Beloved Community and the Beloved Economy

 

Continuing the theme...

The Beloved Community/A Beloved Economy
Vs
A Loveless Community/the Extractive Economy

I'm currently reading a book called Beloved Economies: Transforming How We Work, by Jess Rimington and Joanna L. Cea. I'm still early in, but it appears to be a great work talking about positive workable solutions for our Work and a healthy community/communities and world.

It touches on and borrows much (with acknowledgment) from the giants (known and lesser known) who've gone before us. Beloved Community, of course, from Dr King (who found much of that notion in Jesus' Community and the Bible) and "loveless" communities and economies from Kentucky's own deeply missed, bell hooks.

I'm reading it because it was recommended by those in my work world specifically about building economies that work for folks with disabilities who've been so marginalized and left out of nearly ANY economy for, well, ever. But of course, it's much bigger than that.

Because what many of us have talked about for a long time involves systemic policies and rules and traditions that are intertwined and interwoven, I think it can be difficult (at least for me) to think clearly about it. I think this book will help/is helping.

I imagine I'll have more excerpts and thoughts from the book in the weeks to come.

"It raised a question:

If work doesn't have to be locked in
harmful, exhausting patterns for our endeavors to succeed,
why aren't more of us adopting
beloved patterns of working?"

The premise of the book is that the way we, collectively, work isn't working for many/most of us. The "system" has been designed to work very well for the people at the top of the system, the people who make the most money. And it DOES work well for them. But if you're someone from an historically oppressed or marginalized group or just a regular citizen, that system - the "loveless economy" or "business as usual" - is not working well. It doesn't bring true wealth to society and especially, the most marginalized groups of people.

As I read this book, I find it ringing true over and over on point after point and yet, at the same time, find myself trying to wrap my head around its implications. This is the problem with any New Way of Thinking, I think. Being a new way of thinking and doing things, means literally thinking in new ways and that can be hard to do if, you know, you only have known the old ways of thinking.

And by pointing to "new ways of thinking," the authors of the book continually point out that they're not really new. Many/most of these ideas are actually ancient in different cultures. They're just outside of our current way of doing business.

Beloved Community, Jesus and the Disinherited

It is rumored that Dr King often (always?) carried two books with him when he traveled: The Bible and Howard Thurman's "Jesus and the Disinherited." Some excerpts from the latter...

I can count on the fingers of one hand the number of times that I have heard a sermon on the meaning of religion, of Christianity, to the man who stands with his back against the wall. it is urgent that my meaning be crystal clear. The masses of men live with their backs constantly against the wall. They are the poor, the disinherited, the dispossessed.

What does our religion say to them? The issue is not what it counsels them to do for others whose need may be greater, but what religion offers to meet their own needs. The search for an answer to this question is perhaps the most important religious quest of modern life...

It was this kind of atmosphere [a desperate need the oppressed have for liberty] that characterized the life of the Jewish community when Jesus was a youth in Palestine. The urgent question was what must be the attitude toward Rome. Was any attitude possible that would be morally tolerable and at the same time preserve a basic self-esteem—without which life couldn’t possibly have any meaning?

The question was not academic. It was the most crucial of questions. In essence, Rome was the enemy; Rome symbolized total frustration; Rome was the great barrier to peace of mind.

And Rome was everywhere. No Jewish person of the period could deal with the question of his practical life, his vocation, displace in society, until first he had settled deep within himself this critical issue.

This is the position of the disinherited in every age. What must be the attitude toward the rulers, the controllers of political, social, and economic life? This is the question of the Negro in American life. Until he has faced and settle that question, he cannot inform his environment with reference to his own life, whatever may be his preparation of his pretensions.

In the main, there were two alternative faced by the Jewish minority of which Jesus was a part. Simply stated, these were to resist or not to resist. But each of these alternatives has within it secondary alternatives...

The solution which Jesus found for himself and for Israel, as they faced the hostility of the Greco-Roman world, becomes the word and the work of redemption for all the cast-down people in every generation and in every age. I mean this quite literally. I do not ignore the theological and metaphysical interpretation of the Christian doctrine of salvation. But the underprivileged everywhere have long since abandoned any hope that this type of salvation deals with the crucial issues by which their days are turned into despair without consolation.

The basic facts that Christianity as it was born in the mind of this Jewish teacher and thinker appears as a technique of survival for the oppressed.

