled passion to act and advocate on behalf of the poor, the oppressed and the marginalized in this society, and our world. You can become a Christian who enters ‘recovery’ from the disease of Christianimation. Stay with me. I’m about to turn the lights on. Let me spell it out for you.

**‘Hispurgatory ‘**

From a purely historical standpoint, the plight of undocumented Hispanic immigrants residing in the U.S. can be accurately characterized with the term Hispurgatory: A moment in U.S. history when approximately 5% of the U.S. population is caught in a state of legal limbo. Their standard of living is typically well below the official poverty level. Their daily existence is one of endurance and survival. They are motivated by the hope that their service to this country as upstanding, creative, contributing, law abiding residents will be rewarded someday by legitimate, official acceptance by the government of the Promised Land. The country they departed was, at least, economically oppressive. If the prospects for a better life for their families in their country of origin was without hope, then, that is hell. They were led by hope to our borders. We left the gates open and unlocked. Hope led them here. Hope keeps them here. They hope that we will awaken from our self-righteous indignation and accept them formally into this Promised Land. Until then, they remain among us in Hispurgatory.

For Eduardo and Lola, their city, Santa Ana, CA has just been ranked the #1 Toughest City in the U.S. to make ends meet.[iii] They can’t afford to move. If they did, or miss their rent payment, there are people lined up to inhabit the squalor they call home. They remain in the same seat.

However, undocumented Hispanic immigrants in the U.S. cannot raise their voices for fear of arrest and deportation. Who shall speak up for them? As one author points out: “There is no theme more deep in American consciousness than that of the transplanted person who comes to participate in the American experiment and who succeeds in the land of the free.”[iv]

The New Testament has some advice for those suffering from Christianimation. In the first chapter of Acts, Jesus has ascended into heaven. His disciples stood motionless. “10They were looking intently up into the sky as he was going, when suddenly two men dressed in white stood beside them. 11″Men of Galilee,” they said, “why do you stand here looking into the sky?”[v]

This advice is as pertinent for His disciples today as it was when it was spoken: “Stop gawking at the sky and get on with what I have asked you to do.” We must change our posture.

KABOOM!

Advocating and serving the poor, the oppressed and the marginalized in our society and our world is the overlooked opportunity for mainstream Christianity in the U.S. to rise from the lethargy of Christianimation. We must repent and renew our dedication to move outward from ourselves as the only vessels available to carry the love of Christ to a lost world. As one author says: “Obviously, we cannot be a demonstration to the past; and it can be only partially through our writings and our works that we leave a demonstration to the future, though there should be an accumulative demonstration, rolling up like a snowball through the centuries. But, primarily, every Christian is to be a demonstration at his own point of history and to his own generation.”[vi]

We were made to be accountable to our Creator. He’s asking; “How’s it goin? How ya doin? How’s everybody? What’s goin on? Wassup?” He’s not interested in responses that are full of superficial, impersonal niceties like; “Uh, we dunno, awful, fine I guess, Uh Oh, mediocre, okay, wonderful, awesome and fantastic?” Our God is interested in results. Consider the following from C.S. Lewis:

“Fine feelings, new insights, greater interest in ‘religion’ mean nothing unless they make our actual behaviour better; just as in illness, ‘feeling better’ is not much good if the thermometer shows that your temperature is still going up. In that sense the outer world is quite right to judge Christianity by its results. Christ told us to judge by results…Our careless lives set the outer world talking; and we give them grounds for talking in a way that throws doubt on the truth of Christianity.”[vii]

How do you behave when you know somebody is monitoring your progress by virtue of the results you produce? You cannot graduate from high school or college without accumulating satisfactory grades and credits. You cannot have standings or winners and losers in sport unless somebody keeps score! Christians in the U.S. have wandered from the biblical truth that our results matter and, as Francis Schaeffer says, our Christian behavior is under constant scrutiny:

