This afternoon I plopped on the couch while my wife Deena was watching a rally where former President Barak Obama was speaking. It was in Wisconsin, that he was just concluding his remarks. The repeated rounds of applause were positively thunderous. As he was about to introduce Vice-Presidential candidate Tim Walz (D), Bruce Springsteen’s voice could be heard in the background singing “Land of Hope and Dreams.” Springsteen has always been a favorite musician of mine, at least since “The River.” I like ballads. A guy gets off work at the mill, buys a beer and a dollar’s worth of gas, drives home in his beat up truck and his wife tells him she heard from her doctor today that she’s pregnant. Songs like that.
I feel like I’m somehow privileged. Not because I’m white, but because I’m living in America. We have serious poverty here, but you don’t know how bad poverty can be until you visit a Fourth World country. Try eating cardboard or grass or feeding it to your hungry children. Many countries cannot feed their people or import food. In the U.S., we pay farmers not to plant crops.
Migrants walk or climb trucks or trains to transit Mexico as they follow the Northern Star to America. They flee horrible, unimaginable conditions to reach our borders. Some, but a very small minority have ever seen the inside of a prison. Fewer still, the walls of an asylum. Will they ever find peace and acceptance from the Yanqui? Even from their Christian brothers and sisters? As “The Boss” sings:
“Leave behind your sorrows
Let this day be the last
Tomorrow there’ll be sunshine
And all this darkness past“[Land of Hope and Dreams lyrics © Mayfield Music, Bruce Springsteen Music, Sony Pop Music Publishing, Eldridge Publishing Co.]
“Land of Hope and Dreams” is a song for working men and women. Most of us can probably identify with it, but unfortunately not all of us are able to. Many of us search for coins between our sofa cushions a week before payday. Others have dry cleaning bills that we could never personally afford. We pay regressive taxes (excise taxes, sales taxes, property taxes) which may seem fair on the surface, but which proportionately hurt the poor more than the wealthy.
ORIGINS OF INEQUALITY
My favorite political theorist was Jean Jacques Rousseau. In 1754, he wrote a treatise called “On the Origin and Foundation of The Inequality of Mankind . . .” Rousseau points out that in nature–man’s original state–there was no inequality between people. Writes Rousseau:
“I conceive that there are two kinds of inequality among the human species; one, which I call natural or physical, because it is established by nature, and consists in a difference of age, health, bodily strength, and the qualities of the mind or of the soul: and another, which may be called moral or political inequality, because it depends on a kind of convention, and is established, or at least authorised by the consent of men. This latter consists of the different privileges, which some men enjoy to the prejudice of others; such as that of being more rich, more honoured, more powerful or even in a position to exact obedience.”
Young people are sometimes preferred over aged one for certain purposes, such as military service. It may be illegal to say to people “you are too old,” but de facto age discrimination certainly exists. In fact, it exists in Article II of our Constitution when the framers required that someone who wanted to serve as President must be at least thirty-five years of age.
Rousseau also points out that health is a consideration. Before the Affordable Care Act (“Obamacare” to the Republicans), health insurance companies would not insure people with pre-existing health conditions. You might get a policy that would cover you if you developed cancer, but not if you had heart disease. Some jobs require that you have certain body strength, minimum height requirements, or be a certain sex. Presently, many voters will rule out voting for Vice-President Kamala Harris for President because she is a woman. They would prefer a man, any man in some cases (based on the enthusiasm for Donald Trump.). You may also flip these points around. An eighteen-year-old baseball player with a breathtaking fastball might be preferred over another player twenty years his senior. At eighteen, a baseball player would be considered an investment (like a franchise player in football.) If you are much older than that, you are a question mark.
Rousseau is saying that people and society have burdened citizens by making them unequal. If a high school student drives to school in a BMW or a, expensive, sporty car (which his parents have bought for him), he immediately earns the respect of his peers. Expensive clothing also separates young people as well as neuro-atypical behavior or physical disabilities. Students classify their peers as “jocks, goths, geeks or nerds, stoners, kickers, zesties” and so on. This is an informal type of inequality. And these terms don’t even include racial slurs or comments about national origin. Then there is beauty and so on.
In some countries, you are born disadvantaged if you are female, or in a certain caste, or to poor parents or a family of a certain religion or ethnic group. The possibilities for inequality are endless. It’s less than twenty miles from San Diego, California to Tijuana in Baja, California, but the inequality between being a citizen of the U.S. and a citizen of Mexico is striking, and substantial.
Jesus in Luke 12:48 notes:
“From everyone who has been given much, much will be demanded; and from the one who has been entrusted with much, much more will be asked.”
What does this mean? What has been given to us at birth? Beauty? Health? Wealth? Intelligence? Each of these allow you to get ahead in life. People born uncomely, in poor health, to poor families with limited intellectual potential through no fault of their own face a future of at best marginal success or inequality.
The question is, can this same statement by Jesus apply to nations as well as individuals? The U.S. has mineral wealth. We have deposits of gold, silver, copper, and other precious metals. We have petroleum. The U.S. has natural beauty and our coasts contain plentiful harvests of cod, flounder, salmon and other fish if we are careful when we harvest them. Our soil is rich and we can grow more wheat, corn, soybeans, sugar and vegetables per acre than most if not all other countries in the world can.
We also attract talent from other countries. How many readers have physicians or medical specialists from India or Pakistan? We also have talented scientists from China or Japan.
If we as a people by accident of birth (as mine was, because I might easily have been born in South Africa as in the U.S. because my grandparents almost emmigrated to that country instead of the U.S.) have been given much, then do we not have a responsibility to help others? I’m not talking about the Marshall Plan or foreign aid to Egypt. I’m talking about helping people who come to our shores for the same reason your ancestors did.
Again, we cannot be “home” to several billion people in the world. So, Congress must “fix” the immigration problem, not any single President. The Democrats and the Republicans must work together to accomplish this.
We need a annual birthrate of 2.1% to replace our population. Last year, the net growth was only 0.5% (and that was the largest gain in the past six years!) Less babies are being born even as the workforce grows older. So, there is a need for more people. We should consider this before we pack them on busses to ship them off. Because they are Hispanic. Because they speak French. Because they are Muslim.
Jesus was and is a revolutionary. There is no way you can “mainstream” his comments without twisting them. I do believe that we can responsibly accommodate what God in Christ expects of us and this is how we make American great again!