Ninety-Nine Percent: Less Money for Everything From Mall Trips to College Education

 

The top one percent (1%) of Americans earned over nineteen percent (19.3) of household income in 2012, according to news reports. This share is the largest since 1928, shortly before the Great Depression. Inequality is not merely the result of the recession that began in 2008. Income inequality has been growing for three decades, according to the reports.

Last year, as the recession eased, the income of the top one percent rose twenty percent. The income of the remaining ninety-nine percent rose one percent.

The generosity of wealthy people is well known: Warren Buffet, Bill Gates, and countless others. However, a vibrant economy needs a large middle class. They spend more of their income. They are more numerous and buy more goods and services.

We may, and should, discuss the morality of a country in which the rich grow richer and the income of ordinary workers does not pay for decent housing and education. A just society rewards those who work hard, even if they don’t make huge incomes. However, sheer desire for a productive, growing economy compels us to address the reasons behind the increasing income inequality.

Diplomacy The Old-Fashioned Way

 

Noting U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry’s peripatetic globe trotting, I remember a criticism someone leveled at U.S. diplomacy at the beginning of the digital age. Now that we have instant electronic communications, he said, we don’t need diplomats. Now the leaders can communicate electronically.

Thankfully, national leaders can and do utilize modern communications, but face to face meetings remain essential. These meetings do not magically appear. Venues, lists of invitees, translators, hotels, protocols (who will sit next to whom in an order established over centuries) must be organized, at times on short notice. Executive summaries, background papers, and talking points provide up-to-the-minute information for the principals, flying in for a day or two.

Diplomats who live in these countries and speak the language perform these functions. They hold conversations, not only with leaders, but with ordinary citizens of the country. They talk to the opposition who may one day lead and to the younger populace who will become the next movers and shakers. Person to person remains paramount. Electronic communication enhances. It can never replace.

Kerry is especially knowledgeable about the work of a diplomatic outpost. He is the son of a U.S. diplomat and spent at least a few years of his childhood living in U.S. overseas missions. Kerry likes to tell of the time when his father and family were posted to Berlin during the days of the Cold War. The twelve-year-old Kerry, using his diplomatic passport allowed him as part of a diplomatic family, biked through checkpoints one day over to East Berlin.

His father, Kerry says, was not pleased when he found out, confiscating his young son’s passport to prevent future such escapades. “You could have caused a diplomatic incident,” he lectured the future Secretary of State.

Syria Who?

 

Now with an agreement between the U.S. and Russia over the Syrian impasse on chemical weapons, we appear to have dodged the bullet, temporarily at least.

What a relief. Now we can return to what’s really important: Miley Cyrus, football, Justin Beiber, and the vendor who was fired for hating ketchup. As well as the personal tragedies (mostly American) served up to us on our news feeds as entertainment.

Iraqi Shadow Haunts Syria

 

I watched Colin Powell’s presentation before the UN Security Council in 2003 as he tried to persuade members to follow the U.S. lead into Iraq. Many members of the Security Council were unconvinced, as well they might be. The charge that Iraq harbored chemical or other weapons of mass destructions proved unfounded. We learned the truth only after the deaths of Americans, Iraqis, and those allies who, believing us, followed us into war.

Critics later charged that American officials molded U.S. intelligence to fit a desire to attack Iraq, though Iraq at the time posed no direct threat to us. The intelligence was flawed, deliberately “cherry picked” to suit our purposes. We are now paying for that choice.

As America lays out intelligence about the use of chemical weapons in Syria, where the evidence is much stronger, our past deception haunts us. No nation is unswervingly honest, but the United States before Iraq was trusted more than most. After the misuse of intelligence in the runup to Iraq, we lost our valuable credibility. Indeed, our right to lead in foreign policy anywhere in the world is now questioned.

Trust, once lost, is not easily regained.

 

Syria: Praying in the Peace

 

This afternoon Christians of all persuasions in our small island community came together to pray for the situation in Syria. The most peace I have felt in days washed over me in that quiet sanctuary.

I prayed for the people of Syria, for leaders in this country and abroad, for peace between Israel and Palestine, for the people of my faith in the Middle East, and for the people of all faiths in that conflicted land.

How often do we take time out of busy days to surround ourselves with listening silence, to pray without distractions?

I didn’t know such a quiet simplicity was so powerful. God grant peace to the nations such as I felt this afternoon.

Syria: Questions To Help Us Think

 

To attack Syria or not to attack Syria with missile strikes has divided everyone, it seems, Democrats and Republicans, liberals and conservatives. Rather than give my own opinion (which is still evolving), I’m enclosing links to two thoughtful pieces. One is a general question-and-answer piece about Syria. The other is a colunn by Nicholas Kristof, a journalist for The New York Times whom I have always admired:

Question and Answer

Kristof article

 

Enemy of My Enemy Is My Friend?

