[Dialogue] FW: Bill Moyers: A Time for Anger, a Call to Action

[Harry Wainwright]

Colleagues,

 

Someone asked for a copy of this on either the Dialogue or OE lists.  So
here it is and apologizes for double posting.

 

Peace,

Harry

 

  _____  

 

A Time for Anger, a Call to Action
    By Bill Moyers
    CommonDreams.org

    Thursday 22 March 2007

The following is a transcript of a speech given on February 7, 2007 at
Occidental College in Los Angeles.

 

    I am grateful to you for this opportunity and to President Prager for
the hospitality of this evening, to Diana Akiyama, Director of the Office
for Religious and Spiritual Life, whose idea it was to invite me and with
whom you can have an accounting after I've left. And to the Lilly Endowment
for funding the Values and Vocations project to encourage students at
Occidental to explore how their beliefs and values shape their choices in
life, how to make choices for meaningful work and how to make a contribution
to the common good. It's a recognition of a unique venture: to demonstrate
that the life of the mind and the longing of the spirit are mirror images of
the human organism. I'm grateful to be here under their auspices.

    I have come across the continent to talk to you about two subjects close
to my heart. I care about them as a journalist, a citizen and a grandfather
who looks at the pictures next to my computer of my five young grandchildren
who do not have a vote, a lobbyist in Washington, or the means to contribute
to a presidential candidate. If I don't act in their behalf, who will?

    One of my obsessions is democracy, and there is no campus in the country
more attuned than Occidental to what it will take to save democracy. Because
of your record of activism for social justice, I know we agree that
democracy is more than what we were taught in high school civics - more than
the two-party system, the checks-and-balances, the debate over whether the
Electoral College is a good idea. Those are important matters that warrant
our attention, but democracy involves something more fundamental. I want to
talk about what democracy bestows on us, the revolutionary idea that
democracy is not just about the means of governance but the means of
dignifying people so they become fully free to claim their moral and
political agency. "I believe in democracy because it releases the energies
of every human being" - those are the words of our 28th president, Woodrow
Wilson.

    I've been spending time with Woodrow Wilson and others of his era
because my colleagues and I are producing a documentary series on the
momentous struggles that gripped America a century or so years ago at the
birth of modern politics. Woodrow Wilson clearly understood the nature of
power. In his now-forgotten political testament called The New Freedom,
Wilson described his reformism in plain English no one could fail to
understand: "The laws of this country do not prevent the strong from
crushing the week." He wrote: "Don't deceive yourselves for a moment as to
the power of great interests which now dominate our development... There are
men in this country big enough to own the government of the United States.
They are going to own it if they can." And he warned: "There is no salvation
in the pitiful condescensions of industrial masters... prosperity guaranteed
by trustees has no prospect of endurance."

    Now Wilson took his stand at the center of power - the presidency itself
- and from his stand came progressive income taxation, the federal estate
tax, tariff reform, the challenge to great monopolies and trusts, and, most
important, a resolute spirit "to deal with the new and subtle tyrannies
according to their deserts."

    How we need that spirit today! When Woodrow Wilson spoke of democracy
releasing the energies of every human being, he was declaring that we cannot
leave our destiny to politicians, elites, and experts; either we take
democracy into our own hands, or others will take democracy from us.

    We do not have much time. Our political system is melting down, right
here where you live.

    A recent poll by the Public Policy Institute of California found that
only 20% of voters last November believe your state will be a better place
to live in the year 2025; 51% say it will be worse. Another poll by the New
American Foundation - summed up in an article by Steven Hill in the January
28th San Francisco Chronicle - found that for the first time in modern
California history, a majority of adults are not registered with either of
the two major parties. Furthermore, writes Hill, "There is a widening breach
between most of the 39 million people residing in California and the fewer
than 9 million who actually vote." Here we are getting to the heart of the
crisis today - the great divide that has opened in American life.

    According to that New American Foundation study, frequent voters [in
California] tend to be 45 and older, have household incomes of $60,000 or
more, are homeowners, and have college degrees. In contrast, the 12 million
nonvoters (7 million of whom are eligible to vote but are not registered)
tend to be younger than 45, rent instead of own, have not been to College,
and have incomes less than $60,000.

