Repeat a Lie Often Enough

“Repeat a lie often enough and it becomes the truth” is a saying often attributed to the Nazi propagandist Joseph Goebbels. Regardless of who first said it, the concept is a well-used strategy of those seeking power with little regard for truth.

Some practice it with respect to the U.S. 2020 election. Numerous cases have been brought before U.S. courts in an attempt to cast doubt on Joe Biden’s election victory. All have found Biden the legitimate winner over Trump.

Nevertheless, the falsehood continues to spread.

A sister lie also making the rounds is that the attempt to defeat the electoral count on January 6 was merely a demonstration of concerned Americans. That was not the case when huddled legislators hid in terror and those “concerned Americans” shouted for blood in the hallways of Congress.

Our system of government is not a pure democracy, of course. We have leftovers from the founding fathers, some of whom weren’t all that sure about allowing ordinary men (women were denied the vote) to have true power. Nevertheless, most Americans today probably think they believe in rule of the majority.

This expressed belief is threatened in times of great change, when what has been the majority view becomes the minority view. The test comes then: do we really believe in rule of the people when many of the people don’t believe as we do?

Easier, perhaps, to shout “fraud.” Easier to lie and spread falsehoods about stolen votes. After all, we must appear to believe in democracy. Thus, we must lie about stolen votes. The only way we can appear to believe in rule by the people is to lie about how the people voted.

I don’t think the founding fathers saw this one coming.

Perfect in Weakness

Plough magazine devoted an issue (“Made Perfect; Ability and Disability,” Winter 2022) to those with special challenges: physically and mentally, as well as one person suffering from a mysterious, intractable illness. The articles remind us of Christ made flesh, experiencing human suffering as we do. He knew the shortness of life, the little time left to accomplish whatever we are here to do.

In his long struggle with what turned out to be Lyme Disease, Ross Douthat talked of faith surviving (“Hide and Seek with Providence”). “To believe that your suffering is for something, that you are being asked to bear up under it, that you are being in some sense supervised and tested and possibly chastised in a way that’s ultimately for good. . . . God brought you to it. He can bring you through it . . ..”

The articles are a blessing at any time, but especially as the Covid pandemic is reminding us of our vulnerability.

I don’t think we are being asked to overcome Covid just so we can buy more stuff. What we’ve lacked most in the recent past, I think, is community. If we have any ability to learn from our long Covid night, surely it’s the need to grow our communities.

We are all vulnerable, handicapped in some degree or another. We are all in need of family, neighborhood, and spiritual communities. When our acquisitiveness runs rampant, as seems often to be the case in these latter years, the pandemic can be a reminder of our more basic needs

Pandemic? When Is the End ‘in sight’?

I loved the cover of The Week magazine on March 26, 2021. On the cover, Uncle Sam had discarded his face masks as he gazed out the window at springtime’s arrival. His solemnity was overcome by a posture of dared hope. The title was: “The end is in sight.”

Businesses might again hold face to face meetings, we thought. School children might return to classrooms. Houses of worship might reopen.

Then the pace of vaccines faltered. About the same time, a new strain of Covid arrived.

Just as we had planned, finally, a return to normal holiday celebrations of families and friends, the virus numbers reversed and crept upward. The new strain of the virus spread. We heard more about “break-through” cases affecting even the vaccinated.

We returned to Zoom. Normal social gatherings were replaced by carry out meals. (Though some workers were unwilling to risk more exposure to the virus and undertake the necessary service jobs.)

What is our path out of this second invasion?

Though Covid sometimes breaks through and infects vaccinated individuals, the vaccinated (especially including those with booster shots) appear, on the whole, to be less seriously ill than the unvaccinated. Vaccination is more important than ever before.

Another lesson is the sharing of vaccines. As some predicted, the new strain of Covid broke through in a country with less access to them. We don’t stop after vaccinating our own citizens but push harder for sufficient vaccines for every country.