“It is the idea of the theater; we are on a stage being observed. He (Apostle Paul) says here that the supernatural universe is not far off, and that while the real battle is in the heavenlies, our part is not unimportant at all, because it is being observed by the unseen world. It is like a one-way mirror. We are under observation.” [viii]

In my community, a mega-church has an outreach ministry in a poverty ravaged, gang infested, predominantly Hispanic neighborhood. This church has a reported weekend attendance of around 10,000. On Tuesday’s, Hispanic children between the ages 8 and 12 begin placing their coats on the sidewalk in the “pick-up” area of their neighborhood around 3:00PM in the afternoon. They are reserving their place in line to be placed with a volunteer driver who arrives at 6:00PM to take them to a weekly Kid’s Club activity. On most days, there are more kids walking home with their coats at 6:20PM than there are in the cars with volunteer Christian drivers.

In speaking with one of the volunteer drivers, tears trickle from beneath his sunglasses as he asks: “Don’t they know Jesus is weeping about this? Where is everybody? What are those kids thinking as they grab their coats, hang their heads and return home? Are we really doing something constructive for Christ here or are we shooting Him in the heart? Don’t our people understand that He is watching all this?”

As stated in the quote in the first paragraph of this section, how can the Christian community in American society today respond to the statement that our progress can be characterized as an accumulative demonstration, rolling up like a snowball through the centuries? As individual disciples of Christ, have we lost sight of the importance of the biblical truth that “faith without works is dead?” Have we succumbed to the illusion that the grace, mercy, forgiveness and the love of Christ that provides us with a free pass to eternity in heaven is all that really matters? KABOOM!

This article is designed to provide you with the essential KABOOM! required to turn your attention to the voice of Jesus whispering: “You matter. Your life matters. I have more in store for you as My disciple than you have been led to believe. Follow Me. Allow Me to reveal dimensions of Myself to you that will reinvigorate your thirst for Me, transform you and the world around you. I am the God of More, much More. I need you to serve Me in ways I can teach you, if you’re willing. Come to Me my child. Join Me to personally and more deeply participate in the progress of My kingdom. The harvest is plenty but the workers are few. It is time to awaken and rediscover your willingness to rekindle your love for Me. Together we can participate in the joyous triumph of creating an accumulative demonstration, rolling up like a snowball through the centuries.”

Eduardo is forty eight-years old. After sundown, you can find him scavenging dumpsters behind his apartment looking for cans, bottles and cardboard that he can take to a local recycler. He had a stroke last year brought on by untreated diabetes that raged out of control. He has numbness on his left side preventing him from the ordinary course mobility and stamina most of us take for granted. He cannot afford ongoing medical care. It’s not unusual for him to be without insulin at certain times of the month. He goes without insulin so his family can eat. KABOOM! There are likely hundreds of families like the Lopez family within any urban community who would truly appreciate a helping hand.

For Eduardo and Lola Lopez, the immigration policy paradox has implications within their own family. Three of their daughters were whisked across the border with them twelve years ago. Since that time, they added three sisters, born in the U.S.. Thus, you have three sisters that are legally considered Chillegals (children of undocumented, illegal immigrants) and three are U.S. citizens. All six children come from the same two parents, yet their legal status and prospects for contributing to mainstream American society are distinctly different. Their oldest daughter recently graduated from high school in the top 3% of her class. By virtue of her Chillegal status, she cannot get a legitimate job to help pay her way through college, cannot participate in paid internship programs in her field of study, is unable to join her classmates traveling by air to conferences, cannot get a drivers license to get to campus, and does not qualify for any sort of student loans. Imagine your six children walking to school together. Three of them are carefree. The other three keep looking over their shoulders wondering if Immigration and Naturalization Service field agents are in the neighborhood. KABOOM! This is not the level playing field described in Scripture. It is an opportunity for the Christian community to become actively involved in ridding this society of biblically proscribed oppression.