    In other words, "Considering that California often has one of the lowest
voter participation rates in the nation - in some elections only a little
more that 1/3 of eligible voters participate - a small group of frequent
voters, who are richer, whiter, and older than their nonvoting neighbors,
form the majority that decides which candidates win and which ballot
measures pass." The author of that report (Mark Baldassare) concludes: "Only
about 15% of adult people make the decisions and that 15% doesn't look much
life California overall."

    We should not be surprised by the consequences: "Two Californias have
emerged. One that votes and one that does not. Both sides inhabit the same
state and must share the same resources, but only one side is electing the
political leaders who divide up the pie."

    You've got a big problem here. But don't feel alone. Across the country
our 18th political system is failing to deal with basic realities. Despite
Thomas Jefferson's counsel that we would need a revolution every 25 years to
enable our governance to serve new generations, our structure - practically
deified for 225 years - has essentially stayed the same while science and
technology have raced ahead. A young writer I know, named Jan Frel, one of
the most thoughtful practitioners of the emerging world of Web journalism,
wrote me the other day to say: "We've gone way past ourselves. I see the
unfathomable numbers in the national debt and deficit, and the way that the
Federal government was physically unable to respond to Hurricane Katrina. I
look at Iraq; where 50% of the question is how to get out, and the other 50%
is how did so few people have the power to start the invasion in the first
place. If the Republic were functioning, they would have never had that
power."

    Yet the inertia of the political process seems virtually unstoppable.
Frel reminds me that the chairman of the Senate Budget Committee can
shepherd a $2.8 trillion dollar budget through the Senate and then admit:
"It's hard to understand what a trillion is. I don't know what it is." Is it
fair to expect anyone to understand what a trillion is, my young friend
asks, or how to behave with it in any democratic fashion?" He goes on: "But
the political system and culture are forcing 535 members of Congress and a
President who are often thousands of miles away from their 300 million
constituents to do so. It is frightening to watch the American media culture
from progressive to hard right being totally sold on the idea of one
President for 300 million people, as though the Presidency is still fit to
human scale. I'm at a point where the idea of a political savior in the
guise of a Presidential candidate or congressional majority sounds downright
scary, and at the same time, with very few exceptions, the writers and
journalists across the slate are completely sold on it."

    Our political system is promiscuous as well as primitive. The first
modern fundraiser in American politics - Mark Hanna, who shook down the
corporations to make William McKinley President of the United States in 1896
- once said there are two important things in politics. "One is money, and I
can't remember the other one." Because our system feeds on campaign
contributions, the powerful and the privileged shape it to their will. Only
12% of American households had incomes over $100,000 in 2000, but they made
up 95% of the substantial donors to campaigns and have been the big winners
in Washington ever since.

    I saw early on the consequences of political and social inequality. I
got my first job in journalism at the age of 16. I quickly had one of those
strokes of luck that can determine a career. Some of the old timers were on
vacation or out sick and I was assigned to cover what came to be known as
the 'Housewives Rebellion.' Fifteen women in my home town decided not to pay
the social security withholding tax for their domestic workers. They argued
that social security was unconstitutional, that imposing it was taxation
without representation, and that - here's my favorite part - "requiring us
to collect (the tax) is no different from requiring us to collect the
garbage."

    They hired themselves a lawyer - none other than Martin Dies, the former
Congressman best known, or worst known, for his work as head of the House
Committee on Un-American Activities in the 30s and 40s. He was no more
effective at defending rebellious women than he had been protecting against
Communist subversives, and eventually the women wound up holding their noses
and paying the tax. The stories I wrote for my local paper were picked up
and moved on by the Associated Press wire to Newspapers all over the
country. One day, the managing editor called me over and pointed to the AP
ticker beside his desk. Moving across the wire was a notice citing one "Bill
Moyers" and the News Messenger for the reporting we had done on the
rebellion.

    That hooked me. In one way or another - after a detour through seminary
and then into politics and government for a spell - I've been covering
politics ever since.

    By "politics" I mean when people get together to influence government,
change their own lives, and change society. Sometimes those people are
powerful corporate lobby groups like the drug companies and the oil
industry, and sometimes they are ordinary people fighting to protect their
communities from toxic chemicals, workers fighting for a living wage, or
college students organizing to put an end to sweatshops.

