The merit of charity is so great that I am happy to give to 100 beggars even if only one might actually be needy. Some people, however, act as if they are exempt from giving charity to 100 beggars in the event that one might be a fraud.

- Rabbi Chaim Halberstam, as quoted in Introduction to Judaisim: A Sourcebook

What is the price of personal dignity? Would you trade the security of never having to work again for the loss of respect of your family, friends, co-workers, and general public? Granted, the public’s memory is short, but still…

I’m pretty sure I’d keep (what’s left of) my personal dignity and wallow in the (rapidly vanishing) middle class.

This bank is like the world’s worst-behaved teenager, taking your car and running over kittens and fire hydrants on the way to Vegas for the weekend, maxing out your credit cards in the three days you spend at your aunt’s funeral. They’re out of control, yet they’ll never do time or go out of business, because the government remains creepily committed to their survival, like overindulgent parents who refuse to believe their 40-year-old live-at-home son could possibly be responsible for those dead hookers in the backyard.

The Rolling Stone article.

I work with and sit next to my co-worker, who is male, Caucasian, middle-aged, and right-wing. He would argue this last adjective, as he frequently reminds me that he’s been “a Democrat my whole life and voted for Obama.” But he’s right-wing. As you shall see. We occasionally get into lo-o-o-o-o-o-ong debates over social and political issues. I’ve learned to – usually – save my breath. But this time I couldn’t help myself.

I have to take blame for this instance. I emailed an article to my co-worker – let’s call him “Mitt” – that was designed to torque him a little, being a list of charts recently released by the government showing how the economy has been improving the last two years. Although Mitt never really reviewed the charts or data, he refuted them immediately on account of the article about the charts being published by The Atlantic. This then led to a hour-and-a-half debate – just when it was time to go home – over issues of government, bail-outs, poverty, birth control, drugs, moral decline, etc.

The thing that made Mitt the most angry was when I said that there is a direct correlation between poverty and increased crime rates, and that the way to reduce crime is to reduce poverty. “Being poor does not make you a criminal! I came from a poor family, and I had morals!” Here’s the thing: he did not come from a poor family – he grew up middle-class in Minneapolis in the early 70s – and doesn’t understand what true poverty is.

Mitt thinks the base problem in our society is a creeping lack of morality. An underlying menace. Brought about by the lack of “real” man/woman families, not going to church, not teaching morality…and being black. OK, he didn’t really say that, but the dog whistle was loud and clear. Here’s Mitt’s thesis in one convenient jumble:

Single black moms have lots of kids with deadbeat dads who aren’t held accountable for child support by the government via DNA tracking and then take scads of government welfare money which raises our taxes and leads to having no impetus to ever get a job and not having any responsibility and using all that cash to buy drugs and liquor which leads to more crime but using birth control is bad because the Pope says so and immoral so we shouldn’t offer birth control and sex is only for procreation but since they are so lazy they sit around all day watching all those TV shows that advocate immorality and then have more babies and no work ethic.

Mitt is actually a very smart person. But he’s so convinced of the overwhelming populace of these fictional freeloaders that he is impervious to facts. His lack of exposure to people of color and over-exposure to Faux Fox News makes him fearful of the different. He is a poster-boy for the fear-driven I-work-hard-and-anyone-else-can-do-the-same-to-get-a-job-and-be-successful all-regulations-are-bad-the-market-will-regulate-itself I’m-not-a-racist-but-people-with-different-colored-skin-scare-me crowd.

These people sadden and worry me. I’m saddened that some people are so fearful that they let themselves be unwittingly led by hatemongers. Worried that so many of this type of person end up – usually by virtue of inherited wealth – in our political system. The thing that gives me hope is evolution. Gradually these people are dying out, to be replaced by a younger generation with more acceptance and open-mindedness. We can see the course of history, and how over the long arc of time we’ve inculcated acceptance of different classes of people: Jews, Irish, women, atheists, Protestants, etc. It hasn’t been perfect. We’re still fighting the battles for women and different religious groups. And we still haven’t fully accepted – as a society – blacks, Native Americans, and homosexuals. But it’s coming. The old white males and fundamentalists are becoming less and less relevant. And I think that this trend will continue.

We shall overcome.

How to measure the heat loss? The cost to replenish those lost BTUs?

Martin Bracewell’s editorial of last week raised my ire. The gist of his message is that Christians are “persecuted” in America for their beliefs. This is laughable. The definition of (religious) persecution is “a program or campaign to exterminate, drive away, or subjugate a people because of their religion.” This is not happening in a nation that is over 78% Christian. Instead, what is happening is that true patriots in this country are calling attention to the fact that a small group of “religious” fundamentalists are trying to enshrine their religious beliefs as law.