As stated in Scripture: Zechariah 7: 8And the word of the LORD came again to Zechariah: 9″This is what the LORD Almighty says: `Administer true justice; show mercy and compassion to one another. 10Do not oppress the widow or the fatherless, the alien or the poor. In your hearts do not think evil of each other.’ 11

The ‘Intimmigration’Proponents

As it relates to U.S. immigration policy, on one side of the debate are the proponents of intimmigration. Their arguments are filled with themes of legality, protectionism, blaming the individual, fear, misplaced patriotic fervor, self-righteousness, economic considerations and national security concerns. The following are some terms that characterize the essence of their position and will assist you in identifying who they are by what they say. They are typically the loudest voices, yet are careful to veil their arguments behind more moderate intonation in the mainstream media. These are the voices and viewpoints that you hear most often, if you listen for them. As you read the following, try to identify the voice of Jesus as He speaks about the alien, the poor and needy, and the oppressed in the New Testament. If you’re like me, I don’t believe you will be able to recognize His voice.

Latillegals – “These people are criminals by virtue of their unauthorized border crossing. It’s illegal. The entire immigration policy debate begins and ends with this one fact. Period!”

Hispanicriminals – “These illegals are robbing us blind! Most are disproportionately represented in gangs, drugs and alcohol abuse. They even drive illegally without any insurance coverage. We must do everything in our power to protect ourselves from these people.”

Latimmorals – “Entering this country illegally is immoral. These people are going to infect American society with the influences that contribute to the ongoing moral decay of this nation.”

Hispanationalsecurity – “The potential for terrorists to be among their lot is an absolute certainty. It’s just a matter of time before they attack us. I’m scared to death of these people.”

Latinomas – “Round em up and send em back where they came from! Every last one of em. You know, the internment camps during World War II did provide the country with a sense of comfort by virtue of the fact that we had our arms around the situation.”

Hispaniconomic – “They’re taking our jobs, overwhelming the jails, prisons, healthcare, affordable housing and social welfare institutions that our tax dollars are supporting. This is an outrage! No wonder this country’s economic recovery is retarded.”

Latinomo – “Build the damn wall! From the Pacific Ocean to the Gulf of Mexico. It’s the only way we’re gonna stop the ongoing incursion by these insurgents!”

Hispanitsyourowndamnfault - “Their lot is what they deserve.”

Latinotonmywatch – “Establish a road to residency for these people? It’s not gonna happen on my watch! There isn’t a politician in the country who’s dumb enough to advocate for this. What’s this world coming to anyhow?”

Hispaniconstituency – “Just imagine if we give these people the right to vote. That will be the day when we can all pack up and move to Canada. All hell’s gonna break loose. Our nation will be overrun with foreigners.”

Latillerates – “These people are stupid and lazy. They’re sure to drag our economy down and further the decline of the U.S. in the world from a competitive standpoint. There has always been an underclass in this country that has served a purpose for the majority. They should just accept their position in our society and be grateful we don’t round em up and send em back where they came from.”

Conclusion:

Something must change. If you have read this far in this article, I only hope that you recognize what it is that must change. It is you, it is me, it is us. We must change. Until we recognize the essence of the vocabulary that inhabits the dialogue of the debates on public policy issues in the U.S. that involve the poor and needy, and contrast those voices with the truth revealed in Scripture, we shall remain victims of Christianimation. We cannot hope to contribute our voices and actions to the chorus and efforts that must be heard and seen to have the hopes of the families like the Eduardo and Lola Lopez family realized. U.S. immigration policy won’t change until the Joe and Sally Christians of our nation raise their voices on behalf of the millions of undocumented immigrants residing in our country whose lives remain suspended in a state of Hispanimation. We have the keys to release the oppressed from Hispurgatory. Yet, we must rise from the posture of complacency to free God’s children from their cells.