    Those women in Marshall, Texas - who didn't want to pay Social Security
taxes for their maids - were not bad people. They were regulars at church,
their children were my friends, many of them were active in community
affairs, and their husbands were pillars of the business and professional
class in town. They were respectable and upstanding citizens all.

    So it took me awhile to figure out what had brought on that spasm of
reactionary rebellion. It came to me one day, much later. They simply
couldn't see beyond their own prerogatives. Fiercely loyal to their
families, to their clubs, charities, and congregations - fiercely loyal, in
other words, to their own kind - they narrowly defined membership in
democracy to include only people like them. The women who washed and ironed
their laundry, wiped their children's bottoms, made their husbands' beds,
and cooked their families meals - these women, too, would grow old and
frail, sick and decrepit, lose their husbands and face the ravages of time
alone, with nothing to show from their years of labor but the creases in
their brow and the knots on their knuckles.

    In one way or another, this is the oldest story in America: the struggle
to determine whether "We, the People" is a spiritual idea embedded in a
political reality - one nation, indivisible - or merely a charade
masquerading as piety and manipulated by the powerful and privileged to
sustain their own way of life at the expense of others.

    We seem to be holding our breath today, trying to decide what kind of
country we want to be. But in this state of suspension, powerful interests
are making off with the booty. They remind me of the card shark in Texas who
said to his competitor in the poker game: "Now play the cards fairly Reuben.
I know what I dealt you."

    For years now a small fraction of American households have been
garnering a larger and larger concentration of wealth and income, while
large corporations and financial institutions have obtained unprecedented
power over who wins and who loses. Inequality in America is greater than
it's been in 50 years. In 1960 the gap in terms of wealth between the top
20% and the bottom 20% was 30 fold. Today it's more than 75 fold.

    Such concentrations of wealth would be far less of an issue if the rest
of society were benefiting proportionally. But that is not the case.
Throughout our industrial history incomes grew at 30% to 50% or more every
quarter, and in the quarter century after WWII, gains reached more than 100%
for all income categories. Since the late 1970s, only the top 1% of
households increased their income by 100%.

    Once upon a time, according to Isabel Sawhill and Sara McLanahan in The
Future of Children, the American ideal of classless society was 'one in
which all children have roughly equal chance of success regardless of the
economic status of the family into which they were born. That's changing
fast. The Economist Jeffrey Madrick writes that just a couple of decades
ago, only 20% of one's future income was determined by the income of one's
father. New research suggests that today 60% of a son's income is determined
by the level of his father's income. In other words, children no longer have
a roughly equal chance of success regardless of the economic status of the
family into which they are born. Their chances of success are greatly
improved if they are born on third base and their father has been tipping
the umpire.

    As all of you know, a college education today is practically a necessity
if you are to hold your own, much less climb the next rung. More than 40% of
all new jobs now require a college degree. There are real world consequences
to this, and Madrick drives them home. Since the 1970s, median wages of men
with college degrees have risen about 14%. But median wages for high school
graduates have fallen about 15%. Not surprisingly, nearly 24% of American
workers with only a high school diploma have no health insurance, compared
with less than 10% of those with college degrees.

    Such statistics can bring glaze to the eyes, but Oscar Wilde once said
that it is the mark of truly educated people to be deeply moved by
statistics. All of you are educated, and I know you can envision the stress
these economic realities are putting on working people and on family life.
As incomes have stagnated, higher education, health care, public
transportation, drugs, housing and cars have risen faster in price than
typical family incomes, so that life, says Jeffrey Madrick, "has grown
neither calm nor secure for most Americans, by any means."

    Let me tell you about the Stanleys and the Neumanns, two families who
live in Milwaukee. One is black, the other white. The breadwinners in both
were laid off in the first wave of downsizing in 1991 as corporations began
moving jobs out of the city and then out of the country. In a documentary
series my colleagues and I chronicled their efforts over the next decade to
cope with the wrenching changes in their lives and to find a place for
themselves in the new global economy. They're the kind of Americans my
mother would have called "the salt of the earth". They love their kids, care
about their communities, go to church every Sunday, and work hard all week.