One of the reasons America was settled was to escape religious oppression. The founding fathers were very aware of the danger of religion-influenced government, and addressed this in the Bill of Rights, which says, “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion.” Bracewell’s article says he finds it strange that many people fear that Bachmann and Perry might try to establish a theocracy. It isn’t strange at all; both Bachmann and Perry have publicly stated that they want to turn their religious beliefs into law, which is the very definition of a theocracy. One need only look at Iran to see how a theocracy looks.

It’s as simple as this: we can practice – or not practice – the religion we choose, and no one has the right to make the choice for us. That extends to laws based on religious beliefs. That’s what America is about. The exercise of – or lack thereof – my religion does not – and cannot – take rights away from anyone else. It is the hypocrisy of the right wing that they constantly bemoan the government interfering with their lives, yet at the same time want to interfere with our lives by making their beliefs law.

Donald,

I just read a story about your university requiring all employees to sign a “Personal Lifestyle Statement” or be fired. I’m appalled. First of all, the hypocrisy of you calling your school a “Christian” university is stunning. You are about as far from Christ as East is from West. If you don’t recall – as many of you self-professed “Christians” don’t – Jesus never said a word about homosexuality. He did, however, list the two greatest commandments: Love God, and Love Your Neighbor as Yourself. I don’t find any ambivalence with that statement. He didn’t say, “Except for gay people.”

If you truly are a school of higher learning, you might take note of the fact that the Bible 1) was written by humans, some 70+ years after Jesus’ death; 2) was not compiled into its present-day books until hundreds of years later; 3) was not written in English; 4) has much nuance and debated translation. In fact, there is no “one” Bible that God just plunked down on your desk. And many, many Biblical scholars – people who actually think and explore and research and seek answers and who don’t wear blinders – debate the meanings of the verses that you use to promote your hateful and decidedly non-Christian agenda of the persecution of gay men and women. Not to mention that the verse most quoted in defense of your indefensible position was in the book of Paul, and not from Jesus himself.

I wonder how many other Biblical tenets you will force your employees to follow. Will you prohibit shellfish from being eaten on campus? Will you stop the wearing of all clothing with mixed fibers? Will you require professors to kill their children if they talk back to their parents? Since you follow the Bible so closely, I’m sure you’ll be enforcing these “rules” as well. Or will you use the tired argument of the “Christian” zealot and say that those rules were just a product of that time period, and that we now know better? The fallacy that somehow you know which parts of the Bible can be discarded and which parts should be applied religiously (pun intended)? If you’re going to tell me it’s the infallible word of God, then you better follow all of it, buddy. But I’m familiar with your hypocrisy, and am sure you have shielded yourself from logic with raiments of twisted God-speak that sound wonderful to the unthinking extremists that seek “learning” in the halls of your institution.

Perhaps you may someday – not out loud, but in that tiny part of your soul still struggling for love and compassion to win out over hate and fear – consider the idea that the Bible is a spiritual guide, and not the faultless writings of a God who somehow took pen in hand and wrote down a series of conflicting messages – in English – and then expected us to follow them all unerringly. I pray for you and your misguided policies, and especially for the teachers and students who are subjected to your unloving and un-Christian actions.

You can send your own letter to Don at chimes@shorter.edu. He’s far too important to make his own email address available, so filters it through his administrative assistant.

Between the second quarter of 2009 and the fourth quarter of 2010, our nation’s total income rose by $528 billion. Of that economic growth, $464 billion went to pretax corporate profits. Just $7 billion went to wages and salaries. In other words, 88% of the brief recovery went to corporate profits and just 1% — that’s right, 1% — went to workers, according to a study by economists at Northeastern University. By contrast, when the United States was recovering from a downturn in the early 1990s, 50% of the growth in the national income went to wages and salaries.

Read the full article by Sally Kohn here: Time to raise taxes on the rich

Remembering that I’ll be dead soon is the most important tool that I’ve ever encountered to help me make the big choices in life. Because almost everything—all external expectations all pride, all fear of embarrassment or failure—these things just fall away in the face of death, leaving only what is truly important. Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose. You are already naked. There is no reason not to follow your heart.

To truly teach is to instill the values and knowledge which promote the common good and protect a society from the folly of historical amnesia. The utilitarian, corporate ideology embraced by the system of standardized tests and leadership academies has no time for the nuances and moral ambiguities inherent in a liberal arts education. Corporatism is about the cult of the self. It is about personal enrichment and profit as the sole aim of human existence. And those who do not conform are pushed aside.