We need a new posture within the Christian community in the U.S. Our future depends upon it, as one author says: “The future depends on God and on His people who will hear Him, believe Him, and obey Him.”[ix]

The purpose of this article is to expose the disease of Christianimation that has infected the Christian community in the U.S. Our advocacy on behalf of, and service to, the poor and needy within our respective communities represents the litmus test for our obedience to the cause of Christ. It is an important ingredient in our inoculation for this disease.

Furthermore, I have attempted to clarify the voices that populate the dialogue of the U.S. immigration policy debate. Do these voices sound like the voice of Jesus Christ? I think not. We are the one’s who are responsible for ridding this country of what one author has characterized as “man’s inhumanity to man.”[x] It is up to us to expunge the contradiction that Christianimation in the U.S. shouts to the world, and solidify the reputation of our faith and our country as “the land of the free, the home of the brave, with liberty and justice for all.

I conclude with the words of former President Theodore Roosevelt:

“Until we put honor and duty first, and are willing to risk something in order to achieve righteousness both for ourselves and for others, we shall accomplish nothing; and we shall earn and deserve the contempt of the strong nations of mankind.”[xi]

The Eduardo and Lola Lopez family are deeply grateful to you. Speak up. Get involved. They can’t. Become a Christian who is ‘in recovery’ from Christianimation.

KABOOM! He’s counting on you. The Good News is that the Christian life is not about just changing, but changing for the better. Progress begins with Him and includes you.

Isn’t it about time you re-dedicated your life to this truth?

NOTES:

[iii] Montiel, Lisa – Nathan, Richard – Wright, David An Update on Urban Hardship, August 2004 (c) 2004 by The Nelson A. Rockefeller Institute of Government, State University of New York p. 4 www.rockinst.org

[xi] Allies to Punish Turks Who Murder, New York Times, May 24 1915, p. 1

Count Me In

bill — Sat, 01 Nov 2008 21:21:36 +0000

Poppycock

What if you couldn’t count? You probably wouldn’t have any use for the words you take for granted like countless, counter, countdown, Count Dracula, or catchy little nursery rhymes your parents taught you as a child. Yet God created us to count. Each of us is created to count for something. He will also call us to account for this. As the Bible says, “Nothing in all creation is hidden from God’s sight. Everything is uncovered and laid bare before the eyes of Him to whom we must give account.” You can count on it.

When it comes to the statistics that populate the U.S. immigration policy reform debate, I’m absolutely certain we’ve forgotten how to count. I am so convinced of this, I’ve created an experiment for you to complete to help you understand.

Have you ever attempted to count the number of pops you hear as a bag of popcorn bakes in your microwave? (Of course you haven’t! I’m one of the very few human beings silly enough to do this from the first pop to the last). Try it. Then, open the bag and count each of the fully formed morsels of popcorn that are ready to eat. How does that sum compare to the number you counted by listening to the popping? My guess is there are many more morsels of popcorn formed in the bag than your ears were capable of counting. What do you care? You’re going to devour the whole bag mindlessly watching the television anyway.

What if I told you to pop a second bag of popcorn? Same brand, same size bag. This time, the number of pops you count, actually add up to something meaningful. You are only allowed to eat the number of individual popcorn that you actually recognize and count aloud whilst popping. My ability to count more pops unquestionably goes up on this second try. Yours will to. Why? Because we had a vested interest in the outcome (satisfying our hunger).

I find it fascinating that the results of counting have very little to do with what’s actually being counted versus the importance of what the motives of the counter are. Well, I guess it’s all poppycock anyway. Or is it?

Dreaming About Reality?

I called Senator Orrin Hatch’s Washington D.C. office last week inquiring about when the Senator will introduce the Dream Act again. I got into a discussion with the Senator’s aide who answered the phone about the sixty-five thousand students figure that is consistently used when describing the number of resident, undocumented students who graduate from U.S. high schools each year. This is the number the Dream Act is supposed to positively impact every year. I researched this “65,000″ number and find that it goes back to the 2000 census. However, from 2000 to present, the enrollment of immigrant students in the U.S. public school system has been the primary source of student enrollment. This influx of enrollment has dramatically exceeded the enrollment projections for the period by the vast majority of urban school districts.

