Prodigal Prophet

If you can rebut any of this, please do. That’s why I posted it.

Use facts, though.

Wednesday 12 October 2011 

by: Robert Reich, Robert Reich’s Blog | News Analysis

The President’s Jobs Bill doesn’t have a chance in Congress — and the Occupiers on Wall Street and elsewhere can’t become a national movement for a more equitable society – unless more Americans know the truth about the economy. 

1. Tax cuts for the rich trickle down to everyone else. Baloney. Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush both sliced taxes on the rich and what happened? Most Americans’ wages (measured by the real median wage) began flattening under Reagan and have dropped since George W. Bush. Trickle-down economics is a cruel joke.

2. Higher taxes on the rich would hurt the economy and slow job growth. False. From the end of World War II until 1981, the richest Americans faced a top marginal tax rate of 70 percent or above. Under Dwight Eisenhower it was 91 percent. Even after all deductions and credits, the top taxes on the very rich were far higher than they’ve been since. Yet the economy grew faster during those years than it has since. (Don’t believe small businesses would be hurt by a higher marginal tax; fewer than 2 percent of small business owners are in the highest tax bracket.) 

3. Shrinking government generates more jobs. Wrong again. It means fewer government workers – everyone from teachers, fire fighters, police officers, and social workers at the state and local levels to safety inspectors and military personnel at the federal. And fewer government contractors, who would employ fewer private-sector workers. According to Moody’s economist Mark Zandi (a campaign advisor to John McCain), the $61 billion in spending cuts proposed by the House GOP will cost the economy 700,000 jobs this year and next.

4. Cutting the budget deficit now is more important than boosting the economy. Untrue. With so many Americans out of work, budget cuts now will shrink the economy. They’ll increase unemployment and reduce tax revenues. That will worsen the ratio of the debt to the total economy. The first priority must be getting jobs and growth back by boosting the economy. Only then, when jobs and growth are returning vigorously, should we turn to cutting the deficit.

5. Medicare and Medicaid are the major drivers of budget deficits. Wrong. Medicare and Medicaid spending is rising quickly, to be sure. But that’s because the nation’s health-care costs are rising so fast. One of the best ways of slowing these costs is to use Medicare and Medicaid’s bargaining power over drug companies and hospitals to reduce costs, and to move from a fee-for-service system to a fee-for-healthy outcomes system. And since Medicare has far lower administrative costs than private health insurers, we should make Medicare available to everyone.

6. Social Security is a Ponzi scheme. Don’t believe it. Social Security is solvent for the next 26 years. It could be solvent for the next century if we raised the ceiling on income subject to the Social Security payroll tax. That ceiling is now $106,800. 

7. It’s unfair that lower-income Americans don’t pay income tax. Wrong. There’s nothing unfair about it. Lower-income Americans pay out a larger share of their paychecks in payroll taxes, sales taxes, user fees, and tolls than everyone else.

Demagogues through history have known that big lies, repeated often enough, start being believed — unless they’re rebutted. These seven economic whoppers are just plain wrong. Make sure you know the truth – and spread it on.

I read an article, a homily of sorts, I suppose, the link to which was posted on Facebook by my friend, Lori Lowe. The article, written by a reverend, was about her reactions to the “spiritual-not-religious” crowd. Click here to read it for yourself.

I understand and share some of the author’s opinions. I understand and share also the opinions of those she described–the ones who, on Sunday, attend the “Church of the Inner Springs.” For 30+ years, I went to that church, religiously. (That’s a euphemism for staying in bed, by the way.)

I read a fair sampling of the comments in response to the article, too, which ranged from thank-yous to challenges, from applause to defensiveness, and then did what Lori suggested in her post. Chewed on it.

I found it interesting that I’m in the throes of writing a book, and hopefully a series of workshops, about the connections I see between the results of major psychological experiments of the last century and what Jesus and others reportedly said 20 centuries ago. My motivation is similar, I think, to the author of the article/sermon, Lillian Daniel—born of a frustration that the Christian church as a whole seems to be losing ground in terms of membership and for no good reason. In my opinion, Jesus’ message is as vibrant and relevant as it has ever been. It’s ours that is flawed.

My approach is different, though, in that I see something else at the core, not only of the attrition in the church, but in the words of Lillian Daniel–the reflexive response to perceived criticism or attack into positions of “we” vs. “them.” And the equally divisive automatic suggestion of superiority of “we” over “them.” Doesn’t matter which “we” you perceive yourself as being part of.

The tragedy to me is that I perceive the message of Jesus to be, first and foremost, one of unity and the equality of every soul in the eyes of God, the differences among us (especially in belief) a reason for celebration, not rancor.

