No Surprises

Two weeks ago the House passed a "landmark" health care bill by a squeaker, 220 to 215. Now, as President Obama remarked, it's up to the Senate "...to take the baton and bring this effort to the finish line on behalf of the American people. And I’m absolutely confident that they will."

Not bloody likely. As Senator Lindsey Graham (R-SC) threatened emphatically on CBS's Face the Nation, "The House bill is dead on arrival in the Senate. Just look at how it passed." So opponents are dug in for a fight.

Ironically, Republicans have coined this legislation a "government takeover of health care." Meanwhile, the President is calling it "insurance reform." Actually, neither could be further from the truth.

Essentially, despite some minor reforms that would actually be helpful, what this bill does in the big picture is lock us into a failing system of private insurance. Instead of reigning in the insurance industry and protecting consumers as originally intended, the bill would require all Americans to purchase health insurance. Not only do insurance companies make out like bandits with over 30 million new customers; they also get subsidized by the government.

And what happened to the so-called "public option" that was supposed to provide competition and control costs? It's been whittled down to a nub that will cover only about 6 of the 45 million without health insurance. And that anemic little option is sure to be reduced even further in the Senate, if it makes it into the final bill at all.

In short, just like every other attempt at "reform" that makes its way through the congressional sausage factory, this bill turns out to be nothing more than another big fat giveaway for big business.

Listen to the rhetoric coming from the Oval Office: "I’m equally convinced that on the day that we gather here at the White House and I sign comprehensive health insurance reform legislation into law, they’ll be able to join their House colleagues and say that this was their finest moment in public service—the moment we delivered change we promised to the American people and did something to leave this country stronger than we found it.”

Change? Really? How do they define it? Change: defn. The ever increasing power and wealth of the few in place of the many.

If only the GOP were opposing the bills for the right reasons. They're right on one score: it is socialism; it's just not the kind of socialism they're thinking of. For it's the same brand of corporate socialism that has coddled and subsidized the private sector for decades. The Vice-President put it aptly this week on The Daily Show: "My grandfather used to say, 'Joey, it's socialism for the rich, and capitalism for the poor.'"

The rich get richer. The poor poorer. And they call it "reform."

Time to Disenthrall Ourselves

During the first two centuries of the Church’s existence, Christians throughout the Greco-Roman world suffered the cruelest of persecutions. Commonly charged by their pagan neighbors with being anthropophagoi (cannibals), misanthropoi (haters of mankind), and even atheoi (impious, atheists), like the Jews before them, they became the victims of the basest calumnies. To the cosmopolitan Greek mind, a stubborn refusal to “fit in” was the worst of crimes, as was the audacity of condensing the entire pantheon down to only one God. While such allegations rarely took the form of legal charges, intolerance and at times mob violence against Christians frequently brought the curious little sect to the attention of the authorities. Once in court, not so easy to counter were the charges of inflexibilis obstinatio (inflexible obstinacy, an unwillingness to recant) and maiestas (treason against the Roman state)-- especially when disproving them involved performing acts of idolatry.

Today, similar charges are laid at the Church’s door. The only difference is that now they’re largely true.

What has happened to the Church? The faith that once championed the poor, raised its voice on behalf of the voiceless, stood up to the bullying of empires, and cared for the earth, has become a noisy and unthinking mob, a mouthpiece for greed and privilege, restless for war and bloodshed, running like lemmings toward a precipice it thinks is heaven, while pushing the rest of the world toward the brink of Armageddon.

Whom are we protecting? Certainly not ourselves. What have Big Oil, Big Pharma, Big Agro, and the Big Insurance and Defense industries done for us that we spread out like a carpet and allow them to walk upon our backs like some oriental potentate? When did we agree to become their attack dogs? When did they become our masters that we should be beholden to them? Is it such a blatant sacrilege to try to build a little bit of heaven on earth? To help the poor, to carry the burdens of the weak, to love our enemies, to care for God’s creation, and to make peace?

I know that there are healthier patches of Christianity in this country, but the pack with the loudest voices seem to drown out the rest. Why are they so toxic? Because this form of Christianity is not true biblical Christianity at all but a syncretistic blend of the Bible, free market capitalism, and armed paranoia. It has little connection to the Sermon on the Mount that I’m familiar with. “Blessed are the rich… Blessed are the powerful…Blessed are those who condemn and judge… Blessed are the warmongers…”

Yes, blessed are the free markets, unfettered with regulation; blessed is globalization; blessed is the land rid of indigenous peoples who don't know how to strip it or mine it; blessed are the streams and aquifers filled with slurry and sludge; and blessed are those damned polar ice caps, melted so we can at last get at what's beneath.

This is a faith that hates the word restraint.

When this nation eventually comes to a close and its final history is written, what will be said of the Church and its role in the demise of the Union Lincoln once called the “last, great hope of earth”? How we aided and abetted the greedy in raping the land, whole people groups, and even the air we breathe.