Past history indicates our ability to overcome infectious diseases, even in undeveloped countries. In the past, diseases like smallpox ravaged societies. Today, because of worldwide inoculation campaigns, small pox has been eradicated.

We have reason to hope for development of better vaccines against Covid, even while the current ones decrease Covid’s strength. As newer vaccines are found, developed countries must share them worldwide.

By practicing common sense and sharing, we can one day have that delayed celebration we looked forward to in spring 2021.

All Politics Is Local

Grace Olmstead left her community in small-town Idaho for a job elsewhere, as did many, perhaps most, of her school mates. She now lives with her husband and family in Virginia. Her book (Uprooted: Recovering the Legacy of the Places We’ve Left Behind) is a very personal study of the movement, of which she is a part, that so threatens the farms and small town communities of rural America.

From her childhood, she remembers small farms growing a variety of fruits and vegetables, surrounded by supporting small towns. Today, many of those towns have emptied out or become suburbs. Farms are larger and grow more monocultural crops. Monoculture is the sowing of one homogeneous crop instead of a healthy mixture of crops and orchards and tillage.

I sympathized with her writing. I grew up in a suburb of Nashville, Tennessee. My father and my mother’s father were part of the movement from the rural Southeast that left similarly challenged small towns and rural areas in that part of the United States.

One of my aunts owned a farm in middle Tennessee. She sold mineral rights to a phosphate company. I’m not sure how much she knew about business dealings. At any rate, the company mined the phosphate, but did not restore her land.

Olmstead interviewed many families in her hometown and elsewhere, attempting to understand what is at stake if America becomes a land of faceless suburbs and monocultural farming.

Her conclusions have to do with community. Toward the end of her book, she realizes that lack of community is one reason the farmers and small towns were unable to band together to protect their interests.

Even her own kin, she finally realizes, were not willing to exchange independence for community. Because of their unwillingness to stand together against vested interests of large agribusinesses, they eventually lost the battle.

The result, she writes, is that “for all of its libertarian claims of freedom and autonomy, Idaho and its resources are often chained to the whims and demands of vast economic interests and powers.”

Even governmental help in the form of economic handouts, she says, “emphasizes individual farming families without looking at their larger context and communities.”

In these days, when a pandemic has driven us even more into our own private enclaves, we might profit by taking a look into our devastating lack of community.

Different Rules for Outside the Box

A religious group once intended to trap their nemesis, the Jewish teacher Jesus. This particular group disagreed with another religious group over resurrection of the human body, taking the stance that resurrection violated what we “know.” As indeed it does, if one looks merely at what we know in a physical sense.

They purported to prove that Jesus’ belief in resurrection was untenable according to the laws of this world. If a woman is married, then is widowed, then is remarried and widowed six more times, with no children, whose wife is she in the resurrection? That question, they thought, should settle the idea of any resurrection.

Jesus replied that the inhabitants of heaven don’t marry. Marriage, so important in this life, isn’t a part of the heavenly kingdom. His questioners judged the future by present rules, but they left out the possibility that the future may operate by different rules. They left out the power of God to set up different rules for another time and place.

As science has increased our knowledge of this physical universe, we know things our ancestors didn’t: that the earth is round, not flat; that tomatoes are not poisonous; that bleeding the body during illness does not cure, but causes harm; and so on.

We live in a closed universe with set rules. We suppose that is all there is. From our little box, we presume things about what is outside the box. We judge the outside of the box by what we know of the inside of the box.

We are giants in the physical realm but pygmies in the spiritual.

 

Christmas: Jeddah Saudi Arabia 1990

Other than a few hours in Mexico and a few days in Canada, I lived my entire life in the United States until December 1990.

Exactly one year before that date, I was happily living in north Georgia, working as a historic preservation planner. Then in the spring, I received a telephone call from the U.S. State Department. A position was available in a State Department’s orientation class for the U.S. Foreign Service. I had applied a couple of years before, but lawsuits within the State Department over hiring practices had put most applications on hold. I had gone on to other interests. Now hiring was beginning again.

