What The Rev. Dr. William J. Barber II points out in the following
article is spot on. But I would include Religion as one of the
corruptions in our crumbling American Corporate Empire. Even though I
am an Agnostic, I do have an oar in these muddied Religious Waters.
It is long past time for us to throw off the oppressive chains of
Religion, any religion, and declare that each of us, to the best of
our individual ability, is responsible for our own life. We need to
take ownership for our actions, not putting them onto the back of some
All Knowing God. We have been trained for centuries to duck our share
of the burden by pretending that we are given Divine Guidance from
Above. Of course our political life reflects this deep seated
conditioning. We turn over our lives to the current strong man,
hoping that this time he will lead us to a better life, and learning
too late that he is leading us to support His Good Life, not ours.
The marriage between Religion and Earthly Government has left us with
no ability to steer our own ship. Nor are we any longer able to
gather in support of one another. Our Leaders have so driven hatred,
fear, suspicion, and mistrust toward others that we are left to the
mercy of our Masters. And since our Masters proclaim themselves to be
the Chosen Ones, well above the Common Masses, they have little mercy
to shed upon us.
And yet, we turn to their God, seeking mercy. We need to turn inward
for mercy, and then learn to trust one another and unite. Our hope
for a better life will only come when we have the numbers and the
strength of our convictions to take command of our own lives.
Carl Jarvis
3/19/16, Miriam Vieni <miriamvieni@optonline.net> wrote:
>
> Published on Alternet (http://www.alternet.org)
> Home > It's Not About Trump - Our Political Culture Is Corrupt
> ________________________________________
> It's Not About Trump - Our Political Culture Is Corrupt
> By Rev. Dr. William J. Barber II [1] / The Nation [2]
> March 15, 2016
> Trumpism was created in the crucible of the "Southern strategy." We have
> sown to the wind, reaping the whirlwind.
> We can't isolate Donald Trump and his supporters, because that is a
> simplification. When you unpack the policies of all of his competitors,
> most
> of their disagreement is in tone, not substance. It is not as though they
> are moderate and he is extreme. Trump is not the problem; it's all of the
> xenophobia and racist innuendo and othering of immigrants that is the
> problem. It is all of the coded language about people who want free stuff,
> from the Southern-strategy lexicon of Wallace, Nixon, Reagan, and Atwater
> that has been spewed for years. That is the problem. Add to it the more
> recent rhetoric that says President Obama is unfit. Long before Trump, all
> of this rhetoric created a kind of us-against-them mob mentality, which
> after it is loosed can manifest in the violence that we now see.
> These were tactics used to end the first Reconstruction in America, too,
> when many white elites began to fear a black-white coalition. And they were
> used in the late 1968, to create the so-called solid South and push back
> against the gains of the 1960s, brought about by black, white, Latino, and
> interfaith relationships. We need to understand all of this as we approach
> this election and think about about kinds of questions we ask the
> candidates.
>
> Recently, Senator Ted Cruz was in Raleigh, North Carolina's Calvary Baptist
> Church when FOX News anchor Megyn Kelly asked him about his moral values:
> "How do you manage to keep your integrity working in Washington?" Cruz said
> as president, he intended to "pass a simple flat tax and abolish the IRS,"
> "prosecute Planned Parenthood," and end the Common Core educational
> standards instantly.
>
> Presidential candidates of all political stripes have long courted what the
> media calls the "evangelical voters" in the South, using the language of
> morality. Well, I am an evangelical. I have been born again. I don't think
> it is because I have African and Native American and some European blood
> flowing in my veins that I have a different view of evangelism. Yes, I
> learned my evangelism from my father, a Disciples of Christ minister. But I
> also learned it from Duke Divinity School, from Union Theological Seminary,
> and from great philosophical thinkers and Biblical scholars across this
> country. I learned that persons who claim to be evangelicals are anointed
> to
> preach good news to the poor.
