Most of you do not realize that Father Orthoduck is an Adjunct Professor of World Religion at an university in the USA. He finds it very interesting to read the answers that students give to various questions. But, the one below had him laughing quite hard. This is only a partial excerpt from all that the student actually said.
Another interesting aspect that I touched on in my post was the actual definition of “evil”. With the wide diversity in the U.S not everyone’s idea is the same. For instance, to key off of comments I have seen, not everyone in the U.S believes in military and actually consider it evil. Being an active duty member myself I would obviously not agree with this opinion, causing a blur between good and evil. That battle has now become what is “fair”, incorporating equal rights for everyone, even when their views or ideas seem naive to a person with a conflicting thought. Ironically, this could be compared to an elementary school yard, leaving the teachers and employees left to make sense of a chaotic scenario.
So what do you think? Has our sense of right and wrong, our conscience, degenerated to the point that all we have is a schoolyard sense of “fair,” as in, “Teacher, that’s not fair, he had the ball yesterday.” Father Orthoduck asks this because it seems that much of the argument over subjects such as the budget or affirmative action or future planning has all become arguments about “fair,” rather than about what is best for this country and her people. For instance, Tea Party Republicans are now talking openly about curtailing, maybe severely, Social Security benefits. The outcry has been all on the line of, “that’s not fair, we have contributed to the system for years.” However, the person has no answer for how to finance the system correctly, because that answer would require some sacrifice, and, yes, maybe some “unfairness” to those who have contributed faithfully. In affirmative action, for years the outcry has been, “That’s not fair, s/he took a job I should have had because I (see myself as) am better qualified.” When it is pointed out that the target group was kept from getting that type of job previously and would have had no chance to get the experience necessary to be as fully qualified, the answer is always, “Well, that is not fair to me, so tough for them.” However, the person has no answer for how to ensure equality between groups, because that answer would require some sacrifice, and, yes, some “unfairness” to those who have had the benefits of the system available to them longer. Future planning in Congress appears to be more about trying to cut those things with which that particular Congressperson (Rep or Dem) politically disagrees and keeping untouched those with which s/he politically agrees rather than of reaching those compromises that would cut from every part of the budget and which would require financial sacrifices from the citizens in order to achieve financial wholeness. From the citizen’s part, despite the years of benefits which we received but were never paid for (deficit spending), there is an outcry that taxes cannot be raised, and must be lowered. There is no sense that maybe we need to sacrifice in this country, whether or not we personally benefited, in order to see financial wholeness return. (In passing, we all did benefit from that deficit spending, we just do not always want to admit it.)
In other words, Father Orthoduck thinks that this student has seen clearly that any sense of “ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country,” has become a childish game of, “It’s not fair!” The idea of self-sacrifice for the greater good has become the idea that no one can touch any of MY entitlements or MY stuff. Please notice that this student is an active duty member of the USA military. S/he knows what it is to sacrifice for the greater good of this country, to the point of laying down his/her life if necessary, and s/he is getting to the disgusted point. So, do you think this student is right?
As things stand now, sacrifice must begin at the top and work downward. This is not only a matter of fairness and yes, justice; it is also an issue of economic sustainability.
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/03/opinion/03reich.html?pagewanted=1&_r=2
The problem is, we are all being conditioned to fight with each other over crumbs.. It is as if there are ten cookies on a table, and a Koch brother or some similar person/corporation (GE, Wal-Mart…) walks in, takes nine cookies, and then looks at the TEA Party guy/gal and says, “Watch out for those union workers over there. They want your cookie.”
Fr. Greg, this is the heart of the matter, all right. Talk about “shared sacrifice” that refuses to ask for any sacrifice from the wealthiest, while even taking more and more from the poor and middle class to hand that, too, over to the wealthy, and forbids even discussing getting corporations to pay their taxes — that kind of talk about “shared sacrifice” is completely beneath contempt, I’ve decided. I have Had It with this situation that the cookie joke so perfectly describes. And it breaks my heart that so many who identify as Christians are vigorously supporting the politics that keeps punishing workers and the poor, handing over all the wealth to the rich, and claiming that’s fiscal responsibility.
Fr Greg brings up an excellent point – it is hard to argue about the pennies when the 100’s are being burned.
Overall, though, I think we fail at a lot of things because we live in an abstract world. In my father’s world, he bought bread from a store. The person he paid for the bread had either ordered it or at least loaded it off the truck. In my world, I worked as a cashier at a grocery store. I came into that enormous store, got my drawer, and 99% of the time never made it passed the check out lines. There were a few cashiers who worked nights/evenings who also stocked sometimes, but for us weekend day people, we never walked more than 20′ deep in the store. People who came into that store bought the bread from me – but I never knew it existed before they showed up with it, couldn’t have told you we sold that kind, and certainly had zero connection to ordering, loading, or shelving the stuff. I just took money for products they hopefully did actually take from a shelf I’d never seen somewhere.
Our whole world is abstracted that way, and it makes it much easier to see the people we hurt or squeeze not as people at all, but as sales numbers or attendance numbers. During the big rice famine, a bank actually sold shares where you could speculate as an average citizen on what little rice there was… they didn’t expect a backlash over the ethics of that, and they didn’t get much of one! Because buying “shares in a low suppy, high value commodity” didn’t equal “making scarce food artificially more expensive for starving people” in the minds of most people who it was offered to. There were no people depending on that rice attached in the minds and conscience’s of the people who bought the shares.
Our consciences, sin burnt as they are, work roughly ok with people we can see, unless we tamp them down further – family, local homeless people, waiters, etc. Past that, they don’t work well at all. Even after Jesus radically alters our whole sense of what people are worth, even after we see that Jesus died for that guy too, and that makes him as valuable as I am, that doesn’t translate easily to the guy who made the keyboard I’m typing this on. I wonder sometimes if that was why God did what he did at Babel.
As an old-school D&D gamer, every time I hear the word “fair”, I am reminded of the characteristic cry of a trid gamer who’s just gotten caught — “BUT THAT’S NOT FAIR!”
“Fair (TM)” has come to mean “Fair means I Get Everything I Wanna, All The Time”, nothing more.