That it became, through the intervening years, a religion of the powerful and the dominant, used sometimes as an instrument of oppression, must not tempt us into believing that it was thus in the mind and life of Jesus. “In him was life; and the life was the light of men.”

Whenever his spirit appears, the oppressed gather fresh courage; for he announced the good news that fear, hypocrisy, and hatred, the three hounds of hell that track the trail of the disinherited, need have no dominion over them...

https://epiphany-md.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/03/Jesus-and-the-Disinherited-.pdf

Beloved Community and a World House

 From Dr King's "The World House..."

Some years ago a famous novelist died. Among his papers was found a list of suggested plots for future stories, the most prominently underscored being this one: "A widely separated family inherits a house in which they have to live together." This is the great new problem of mankind. We have inherited a large house, a great "world house" in which we have to live together-- black and white, Easterner and Westerner, Gentile and Jew, Catholic and Protestant, Muslim and Hindu-- a family unduly separated in ideas, culture and interest, who, because we can never again live apart, must learn somehow to live with each other in peace.

However deeply American Negroes are caught in the struggle to be at last at home in our homeland of the United States, we cannot ignore the larger world house in which we are also dwellers. Equality with whites will not solve the problems of either whites or Negroes if it means equality in a world society stricken by poverty and in a universe doomed to extinction by war.

All inhabitants of the globe are now neighbors. This worldwide neighborhood has been brought into being largely as a result of the modern scientific and technological revolutions. The world of today is vastly different from the world of just one hundred years ago...

We live in a day, said the philosopher Alfred North Whitehead, "when civilization is shifting its basic outlook; a major turning point in history where the pre-suppositions on which society is structured are being analyzed, sharply challenged, and profoundly changed."

What we are seeing now is a freedom explosion, the realization of "an idea whose time has come," to use Victor Hugo's phrase. The deep rumbling of discontent that we hear today is the thunder of disinherited masses, rising from dungeons of oppression to the bright hills of freedom. In one majestic chorus the rising masses are singing, in the words of our freedom song, "Ain't gonna let nobody turn us around."

All over the world like a fever, freedom is spreading in the widest liberation movement in history. The great masses of people are determined to end the exploitation of their races and lands. They are awake and moving toward their goal like a tidal wave. You can hear them rumbling in every village street, on the docks, in the houses, among the students, in the churches and at political meetings. For several centuries the direction of history flowed from the nations and societies of Western Europe out into the rest of the world in "conquests" of various sorts. That period, the era of colonialism, is at an end. East is moving West. The earth is being redistributed.

https://www.beaconbroadside.com/broadside/2010/01/martin-luther-king-jr-the-world-house-excerpt.html

Shame, Shame and Shame

Shame
Shame on Joe Biden for his border policy and his "Parole" answer to letting some people in conditionally which illegally (or so say the lawyers I've heard/read talk about the topic) still denies asylum seekers from, you know, seeking asylum. I know that Biden and the Democrats are ham-strung by the GOP (and some Democrats) who won't create reasonable border policies that simply allow those escaping starvation and violence to enjoy the human right of self-determination. This must change.

Shame

On the GOP (and some Dems) in Congress for not doing better by our immigrant neighbors and asylum seekers. This must change and we need the GOP to be more welcoming to those seeking liberty and safety and the Democrats and the citizens of the US to apply more pressure to all our representatives to see this change. Again, this is a basic human rights issue.

"Imposing asylum bans, expulsions, or other punitive policies on people seeking asylum at the U.S. border is both a violation of U.S. refugee law and the Refugee Convention."

https://humanrightsfirst.org/library/biden-administration-use-and-expansion-of-trump-policy-to-ban-people-seeking-asylum-endangers-lives-tramples-human-rights/

Shame

Shame on the GOP. Shame, shame, shame. The silence in the face of recently elected George Santos and his completely fabricated "history" of "accomplishments is an embarrassment to a free republic. Santos is the ultimate outcome of the modern Trump-style GOP (although it began prior to Trump). He has out-trumped Trump in his complete disregard and attack on facts. His campaign and election is a mockery of a free republic.

But I'm not blaming Santos, not him alone. What he did was deplorable and I hope he gets some help. But he's one man. The GOP, on the other hand, have remained silent so far as I have seen. There certainly has not been an outcry from the GOP demanding that he step down.