After thinking it over a few days, I accepted and spent several months in primary training in Washington, D.C.  Then, in August, 1990, as I went into the second phase of my training, the Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein conquered the country of Kuwait and threatened the nearby oils fields of Saudi Arabia.

I completed my training in December as the United States considered sending troops to protect Saudi Arabia, our oil ally, and I began the journey to my first foreign assignment. I found myself wheels down in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, just as the Christmas season began back home.

I was jet lagged, had picked up the wrong luggage while exchanging planes in Riyadh, and was soon to come down with a throat infection. Nevertheless, I immediately became part of U.S. consulate Jeddah’s team. What can I say? It was physically taxing but the most marvelously exciting time of my life.

I found friends in neighborly get-to-gathers and home church services. I was tossed into adjudicating visas of those wishing to go to the U.S., my official job, but the buildup to the war effort for what would be the first Gulf war thrust me into other positions.

The consulate organized a 24-hour control center in a nearby major hotel. I worked night shifts and performed other duties, including laying out briefing materials for news people arriving from major U.S. networks. I watched senior U.S. officials welcomed in the hotel lobby.

We, the working stiffs, established rapport known only to those joining together in crisis conditions.

Unfortunately, peace efforts failed, and war would come, though quickly over as Saddam was pushed back into Iraq. Eventually, a whole new age would begin, known as the post Soviet era, with its own difficulties and shortcomings.

Nevertheless, that Christmas, thrust into instant dependence and friendship with people I had never known before, remains possibly the best Christmas I have ever had.

Dying to Live

At least 27 migrants, including children, trying to reach Great Britain by boat from France were drowned recently in the English Channel when their boat capsized. Four smugglers who are suspected in the attempted crossing have been arrested.

The migrant families came only a few days after British and French authorities reached an agreement to try to stem the number of people taking to the sea. Both countries struggle to handle large numbers of migrants into their countries.

Thousands of people this year have attempted to cross from France to Britain after French authorities closed unauthorized refugee camps in France. Authorities also have cracked down on smugglers attempting to bring in asylum seekers inside trucks crossing through the Channel Tunnel.

Many migrants from countries in Africa and the Middle East prefer Britain as an ideal destination because of its English language, fellow citizens already there, or because the job market is more favorable to them.

On the other side of Europe, multitudes of refugees flowing through the country of Belarus have been blocked by barricades placed by Poland between Poland and Belarus. The European Union has accused Alexander Lukashenko (leader of Belarus since1994) of an organized campaign to use migrants as a weapon. He appears to have encouraged migrants from crisis regions including Afghanistan, Syria, and Iraq to fly to Belarus on tourist visas, then cross over into European countries. The migrants thus act as a threat against the countries who have criticized his rule.

Meanwhile, Mexico and the United States are the destination of refugees from Haiti and Central America, fleeing corruption and poverty, sometimes massing at border crossings. For years, American immigration policies have lacked responsible, humane goals and implementation.

Immigration done properly is a boon to developed nations. Immigrants are generally younger than the populations of receiving countries. They often revive economies with younger people and new workers. Massive flows, however, can be dangerous for the refugees and can strain the resources of countries they overflow.

Receiving democracies need co-ordinated immigration policies. Just as important are joint efforts to encourage more humane governments in sending countries to avoid massive outflows of their citizens.

Sweet Revenge for Stalin’s Gulag Archipelago

Joseph Stalin ruled the Soviet Union for a quarter of a century until his death in 1953. During that time, millions of people, dissidents and sometimes ordinary citizens with modest wealth, were sent to Soviet prisons as punishment. Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s Gulag Archipelago chronicled their imprisonment.

What happened to these prisoners after their release?

The Economist (December 4th, 2021; “‘Levelling up’ at gunpoint”) pinpointed a study shedding light on this question.

