Check out http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/12/09/AR2007120900911.html?wpisrc=newsletter.
Every time I read much about the farm subsidy bill, I tend toward despair. It is a bill that comes up only every five years and is very far removed from original intent and draws much lobbying money, including much in Georgia. The rich get much of the subsidy, it does little to protect smaller farmers and apparently does major economic and personal damage in less developed countries of the world. The proposed reforms have bipartisan support, but big money and power are likely to carry the day.
People of faith in the US should care about such matters. How can we confront them beyond just writing an occasional letter to a Senator or a Representative from whom we get almost a form response? Are all these issues just too complicated, too controversial, too difficult and/or too inconvenient?
If the answer is that such issues (and each of us could name numerous others) are important but just fall far down on the priority or cost/benefit scale of our Christian action list, what are the items that for each of us are at the top of our list ?
I do not have answers. I am frustrated. Have, for example, people of faith so little leverage against the wishes of big money and big power? Is there anything that we (JEPR folks) can do, and not necessarily about this particular issue, to have our governmental representatives pay more attention to the mandates that faith puts upon us?
In my more cynical and frustrated modes, I suspect that we get the government that we deserve. I also feel that the faith communities often pay woefully little attention to justice for those groups upon which Jesus' focused so much attention, even while we do pretty well at the charity side.
For suggested effective solutions, we ( or at least I) would owe you forever. Absent the silver bullet, do you have comments, thoughts, advice, suggestions?
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Scott,
Here are some scattered thoughts and rants...it just feels good sometimes. ;)
I hear your cynicism and feel it myself many times. The thing that people in general lack is a collective will--guts to get something done. Individuals have it, but it's so hard to mobilize people in an age when fashionable causes result in all causes to be seen as fringe. Yet some people don't help in the world of activism (i.e. public examples of Sharpton and Jackson). Passion with an equal dose of perspective would go a long way, however. I think people are numbed (yet entertained) by the issue-driven duels that we see on the news. I'll steal a metaphor from Andy...It's like turning on FOX news and you have a coke and a pepsi rep giving their best spiel and ripping into each other. Wouldn't it be more helpful to have a nutritionist give comment on both products instead?
The collective numbing seems to produce a characteristic that thinks those who go around the bend are just fanatics and inconvenient people.
Like in the video I posted, there's a scene when the person is on a hamster wheel going to work to make money to buy things to go home and watch tv that says to buy more things so you work again to pay for new things and etc....
The more I watch TV and observe people in public places it just seems like there is so little "soul" there...so much seems to be surface-level pleasure seeking....thus it revolves around pleasure activities or things--not the meaningful relationships that those activities and things might help provide a space for.
So you ask regarding people of faith...have they so little leverage? It seems we don't. Because so many people of faith worship a tiny Jesus wrapped in a package of capitalistic work ethic, prosperity, and modern individualism. If Jesus busted out of those trappings for even a fraction of folks in this country, we might have a fighting chance.
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