    To make ends meet after the layoffs, both mothers took full-time jobs.
Both fathers became seriously ill. When one father had to stay in the
hospital two months the family went $30,000 in debt because they didn't have
adequate health care. We were there with our cameras when the bank started
to foreclose on the modest home of one family that couldn't make mortgage
payments. Like millions of Americans, the Stanleys and the Neumanns were
playing by the rules and still getting stiffed. By the end of the decade
they were running harder but slipping further behind, and the gap between
them and prosperous America was widening.

    What turns their personal tragedy into a political travesty is that
while they are indeed patriotic, they no longer believe they matter to the
people who run the country. They simply do not think their concerns will
ever be addressed by the political, corporate, and media elites who make up
our dominant class. They are not cynical, because they are deeply religious
people with no capacity for cynicism, but they know the system is rigged
against them.

    "Things have reached such a state of affairs," the journalist George
Orwell once wrote, "that the first duty of every intelligent person is to
pay attention to the obvious." The editors of The Economist have done just
that. The pro-business magazine considered by many to be the most
influential defender of capitalism on the newsstand, produced a sobering
analysis of what is happening to the old notion that any American child can
get to the top. A growing body of evidence - some of it I have already cited
- led the editors to conclude that with "income inequality growing to levels
not seen since the Gilded Age and social mobility falling behind, the United
States risks calcifying into a European-style class-based society." The
editors point to an "education system increasingly stratified by social
class" in which poor children "attend schools with fewer resources than
those of their richer contemporaries" and great universities that are
"increasingly reinforcing rather than reducing these educational
inequalities." They conclude that America's great companies have made it
harder than ever "for people to start at the bottom and rise up the company
hierarchies by dint of hard work and self-improvement."

    It is eerie to read assessments like that and then read the
anthropologist Jared Diamond's book, Collapse: How Societies Choose to
Succeed or Fail He describes an America society in which elites cocoon
themselves "in gated communities, guarded by private security guards, and
filled with people who drink bottled water, depend on private pensions, and
send their children to private schools." Gradually, they lose the motivation
"to support the police force, the municipal water supply, Social Security,
and public schools." Any society contains a built-in blueprint for failure,
warns Jared Diamond, if elites insulate themselves from the consequences of
their own actions.

    So it is that in a study of its own, The American Political Science
Association found that "increasing inequalities threaten the American ideal
of equal citizenship and that progress toward real democracy may have
stalled in this country and even reversed."

    This is a marked turn of events for a country whose mythology embraces
"life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness" as part of our creed. America
was not supposed to be a country of "winner take all." Through our system of
checks and balances we were going to maintain a healthy equilibrium in how
power works - and for whom. Because equitable access to public resources is
the lifeblood of any democracy, we made primary schooling free to all.
Because everyone deserves a second chance, debtors, especially the
relatively poor, were protected by state laws against their rich creditors.
Government encouraged Americans to own their own piece of land, and even
supported squatters' rights. In my time, the hope of equal opportunity
became reality for millions of us. Although my parents were knocked down and
almost out by the Great Depression, and were poor all their lives, my
brother and I went to good public schools. The GI Bill made it possible for
him to go to college. When I bought my first car with a loan of $450 I drove
to a public school on a public highway and stopped to rest in a public park.
America as a shared project was becoming the engine of our national
experience.

    Not now. Beginning a quarter of a century ago a movement of corporate,
political, and religious fundamentalists gained ascendancy over politics and
made inequality their goal. They launched a crusade to dismantle the
political institutions, the legal and statutory canons, and the intellectual
and cultural frameworks that have held private power. And they had the money
to back up their ambition.