Released prisoners, the study indicated, tended to settle close to where they were released, generally isolated regions of the Soviet Union. The dissidents often were well-educated. The study suggested that their choice, upon gaining freedom, was a boon for the regions where they settled. After the Soviet Union broke up, economic activity tended to grow rapidly where the released prisoners settled.

This result, the article suggested, is a revenge on Stalin’s inhuman practices: “Joseph Stalin did his best to wipe out perceived enemies.” Instead, their activities have “outlived the gulag by six decades.”

Green Technology Race

“When it comes to climate change, the United States should compete, not cooperate, with its rival.” (Andrew S. Erickson, Gabriel Collins; “Competition With China Can Save the Planet,” Foreign Affairs, May/June 2021)

The United States’ relations with China are among the most important in the world today. While the relationship is complicated, the authors suggest one area in which the U.S. should definitely compete, not cooperate.

The authors cite China’s commitment to coal technology, as seen by their continued building of coal-fired power plants. The authors believe that “cooperation” with China in the field of climate change would mean the U.S. would have to give up its own progress toward climate friendly energy generation.

Instead, they suggest, the U.S. should strengthen competition in green energy technology. “Carbon taxation now attracts serious attention on both sides of the Atlantic, and the world’s democracies are generally significantly ahead of China when it comes to both meaningfully pricing carbon and having the industrial energy-sourcing preconditions in place to make the transition to a future of net-zero carbon emissions viable.”

A race to find better energy technology? Much better than an arms race.

Daniel Boone and Native Americans

I grew up in Tennessee with a father who gave me a love of history, beginning with local and regional history. He told me about the pioneer Daniel Boone and his early settlement in Boonesborough in nearby Kentucky and how Boone lived for a time with native Americans.

In Matthew Pearl’s book The Taking of Jemima Boone, the stories I had learned as a child were fleshed out with Pearl’s research. Pearl begins with the capture of Daniel Boone’s daughter and two other young women by a Cherokee-Shawnee raiding party in July 1776.

The American Revolution began that month. The land’s original inhabitants would be called on to take sides in the struggle. The wiser ones knew that a win by either side would not be of benefit to them in their struggle to survive the coming of European settlers.

Pearl lays out the conflicts, the reasons, and the struggles of the time. We have celebrated America as a haven for the oppressed fleeing Europe’s wars and persecutions. Jemima Boone’s story and its long aftermath does not take from this story. Daniel Boone was portrayed as a decent individual, with feeling for his family as well as native Americans with whom he came in contact.

The coming of Boone’s people began in hope for inhabitants in the old world, those on the margins who now had the opportunity to better their lives in this new country.

But how does a country act as a sanctuary without the sanctuary being overwhelmed? The question exists for African villages, overwhelmed by fleeing refugees, as it did for America’s original inhabitants and does for the United States today and for Europe, pressed by desperate people on Europe’s borders.

The ultimate answers surely include actions which improve the lot of the sending countries. The ability of people who want to better their lives by moving is generally a spur to a more advanced society only if the numbers are not overwhelming.

In the meantime, the American story needs to be seen warts and all. Our great American experiment has been more costly than it should have been to some.

Owning Up to Our History

Tish Harrison Warren, a white Anglican priest, addressed the question lately roiling the political landscape: “Is America Willing to Tell the Truth About Its History?” (The New York Times, November 14, 2021)

“Yes, the white American church has sometimes conflated a sanitized story of America with Christianity to embrace loyalty to ‘God and country,’” Warren wrote.

As a child of the American south myself, I appreciated her commentary. I accepted, as children do, without reflection, the racism of my early years: the separate drinking fountains for “Colored” and the segregated schools.

I began to change as court decisions mandated an end to separate school systems. My undergraduate study was in an all white Southern Baptist college (at the time) in Alabama. Yet we students, especially in our church groups, discussed how wrong this segregation was. By the time I studied for a graduate degree in a state school in Georgia, it had changed. The school was integrated without, it appeared, whites thinking much about it.