I, like everyone else, need to be a part of a “we,” and I long for that “we” to exist in the absence of a “them.” Maybe it comes from being a little girl who stood on the fringe of every group, so different in some ways that the ways I was similar weren’t so obvious.

I write in an earlier blog about the fall of 1991, when I went to a World Series game at Atlanta-Fulton County Stadium and literally “drank in” the sound of 50,000 people singing the “tomahawk chant” in unison. I stopped singing for a moment and the goose bumps shot up my arm. Don’t get me wrong, here. I love baseball, especially the Braves, and I enjoy immensely being part of the Braves-loving “we,” but what I felt had nothing to do with the Braves or baseball. It had to do with the fact that 50,000 people, each unique in a variety of ways, each members of different “we” groups, for one moment in time merged into one voice. The power of that voice was incredible, reverberating out of the stadium and beyond.

I realized that night that the feeling I experienced was the one I had expected and sought in the church, thought I’d found, but really hadn’t, as a child, a teenager, a young adult. I would leave the church, searching elsewhere for that sense of belonging I so craved. Even so, it would be another 17 years, in the wake of grief, before I would, by choice, trade the “church of the inner springs” for the one I now drag myself out of bed to attend almost every week.

Though I am no longer a child, teenager or young adult, I still go in search of that feeling, the sense of a place where despite my individual successes and failures, joy and despair, I am equal to those around me. And most importantly, equally loved. As before, there is no shortage of arguments and misunderstandings, no scarcity of criticism–no lack of “I like this rector better than that one, that altar dressing isn’t as pretty as the last one, that sermon was better than this one, she’s a better teacher than he is.”

Though I’m Episcopalian now, I share some of the beliefs, but not others. I share some of the beliefs of the UCC Church (where Lillian Daniel is a pastor), but not others. I even share some of the beliefs of the Baptist church, from which I originally came. Obviously, there are some there I don’t share.

None of that matters when I am kneeling at the altar, with one person to my right and one to my left, when, like them, I extend my hands to receive the symbolic bread and wine of life offered to me by yet another human. I am reminded, instead, of a cool night in 1991. Sometimes the person to my left is a person of color, sometimes white like me. Sometimes the person to my right is Jamaican-born, other times Canadian, and sometimes even a Yankee! Sometimes that person is female, sometimes male. Sometimes a judge, sometimes even a math teacher. Sometimes he’s conservative, sometimes liberal. Sometimes, she’s physically or mentally challenged in some way. Some will spend the next week deciding whether to buy a new car or house. Others will spend the next week wondering where their next meal will come from.

For a moment in time, there is only one “we.”

And my hope survives.

I read somewhere that when “Good Night and Good Luck,” George Clooney’s film about Edward R. Murrow, was screened in LA, some of the audience wrote in review that they thought the actor portraying Senator Joseph McCarthy “over-acted.” Those remarks were quite interesting, in that Clooney didn’t cast McCarthy’s part. Instead, he had used actual footage of the senator, whose rampage against fellow citizens would be one of our darkest hours as a nation.

In an article published in 1952 in the Las Vegas Sun, a staff journalist wrote of his behavior at a party function in Nevada: “…McCarthy in his typical wild swinging fashion, with no regard for the facts but with hold on his audience that is frightening called [Hank] Greenspun ‘an ex-convict’ and ‘an admitted Communist.’” (Greenspun was the Sun’s publisher who had been convicted of smuggling arms to the Israelis.) It had been two years since the start of McCarthy’s “witchhunt,” and it would be two more years before he would be revealed as the severely alcoholic demagogue he was—a mentally deranged man who preyed on the fears of the populace and ruined, without cause, the reputations and lives of hundreds, if not thousands of innocent Americans.

It would not be a Congressman or a Senator who would deliver the knock-out blow to McCarthy’s “hold.” It would be his over-reach, his accusations with respect to the Army on live television, a new and powerful communications medium that had, ironically, fueled his rise—a mistaken judgment of his own power. (He had gone after the U.S. Army at a time when the President was the very popular general who only a decade before had been one of the masterminds who’d led the Allies and turned the tides of the Second World War.) And it would be the Army’s chief attorney at the time, Joseph Welch, whose sound-bite would be remembered: “Until this moment, Senator, I think I never really gauged your cruelty or your recklessness…let us not assassinate this lad further, senator. You have done enough. Have you no sense of decency, sir, at long last?” (Click here to see the actual footage.)

Applause erupted from the chamber when the attorney concluded his remarks, and when the hearings were over, McCarthy would be condemned by his peers for abuse of power, for “conduct contrary to senatorial traditions.” Less than three years later, he would be dead, succumbing to peripheral nephritis secondary to cirrhosis.