This complete disregard of facts is an attack on facts and, by extension, our free republic. Santos, for his part, has denied that he's even done anything wrong. He says he just "embellished" his resume. Bullshit. That is nothing but vomitous bullshit. Saying, "I had about a 4.0 in college..." when you had a 3.4 is an embellishment. Saying you graduated from a college you didn't attend or that you worked at places you didn't work is a lie. I am at a loss as to what to do with the GOP that remains silent, indicating that power is more important than facts or doing the right thing.

And while I'm at it: SHAME on conservative churches/christians who, so far as I've seen, have remained silent about Santos. Lord, have mercy.

Finally...

Shame

Shame on Biden for having classified documents in the wrong place. This is, of course, wrong and should be investigated. BUT, by all evidence to emerge so far, it sounds very much like a simple oversight and mistake and, thus, not a crime at all.

So, Way to Go, Biden, for showing how to deal with these sorts of mistakes. He informed the authorities as soon as he heard about it, has cooperated entirely and has not, in anyway whatsoever, tried to defend it or demand that he owns these documents and they belong to him and otherwise obstructed justice.

And so,

SHAME

On those conservatives who try to make a false equivalence between Biden and Trump on this issue. There's no comparison and those who accuse Biden of hypocrisy while not condemning Trump are, themselves, showing themselves to be the hypocrites.

I Had a Dream

 In my dream, I was feeling ill, heavy, bloated, slow-moving, weighed down.

I went to the doctor's office (walked and bused there, in spite of not feeling well), where they did some tests and seemed quite concerned, but also unsure of what to do next.

So, they recommended more tests from more doctors, and told me to get with the front desk to find out details of where to go and when.

I went to the front desk, where I could see the nurse had some official-looking document printed out with four or five doctors' names. But instead of giving that to me, she handed me a piece of paper with a hand-written address on it and, looking furtively around, said, "Go here, now..."

While this seemed a bit odd, to be sent directly to another doctor for more tests right away, and with no name, no phone number or anything but an address, I followed her directions and started walking to this new appointment.

The trip to this new place seemed to take a long time, but I don't really remember any details (I think I stopped for a fund-raiser for homelessness and saw there the guy who sells hotdogs down the street from my office... but that may have been a separate dream...). I just remember feeling more and more weighed down and bigger, as if this illness was literally making me rounder, larger.

I believe the address was just an address, nothing else, but I kept looking at the paper as if it were giving me directions, leading me further from a developed city and further into the woods, until I was literally on a path in the woods. Then, at the "end of the woods" (or so it felt), there was a beautiful, oddly-shaped tree.

I felt I was supposed to climb it, but by this point, I was totally worn out. I felt even more tired, uncomfortably physically larger, my legs were tired, my hands were swollen and I just couldn't do it. Besides which, there was a storm brewing, the wind was blowing, leaves were whipping around and it felt rather unsafe.

Then, I think a wolf (or a scary wolf-like animal) showed up. I heard it first, a large animal moving in the woods around me, it seemed on all sides. Finally, it came out of the woods and while I don't think it was behaving in a threatening manner, wolf, you know, so I was sorta scared.

In my fear, I began climbing the tree. As I did, the wolf ran over to the bottom of the tree to chase me further up. Up I climbed, further than necessary to escape the wolf. Up into the blowing leaves with the limbs whipping around, threatening to knock my tired and gravity-soaked body to the ground. Eventually, I reached an opening in the tree branches, where I could see the forest around me and all the trees blowing in the wind.

Having a secure, large, flat branch below me and the tree against my back, I stood up and stretched out my arms, enjoying the terrifying wind that was flowing through the forest like an out-of-control river. And, as I stretched out my arms and stood there - autumn leaves blowing all around - parts of "Me" were blowing off, all that bloating and excess that I had accumulated were blowing off just like the leaves that were blowing off the trees.

I began to feel lighter, less weighed-down, more invigorated and still the wind whipped off bits of me to flutter away. Finally, I reached a point where I was so light, so freed from gravity, that I knew I wouldn't be able to stand there much longer, I was going to lose my balance and fall.

And then, I did.

Only, by that time, there wasn't much of "me" left, and - with the sky clearing and the wind lessening to a gentle breeze - I floated down to the ground below like just another autumn leaf.

Although I thought I was dying by then, it was an exhilarating and freeing fall to the forest floor that seemed to last a very long time.

From that point, I think it was as if I were seeing the scene apart from myself. I saw the bottom of the tree, the forest floor with golden and red leaves, and the wolf, still waiting at the bottom of the tree. The wolf padded over to a pile of leaves and began pawing through them and there I was, made whole and healthy.

I woke up soon thereafter.

Happy New Year.