Only much later, I confess, did it occur to me that I indeed had been favored by my white skin. I never had to think about my color when I applied for a job or went shopping or approached a teacher in school. I realized that any American of color, stepping into the larger society, knew that the people around them, even if not consciously racist, noticed first that the person before them was not white.

Within my lifetime, black Americans have been killed and mutilated by whites without the whites, at the time, in any way being called to account for their sins.

Do we need to understand this? Do we need to repent? Yes, we do. It can’t be said often enough.

The old South, where white school children, including myself, stood up for “Dixie” as they did for the national anthem, has to repent.

Russia’s Pet Poodle?

“The polarization of American society has become a national security threat.”

So writes Fiona Hill in “The Kremlin’s Strange Victory,” (Foreign Affairs, November/December 2021.) Hill served as an intelligence officer dealing with Russia and Eurasia under Presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama.

In time, Hill writes, the United States has moved surprisingly close to Russia “as populism, cronyism, and corruption have sapped the strength of American democracy.”

Especially under President Donald Trump, the country moved in the direction of Vladimir Putin’s Russia. Trump, according to Hill, admired Putin, who “adjusted Russia’s political system to entrench himself in the Kremlin.”

Trump desired to do the same thing, she writes. “He saw the United States as an extension of his other private enterprises: the Trump Organization, but with the world’s largest military at his disposal.”

Americans must defeat the corruption of the American political system as well as deny Putin the ability to exploit America’s current dangerous divisions. Politicians should cooperate with the private sector, Hill says, “to cast light on and deter Russian intelligence operations and other efforts to exploit social media platforms.”

She suggests the importance of investing in people to tackle “inequality, corruption, and polarization.”

Keeping a democracy in this age of social media takes discipline: to read newspapers instead of tweets, to read a book instead of depending on visual media.

Democracy without discipline dies. It’s much easier to follow a Hitler or a Putin or a Trump, loud voices untethered to any life lived in the service of others.

Cold War Nostalgia

Reading Ben Macintyre’s The Spy and the Traitor, I was tempted to yearn for those Cold War days when friends and enemies and goals seemed more easily defined.

Macintyre’s recounting of a Soviet Union diplomat who spied for Britain during the Cold War is both fascinating and a bit nostalgic. We knew who our enemy was. In the United States, Democrats and Republicans actually cooperated for the good of the country.

Most important, World War III did not happen. Unlike the first half of the twentieth century, neither superpower desired a major war, though misunderstandings and challenges brought that war perilously close at times. The spy’s courage in passing information about our enemies may have contributed to this avoidance of a nuclear war.

Yet even while the glory days of the late 1980’s and early 1990’s played out, forces emerged to challenge our smugness. Racial sins haunted and divided us. Respect for our history too often turned into a worship of country. New role models challenged old ideas.

No need to yearn for the past. Struggles, temporarily hidden by those Cold War days, have emerged, requiring our attention, finally.

The problems we face today call for the same courage shown then by leaders of both parties: respect for those with whom we disagree; avoidance of self-serving propaganda; disregard for unfounded allegations spread today by social media.

We are all fallible human beings. No one of us has perfect truth. A respectful coming together with a bit of humility may overcome dangerous trends toward demagoguery.

Where the Light Fell

When the author Philip Yancey was a baby, his father contracted polio and died. Today, few Americans give thought to that horrible disease, arriving without any seeming purpose, crippling some, killing others.

Yancey doesn’t remember his father’s death. He only learned as a young man of his parents’ decision to remove his father from the hospital and its life saving equipment “against medical advice.” The couple had planned to be missionaries. They believed God would heal Yancey’s father so the couple could carry out what they believed to be their mission.

When the father died instead, Yancey’s mother dealt with this crisis of faith by offering up her two sons to be missionaries in the couple’s place. Yancey comes to realize: “My brother and I are the atonement to compensate for a fatal error in belief.”