McCarthy wasn’t the first, by any means, to use these tactics. Nor would he be the last. It can be argued that the demagoguery of the high priest and those in religious power killed Jesus of Nazareth by playing on the fear of their constituents. Alexis de Tocqueville, a Frenchman and political scientist, had referred to this particular brand of American political manipulation a century before, when he wrote, “In America, the majority raises formidable barriers around the liberty of opinion; within these barriers an author may write what he pleases, but woe to him if he goes beyond them.” That’s okay, as long as the majority opinion is the “right” one (translation: the one my party espouses). But woe to us when it turns out not to be.

De Tocqueville wrote a lot more as well. For instance, “America is great because she is good. If America ceases to be good, she will cease to be great,” and the perhaps chillingly prescient statement, “The American Republic will endure until the day Congress discovers that it can bribe the public with the public’s money.” Those two quotes placed side-by-side give me pause.

I was born the year McCarthy died. And though the decades of my childhood and adolescence were quite turbulent as my peers will agree, I still believed in the goodness of America, in the gentleness and kindness of the American people individually and as a whole. I believe in Superman, too—Superman who came from the heartland of America and unceasingly fought “the never-ending battle for truth, justice and the American way.”

But the “American way” that I’ve seen of late has no regard for truth or justice. We have become McCarthy-esque, reckless in our accusations, wild swinging with no regard for the facts and precious little concern with justice for those harmed by cruel words and thoughtless decisions made in service of empty political rhetoric. And we have long since been bribed by Congress with our own money, the result of which we recently saw in action. To borrow a phrase from that journalist 59 years ago, “the holds [of some] on [their] audiences…is frightening.”

I’m still hopeful, though, in spite of myself—ironically because of yet another de Tocqueville quote. My adolescent pride at being an American survived because of it. The gist of it is that, though it has admittedly sometimes taken a while, in the end, Americans have done the right thing. “The greatness of America lies not in being more enlightened than any other nation, but rather in her ability to repair her faults.”

Let it be so again.

The following is an extended response to a comment thread on Facebook, reproduced below:

ORIGINAL POST BY A FRIEND: “If the US Government was a family, they would be making $58,000 a year, they spend $75,000 a year, & are $327,000 in credit card debt. They are currently proposing BIG spending cuts to reduce their spending to $72,000 a year. These are the actual proportions of the federal budget & debt, reduced to a level that we can understand.” – Dave Ramsey, professional financial advisor and author.

 MY ORIGINAL COMMENT: Unfortunately, however, the government isn’t a family. I like Dave and his programs but the analogy doesn’t fly. If the government were a family, it would also change parents at least once a decade, based on the children’s judgment.

RESPONSE FROM JOHN (a fictitious name): Vally, it is still a good analogy. An analogy only has to have one point of contact. If I say, boy that guy runs like a cheetah, you know that the only point of comparison is speed. Just because the guy is not furry and does not walk on all fours, the analogy is not invalid. No analogy holds up if you move it beyond the intended point(s)of comparison.

MY RESPONSE TO JOHN:

You’re right, John, of course, about the fine point of analogies. I apologize for taking the discussion off-road into the tangents, and will say what I really wanted to say instead.

If Dave had left it at the end of the first sentence, where the analogy, in and of itself, ended and the applied judgment begins (the part about the BIG reduction in spending), I would be perfectly happy with it. Well…not happy, exactly…but at least satisfied with the comparison.

So let’s go back before the opinion and expand on the analogy in its current context.

Let’s agree that Dave’s scenario, for purposes of discussion, is factual in basis. Let’s talk about the actual composition of the family instead of pretending we’re not part of it. (The “US Government” does not exist separate from us—in effect, we elect parents for our 300 million member “family” and give them a checkbook, and we are bound by the decisions they make for the period of time we allow them to be there.) And for the ease of numbering, agree that Dave’s family has 100 members.

One addition to the scenario, however. In this family, the salary was once $75,000, but has recently been reduced to $58,000—10 of the family members are out of work, and not currently able to contribute. Though one, maybe two got jobs making less than they were before, they were quickly replaced by two other siblings. While they were losing their jobs, another ten actually made more than they did before.

The debt, however, didn’t go down. As Mary, the original poster of the quote, remarked later, it is one of the “sins of the fathers.” Doesn’t matter a whit who’s responsible (even though, technically, we all are)—it’s still there to deal with. It’s money already spent, my friends.

