One Lump or Two?  

By Harry T. Cook 

4/5/13

Harry T. Cook

Our friends of tea party fame have put me off tea forever. This party has so constipated the legislative process in Congress and in many state legislatures that government can't -- well, can't go, can't do its thing.

The tp-ers are unwilling to enact budgets that include revenue sufficient to enable government to do its work. Of course, the whole perverse idea is to reduce the size and scope of government so as to render it unable to function in a coherent manner.

"Taxes are heretical and regulation blasphemous." That is the subtext of the Ayn Ryan tea party-sponsored budget bill passed by the House of Representatives the other week. Were that bill to clear Congress and be signed into law by the president, it would very quickly make the poor poorer and the rich richer. It is not possible that such a state of affairs is what the coiners of the phrase "more perfect Union" had in mind.

Ryan insists that government must be reduced in size by cutting many of its social programs, including food stamps and Medicaid. Anyway, he says, it's not government's job to take care of people. It is the churches' job to provide such services.

There is scarcely a church anywhere in America these days that doesn't have a food pantry or some kind of food outreach. It is estimated that congregations in the United States would have to raise a minimum of $50,000 per annum above their already stretched budgets to take over the quite-efficient government food stamp program.  

For those with fabulous incomes, the Ryan-GOP budget would lower taxes to levels even less than they are already. That's the whole point. Those who have rocketed into the financial stratosphere should get to keep more of their income. As for those who haven't been as fortunate, tough cookies.

An acquaintance of mine is proud, he says, to be a member of the tea party. He relishes any opportunity to tell me again and again that the "tea" stands for "taxed enough already." He is backed up by Speaker of the House John Boehner and Senate minority leader Mitch McConnell, who have decreed that "revenue" is now a swear word. No more revenue from taxes. The future is cutting, "and damn'd be him that first cries 'Hold, enough!' "

That is a cup of tea from which the American people should not be so quick to sip. Establishing a Gilded Age kind of economic oligarchy that is already fairly well entrenched would, in a democratic society, be an abrogation of the social contract.

It will be said that the Constitution mandates such guarantees as freedom of religion, of the press, of lawful assembly as well as equal treatment under law, but that it does not guarantee anyone a place in the sun.

However, as 20th-century social and political philosopher Isaiah Berlin has said: "To offer political rights, or safeguards against intervention by the state, to [those] who are ill-clothed, illiterate, underfed and diseased is to mock their condition. ... What is freedom to those who cannot make use of it? Without adequate conditions for the use of freedom, what is the value of freedom?"

By that measure, Ryan, Boehner and McConnell and the tea party mobs chasing them all over Washington, D.C., with torches and pitchforks in hand are -- and I will say it -- un-American. And if they espouse either Judaism or Christianity, then they are not good Jews or Christians. Moreover, the tea they brew is toxic -- veritable hemlock to a government of the People, by the People and for the People.

The medieval social economics espoused by the likes of those Republican leaders would lead this country over a precipice. Do they not realize that in a democracy of the kind our founding parents and the likes of Abraham Lincoln, Theodore and Franklin Roosevelt, Harry Truman, Lyndon Johnson, Richard Nixon (yes, Nixon; he was a progressive!) and Bill Clinton helped to create and maintain, taxes are essentially membership dues?

You want your roads and streets and bridges to be safe and passable, pay up. You want the defense apparatus of your country to guard you waking and sleeping, pay up. You want your children and grandchildren educated in decent schools by qualified professional teachers, pay up. Because your values do not include the deliberate infliction of cruelty on the poor and disadvantaged, pay up.

If you're in that fabled top 1%, pay up big time. You can afford it. In fact, you can't afford not to pay up if you wish to be known as a real American and as a member in good standing of whatever religion you espouse. The ethical mandates of all major religions are remarkably similar.

If we're lucky in this country, a great figure will rise up and speak to us as Winston Churchill spoke to England in 1940. We as a nation might fall in line behind that person even as Britain fell in behind Winston Churchill at a time it most needed to follow a charismatic leader:

"We have differed and quarreled in the past; but now one bond must unite us all, that we may never surrender ourselves to the shame of gross neglect of our disadvantaged brothers and sisters. ... Should we fail in this regard, the United States of America and all of our history of democracy will begin to sink into the abyss of a new Dark Age, made the more gruesome and perhaps more protracted by a revolution of those hopeless at the bottom of the heap on top of which the greedy even now teeter in uncertainty. Let us therefore brace ourselves to our duties, and so bear ourselves that, if America were to last another thousand years, this could be our finest hour."

re essay of 3/29/13 About Easter                

Tom Hall, Foster, RI:

Right on!