    Let me read you something:

    When powerful interests shower Washington with millions in campaign
contributions, they often get what they want. But it is ordinary citizens
and firms that pay the price and most of them never see it coming. This is
what happens if you don't contribute to their campaigns or spend generously
on lobbying. You pick up a disproportionate share of America's tax bill. You
pay higher prices for a broad range of products from peanuts to
prescriptions. You pay taxes that others in a similar situation have been
excused from paying. You're compelled to abide by laws while others are
granted immunity from them. You must pay debts that you incur while others
do not. You're barred from writing off on your tax returns some of the money
spent on necessities while others deduct the cost of their entertainment.
You must run your business by one set of rules, while the government creates
another set for your competitors. In contrast, the fortunate few who
contribute to the right politicians and hire the right lobbyists enjoy all
the benefits of their special status. Make a bad business deal; the
government bails them out. If they want to hire workers at below market
wages, the government provides the means to do so. If they want more time to
pay their debts, the government gives them an extension. If they want
immunity from certain laws, the government gives it. If they want to ignore
rules their competition must comply with, the government gives its approval.
If they want to kill legislation that is intended for the public, it gets
killed.

    I'm not quoting from Karl Marx's Das Kapital or Mao's Little Red Book.
I'm quoting Time Magazine. From the heart of America's media establishment
comes the judgment that America now has "government for the few at the
expense of the many."

    We are talking about nothing less that a class war declared a generation
ago, in a powerful polemic by the wealthy right-winger, William Simon, who
had been Richard Nixon's Secretary of the Treasury. In it he declared that
"funds generated by business... must rush by the multimillions" to
conservative causes. The trumpet was sounded for the financial and business
class to take back the power and privileges they had lost as a result of the
Great Depression and the New Deal. They got the message and were soon waging
a well-orchestrated, lavishly-financed movement. Business Week put it
bluntly: "Some people will obviously have to do with less... .It will be a
bitter pill for many Americans to swallow the idea of doing with less so
that big business can have more." The long-range strategy was to cut
workforces and their wages, scour the globe in search of cheap labor, trash
the social contract and the safety net that was supposed to protect people
from hardships beyond their control, deny ordinary citizens the power to sue
rich corporations for malfeasance and malpractice, and eliminate the ability
of government to restrain what editorialists for the Wall Street Journal
admiringly call "the animal spirits of business."

    Looking backwards, it all seems so clear that we wonder how we could
have ignored the warning signs at the time. What has been happening to
working people is not the result of Adam Smith's invisible hand but the
direct consequence of corporate activism, intellectual propaganda, the rise
of a religious literalism opposed to any civil and human right that threaten
its paternalism, and a string of political decisions favoring the interests
of wealthy elites who bought the political system right out from under us.

    To create the intellectual framework for this revolution in public
policy, they funded conservative think tanks that churned out study after
study advocating their agenda.

    To put muscle behind these ideas, they created a formidable political
machine. One of the few journalists to cover the issues of class, Thomas
Edsall of the Washington Post, reported that "During the 1970s, business
refined its ability to act as a class, submerging competitive instincts in
favor of joint, cooperate action in the legislative area." Big business
political action committees flooded the political arena with a deluge of
dollars. And they built alliances with the religious right - Jerry Falwell's
Moral Majority and Pat Robertson's Christian Coalition - who gleefully
contrived a cultural holy war that became a smokescreen behind which the
economic assault on the middle and working classes would occur.

    >From land, water, and other resources, to media and the broadcast and
digital spectrums, to scientific discovery and medial breakthroughs, a broad
range of America's public resources have been undergoing a powerful shift
toward elite control, contributing substantially to those economic pressures
on ordinary Americans that "deeply affect household stability, family
dynamics, social mobility, political participation and civic life."

    What's to be done?

    The only answer to organized money is organized people.

    Again:

    The only answer to organized money is organized people.

    And again:

    The only answer to organized money is organized people.

    I came to Occidental because your campus has a reputation for believing
in a political system where ordinary people have a voice in making the
decisions that shape their lives, not just at the ballot box every two or
four years in November, but in their workplaces, their neighborhoods and
communities, and on their college campuses. In a real democracy, ordinary
people at every level hold their elected officials accountable for the big
decisions, about whether or not to go to war and put young men and women in
harm's way, about the pollution of the environment, global warming, and the
health and safety of our workplaces, our communities, our food and our air
and our water, the quality of our public schools, and the distribution of
economic resources. It's the spirit of fighting back throughout American
history that brought an end to sweatshops, won the eight-hour working day
and a minimum wage, delivered suffrage to women and blacks from slavery,
inspired the Gay Rights movement, the consumer and environmental movements,
and more recently stopped Congress from enacting repressive legislation
against immigrants.