It isn’t that I disagree at all with what I think Dave was saying. Because I haven’t seen the context in which he said it, I assume that he was frustrated with the fact that the amount of spending reduction is barely a drop in the bucket toward any real change. But I seem to remember that Dave gained his great wisdom after going bankrupt himself, which means whatever debt he used to have “went away” with no negative consequence to anyone except those to whom he owed the debts, his credit rating and those who depended on him. He’s obviously done quite well. Nothing quite like a reformed smoker when it comes to smokers, is there?

My discomfort comes from the fact I am once again reminded of the old story about the elephant and the blind men. I’ve mentioned it before, but if you’re unfamiliar with the story, the essence is that four blind men are introduced to an elephant and asked to describe it. One, of course, talks about the trunk, another the tail, another the body. You get the picture. At the end of one version of the story:

O how they cling and wrangle, some who claim
For preacher and monk the honored name!
For, quarreling, each to his view they cling.
Such folk see only one side of a thing.

We seem to be unable to take off our blindfolds and look at the whole animal for what it is. I’m personally tired, as many seem to be, of the “re-election-focused” blame game. We’re making decisions about “trunks” with no regard for the effect of our decisions on the “tail.”

A case in point: Here in Georgia, out of fear and prejudice and an unwillingness to put partisan bickering aside and find a solution to how to keep financially-contributing immigrants here legally, we passed an immigration law. At the time, Tom Smith, a finance professor at Emory University, said Georgia businesses were bracing for the impact and watching Arizona, since Arizona’s law cost the state as much as $250 million in convention business. “People are looking at the history in Arizona and thinking, ‘Could a law in Georgia have the same impact?’ ” he said, according to one article. “We’re waiting to see whether that will happen in Georgia now.” Never mind the other question—since 70 million baby-boomers are headed for retirement (well, we were until our retirement packages and stock portfolios evaporated), of how our 30 million children were going to replace twice their normal tax revenues. Ten years ago, when the question was posed, the best answer they came up with had to do with immigrants in the labor force, by the way.

Meanwhile, down in south Georgia where I am originally from, crops in the field lie rotting, un-gathered because already beleaguered farmers don’t have the wherewithal financially or physically to do the job. And matters will only get worse—you can’t sell crops, even at a discount, that you can’t gather, supply goes down, prices go up…and that $58,000 now doesn’t go even as far as it did before we started. But we didn’t think of that…and we’re not through with the fallout.

Nor will the powers that be who drove the legislation through likely admit their folly with due humility, admitting that maybe they pulled the trigger a bit early, and work with their other blind brothers and sisters to find a solution that provides the possibility of a win-win for the greatest number of people. Instead, on the basis of their description of the “tail,” the ONLY right description, they’ll explain how it was the fault of the legislature two terms ago, and act surprised when the elephant decides to sit down on all of our heads.

If we are, in fact, the strongest nation in the world…if we are, in fact, the nation that put a man on the moon in a decade’s time…if we are, in fact, a “family,” then we need to act like it, looking for ways to stimulate job creation so there will be more people to pay taxes, make good on the promises made in our names to take care of those who took and take care of us—like our parents, our teachers, our troops and veterans, our police and fire departments—and have the character to say when we’re wrong without trying to pin our bad decisions on our siblings.

I don’t care who’s to blame. Doesn’t matter a bit. Like the debt, none of this mess will change as a result of knowing who did it or why. Besides, the answer to that question is easy.

It’s us. We’re the “such folk” of the elephant story, all guilty of seeing only “one side of a thing,” the side that we touch, the side that affects us and ours. We don’t give a damn about those poor schmucks who didn’t do what we told them to until we wake up and figure out the poor schmucks are the ones looking back at us in the mirror.

Sorry, guys but that doesn’t sound like “family” to me. 

I was reading through reviews of a book I just converted into an ebook and one of them said, “It changed my life.” My mind wandered for a moment.

Is there a book on my shelf that I would say that about, that by virtue of reading it, had had that kind of impact on me? Life-changing? No book, of course, literally changes your life unless you’re the author of a new best-seller. If the words of another have impact on our lives at all other than providing information or entertainment, they either change our perspective or confirm our prejudices, more deeply entrenching our beliefs around a subject.

I thought about my absolute favorite, To Kill a Mockingbird.  Did it change my life, my perspective? Not really. It was one of those “Wow, somebody else understands how I feel” kind of books for me, a white girl in the troubled South of the 1960s as Nelle Lee had been in the 30s. A confirmation, in other words.

How about God is No Fool, the book of Christian meditations given to me as a Christmas present by my older sister when I was 12? It certainly influenced my views about spirituality during that just-about-to-move-into-the-teenage-years angst, enough that I sought out the author and asked for the rights to republish it 35 years later. But had it changed my life? No, it had simply provided affirmation of what I’d already begun to think and believe, given my then relatively short life.