>
> As the Gospel of Luke says, "The Spirit of the Lord is upon me for he hath
> anointed me to preach good news to the Poor." The word poor here is
> "ptochos," a Greek word that means those who have been made poor by
> economic
> exploitation. Evangelism always starts with Jesus' words: "When I was
> hungry
> did you feed me? When I was naked, did you clothe me?" In North Carolina,
> even our state constitution notes, in Article 11, "Beneficent provision for
> the poor, the unfortunate, and the orphan is one of the first duties of a
> civilized and a Christian state."
>
> So as the presidential campaign comes to North Carolina on Tuesday, we in
> the Forward Together Moral Movement and the North Carolina NAACP urge the
> media not to take a positive or negative stance toward specific candidates,
> but to ask deep moral questions of all of them. We encourage media and
> voters to ask about public morality-determined by policy choices and budget
> choices, by concerns like Medicaid expansion, voting rights, and poverty.
>
> Ask them how they "manage to keep their integrity" when 500,000 low-income
> North Carolinians-including roughly 30,000 veterans-have no health
> insurance
> because Governor Pat McCrory and the legislature have chosen not to expand
> Medicaid. Medical authorities at UNC Hospitals estimate that as a result of
> this immoral choice, each year 2,500 North Carolinians will die
> unnecessarily due to lack of health care. Most will die because a lack of
> preventive care leads to needless strokes and heart attacks. Ask them why
> they place their political ideology over human needs.
>
> Ask state legislators how they manage to keep their integrity when they
> passed a voter suppression bill the afternoon after the US Supreme Court
> gutted the Voting Rights Act in the morning. Their voter suppression law
> made dozens of changes to voting policies, aiming to hold down turnout. Ask
> candidates what they are doing to expand voting, not restrict access to the
> ballot.
>
> Ask them what they will do to raise real wages, which have dropped steadily
> since the 1970s, leading to the greatest economic inequality in America
> since the Great Depression? Ask them if they support the fundamental
> principle of all great religions and ethical systems in the world: To love
> one's neighbor. Ask them whether they can name three or four policies that
> they believe would be the logical outgrowth of a social ethos grounded in
> love for one's neighbor. How would they act to bring those policies about?
> And in that context, what would a moral, comprehensive immigration policy
> look like?
>
> Few moral issues are more pressing than public education. We might ask
> candidates if they support the use of public money to pay for private
> schools, including voucher or tax credit programs. Do candidates support
> the
> unlimited replacement of traditional public schools with charter schools
> and
> how do they see the impact of charter schools on public education? What are
> some ways that candidates would support public school teachers?
>
> Most citizens increasingly support equality and justice for all citizens,
> including those of different sexual or gender orientations. One moral
> question for candidates is how they would safeguard the rights of LGBTQ
> citizens to be free of discrimination or attack because of their sexual or
> gender orientation.
>
> These are a few of the moral questions the Forward Together Moral Movement
> and the North Carolina NAACP believe the media should be asking candidates
> today. If we are to "prosecute Planned Parenthood," what will we prosecute
> them for? Would we prosecute those who slandered Planned Parenthood with
> doctored film footage? What kind of educational standards would best serve
> our children and nurture them for the world in which they are growing up?
> It
> is time that we asked serious moral questions of all of our candidates.
> The Rev. Dr. William J. Barber II is co-author of The Third Reconstruction:
> Moral Mondays, Fusion Politics and the Rise of a New Justice Movement [3],
> published in January 2016 by Beacon Press. In January 2016 he also began
> filing regular dispatches from the southern movement for racial justice for
> The Nation, resuming a role Martin Luther King Jr. once filled for the
> magazine. Rev. Barber II is the architect of the Forward Together Moral
> Monday Movement, president of the North Carolina NAACP and pastor of the
> Greenleaf Christian Church (Disciples of Christ) in Goldsboro. He is also
> president of Repairers of the Breach [4]. In 2015, he was the recipient of
> the Puffin/Nation Prize for Creative Citizenship.
