[Oe List ...] 12/3/10, Spong: Thoughts at the End of 2010 - Darkness Ahead

Thu Dec 30 13:00:07 CST 2010

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Dear Reader,
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A Note From Mike Keriakos and Ben Wolin, Founders of Everyday Health, Inc.
We're very grateful that Bishop Spong entrusted his long reputation to a couple of guys in a kitchen in Brooklyn. We're thrilled by what we achieved together, and saddened that our business took us squarely into the health category, and away from publishing Bishop Spong's important message. We wish him and his new publisher the best of luck in continuing this worthwhile pursuit.						
Sincerely,
Mike and Ben

                  Thursday December 30, 2010                

Thoughts at the End of 2010 - Darkness Ahead

Momentarily a new year will dawn.  2010 has been difficult economically for this nation and the world.  Now is a traditional time both for looking backward and forward.
		When I watch our politicians discharge their duties at year's end, I find myself despairing for two reasons. First, few people in public life seem eager to accept accountability and to recognize their role in creating the problems that this nation now faces.  It is always someone else's fault.  Second, when one listens to the political rhetoric, it becomes apparent far too often that many of our lawmakers are either uninformed or dishonest. I cite these data that lead me to these depressing conclusions.
		Many political voices bemoan publicly the out-of-bounds growth in the national debt, but few of them are willing to take any concrete steps to address this issue.  Clearly solving the fiscal crisis is not the path to political success.  The fact is that this country has been living beyond its means for sometime now.  There are three ways only to bring the nation's finances under control.  We can raise taxes, we can cut government spending or we can adopt a combination of both.  While that is fairly obvious, the fact is that there is no political constituency developing around any aspect of this equation.
		How did the debt grow to such threatening proportions?  There are four primary, easy to document causes.  Two of them are our current wars, neither of which was provided for in the national budget.  To finance these wars by calling for sacrifices on the part of our citizens was just too painful politically.  No one on either side of the aisle was willing to raise taxes or to cut non-essential spending to spread the sacrifice.  To do either ran the risk of eroding support for these wars and so a decision was made at the highest level that the only Americans who would have to sacrifice for these foreign policy initiatives would be the members of the armed services and their families, and sacrifice they did with their lives, their limbs and for many, we are now recognizing, their long- term mental health.  No one else had either to pay a nickel or to see his or her life style inconvenienced. War also creates new sources of wealth.  Certain businesses seize the war opportunity  to make enormous profits. These businesses are primarily in security, construction and oil and each has powerful friends in high places.  It is also the case, inappropriately enough, that many of these war profits made abroad find ways of escaping taxation at home.  If a nation's freedom or survival is at risk most would be willing to sacrifice the economy.  Can anyone, however, honestly say that the wars in either Iraq or Afghanistan represented a response to either our freedom or our survival?  One could argue, I believe, that invading Afghanistan was an act of self-defense, since the Taliban government of that country had sheltered Al Qaeda when they attacked the United States. The Iraq war, however, the far more expensive of the two, was begun on trumped-up charges about that country's possession of weapons of mass destruction. Those charges turned out to be first blatantly false, second politically calculated lie and third covered up.  It is also a fact that neither war  has yet achieved popular support.
		When a nation or a government is not convinced of the rightness of its cause, its leaders always find ancillary excuses to justify their actions.  The most popular of these in Afghanistan at least, was the Taliban's treatment of its women under fundamentalist Muslim rule.  We have all read stories of women being beaten and even executed for such crimes as having too much ankle visible in public, for being in the company of males other than their family and for becoming pregnant out of wedlock.  Girls were not allowed to go to school.  Greg Mortenson's popular book, Three Cups of Tea, related the attempts by an American to build schools for girls in Afghanistan and touched such a deep place in the American psyche that it remained at the top of American best selling book lists for years, making our citizens feel better about this troubling war.  When President Obama supported a surge of troops in Afghanistan he effectively made that war his own.  Neither President Bush  nor Obama has yet gone to the Congress to secure budgetary support for either war, so their costs continue to feed the increasing deficit.
		The third cause of our gigantic current deficit was the second round of what were called "The Bush Tax Cuts."  The initial Bush tax cuts early in his first term were judged by most economists to be both reasonable and necessary.  The government of the United States had begun to run a surplus in the  1990's.  What to do with this surplus had become a hotly debated political issue. One option was to use the surplus or some part of it to guarantee the solvency of Social Security.  That course of action was defeated in favor of tax cuts alone.  The second tax cut, however, had no such justification and even a conservative economist like Alan Greenspan called them "irresponsible."  No cuts in government spending were offered to minimize the inevitable addition to the national debt.  There was sufficient opposition to these second tax cuts that the only way the Bush administration could get this proposal passed was to make them "temporary."  They were to expire on December 31, 20 10.  No one anticipated that when that date arrived this country would be in the deepest recession since the Great Depression.
		The fourth reason for the ever-widening deficit was that same recession.  In the fall of 2008 reckless greed ultimately received its comeuppance.  The "irrational exuberance" finally broke and began to spiral downward toward a world wide depression.  Venerable businesses like Lehman Brothers, Merrill-Lynch, Bear Sterns and Wachovia Bank disappeared into either liquidation or fire sales.  Giant banks like Citicorp, Bank of American, JP Morgan Chase and Morgan Stanley tottered on the brink of failure.  The housing industry collapsed, having been financed by loans based on the premise of continuous inflation on housing prices.  Washington Mutual and Countrywide Financial went into bankruptcy.  AIG,  the world's biggest insurance company was in ruins.  Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the government housing agencies, were no longer solvent.  The American auto industry almost disappeared.  Chrysler and General Motors received massive infusions of government money. Ultimately Chrysler  went private and General Motors went into bankruptcy.  Of course, with massive losses in the stock market, government revenues also tumbled, while government spending went on as if nothing had happened.  Eventually, this nation itself flirted with bankruptcy.
		No president, with the possible exception of Franklin D. Roosevelt, ever took office in a more difficult time than Barack Obama.  Recession, a tottering economy and two unfinished and unfinanced wars greeted him.  It has not been an easy time for our nation or our people. Of course, if one believed the political rhetoric, no one was to blame for these disasters except one's political enemies.  It was obvious, according to Republican talking points, that the way to climb out of this downturn was to cut runaway social programs.  Democratic talking points countered by suggesting that allowing the Bush tax cuts on the rich to expire was the clear pathway back to prosperity.  As the showdown developed in the Senate the Republican minority clearly proved itself to be more politically adept than the Democratic majority.  Taking a position of negativity on all issues, they fought the Democrats to a standstill.  They exhausted the administration in the Health Care fight, while prohi biting the public option, which was the one thing in the original Obama health care proposal that had any possibility of lowering health care costs.  Once that was defeated they began their attack on "the government's takeover of health care."  It was strange logic and observers noted that the price of the stock in the private health care companies went up during and after the health care debate.  Then using the recession as the reason for extending the soon to expire "Bush tax cuts" for all Americans including the top two percent of our wealthiest citizens, they added another huge hole to the national debt causing it to spin out of control for the foreseeable future.  The Republican strategy is to build their future political victories by campaigning against the very deficit they helped to create.  The Democrats, on the other hand, seemed to have been reduced to whimpering in the dark shadows of Washington about how heartless Republicans are.  Yet they were unwilling to ini tiate any cuts in the national budget. In a similar manner no union seemed willing to face the fact that their companies can no longer compete against foreign businesses because of the cost of labor, making their only choice to be that that of bankruptcy or shifting jobs overseas. No teacher's union wants to have any teachers judged by the standard of their students' achievements despite the fact that the purpose of education is to educate.  The fact is that this nation spends more money on education and achieves lower results than any developed nation in the world.
		So we enter 2011 facing difficult days ahead.  The recession lingers; the unemployment rate remains just under 10%.  Instead of working together to solve these critical issues, the primary agenda in Washington seems to be posturing for the next election.  We are sowing the seeds of a disaster.  It is not a time to be proud of our elected leaders, but this is there we are as we enter 2011.