Several other books passed through my mind—more recent ones. The Kingdom Within by John Sanford, The Active Life by Parker J. Palmer, virtually all of Fritz Buechner’s books. Nope—all confirmers.

I went back to work and banished the idea from my mind for the moment, but later that day, when I was taking a break, the image of another book came to me. At six years old, I had pulled it down from the shelf of a man who, in many ways, served as a surrogate father in my early days, and I had been surprised to find it there.

I’d always thought of Roy as a “hard” man, not the sort you necessarily wanted to crawl into the lap of. He’d risen to the top of a corporate ladder and fallen flat on his face after barely surviving a small plane crash. His voice was always stern, his words challenging, his face serious. As you might imagine, he had little patience for small talk—the events of his life turned most of my everyday complaints into minor annoyances. He never went to church during the time I knew him. Perhaps he never had. Yet the dust jacket was wrinkled and worn, so I knew it had been perused several times.

A precocious child and voracious reader, I devoured the book in a matter of days, planning to give it back as fast as possible. “Be sure to return it,” he’d barked as I left the small apartment in which he lived. And I did, but not before it changed my life.

The book was The Day Christ Died by Jim Bishop.

It wasn’t the part about Jesus’ life per se that would change my life. Born into a Southern conservative every-time-the-church-doors-were-open-we-were-there family, I was well-versed in that story by the time I was seven. Nor was it the historical information presented. Scholars today, 55 years after the book was first published, would argue with most of the conclusions of Jim Bishop’s research.

It was the other parts—a description of what would later come to be called Judaism and its practice, musing about what life was like in Jerusalem and surround in that period when Jesus walked on the earth, the sociological interplay of Roman culture and the “my god is better than your god” clashes—that got my attention, expanding the world view of a little girl who, for reasons that are hopefully obvious, had assumed without thinking that Jesus was a handsome 6’2” blue-eyed young Anglo-Saxon man.

I remember going to our 1959 World Book Encyclopedias and looking up the Middle East to get a glimpse of what he might have really looked like. Although I already knew about the Holocaust and World War II from family stories, there were only two Jewish families in our small town in south Georgia—owners, as one might expect, of the two department stores. I was friends with members of both families—a daughter in one and I were born just a couple of hours apart. I thought about our celebration of Christmas and was suddenly curious about what my “birthday buddy” did during what were then called the “Christmas holidays.” Until then, the word “Hanukkah” hadn’t even crossed my vocabulary’s doorstep.

From that day, I never again took the word of anyone else about what Jesus might have looked like, did, or said without considering the context of the world in which he lived and how what he looked like, did and said related to that world. I would never again blindly accept another’s religious or spiritual view as my own.

It only followed that the view from anyone else’s eyes would be affected by their experiences—experiences I might or might not have had, and that my perceptions about others, their motivations, their beliefs—even those closest to me— were at risk of being misperceptions unless I asked them and then listened carefully to what they told me. (That includes God, by the way.)

For a while after I read the book, the lonely child in me felt even more isolated than before. But as I grew up and older, I realized that beneath the different outer shells we wear, including the multi-colored, multi-shaped bodies we haul around, humans are humans, and we all have the same basic feelings,  responses, motivations, and needs for love and respect.

No one is greater than I am nor anyone else. No one is less, either. And nothing can elicit the fire of my anger faster than the arrogance of one who deems himself judge and jury of another’s behavior, value as a human being or his motivation without talking to him first.

We’ve all been victims of such judgment. I know I have. And imperfect as I am, I’m sure I have diminished others by judging them unfairly as well. Only one person in history, as far as I know, succeeded in defeating the judge in himself, though he was judged unfairly and executed as a result. I am nonplussed at how quickly we are “up in arms” over his mistreatment, yet rationalize the same behavior in his name.

That same fellow reportedly said something to the effect of “Don’t judge or you’ll be judged,” the mirror of something else he is recorded as having said. “Love others as you love yourself.”

What a novel idea. Do unto others what you would have them do unto you. Don’t do unto others what you don’t want them to do unto you. Don’t judge others unless it’s perfectly okay with you if they return the favor. It’s a pretty good starting place. Of course, as with Jesus, there’s no guarantee that others won’t judge you if you don’t judge them, but there’s an almost airtight guarantee that they will if you do.

When Roy died in 1972, his widow asked me if there was anything of Roy’s that I wanted and the book was the only thing I could think of. Its dust cover is more tattered now than it was in 1963, just as I am. Memory has transformed Roy’s sternness into a tired resignation, his impatience into a trait I happen to share, and his penchant for getting up every time life brought him to his knees came to represent a courageous act worth emulating.