 

Those faded photos on the walls of my office at the U.S. consulate in Dhahran, Saudi Arabia, hinted at beginning bonds between two disparate nations. American oil prospectors sit in sand-dusted offices, close to where the consulate is now, resting a few moments before continuing the search for the black gold that would transform both nations. In 1938, Dammam well No. 7, a few miles from where I later was to work, began producing.

At the time, most Americans lived in small towns or central cities. Suburbs were mostly for the elite, founded on train lines that connected them to the still important city. Then came World War II, with its need for energy to power war machines. Following victory by America and her allies, Americans fled to the car-centric suburbs. The U.S. formed alliances with Middle Eastern governments, none of which could be called democracies, in order to keep the oil flowing for our cars and machines.

Americans had oil in their veins from the beginning of oil exploration in the 1800’s. Thousands of them from Oklahoma, Texas, and other oil producing states found jobs at Saudi Aramco, the Saudi oil giant, in a city built for them, with housing, swimming pools, restaurants, a commissary, and medical care.

Thus, the United States became bound to the Middle East, with all its religious divides, power politics, and ethnic hatreds.

During the Soviet era, the alliances were clear. We were against communism and so were they, at least the countries that provided us with oil. The founding of Israel complicated the alliances, but until the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, our friends were the enemies of our enemies.

Since then, our major conflicts have risen from those early alliances. The terrorism that haunts us grew out of them.

Syria, our current nightmare, while not a friend in any traditional sense, is the enemy of our enemy, a secular state that opposed our terrorist foes. Now it, too, is home to a human tragedy that threatens to engulf the whole region and the world beyond. Our NATO allies are intricately bound to the region, affected by refugees from its wars. China’s dependence on oil to power its growing economy makes it a front row participant.

So those rough prospectors pictured in my office at the U.S. consulate began something that we never learned to deal with in any long term way. We wanted the oil, whatever the consequences.

The consequences have arrived.

Syria: No Good Options

 

We are weary of our Viet Nams, our Iraqs, our Afghanistans, and our Libyas. We have fought, shed blood, and expended treasure for what we are not sure.

We are cured of our hubris that followed the end of World War II and later the cold war. We know that sending in our military when wrongs are done does not necessarily end the wrongs. As we contemplate the brutal evidence of innocent men, women, and children dying horrible deaths in Syria after a probable gas attack, we know a military response may not stop the brutality.

We should know, if we contemplate action, not to expect a democracy friendly to us or even a democracy at all as a result. It could even encourage another Iranian style theological state, quite hostile to us.

The bloody regime of Bashar al-Assad has not attacked us nor supported al-Qaeda nor Iranian nuclear ambitions. If we should decide to act in Syria, we should do so with the motive of, possibly, shortening this inhumane war. Pure altruism and nothing more. Most likely we shall gain, if anything, only that. No scenes of welcome as liberators. It may be enough—if we take the chance and lives are saved. But it is not a definite nor easy decision to make. We can at least refrain from name-calling the decision makers. Prayer for them, and sympathy, are more in order.

What Do the Youth of Afghanistan Want?

 

An article in The New York Times examines the youth of Afghanistan. They have adopted bits of American culture, some of the clothes and music. However, they also appear wedded to the mores and customs of their parents.

One young Afghan woman protested against Western values. She expressed fear that her society would be “corrupted like that of the West.”

These ideas are discouraging to many Americans. Women have been brutalized in that traditional society. We surely want an end to the inferior status of women.

We may learn other lessons, however. The first is that American culture is not always as desired in the rest of the world as we sometimes think, or, indeed, as it used to be in the past. We treasure equality and the freedom to pursue one’s own path. Others in places like Afghanistan see us as condoning drugs, promiscuity, permissiveness, and dysfunctional government.

Although we wish to see changes in Afghanistan, we can be sympathetic also to the views they have of America. We are, perhaps, not the beacon we once were.

Egypt and Syria: Worrying Prelude to the Future?

 

Are the Egyptian and Syrian conflicts typical of the near future for the Middle East? Good guys, bad guys, sometimes on the same side? Ethnic and religious attacks? Plenty of villains but no clear heroes? The Syrian conflict, especially, now involves nearby countries: masses of refugees, arms shipments, and occasional spillover of armed forays. Are these preludes to larger conflicts? What does past history tell us?