– John Shelby Spong

                  Question and Answer                  
With John Shelby Spong

Mark Dickinson from Ottawa, Ontario, writes:
	I have just finished reading Eternal Life: A New Vision.  Thank you for writing this wonderful book, and thank you for sharing your vision of life eternal fulfilled.   I embrace your vision with enthusiasm and I share in your celebration of our spiritual life.
	In the early chapters of the book, you spend some time describing your journey, as a child and as a youth, within the boundaries and constraints and limitations of a conservative Protestant tradition.  I can identify with many of your memories, and I can recall (20 years ago or so) sharing many of the "fundamentalist" beliefs and ideologies with young Sunday School students that I taught for 10 years within a Lutheran church outside of Ottawa.  The stories of Genesis and Exodus and the narratives of the gospels rolled easily into the empty, hungry minds of the children and, in the spirit of most stories (and especially folklore), left these children excited and intrigued.  But now, looking both backwards to where I started and from what I see today, communication or rather education of our young people becomes a little more complex and challenging.
	If many (or rather, most) adults have difficulty jettisoning the literal interpretations of the Bible, how do we pursue the important task of presenting allegorical, symbolic stories abut the history of God's journey with humanity in a format and language that our young children can absorb and understand?  Consider the following analogy:  If we don't learn how to ride a bike before we can balance ourselves on two legs (and hopefully walk a few meters), should we not then continue to educate our very young with the images and stories that capture their imaginations and speak to their intellect (at that age)?  Possibly, the problem with our Christian education process is that we never leave "the uncomplicated pictures" that we experience in the early grades of learning and that rather than maturing and growing in our divine-human journey, we remain closed in an understanding that we should have outgrown a long time ago.  In other words, is the problem equally as much how we te ach, (i.e. training adults not to remain in a child's thinking) as what we teach?

Dear Mark,
	I think you are correct.  I might expand your thinking to include not just that we remain in childlike thinking, but we literalize the stories so that if the child rejects them, the child is made to feel that he or she has done something wrong or that either God or his and her parents will be disappointed.  We do not do that with secular myths and stories.  We do not teach our children that there really was a Little Red Riding Hood or a Humpty Dumpy who fell off a wall.  The stories capture genuine human experiences.  In Little Red Riding Hood the story is about young girls entering puberty being urged to stay on the "straight and narrow" path lest they be caught by a wolf and eaten up.  The story of Humpty Dumpty points to and illustrates the fact that in life there are some things that once done are irrevocable.
	Religion, because it seeks to provide human security, always seems to have a need for certainty and to literalize a supposedly inerrant source, serves that purpose.
	Another factor is that so many adults have never moved beyond their childhood religious fantasies, so that they do not know how to cope with hard human realities; hence they seek comfort in the simplicity of yesterday in the protective arms of a heavenly parent.
	As a church pastor, I believe the first step in assisting growth into maturity is to open the adults to new possibilities and hope that this knowledge will trickle down to the children.  I do not believe in trickle-down economics; that usually is limited to the possibility that the wealth of John D. Rockefeller will trickle down to Nelson Rockefeller and not much further.  I do, however, believe in the possibility that good ideas and even good theology will trickle down to a new generation.  There is ample evidence that bad ideas and bad theology have done so.
	Thanks for writing.

–								John Shelby Spong

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