I asked him where this number came from. He said, “It’s a well-documented figure that is a statistical extrapolation from the 2000 census of U.S. residents.” We discussed the merits of having a reliable versus a popular figure. He agreed that the figure used must be one that is accurate. He added that “the present figure of 65,000 was likely popular because it has integrity.” I told him I begged to differ as I live in Los Angeles and had been taught otherwise by the ongoing Michael Jackson trial ( Popular/well-known does not necessarily possess the attribute of integrity ).

I pointed out that it might be time to “check the math” because I was aware of some deficiencies in the current statistics that might make that sixty-five thousand figure a heck of a lot higher and vastly more reliable. He asked me for specifics. I told him that PEW Hispanic Research suggested the number of illegal immigrants in the U.S. was now (March 2005) “approximately eleven million.” The Center for Immigration Studies (CIS) has numbers all over the place (depending upon what policy position they are endorsing today) that range from nine to eleven million. FAIR ( Federation for American Immigration Reform ) agrees with CIS ( It’s fascinating how both these organizations espouse remarkably similar public policy positions too). The Urban Institute, Demography and the International Organization for Migration are all in the same guesstimate neighborhood (It’s nice to have company if you’re wrong).

Then, along comes an investment-banking firm, Bear-Stearns, that throws the whole country club into a tizzy… “this figure may be as high as 20 million people.” “Wow!” exclaimed the Senator’s aide. “I’ll have to get back to you on that one.” We politely ended our call and went about our lives.

Why is immigration reform mired in the muck of this murky math? Perhaps the following quote from the Bear Stearns report can help clear things up: “Like corrupt accounting practices or poor national security information, the United States is struggling with its immigration policies because of false assumptions and unreliable data.” Yep, what counts is not being properly accounted for. Let me explain.

Oh, the aide from Senator Hatch’s office? He hasn’t called back yet. Maybe I’m just dreaming about the reality that I will get a return call from this guy.

Arbithmetic

We typically don’t have any problem counting money. Yet, when the equation involves people, that’s when the math gets murky. Unfortunately, we have developed a tendency to forget how to count people accurately when it comes to socio-political issues. It really boils down to counterfeit counting or, counting only the folks that somebody defines as worth counting, the ones that truly matter. The figures we throw around depend upon the position we are attempting to support. This is what I refer to as arbitrary arithmetic or arbithmetic: the rules for counting change depending upon the reason underlying your count. Whether people count or not is dependent upon some pre-defined subjective definition that somebody makes up.

We have arrived at a critical juncture in our world that demands that we revisit the madness of our arbithmetic, as characterized by the following author: “The first step is to measure whatever can be easily counted. This is OK as far as it goes. The second step is to disregard that which can’t be easily measured or to give it an arbitrary quantitative value. This is artificial and misleading. The third step is to presume that which can’t be measured easily really isn’t important. This is blindness. The fourth step is to say that which can’t be easily measured really doesn’t exist. This is suicide.”

Perhaps it’s time to heed the words of the psalmist when he wrote, “Blessed is the man whose sin the LORD does not count against him and in whose spirit is no deceit.” It’s time to re-examine the deceit we’ve come to accept within our math from a moral and spiritual standpoint.

Migraine Math

Our unwillingness to be accountable to God by counting, being counted upon, taking action when it counts and counting correctly has contributed to untold suffering worldwide during the twentieth century. The Ottomans exterminated more than a million Armenians during WW I. The Germans killed six million Jews and approximately five million other folks who crossed their path. The atrocities in Cambodia, Rwanda, the Kurdish territory of Iraq, and Bosnia all add to the 20th century total. Unfortunately, this list continues to grow today with day after day additions of casualties from Somalia, Iraq, the Congo, El Salvador etc. Yet, as one-author notes, “History has shown that the suffering of victims has rarely been sufficient to get the United States to intervene.”