It’s funny what time and a change in perspective will do. Sometimes it changes your life. It can change the world, too. It did once, after all.

It’s not an accident that a lot of what I write has to do with spirituality and healing from a different point of view. That’s true of my two books: Simon Says—Views from a Higher Perspective and Andrew’s Eyes. Click here to learn more about them.

There was always a chance that this grand experiment would fail. Our founding fathers knew it—we were entering uncharted territory, they thought. Never before had the masses been defined as equal, intentionally given the power to create their own reality.

They patterned the structure of their new government loosely after the Roman empire, and called on the Magna Carta and theories of more recent philosophers like John Locke. For the most part, they were Englishmen—some landowners given charters, some debtors escaping destitution with the hope of building new lives, some religious sorts persecuted because they didn’t believe the “right way.” The latter battle had been going on for centuries. So had the civil wars, all about the same things—who got to say, “My way or the highway” for a moment.

One branch of my family came to America from France, by way of England, to escape the oppression of three choices—swear loyalty to the belief system of those in power (Catholic vs. Protestant), become a slave in the hold of a ship, or be hung for doing neither. One son got out. His parents found the noose, apparently. Another branch, descended from a bookseller whose home and office in the doors of St. Paul’s Cathedral had been taken away from him because he’d been vocally supportive of the soon-to-be-beheaded Charles I, indentured his two sons to a man setting sail for Virginia. About the same time, up the coast a bit, new countrymen of his sons (among whom were members of yet another branch of my family), a group who’d set sail without a charter, running for their lives (again for religious reasons) would blame their failed crops and dying relatives and cattle, not on the harshness of life itself or the folly of their decision-making, but on witchcraft and the red-skinned humans they were surprised to encounter upon disembarking. (God, by the way, would be thanked for the demise of those red-skinned people instead of the smallpox (and muskets) brought by the Englishmen themselves.)

It would take only 150 years or so before this somewhat disjumbled group would take the war back across the sea against the mother country, another 90 after that before they were at each other’s throats. And now, here we sit 150 years after that.

Will we make it through another cycle of 90 years? As the world watches and waits, our grand experiment teeters once again at the edge of oblivion, the blame for our woes attributed to witches and warlocks of a different name—Republicans and Democrats. Burn them at the stake! Dunk them under water! He did it! No, she! (Cotton Mather would be proud. So, for that matter, would be Joseph McCarthy…)

Our founding fathers were wrong about one thing, I’m afraid. That notion about us creating our own realities started long before 1776. We did it in the proverbial Eden, and have never stopped. The only question is what reality exactly are we creating? Sounds to me like we’re just repeating ourselves.

“Where there is no property, there is no injustice.” –John Locke

“And knowing their thoughts, Jesus said to them, ‘Any kingdom divided against itself is laid waste and any city or house divided against itself will not stand.’” –Matthew 12:25 (Abraham Lincoln quoted this one, too.)

“United we stand, divided we fall.” –Patrick Henry

Are you a divider or one who seeks to unite? Our reality awaits its creation.

I’ve been confused for a while about why some of the people I know seem to be up in arms over the idea of “closing the loopholes” or increasing taxes for the “rich.” But today when I shared a link to an article posted by a friend of mine and she asked me to elaborate on what I said about it, it occurred to me that those who inhabit the Congress of the United States need a more forceful clarification as to why we elected them in the first place. Some seem to have gotten the wrong idea.

You see, it all started when Orrin Hatch said in a speech the other day that the “rich are paying too much in taxes” and that the “poor” needed to take some “responsibility” for lowering the deficit. He supported that statement by saying that “the top 1 percent of the so-called wealthy pay 38% of all income tax, the top 10 percent pay 70% of all income tax and the top 50 percent pay almost 98 percent of all income tax.”

I wanted to pull out a violin and serenade him until I looked at a couple more statistics, like the fact that the top 1 percent received between 21 and 23 percent of all US income in 2007 and the bottom 50% combined earned only 12.3%. Then I got mad.

Note the difference between the words “received” vs. “earned.” That’s where the subterfuge in Mr. Hatch’s argument lies.

I suspect if you looked at Bill Gates’ tax return, you wouldn’t find a W-2. Or if you did, his gross “wages” wouldn’t even compare to the other income “received.” Income that isn’t subject to the graduated income tax most of us struggle with on our 1040s every year.

That top 1% who “received” between 21 and 23 percent probably didn’t “work” for it. It was income, yes, but the tax rates applied come from a different place in the tax code. The part that deals with capital gains, for instance.

The capital gains tax, the death tax, the taxes we’ve battled over in years past apply for most of us fewer than 5 times in a lifetime, or at least it used to. The only time I heard the term “capital gains” growing up was with respect to the sale of a house, and what I assumed would always be true—that there would be some. Gains, I mean. We know how that turned out.