Mark Bendure, Grosse Pointe Park, MI:

As always, a thoughtful new look at religious dogma -- the crucifixion and resurrection as an exclamation point on the theme so often repeated at funerals, that death (in the worldly sense) is not in fact a great tragedy if the preceding life was righteous and memorable. The timing of Easter with the unfolding spring (at least it is supposed to be spring here in Michigan, but that is another story) is a reminder of the circle of life, like the circle of the seasons, with the fresh and new eventually replacing those whose earthly time has expired. As contemporaries begin to pass, I am always delighted to see grandchildren and other youngsters with unjaded minds and hearts, their hopes, dreams, and aspirations yet unshattered. In elementary school, getting caught talking or misbehaving in class earned "lines": writing a saying a certain number of times. To this day I remember one I wrote many times, "Life given us is short, but memory of a well-spent life is eternal". That the story of Jesus persists to this day attests to the wisdom of that adage.

Roxanne Taylor, Boca Raton, FL:

Your essay on Easter would be quite unpopular with people around here, so I did not forward it as I often do the ones that come on Fridays. I like to be popular, but I'm glad you don't mind being the opposite.

Blayney Colmore, La Jolla, CA:

What could be worse than death? Lots. Increasingly, I wonder if we might consider the odd-against wonder of having been conceived and born, alongside the mercy of dying, as the way we are invited into, and then excused, from this "brief moment onstage" we refer to as life. Our fascination with consciousness has seduced us into thinking we have separated ourselves from the rest of this wondrous terrarium, and that the possibility to my consciousness being scattered and becoming compost for new life, is monstrous. That we find it such an insult to ego has fed the coffers of many a religion. Resurrection is the claim that nothing, not even the certainty of our impending death, need rob us of the significance of being here, and of our obligation to respond to that unearned gift by offering as much of our creative energy as we are able. Maybe everyone should have at least a small garden to tend so as to become infected with the thrill of the cycle of life and death.

Abbot Fr. Tom Jackson Order of Christian Workers, Tyler, TX:

I'll tell you, I'll put you and Doctorow side-by-side any day.

Tracey Martin, Southfield, MI:

Marvelous. I'm confident I won't be back and don't really have such a desire, as what, into what, for what. I'd like to know, however, what happens next. "Not being" troubles me only because, by being, I know what it is. A friend and I have a pact: The first one to enter the nursing home, the survivor kills her. Perhaps I'll go as one last sip of the fermented grape slides effortlessly down my throat, the bottle and I expiring simultaneously.

Cynthia Chase, Laurel, MD:

I never really liked Easter, except for marshmallow Peeps (only the yellow ones). I loved Christmas, but always found Easter kinda creepy. For one thing, in my early 20s, four people dear to me died unexpectedly in the space of two years. Since they "didn't believe any of that stuff," Billy Graham and his ilk kindly assured me that they had gone to hell and urged me to escape the same fate. So much for Easter. I just couldn't get past the funereal scent of lilies and hyacinths and the insistence (by some) that the resurrection be taken literally. This year, thanks to you and others, such as Marcus Borg, I can celebrate Easter. Here's what I tell myself about the gospels. They were written at a time when the Romans' patience with the Jews had run out. They cracked down hard. The Temple was destroyed. The survivors looked around and said to themselves, "Now what?" Some of them remembered stories about Jesus and huddled together. We like to think that they saw themselves as the body of Christ in the world, yet we know from Paul's letters that they were a pretty fractious bunch. But, as some like to think of God as saying, "I have no other plan," so there we are. The Easter story is a parable, not a news report.

Earl Troglin, Spartansburg, SC:

[Said your essay]: "If you want to know how this story turns out, finish it yourself." That seems to be the essence of creative preachers as they craft their versions of the Easter "event." Some have a strange gift of telling the rest of the story with a twist of words that get imbedded in the beliefs of those "who continue to believe that stories are, by the fact of their being told, true." (Doctorow) It happened in our Bible Belt landscape on Easter morning. One whose beliefs are factually grounded in the stories attended the first annual Easter sunrise service in his favorite strawberry patch and had a letter published in our local newspaper with high praise for one comment voiced by the preacher. The quote was a declaration of clarity about the event. It was a "Son Rise service, not a sun rise service." The latter part of the quote was factual. There was no sun, only clouds with rain, but that was acceptable for a Son Rise celebration.