Contemplating atrocities of this scale gives me a raging headache. I become nauseated and sick to my stomach. I am overwhelmed with the sense that I am experiencing a migraine of the soul. Tears stream down my face. My being cries aloud to God. It’s the onset of an episode of migraine math.

Wrestling with these moments, I have come to realize that my mind has limits. I am distinctly incapable of grasping the magnitude and meaning of certain events in life. I am also quite confident that God has a reaction very similar to my own. Although I’m convinced that He can comprehend what I cannot, I’m even more certain that the heart of God is broken over our unwillingness to count as He created us to. I continue to hear the voice of Christ among us today, looking around Himself, shouting at us, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?”

It’s time to repent from our counterproductive ways.

The Compassion Calculation

Counting can be considered, cold, cruel and calculated. When we immerse ourselves in this routine activity, we can become desensitized to the essential compassion required of the character of one who claims the name of Christ as Lord and Savior. As one author points out, “At the end of the twentieth century, many millions of refuges and displaced persons are victims of “compassion fatigue.” Yes, we human beings have a history replete with centuries of evidence documenting our tiring about the care of the less fortunate. Yes, we continue to suffer from this insidious malady today.

One need not look beyond the borders of the United States to count millions of refugees and displaced persons. The present debate about U.S. immigration policy reform is the domestic human rights opportunity of the 21st century in the United States. However, this debate is not about the components of some sort of high-minded, sterile public policy. It is about people. It is as much about the soul of the undocumented immigrant residing in the U.S. as it is about the soul of the Christian citizen in whose neighborhood the undocumented immigrant is your neighbor. It is about the soul of this nation. It is the opportunity to be startled from the numbness of compassion fatigue, rise and “As Christians, by the grace of God, let us act upon what we say we believe.”

Counting the Cost

Spurred on by the relentless pursuit of prosperity and the ruthless defense of what we already have in the name of economic progress, we have become comfortable with diminishing the sacred value of each child of God to an economic cost. Faces, names and souls have been replaced with dollar signs denoting their perceived contribution to, or detraction from the burgeoning global economy.

It’s at this juncture that we must face the fact that we have marginalized Christ in our world. We have erected idols commissioned with prayers for His blessing of abundance. The shadows from these idols obscure our view of the poor, the needy, the displaced, the undocumented immigrant and the refugee. In our nations economic calculations, these people, God’s children, have become costs, economic burdens without faces or voices. Their needs continue to be diminished, overlooked and devalued in state and congressional policy deliberations, as well as in the individual and collective hearts of those who claim to be Disciples of Christ.

When we define people as costs that require containment and/or elimination, we elevate the pedestals that proudly support the idols of efficiency, self-determination, self-righteousness and patriotic fervor. We add a backdrop adorned with subtly subdued, fear-laden images and a swatch of scarcity designed to remind us that we might risk losing what we have if we don’t go along with the proposed formula for our future. Yes, this is the calculation we have arrived at for becoming the greatest nation on the face of this planet.

I believe this nation has the opportunity to become greater than the sum of all this. We must embrace a new math, a moral math, a Christian math.

Net Worth

Total assets minus total liabilities equals net worth. Is being against the fundamental capital outlays required to address the burgeoning divide between the haves and the poor, the needy, the marginalized, the displaced and the undocumented immigrant actually something that detracts from the net worth of this nation? Is it possible that, “In the process of being against something worth being against, one often becomes for something not worth being for.” When world opinion is at an all-time low toward the United States, is it time to examine whether or not we have become for something not worth being for.