Taxes on capital gains are something like 12% if you’ve owned the asset (house or stock, for instance) for 18 months or more, 18% if you’d owned it for fewer than 18 months, considerably less than the 25-39% tax rates of the past on “earned” income, that money that comes in your paycheck once, twice, four times a month. And here’s the real rub…there’s no social security or Medicare tax unless it’s “earned.”

And the story gets worse. Even if you “earn” more than $107,000 per year, there’s no Social Security tax withheld from the excess. Been that way for a while—I benefited from the law 10 years ago. (By the way, the rank and file Senator like Orrin Hatch makes $165,000, not counting his other income. And on another note, if everyone paid that 6.2% of 100% of their income, no matter how that “in-come” came in, reckon how much that would reduce the deficit?)

Don’t get me wrong. I have no argument with Bill Gates, or the top 1% or even the 10%. If they learned how to play the corporate game, or have leverage to negotiate $17 million severance packages while their companies lay off thousands, or get paid to “manage” those hedge funds made of other people’s money, or were born into wealth…more power to them.

But I don’t feel sorry for them, Mr. Hatch, and the calculation of their “fair share” of responsibility for lowering the deficit is a matter for debate, irrespective of percentages, especially when their income is largely generated by the productivity of “poor” schmucks like me.

Well, it used to be. I have to admit that my weekly unemployment check doesn’t do even a bit for the top 10 percent’s investment portfolios.

But I pay taxes on it and when I find a job, I’ll be glad to pay more if that’s what it takes to solve the problem.

I’m doing my share, Mr. Hatch. Now I’d appreciate it if you would shut up and start doing yours.

A dear friend and I were talking on the phone and she said, “I guess you have to be older to come to terms with your limitations—to really appreciate your gifts and your weaknesses for what they are.” She was talking about the joy she feels about the volunteer role she performs at her church and the quiet sense of accomplishment she feels when she carries it out, knowing that by doing it, she makes things easier for some and the worship experience meaningful for others. It’s not something everyone likes to do, but it comes easy to her. The accolades she might have sought once aren’t an issue.

After we hung up, I thought of an essay I wrote a few years ago about why I thought kids in school don’t usually list history as their favorite subject. I wrote that I thought it was because we started teaching dates and events and giving multiple choice tests in social studies, when the essence of history is in the stories—who the people were, what the conditions were, what hardships they faced, what courage or cowardice they showed, what they achieved. I still think that’s true in some part, but I’ve come to the conclusion that to appreciate history you have to have lived long enough to have one and remember it.

In youth, we face outward. We are invincible, energetic, physically virile. We dare not think of ourselves as limited in any way. We push ourselves toward more and more achievement, pushing the envelope, holding our own within our sphere with respect to money and acquisitions. We don’t generally stop and think about where we are or where we’re going or what it means because, in the world of the young, he who hesitates is lost.

There’s nothing wrong with that. In the first part of our lives, the primary goal should be one of finding out just how far we can go, pushing to see where our limits are, identifying and celebrating our unique talents until we reach the peaks, the primes, the pinnacles of our lives.

The proverbial “mid-life crisis” arrives right on time—just when we start to notice that we can’t run quite as fast as we used to or the display of reading glasses suddenly attracts our attention or fitting into the same size clothes we wore at 25 is about all the limit-pushing we have energy for. Activity gives a nod to contemplation and we enter a period that theorist Erik Erikson called “integrity vs. despair,” that time of life when we evaluate our lives in retrospect and decide how we feel about it all.

If we find ourselves in “despair,” we mourn the things we meant to do and didn’t, and bitterness creeps in. But if we find ourselves in a state of “integrity,” once the mourning is done, we realize that the richness of our lives is not as much about the experiences we had, the battles and awards we won, or the mark we made.

Instead, it is in savoring those things that for now, only we and God know we did. And smiling, because we know that no matter how large or small, significant or insignificant in the eyes of the world, in the end, it was enough.

And by virtue of being exactly who we are, so were we.

I was stunned by the verdict, as many were, based on what I knew. But in fairness, I didn’t pay a whole lot of attention to the case until the last few days. I’m about sensational murder trials as I am about basketball games—I don’t watch them until the very end. Too much of an emotional roller coaster, and I’ve had my share of those lately.

But, as I’ve looked at what the jury members who’ve spoken have said about how they came to their decision, I’ve been more settled than stunned, more hopeful than nonplussed. In the end, the prosecution failed to demonstrate in a way that “removed all doubt” a connection between Casey and the crime scene.