Yancey’s book is the story of the sons’ journeys through this awful blood sacrifice. His brother, a talented young man, chose a devastating route out of the destiny his mother planned for him.

Yancey also fought against the legalistic straight jacket placed on him by his mother and some of the churches and colleges he attended. He began his own study of books and writings that opened both his mind and his spirit. He fell in love and knew a joy he had never known before.

Unexpectedly, in a college prayer meeting, he opens up and actually prays—at first defiantly against a God he doesn’t care for—but something happens. His honest prayer begins what is perhaps his first true experience of God’s grace.

Yancey’s story (Where the Light Fell) and his other writings bridge the gap felt by many who struggle within legalistic churches that too often have failed to understand what Jesus lived and taught.

 

Culture and the Christian Faith

The Christian faith, over time, has refused to be bound by one culture. Beginning in the Middle East through a few Jewish followers, it broke the bounds of those who wanted it tied only to that nationality.

It refused to be bound by Greek speakers, spreading to the western Roman empire. When the new religion of Islam devastated Christian empires in the east, it grew in Europe.

Eventually, it burst the bounds of church/state unions in Europe. Kings tried to own it, but segments broke away from a church/state identity and spread, especially in the New World. Amazingly, Christianity began to grow in a new arena that refused any ties to state domination.

Over the centuries, Christianity keeps discovering new areas of growth: against slavery and racism and worship of money. Against nationalism.

Christians still struggle not to be dominated by outside interests: class, wealth, politics, power. In the United States, a too-close identification with American culture has led to declines in some groups.

But one of the faith’s strengths is that defeat leads it to find new arenas for growth.

Touching the Sore Spot

“No one wants to have a sore spot touched, and therefore a society with so many sores reacts strongly when someone has the courage to touch the sore and say, ‘You have to treat that. You have to eliminate that. Believe in Christ and be converted.’” (Oscar Romero, Quoted in Plough, Autumn 2021, “Daring to Follow the Call”)

Oscar Romero, a Roman Catholic archbishop, was a critic of armed groups in El Salvador and a spokesperson for the poor. He was assassinated in 1980 by an unknown assailant.

At the same time as I read of Romero, I was reading about bloody religious battles in 1500’s Europe over efforts to reform what had become an unbelievably corrupt religious system. Criticizing established institutions is not a job for the cowardly.

We Americans are like anyone else in our desire to be proud of our culture and our institutions. They are ours. They are us. We don’t enjoy seeing them criticized.

Yet no human institution is without error. To worship an institution or a country or a leader is not only idolatry. It also cuts off efforts to heal and overcome imperfections, to become, never perfect, but better and more useful.

Many sore spots are being touched today. If we are wise, we will not react with hatred or fear but with the ability to listen and change and heal. Perhaps even to love our neighbors as ourselves—including our critics.

I am God Politics

Recently, during a local election in our normally quiet small town, political fighting has turned ugly. Election signs have been vandalized and hateful words exchanged.

Why?

Most of us say we believe in a peaceful exchange of power according to what the voters decide. Traditionally, the candidates campaign, the voters cast ballots, the votes are counted, and the one with the most votes wins. While the electoral college may cause problems in the presidential election, simple rule by majority is normally the case in local elections.

This November we are electing members of the local school board and our city officials. The vindictiveness of national politics has affected even these elections.

The idea of the gracious loser is an American tradition. John McCain, in his concession speech on losing the election to Barack Obama in 2008, gallantly wished Obama his support and praised the system that elected him and dealt McCain his loss.

Recently, too many of us have spurned his example, nationally and locally. Instead, we’ve chosen to act like those who support charlatans like Putin in Russia or dictators like Lukashenko in Belarus. Some of it is a clinging to power, but some of it, I think, is an arrogance that presumes we have complete truth.