The Spanish Civil War of 1936-1939, a war forgotten by most of us, is called by some a prelude to World War II, which began a few months after the end of the Spanish conflict. The more traditional Spanish citizens, including many in the Catholic Church and landowning and business classes were called nationalists. Many urban workers, middle-class liberals, and some Communists were called republicans. The nationalists received support from Nazi Germany. The republicans received support from the Soviet Union.

Both sides committed atrocities. The town of Guernica was pounded to rubble by incendiary bombs. A third of its population was reported killed or wounded.

The United States was not directly involved, but some Americans joined the republicans, most in a youthful desire to liberate. Earnest Hemingway wrote about one such fictional character in For Whom the Bell Tolls. The story ends tragically for the hero just as the war did. For almost four decades afterward, Spain was ruled by the dictator Francisco Franco.

At the time, European countries had been in a state of tension caused by the horrible brutality of World War I and its unresolved ending. Hatred, pride, and humiliation all played a part in the inability of Europeans to come together to prevent World War II. This hatred was evident in the Spanish conflict. Unfortunately, a failure to understand hatred’s consequences prevented the compromises necessary to resolve the differences.

At this chaotic time, we follow the promise of talks between Israelis and Palestinians. All parties suggest that any progress will be difficult. Bitterness, grievances, and brutalities haunt the process. A look into history should convince us to try anyway, to understand, this time, that only forgiveness offers hope.

Boris Yeltsin And The Soviet Coup

 

Boris Yeltsin, in suit and tie, surrounded by worried colleagues, stands atop a tank in Moscow in  mid-August, 1991, twenty-two years ago this month, and reads a statement.

The recent end of the Cold War between the Soviet Union and the West at the time remained tenuous. Mikhail Gorbachev had become Soviet leader in 1985 and the great draw down of nuclear weapons between the United States and the Soviets began in the years following. Eastern European countries began their movement away from the Soviet orbit in 1989 and 1990. East and West Germany, split since the end of World War II, had united less than a year before.

Now, Russian hard liners wanted to roll back history and reestablish the Soviet Union. They took advantage of Gorbachev’s absence from the capital at that time to attempt a takeover.

Yeltsin led opponents of the coup,  jumping on a tank outside the chief Russian government building. He read from a statement calling on citizens to resist this step backward.

They did, and the coup failed. Gorbachev returned to Moscow. The Soviet Union was dissolved a few months later.

In hindsight, we mourn the turn Russia has taken since then: the chaos that overtook that first stirring of democracy; the return to authoritarianism under Vladimir Putin.

Yet, many dissent from Putin’s rule. They can take comfort in the remembrance of Yeltsin, a man with very human failings, daring to overcome his fear and call on his fellow citizens to resist the return to a dead past.

Farm Summers

 

When I was growing up, one of my family’s relatives owned a farm about a day’s drive from our home in Nashville. We visited from time to time in summer when I was out of school. Sometimes I was allowed to stay a few days with cousins while my family returned to Nashville.

Those days were bliss: building dams across the creek in front of the house, hikes in the hills around the farm, a huge picnic under the big tree by the creek, trips to the spring for drinking water (the house had running water, but my aunt preferred spring water), swinging from grapevines in the woods, playing in the hayloft.

I remember the books. Stacked on shelves in the living room were the literary leftovers of generations of readers. My cousin and I would pick out a book and take it upstairs to read before bedtime, falling asleep with the books by our sides. In the morning when the cock’s crow woke us, we would breathe in the rural fresh air through opened, unscreened windows and continue reading.

Looking back, I realize imperfections. We had to watch out for copperhead snakes. The hills that I so liked to climb were gouged and riddled by the phosphate companies, to which my aunt had sold the mineral rights. Trees had covered the mining atrocities by the time I came along, but the scars still intruded. The pond that my cousins swam in had scum. I had to help with dishes after huge meals. The unscreened windows let in lots of flies.

Yet the freedom of those days is a blessing all children should experience before they pass so quickly into adulthood.

Fear of Secularism

 

” . . . this preemptive assault on secularism with all it entails, strikes me as frightened and antagonistic.”

—Marilynne Robinson, When I Was a Child I Read Books

 

“His disciples remembered that it was written, ‘Zeal for your house will consume me.’”

—John 2:17 (NRSV)

 

No nation has ever belonged completely to God. The Jewish nation repeatedly fell into idolatry. So-called Christian nations, though influenced by Christian teaching, have erred greatly at times from carrying out the principles Jesus taught.

Today in the United States, Christians seem perplexed at secularism’s strength, as though it were something new. Secularism has existed beside Christianity since the first Christian missionaries carried the gospel to the Roman world and beyond.