I don’t know if she’s guilty of killing her daughter. I don’t know if she’s innocent, either. Not my call. But to those whose call it was, I am grateful. They restored my faith in our judicial system by demonstrating the restraint that enabled them to look at what was presented to them, and, irrespective of how they may have felt about Casey Anthony’s behavior, surmised was true, or what they believed about her based on intuitive feeling and judge her on the basis of the instructions they were given. We’re human after all, and sometimes we make mistakes. And I personally would prefer that those mistakes be in the direction of mercy. It’s a tough moral choice, I know, but for me, to err on the side that allows some who may be guilty to go free is the lesser of two evils. To convict an innocent soul, punishing him or her for crimes not committed is a much greater sin.

Today, I am more confident in my peers because of the jury in Casey Anthony’s case. I know too well from personal experience that circumstantial evidence is just that. I suspect we all do, in one way or another. What leaves me pensive, though, are the Christians who would have “put her under the jail,” convinced that she is guilty and that they are all-knowing. I’m pensive because that’s exactly what happened to Jesus, and yet they seem not to make that connection. Jesus was tried, convicted and crucified because the high priests of the time, threatened by his obvious influence over the people, presented circumstantial evidence that he intended to lead a mob and try to overthrow the Romans. And they succeeded in their aim.

We know what we believe happened after that, but we are smug in our self-righteousness that we wouldn’t have been a part of that crowd.

And yet, I wonder…

My oldest friend (in terms of time, not of age) and I have been discussing via email different issues with respect to our faith perspectives.

Today she wrote me, after spending time in Proverbs that God’s attention to detail was astounding, in that he came to earth in human form as an “XY” and not an “XX,” because, as she said, it “encompassed all of humanity.”

If we were able to leave it at that, explaining the “decision” by God to come in physical form as a male as a function of inclusion rather than exclusion, I would be perfectly fine with the idea. After all, in recent years, when my Episcopal parish was recruiting a new rector, I argued that very thing from a different direction. We had a longstanding female deacon (in the Episcopal church, deacons are ordained clergy), and I thought it would be in our best interest to hire a male rector—to achieve the balance, to give both the men and women in our congregation a same-gender pastor to whom to go with gender-specific spiritual concerns.

When all was said and done, however, the vestry hired a wonderful woman, and soon after, for entirely other reasons, our deacon resigned. Today, we have an equally wonderful male deacon, which re-established the balance I’d hoped for. XX and XY.

But we don’t leave it at that. Even as I speak, parishes have “pulled out” of the Anglican Communion or threatened to, over the fact that in 2006, the ECA elected a female presiding bishop, and in 2010, the way was opened for appointment of female bishops in the worldwide church. The Southern Baptist Convention continues to rail against female leadership in the “top” position in any church, quoting the heavily 1^st Century culture-biased suggestion that women should keep silence in the church or misquoting based on culture-biased translations.

One who once aspired to the ministry in that latter church, until as my spiritual director said, I “discovered I was a girl,” I continue to be saddened over being judged “insufficient” by virtue of my being an “XX,” regularly astounded by the inability of some to see the direct contradiction of their demands to the “neither male nor female, slave nor free, Jew nor Greek…” inclusion of membership in the body of believers. Nothing can separate us from the love of God, but we sure can be separated from the use of the gifts given to us by one and the same if the sperm that gets through just happens to have an “X” chromosome embedded in it instead of a “Y.”

I adored William P. Young’s The Shack for a number of reasons. But I mourned the fact that it stimulated such resistance from some. It reinforced the fact that though we have made great strides, we still have an awful long way to go before gender and race, both chromosomes carried in those sperms and eggs, become non-issues with respect to mental and emotional and spiritual capacity. It revealed to me that I won’t live to see that Promised Land. (If you haven’t read The Shack, I hope you will.)

To make God fit the mold of our perception of any demographic group is to diminish the power, the awesomeness, the inconceivability of the great I Am, chopping the source of life and breath and love into tiny bits we can digest. We are, indeed, blind people describing a never-ending elephant. Even our language fails us, forcing us into rigid adjectival boxes.

Whoopi Goldberg once said that she rejected the description of herself using the hyphenated moniker “African-American” because it implied that she was less than “wholly” American, instead of referring to a characteristic of her wonderful uniqueness. I reject the idea of a male-only God for the very same reason.

Sometimes, I need a daddy to run to, with big, strong arms to keep me safe, defending me from my “tormentors.” But sometimes, I need a soft bosom in which to lay my head, comfort for a skinned knee, an “XX” Higher Power who looks like me. Sometimes, I am  bold to say,  “Our Mother, who art in heaven…”

And when I do, my God comes running, just the same.

Here’s wishing you independence from a limited God.