    I believe a new wave of social reform is about to break across America.
We see it in the struggle for a 'living wage' for America's working people.
Last November, voters in six states approved ballot measures to raise their
states' minimum wage above the federal level; 28 states now have such laws.
Since 1994, more than 100 cities have passed local living wage laws that
require employers who do business with the government - who get taxpayer
subsidies, in other words - to pay workers enough to lift their families out
of poverty.

    Los Angeles has led the way, passing one of the nation's strongest
'living wage' laws in 1997. And just the other day the LA City Council voted
to extend that "living wage" law to the thirty-five hundred hotel workers
around the Los Angeles Airport - the first living wage law in the country to
target a specific industry and a specific geographic area. But it took last
fall's march down Century Boulevard - organized people! - to finally bring
it about and it took the arrest of hundreds of college students, including
several dozen from Occidental.

    The great abolitionist Frederick Douglass said that "if there is no
struggle, there is no progress." Those who profess freedom, yet fail to act
- they are "men who want crops without plowing up the ground. They want rain
without thunder and lightning, they want the ocean without the awful roar of
its many waters... power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and
it never will. Find out just what people will submit to, and you have found
the exact amount of injustice and wrong which will be imposed upon them."

    What America needs is a broad bi-partisan movement for democracy. It's
happened before: In 1800, with the Jeffersonian Democrats; in 1860, with
Radical Republicans; in 1892, with the Populists; in 1912, with Bull Moose
Progressives; in 1932, with the New Deal; in l964, with Civil Rights
activists - each moment a breaking point after long, hard struggles, each
with small beginnings in transcendent faith.

    Faith! That's the other subject close to my heart that I have come talk
about. Almost every great social movement in America has contained a flame
of faith at its core - the belief that all human beings bear traces of the
divine spark, however defined. I myself believe that within the religious
quest - in the deeper realm of spirituality that may well be the primal
origin of all religion - lies what Gregg Easterbrook calls "an essential
aspect of the human prospect." It is here we wrestle with questions of life
and purpose, with the meaning of loss, yearning and hope, above all of love.

    I am grateful to have first been exposed to those qualities in my own
Christian tradition. T.S. Eliot believed that "no man [or woman] has ever
climbed to the higher stages of the spiritual life who has not been a
believer in a particular religion, or at least a particular philosophy." As
we dig deeper into our own religion, we are likely to break through to
someone else digging deeper toward us from their own tradition, and on some
metaphysical level, we converge, like the images inside a kaleidoscope, into
new patterns of meaning that illuminate our own journey.

    For most of our history this country's religious discourse was dominated
by white male Protestants of a culturally conservative European heritage -
people like me. Dissenting voices of America, alternative visions of faith,
or race, of women, rarely reached the mainstream. The cartoonist Jeff
McNally summed it up with two weirdoes talking in a California diner. One
weirdo says to the other. "Have you ever delved into the mysteries of
Eastern Religion?" And the second weirdo answers: "Yes, I was once a
Methodist in Philadelphia." Once upon a time that was about the extent of
our exposure to the varieties of Religious experience. No longer. Our nation
is being re-created right before our eyes, with mosques and Hindu Temples,
Sikh communities and Buddhist retreat centers. And we all have so much to
teach each other. Buddhists can teach us about the delight of contemplation
and 'the infinite within.' From Muslims we can learn about the nature of
surrender; from Jews, the power of the prophetic conscience; from Hindus,
the "realms of gold" hidden in the depths of our hearts," from Confucians
the empathy necessary to sustain the fragile web of civilization. Nothing I
take from these traditions has come at the expense of the Christian story. I
respect that story - my story ?even more for having come to see that all the
great religious grapple with things that matter, although each may come out
at a different place; that each arises from within and experiences a lived
human experience; and each and every one of them offers a unique insight
into human nature. I reject the notion that faith is acquired in the same
way one chooses a meal in a cafeteria, but I confess there is something
liberating about no longer being quite so deaf to what others have to report
from their experience.