We choose democracy precisely because no one has complete truth. The best we can do is let the majority rule. We have freedom of expression to state ideas peacefully challenging the majority. In the extreme, if one disagrees with the majority, one may offer civil disobedience, but even this should be peaceful, not a presumption that we have eternal truth. We are all imperfect human beings.

It is supreme arrogance to disrespectfully treat those with whom we disagree. We are all imperfect human beings.

Pledge of Allegiance in Saudi Arabia 1991

The first Gulf War, forgotten by most Americans by now, ended when Iraqi forces under Saddam Hussein were pushed out of the small country of Kuwait in February,1991. U.S. President George H. W. Bush chose not to send U.S. forces further north into Iraq but to end the war with Kuwait’s liberation.

Saddam’s forces had taken over Kuwait in August, 1990. The reason for U.S. entry into this regional conflict was fear that Saddam would continue his southern march and send his troops into Saudi Arabia’s oil fields. The Iraqi dictator would end up controlling much of the world’s oil, as well as a country we considered an ally.

I had arrived at my first diplomatic posting in December, 1990, at the U.S. consulate in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia. The U.S. push into Kuwait began a few weeks later. To say this time was an exciting introduction to working abroad in my chosen profession is an understatement.

No one knew the outcome, of course, when I arrived in Jeddah. Understandibly, Americans, Saudis, and other nationalities greeted our victory—after a short, anxious-ridden few weeks—with jubilation.

That spring, Americans working at the consulate gathered for a Memorial Day ceremony before the consulate flag. I don’t think I’ve ever joined with fellow Americans in a more heartfelt Pledge of Allegiance.

I think about that time in our quibbling over whether some meeting or other opens with the Pledge, or whether this person or that one is patriotic enough. I see such arguments as childish quibbling. Whether one does or does not say the Pledge should be a heartfelt personal choice. We are not, I hope, some dictatorship that requires mouthing loyalty oaths.

Breaking the Cycle: Hope

My mother’s father came down from the mountains of east Tennessee to the big city of Nashville and began working in an iron foundry. My father’s father also moved from rural Tennessee to the big city and found employment as a policeman.

Something happened in the next generation. By the time my brother and I came along, our parents were solidly middle class. They sidestepped aimless lives that trapped some of their brothers and sisters.

Both my parents underwent a spiritual transformation when they were in their teens. Something happened to them that shot them away from ruinous personal choices. A sense of hope gave them meaning and purpose and a sense of responsibility.

My parents were disciplined with their money, saving from modest salaries so their children received the college education they themselves were unable to enjoy.

Except for buying a house, my parents never went into debt. We had health insurance, which kept medical emergencies from overwhelming us. When my father died at the age of fifty-three from a heart attack, his provision of life insurance kept us going, along with our paid-off house, the social security my mother received as a widow with two children, and her modest job as a school secretary.

All these programs benefitted my parents, enabling them to give their children a good start in life. Today’s generational poor need access to jobs that pay a living wage. They need health insurance that stresses good health habits and prevents medical emergencies from ruining family finances. But it may be up to families, ministers, and teachers to instill hope and purpose.

Pax Victoriana and Pax Americana

Julia Baird’s Victoria the Queen, a detailed biography of Britain’s Queen Victoria, highlights that long nineteenth century when Britain became a world power. The nineteenth century, most of which was during her reign, belonged to Britain, it is said, as the twentieth century belonged to the United States.

The accomplishments of Britain in the nineteenth century were many; nevertheless, the author also delves into the shortcomings of her times. They include the terrible legacy left by the superiority many Europeans felt over the rest of the world. A little over a decade later, some of the failings of Victoria’s time became evident in two world wars.

What about the United States and the twentieth? We saved the world for democracy, yet have difficulty keeping democratic rule for ourselves.

We have never been able to rid ourselves of what Jim Wallis, of Sojouners, calls our “original” sin—that of enslaving Africans and refusing to recognize and repent of that sin. Even today, white supremacists march in calls for rule by whites only.

Who will the twenty-first century be named after?