Living In Samaria

As I preach weekly, I'm very often stuck with leftovers. Leftovers are those ideas that come pouring out of my study and reflection on the texts, but that don't really fit within the theme and focus of the day. I can't stand long meandering brain-dump preaching myself, so I'd never intentionally inflict it on others.

After two weeks of preaching from the prophet Amos, one of the big "leftovers" has to do with sociopolitical context. It's clear that one of the major issues for Amos was an unsustainable imbalance of economic power. In the eighth century BCE, Israel was experiencing a time of prosperity...sort of. Wealth and power were accumulating, but that accumulation was occurring primarily around the urban centers, like Samaria and Bethel. Those who served the king did quite well. Those who sold to those who served the king did quite well. The scribes and the priests and the merchants were rolling in it.

But everywhere else, things bit. Exorbitant prices and punishingly high taxes were the price paid to insure that the centers of power stayed powerful, and that the merchants and the merchant's wives lived in the standard to which they were accustomed. So the majority of the people...the farmers and the laborers...knew suffering, while a few islands of prosperity flourished around power.

I live in such an island. I was born and raised in the DC suburbs. That's not to say that there aren't shuttered businesses and foreclosed homes here inside the Beltway. But as our homeland security infrastructure blossoms and spreads and sprawls, most of those jobs are here. More and more military suppliers and contractors are re-siting their headquarters here to DC. Best to be near where the money is if you want to make a few bucks off of our Forever War. And so our area does really rather well.

Of course, prices here are higher. And while the apparent taxes on y'all outside the Beltway aren't punishingly high, your actual tax levels are masked behind debt, debt that is being incurred on the basis of your credit. Meaning, you are, in fact, being punitively taxed. You just don't grasp it, because the bill keeps not being sent, because America only elects cowards who tell us that we can get something for nothing. Only you don't get that something.

And so when I hear Amos laying into the wealthy, I hear him laying into the god of security which we worship. And from which my community profits.

The peskiest thing about Amos is that the stone mansions and the vineyards that he describes could be in the neat neighborhoods of Mclean. Or in the stately McEstates of Loudon County. Or in Bethesda, in the beautiful multi-million dollar homes that surround my church.

So I haven't quite gotten around to preaching about it. It's hard to turn that poison cup into a Practical Lesson for Your Life Now (tm). It's too hard a word. But though Amos suggests that the prudent remain silent in evil times, it does seem worth at least blogging about it.

Let Them Eat Mud

As one of the four people who still read print media, I was going through the WaPo yesterday, and stumbled across an article on Haiti.

Haiti is and has seemingly always been a total mess. As a kid, my church maintained a partnership with Haiti, sending relief supplies and other support. A good friend recently came back from a medical mission there, and the delightful pictures of suppurating wounds and skin ailments he put up confirmed that things are pretty intensely unpleasant there still. It's a little slice of intractably abject poverty, right there in our own backyard.

What particularly struck me in the article were two things. First, that Haitians have been so impacted by the recent economic downturn that they can no longer afford "mud cookies." Those are a delightful baked confection in which the most significant ingredient is clay. People increasingly can't even buy baked dirt in Haiti.

The second item was a little snippet of "hope" being offered up by our Secretary of State as she toured a garment factory in Port au Prince, the capital.

She marveled at the factory, and hailed it as a model for progress in Haiti. Workers there were making between two and three times the average Haitian's daily salary...which means they were making between $4 and $6 a day. Marvelous! Wonderful! They're being given the opportunity to pull themselves out of poverty!

So here we have jobs that used to pay American garment industry workers $6 an hour...and Haitian workers are being paid almost a factor of 10 less to do the same work. Unless you own the factories, how is this a triumph? Six bucks a day isn't going to turn things around. Sure, you can have all the mud cookies you can eat. Haitians can continue to struggle, and be only very slightly better fed, until they get sick and can't do it any more.

What I marvel at as I look at this sort of thing is how perfectly it mirrors the worst elements of late 19th and early 20th century capitalism. Back then, it was Americans who labored for negligible pay and for backbreaking hours. They mostly came from rural backgrounds, and were lured to urban industrial centers with the promise of consistent work. Within most democratic nations, though, the fact that folks could vote and freely organize and associate (more or less) ultimately counterbalanced the worst practices of profit-driven enterprise.

But I struggle to see how this works with globalized capitalism. If those who...ahem...control the means of production are able to circumvent democratic counterbalances, I'm just not sure how the intense imbalances in wealth that the market generates are ever going to be resolved. All one has to do is move industry to places where government is either weak or does not represent it's people.

For some reason, this sort of thing always makes me think of the prophet Amos:

This is what the LORD says:
"For three sins of Israel,
even for four, I will not turn back {my wrath}.
They sell the righteous for silver,
and the needy for a pair of sandals.

They trample on the heads of the poor
as upon the dust of the ground
and deny justice to the oppressed.
Father and son use the same girl
and so profane my holy name.

They lie down beside every altar
on garments taken in pledge.
In the house of their god
they drink wine taken as fines.