When a national obsession on GNP inevitably leads to hollow, belated political programs entitled “NCLB” (No Child Left Behind), perhaps it is time to examine the math we are feeding into the calculator. It’s time to stop the blame game. There’s nothing wrong with the calculator. It’s operator error that must be confronted. Where do we turn when our collective conscience is stirred with questions about the net worth of this nation’s soul? Jesus has a formula. The liabilities we have been attempting to reduce, marginalize or eliminate must be revalued as His greatest assets. For God, math is always counterintuitive to the mind of man.

Summary

“We will stand before God one day and give an account for our lives. And this generation of Christians is responsible for this generation of non-Christians. God will ask, ‘Did you do all that you could? Did you match the intensity and fervor I brought to the cross?’ People must be brought to the point of understanding that it would be a tragedy if change didn’t happen. They must not simply embrace change, but cry out for it”. This is why the math matters.

Count me in. I am re-evaluating what really counts in life. The consequences will be eternal. Will you join me? Will you join Him? He is why the math matters. Can He count on you to draw near to Him and learn the only equation that has ever produced the results of righteousness this world, this nation, your community and you so desperately require.

Draw near to Christ. He’s counting on you.

Bibliography & Notes

1 Hebrews 4:13 – NIV

2 www.bearstearns.com/bscportal/pdfs/underground.pdf.

4 Psalm 32:2 – NIV

6 Mark 15:34 – NIV

9 Campolo, Tony and McLaren, Brian Adventures in Missing the Point – How the Culture Controlled Church Neutered the Gospel, Emergent YS Books - Zondervan Publishers, Inc. Grand Rapids, MI., Copyright © 2003 by Youth Specialties p. 242.

The Little Ones

bill — Sat, 01 Nov 2008 03:59:27 +0000

Little One

Mommy and Daddy had a fight today.
It was really loud – in a most unusual way.
I heard them very clearly,
Every word they had to say.

My little brother came running in,
Tears of fear ran down his left cheek.
He jumped up on my lap,
Startled, afraid, innocent and meek.

“We can’t make ends meet!”
We heard daddy yell.
“I can’t live like this!” he shouted.
“This economy’s gone to hell!”

We could hear mommy,
Sobbing in depression,
“What are we going to do?
To survive this recession.”

We peeked out my bedroom door,
Daddy hugged Mommy tight.
He ran his hand through her hair,
Comforting her plight.

Dad just got laid off,
Mom works just part time.
The best parents in the world.
This recession – it’s a crime.

“Our savings are all gone,
I wish we could borrow.
All our credit lines are maxed.”
He shared with mom in sorrow.

“The equity in the house;
It’s gone or going south.
“We’re going to lose our home,”
He raised his hand, covering his mouth.”

“Bailing out Wall Street!
Billions for the largest banks.
Rescuing sub-prime borrowers.
Where’s the help for families in our ranks?”

My mom and dad used to be happy,
The joy was delirious.
We had so much fun together,
Now it’s way too serious.

When your house is worth -
less than what you owe.
Why should mom & dad keep paying?
Why don’t we just pack up and go?

Dad:”We can’t even sell,
With all the homes on the market.”
Families in mainstream America,
We’re the bulls eye in the target.”

Mom: “Should we sell the house,
We’ll get a 1099.
We’ll owe the IRS —
This law’s outlived it’s time.”

Dad: “Friends and relatives are hurting.
What’s a family to do?
Does Congress understand our predicament?
Will they come to our rescue?”

Mom: “With our health insurance gone,
We cannot get sick.
Don’t spend any money whatsoever,
Until this economy begins to click.”

Mom burst out in tears,
My little brother began to cry.
As I reached out to comfort him,
I caught my daddy’s eye.

Mom and dad surrounded us,
We hugged on my bedroom floor.
“Please help our family —
We can’t take this anymore!”

Walking Home From School Today

bill — Sat, 01 Nov 2008 03:57:04 +0000

Walking Home From School

I was walking home from school today,
When something caught my eye.
“For Sale” signs are everywhere.
I began to wonder why.