    So let me share with you what I treasure most about the faith that has
informed my journey. You will find it in the New Testament, in the gospel of
Matthew, where the story of Jesus of Nazareth unfolds chapter by chapter:
The birth at Bethlehem. The baptism in the River Jordan. The temptation in
the wilderness. The Sermon on the Mount. The healing of the sick and the
feeding of the hungry. The Parables. The calling of the Disciples. The
journey to Jerusalem. And always, embedded like pearls throughout the story,
the teachings of compassion, forgiveness, and reconciliation:

    Love your enemies, bless those who curse you, do good to those who hate
you, and pray for those who spitefully use you and persecute you.

    Whoever strikes you on the right cheek, turn the other to him also...
and whoever compels you to go one mile, go with him two.

    If you bring your gift to the altar, and there remember that your
brother has something against you, leave your gift before the altar, and go
your way. First be reconciled to your brother, and then come and offer our
gift.

    Judge not, lest ye be judged.

    In these pages we are in the presence of one who clearly understands the
power of love, mercy, and kindness - the 'gentle Jesus' so familiar in art,
song, and Sunday School.

    But then the tale turns. Jesus' demeanor changes; the tone and temper of
the narrative shift, and the Prince of Peace becomes a disturber of the
peace:

    Then Jesus went into the temple of God and drove out all those who
bought and sold in the temple, and overturned the tables of the
moneychangers... and he said to them, "It is written, 'My house shall be
called a house of prayer but you have made it a den of thieves.'"

    His message grew more threatening, amid growing crowds right on the
Temple grounds. In his parable of the wicked tenants, he predicted the
imminent destruction of the Jerusalem elites, setting in motion the events
that led to his crucifixion a short time later.

    No cheek turned there. No second mile traveled. On the contrary, Jesus
grows angry. He passes judgment. His message becomes more threatening. And
he takes action.

    Over the past few years as we witnessed the growing concentration of
wealth and privilege in our country, prophetic religion lost its voice,
drowned out by the corporate, political, and religious right who hijacked
Jesus.

    That's right: They hijacked Jesus. The very Jesus who stood in Nazareth
and proclaimed, "The Lord has anointed me to preach the good news to the
poor" - this Jesus, hijacked by a philosophy of greed. The very Jesus who
fed 5000 hungry people - and not just those in the skyboxes; the very Jesus
who offered kindness to the prostitute and hospitality to the outcast; who
raised the status of women and treated even the hated tax collector as a
citizen of the Kingdom. The indignant Jesus who drove the money changers
from the temple - this Jesus was hijacked and turned from a friend of the
dispossessed into a guardian of privilege, the ally of oil barons, banking
tycoons, media moguls and weapons builders.

    Yet it was this same Jesus who inspired a Methodist ship-caulker named
Edward Rogers to crusade across New England for an eight hour work day;
called Frances William to rise up against the sweatshop; sent Dorothy Day to
march alongside striking auto workers in Michigan, fishermen and textile
workers in Massachusetts, brewery workers in New York, and marble cutters in
Vermont; who roused E.B. McKinney and Owen Whitfield to stand against a
Mississippi oligarchy that held sharecroppers in servitude, challenged a
young priest named John Ryan to champion child labor laws a decade before
the New Deal, and summoned Martin Luther King to Memphis to join sanitation
workers in their struggle for a decent wage.

    This Jesus was there on Century Boulevard last September, speaking
Spanish. And it is this resurrected Jesus, in the company of the morally
indignant of every faith, who will be there wherever Americans are angry
enough to rise up and drive the money changers from the temples of
democracy.

    To you students at Occidental, let me say: I have been a journalist too
long to look at the world through rose-colored glasses. I believe the only
way to be in the world is to see it as it really is and then to take it on
despite the frightening things you see. The Italian philosopher Gramschi
spoke of the "the pessimism of the intellect and the optimism of the will."
With this philosophy your generation can bring about the Third American
Revolution. The first won independence from the Crown. The second won equal
rights for women and for the sons and daughters of slavery. This third - the
revolution of the 21st Century - will bring about a democracy that leaves no
one out. The simple truth is we cannot build a political society or a nation
across the vast divides that mark our country today. We must bridge that
divide and make society whole, sharing the fruits of freedom and prosperity
with the least among us. I have crossed the continent to tell you the Dream
is not done, the work is not over, and your time has come to take it on.

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