> Share on Facebook Share
> Share on Twitter Tweet
>
> Report typos and corrections to 'corrections@alternet.org'. [5]
> [6]
> ________________________________________
> Source URL:
> http://www.alternet.org/election-2016/its-not-about-trump-our-political-cult
> ure-corrupt
> Links:
> [1] http://www.alternet.org/authors/rev-dr-william-j-barber-ii
> [2] http://www.thenation.com
> [3] http://www.beacon.org/The-Third-Reconstruction-P1139.aspx
> [4] http://www.breachrepairers.org/
> [5] mailto:corrections@alternet.org?Subject=Typo on It's Not About
> Trump - Our Political Culture Is Corrupt
> [6] http://www.alternet.org/
> [7] http://www.alternet.org/%2Bnew_src%2B
>
> Published on Alternet (http://www.alternet.org)
> Home > It's Not About Trump - Our Political Culture Is Corrupt
>
> It's Not About Trump - Our Political Culture Is Corrupt
> By Rev. Dr. William J. Barber II [1] / The Nation [2]
> March 15, 2016
> Trumpism was created in the crucible of the "Southern strategy." We have
> sown to the wind, reaping the whirlwind.
> We can't isolate Donald Trump and his supporters, because that is a
> simplification. When you unpack the policies of all of his competitors,
> most
> of their disagreement is in tone, not substance. It is not as though they
> are moderate and he is extreme. Trump is not the problem; it's all of the
> xenophobia and racist innuendo and othering of immigrants that is the
> problem. It is all of the coded language about people who want free stuff,
> from the Southern-strategy lexicon of Wallace, Nixon, Reagan, and Atwater
> that has been spewed for years. That is the problem. Add to it the more
> recent rhetoric that says President Obama is unfit. Long before Trump, all
> of this rhetoric created a kind of us-against-them mob mentality, which
> after it is loosed can manifest in the violence that we now see.
> These were tactics used to end the first Reconstruction in America, too,
> when many white elites began to fear a black-white coalition. And they were
> used in the late 1968, to create the so-called solid South and push back
> against the gains of the 1960s, brought about by black, white, Latino, and
> interfaith relationships. We need to understand all of this as we approach
> this election and think about about kinds of questions we ask the
> candidates.
>
> Recently, Senator Ted Cruz was in Raleigh, North Carolina's Calvary Baptist
> Church when FOX News anchor Megyn Kelly asked him about his moral values:
> "How do you manage to keep your integrity working in Washington?" Cruz said
> as president, he intended to "pass a simple flat tax and abolish the IRS,"
> "prosecute Planned Parenthood," and end the Common Core educational
> standards instantly.
>
> Presidential candidates of all political stripes have long courted what the
> media calls the "evangelical voters" in the South, using the language of
> morality. Well, I am an evangelical. I have been born again. I don't think
> it is because I have African and Native American and some European blood
> flowing in my veins that I have a different view of evangelism. Yes, I
> learned my evangelism from my father, a Disciples of Christ minister. But I
> also learned it from Duke Divinity School, from Union Theological Seminary,
> and from great philosophical thinkers and Biblical scholars across this
> country. I learned that persons who claim to be evangelicals are anointed
> to
> preach good news to the poor.
>
> As the Gospel of Luke says, "The Spirit of the Lord is upon me for he hath
> anointed me to preach good news to the Poor." The word poor here is
> "ptochos," a Greek word that means those who have been made poor by
> economic
> exploitation. Evangelism always starts with Jesus' words: "When I was
> hungry
> did you feed me? When I was naked, did you clothe me?" In North Carolina,
> even our state constitution notes, in Article 11, "Beneficent provision for
> the poor, the unfortunate, and the orphan is one of the first duties of a
> civilized and a Christian state."
>
> So as the presidential campaign comes to North Carolina on Tuesday, we in
> the Forward Together Moral Movement and the North Carolina NAACP urge the
> media not to take a positive or negative stance toward specific candidates,
> but to ask deep moral questions of all of them. We encourage media and
> voters to ask about public morality-determined by policy choices and budget
> choices, by concerns like Medicaid expansion, voting rights, and poverty.