Maybe folks don’t like it here.
Perhaps some people just need a change.
It’s unusually quiet now.
Gosh – this is really strange.

Jenny’s dad was just laid off,
Her mom works just part time.
Jenny overheard her parents say,
“We’re down to our last dime.”

My friend Junior, he has asthma.
Sometimes he struggles to get air.
His parents can’t afford his medicine,
They have no healthcare.

I am passing Mr. Jacobsen’s,
“This economy really blows!”
He remarked to Mr. Johnson.
“A real recession I suppose.”

Mr. Johnson walked toward the fence,
As he shut off his hose.
“My banker said this morning,
The credit markets froze.”

Katie’s mom was at the mailbox,
As I approached I could hear her sob.
What’s the matter Mrs. Brown, I asked.
“I just lost my job!”

Miss Koski chatted with Mrs. Fern,
She spoke softly, almost paternal.
“I’ve never seen it quite like this,”
As she waved her Wall Street Journal.

As I turned right on Elm and crossed the street.
A man emerged looking quite distressed.
A truck was towing away his car,
His bank had repossessed.

He wandered out into the street,
He brandished one middle finger high.
As he watched his car go down the road,
Behind the tow truck guy.

As he turned I recognized his face,
He wasn’t angry, he was awfully sad.
I began to run toward him.
To comfort my own dad.

He put his arm around me,
As we walked toward our front door.
“What’s the matter dad?” I asked.
“Can we go to the store?”

Mom was seated in the living room,
Her face – a shade of red.
She held a tissue in her hand,
Soaked with tears of dread.

My dog Barney lay in the corner,
Head on paws, he didn’t move a muscle.
He always jumps up to greet me,
Engaging in a joyful bustle.

Mommy rose and smiled at me,
Tears twinkled in here eyes.
When Daddy joined our family hug,
I began to realize.

Somehow, life has changed,
In these unsettling economic times.
I express my own observations,
Writing these little rhymes.

We didn’t go to the store tonight,
Dad said, “Let me explain something honey -
Our family is really hurting.
We’re terribly short on money.”

I always enjoyed shopping with my dad.
For me, a source of joy and thrills.
We can’t do that anymore.
What we have must pay the bills.

I learned something walking home today,
A lesson they don’t teach in school.
Republicans or Democrats -
Everyone can use this tool.

In a world full of viewpoints,
Regarding who, what, when and whether.
My family’s no exception -
We’re all in this together.

Immillusion

bill — Sun, 26 Oct 2008 08:11:28 +0000

Peering behind us through the fog,
To the past, from present day.
I wonder what our forefather’s would think.
I Ponder what they might say.

Their incredible design,
A melting pot we would be.
Oppressed in other lands,
“In the U.S.A. you ‘ll be free!”

In just over two hundred years,
My oh my how things have changed!
The wisdom of simplicity becomes complex,
Hearts hardened and rearranged.

Wars, partisan politics, and fear
We’ve become adept, wielding the sword.
The wealthiest nation on the planet,
We’ve idolized the necessity to hoard.

What are we attempting to keep?
Our motives seem rather odd.
Hope cannot be quarantined.
Giving freely is the essence of our God.

Fences, raids and deportation
“Keep them out! Take them away!”
The heart of America has spoken!
Evidencing hardness, and decay.

The songs of history seem to change -
Echoing the soul of our nation.
Perhaps it’s time to change our tune -
Sing a new harmony about U.S. immigration.

This new tune will require unlearning,
Poor attitudes we have sung in the past.
Our concert performances can be revamped -
Orchestrated with love; destined to last.

Lift your voice today my friends,
Belt out love from your heart.
A love for the other,
Those filled with hope for a new start.

It’s time to sing a new tune America -
A harmony that moves beyond all the confusion.
We can and must sing a new song,
Or remain mired in immillusion.