If these words sound harsh, remember that our Master’s most caustic words were reserved for the religious establishment of his day that shut the kingdom of heaven in men’s faces. “Woe to you, teachers of the law and Pharisees, hypocrites! You travel over land and sea to win a single convert, and when he becomes one, you make him twice as much a son of hell as you are.” (Mt 23:15)

In the conclusion to his address to Congress in 1862, Abraham Lincoln said, “…The dogmas of the quiet past are inadequate to the stormy present. The occasion is piled high with difficulty, and we must rise with the occasion. As our case is new, so we must think anew, and act anew. We must disenthrall ourselves, and then we shall save our country.”

If I could say one thing to the church in America at this moment in time, it would be this: “Let us disenthrall ourselves.” Stop listening to the warmongers, the hate-mongers, the purveyors of intolerance, greed, and the status quo. And start putting our Master's words into action. If we’re not sure what that means, then it is time for us to become children again in the kingdom of God, to sit at the Lord’s feet and learn from him.

Le Plus Ca Change...

(I want to reproduce here a speech given by the late Robert F. Kennedy in 1968, at the height of the Vietnam War. I do not need to point out the many correspondences with today's headlines. They speak for themselves.)

"I do not want--as I believe most Americans do not want--to sell out American interests, to simply withdraw, to raise the white flag of surrender. That would be unacceptable to us as a country and as a people. But I am concerned--as I believe most Americans are concerned--that the course we are following at the present time is deeply wrong. I am concerned--as I believe most Americans are concerned--that we are acting as if no other nations existed, against the judgment and desires of neutrals and our historic allies alike. I am concerned--as I believe most Americans are concerned--that our present course will not bring victory; will not bring peace; will not stop the bloodshed; and will not advance the interests of the United States or the cause of peace in the world. I am concerned that, at the end of it all, there will only be more Americans killed; more of our treasure spilled out; and because of the bitterness and hatred on every side of this war, more hundreds of thousands of [civilians] slaughtered; so they may say, as Tacitus said of Rome: 'They made a desert, and called it peace.' . . .

"The reversals of the last several months have led our military to ask for more troops. This weekend, it was announced that some of them--a 'moderate' increase, it was said--would soon be sent. But isn't this exactly what we have always done in the past? If we examine the history of this conflict, we find the dismal story repeated time after time. Every time--at every crisis--we have denied that anything was wrong; sent more troops; and issued more confident communiques. Every time, we have been assured that this one last step would bring victory. And every time, the predictions and promises have failed and been forgotten, and the demand has been made again for just one more step up the ladder. But all the escalations, all the last steps, have brought us no closer to success than we were before. . . . And once again the President tells us, as we have been told for twenty years, that 'we are going to win'; 'victory' is coming. . . . It becoming more evident with every passing day that the victories we achieve will only come at the cost of the destruction for the nation we once hoped to help. . . .

"Let us have no misunderstanding. [They] are a brutal enemy indeed. Time and time again, they have shown their willingness to sacrifice innocent civilians, to engage in torture and murder and despicable terror to achieve their ends. This is a war almost without rules or quarter. There can be no easy moral answer to this war, no one-sided condemnation of American actions. What we must ask ourselves is whether we have a right to bring so much destruction to another land, without clear and convincing evidence that this is what its people want. But that is precisely the evidence we do not have. . . .

"The war, far from being the last critical test for the United States, is in fact weakening our position in Asia and around the world, and eroding the structure of international cooperation which has directly supported our security for the past three decades. . . . All this bears directly and heavily on the question of whether more troops should now be sent--and, if more are sent, what their mission will be. We are entitled to ask--we are required to ask--how many more men, how many more lives, how much more destruction will be asked, to provide the military victory that is always just around the corner, to pour into this bottomless pit of our dreams? But this question the administration does not and cannot answer. It has no answer--none but the ever-expanding use of military force and the lives of our brave soldiers, in a conflict where military force has failed to solve anything yet. . . .

"But the costs of the war's present course far outweigh anything we can reasonably hope to gain by it, for ourselves or for the people of Vietnam. It must be ended, and it can be ended, in a peace of brave men who have fought each other with a terrible fury, each believing he and he alone was in the right. We have prayed to different gods, and the prayers of neither have been answered fully. Now, while there is still time for some of them to be partly answered, now is the time to stop. . . .

"You are the people, as President Kennedy said, who have 'the least ties to the present and the greatest ties to the future.' I urge you to learn the harsh facts that lurk behind the mask of official illusion with which we have concealed our true circumstances, even from ourselves. Our country is in danger: not just from foreign enemies; but above all, from our misguided policies--and what they can do to the nation that Thomas Jefferson once told us was the last, best hope of man. There is a contest on, not for the rule of America, but for the heart of America. . . . I ask you to go forth and work for new policies--work to change our direction--and thus restore our place at the point of moral leadership, in our country, in our hearts, and all around the world."