>
> Ask them how they "manage to keep their integrity" when 500,000 low-income
> North Carolinians-including roughly 30,000 veterans-have no health
> insurance
> because Governor Pat McCrory and the legislature have chosen not to expand
> Medicaid. Medical authorities at UNC Hospitals estimate that as a result of
> this immoral choice, each year 2,500 North Carolinians will die
> unnecessarily due to lack of health care. Most will die because a lack of
> preventive care leads to needless strokes and heart attacks. Ask them why
> they place their political ideology over human needs.
>
> Ask state legislators how they manage to keep their integrity when they
> passed a voter suppression bill the afternoon after the US Supreme Court
> gutted the Voting Rights Act in the morning. Their voter suppression law
> made dozens of changes to voting policies, aiming to hold down turnout. Ask
> candidates what they are doing to expand voting, not restrict access to the
> ballot.
>
> Ask them what they will do to raise real wages, which have dropped steadily
> since the 1970s, leading to the greatest economic inequality in America
> since the Great Depression? Ask them if they support the fundamental
> principle of all great religions and ethical systems in the world: To love
> one's neighbor. Ask them whether they can name three or four policies that
> they believe would be the logical outgrowth of a social ethos grounded in
> love for one's neighbor. How would they act to bring those policies about?
> And in that context, what would a moral, comprehensive immigration policy
> look like?
>
> Few moral issues are more pressing than public education. We might ask
> candidates if they support the use of public money to pay for private
> schools, including voucher or tax credit programs. Do candidates support
> the
> unlimited replacement of traditional public schools with charter schools
> and
> how do they see the impact of charter schools on public education? What are
> some ways that candidates would support public school teachers?
>
> Most citizens increasingly support equality and justice for all citizens,
> including those of different sexual or gender orientations. One moral
> question for candidates is how they would safeguard the rights of LGBTQ
> citizens to be free of discrimination or attack because of their sexual or
> gender orientation.
>
> These are a few of the moral questions the Forward Together Moral Movement
> and the North Carolina NAACP believe the media should be asking candidates
> today. If we are to "prosecute Planned Parenthood," what will we prosecute
> them for? Would we prosecute those who slandered Planned Parenthood with
> doctored film footage? What kind of educational standards would best serve
> our children and nurture them for the world in which they are growing up?
> It
> is time that we asked serious moral questions of all of our candidates.
> The Rev. Dr. William J. Barber II is co-author of The Third Reconstruction:
> Moral Mondays, Fusion Politics and the Rise of a New Justice Movement [3],
> published in January 2016 by Beacon Press. In January 2016 he also began
> filing regular dispatches from the southern movement for racial justice for
> The Nation, resuming a role Martin Luther King Jr. once filled for the
> magazine. Rev. Barber II is the architect of the Forward Together Moral
> Monday Movement, president of the North Carolina NAACP and pastor of the
> Greenleaf Christian Church (Disciples of Christ) in Goldsboro. He is also
> president of Repairers of the Breach [4]. In 2015, he was the recipient of
> the Puffin/Nation Prize for Creative Citizenship.
> Error! Hyperlink reference not valid.
> Error! Hyperlink reference not valid.
> Report typos and corrections to 'corrections@alternet.org'. [5]
> Error! Hyperlink reference not valid.[6]
>
> Source URL:
> http://www.alternet.org/election-2016/its-not-about-trump-our-political-cult
> ure-corrupt
> Links:
> [1] http://www.alternet.org/authors/rev-dr-william-j-barber-ii
> [2] http://www.thenation.com
> [3] http://www.beacon.org/The-Third-Reconstruction-P1139.aspx
> [4] http://www.breachrepairers.org/
> [5] mailto:corrections@alternet.org?Subject=Typo on It's Not About
> Trump - Our Political Culture Is Corrupt
> [6] http://www.alternet.org/
> [7] http://www.alternet.org/%2Bnew_src%2B
>
>
>
No comments:
Post a Comment