In the fourth century, the emperor Constantine increasingly favored Christianity as the Roman Empire’s established religion. Before that time, Christianity grew because of the way Christians lived in a pleasure-loving, inhumane world. People were increasingly drawn to the “narrow way” which called its adherents to lives of forgiveness and compassion.

When Christianity became the “established” religion, it tended to succumb to the ways of the world and to seek power. Religious leaders like St. Francis, akin to Old Testament prophets, repeatedly called for a different kind of life, serving as role models for a return to the way of Jesus.

Christians have always lived amid secularism. Secularism wanes when Christians practice what Jesus taught and draw people to him. They are less effective when they seek power.

Barbara Pym’s Quiet Books

Quartet in Autumn

I recently read a review of the novelist Barbara Pym’s life. Pym, writing in the middle of the twentieth century, wrote gentle stories of ordinary people coping with life.

Pym’s books sold well enough until the mid-sixties. Then, as she said, rather than the ordinary lives she wrote about, writers turned to juicier subjects. Her novels, which she continued to write, were rejected for the next fourteen years.

In 1977 she returned to popularity. Her Quartet in Autumn (previously rejected several times) was shortlisted for the Booker Prize.

Advice to writers these days emphasizes suspense. We must hook the reader from the first sentence and the first paragraph and in every scene thereafter. This is good advice if not taken too narrowly, else we end up refusing to write anything except murder and mayhem.

I enjoy a good mystery, even an occasional dead body, but I’m especially taken with a mystery like Gaudy Night by Dorothy Sayers. People are murdered in other Peter Whimsey stories, but Gaudy Night is a story of relationships and gray areas of right and wrong.

I have found that with most suspense novels, I’m now apt to skim, even skip, large sections in order to satisfy my curiosity about the end. Having finished, I rarely ponder them. My preference is increasingly for quiet writing, something to savor instead of hurry through. A desire for slow food versus fast food for those in the fast lane.

What Happens When U.S. Embassies Close?

 

Twenty-two U.S. embassies, as of this writing, are affected by new intelligence which indicates terrorists are planning attacks on American interests. The embassies will close August 4, a few days before the end of the Ramadan fasting period for Muslims, and perhaps other dates as well.

U.S. embassies close not only to protect their staffs but also to prevent injuries to the public. An embassy is a busy place. Those seeking visas, usually to visit or study in the U.S, may be so numerous that they must wait hours in long lines at some embassies. American citizens also visit to renew passports, receive notarial services, or to register new-born children.

To announce a closure does not mean everybody stays home. The majority of the staff in an embassy is usually non-American. Most embassy work is not classified. This includes maintenance of the embassy and housing for Americans assigned to work there. Foreign service nationals, or locally hired staff, as they are now called, also perform skilled work because of their language abilities, knowledge of the country, and continuing contact with local government. They often work their entire adult lives for the embassy and develop valuable contacts for their American employers. Many local staff are asked to stay at home when the routine work at the embassy is shut down.

During the times I served in embassies in the Middle East, I don’t remember a closure in which I stayed home. As one who served American citizens, I needed to be there for emergencies and often to notify our citizen warden networks if new information came in.

I hated when an embassy closed because it meant a double work load the day we opened again.

Automobile Age Dirge

 

Automobiles became more than a plaything for eccentrics when Henry Ford mass produced his Fords beginning with the Model T in 1908. Motorized vehicles were sold at prices that the average American family could afford. The automobile age began.

In 1956 President Dwight Eisenhower signed the Federal Aid Highway Act (FAHA). Controlled access “Interstates” soon covered the landscape. American families moved out to suburbs and the malls. The 1950’s and 60’s were the apex of the automobile age. Americans who came of age during the first decades after World War II abandoned walking, mass transit, and the shops and houses of Main Street.

Changes crept in, hardly a ripple at first. A few, mostly younger people, turned their backs on the suburban lifestyle and returned to the cities. As the twentieth century gave way to the twenty-first, their numbers increased. Access to walking and mass transit became assets for selling homes. Some workers even commuted by bicycle. The housing in newer suburbs became denser and included sidewalks and community parks.

Instead of freedom, automobiles now conjure visions of traffic jams, painful gas prices, and the use of scarce financial resources for car payments. Meanwhile, Americans who came of age during the automobile era face adjustment. Many never developed habits of physical exercise and are uneasy with walking or taking mass transit. Yet, poor eyesight and other health problems lead to inability to drive their beloved cars.

Neal Peirce in a Washington Post column suggested “multigenerational cities.” The Atlanta Regional Commission (where I used to work) promotes the concept. It encourages lifetime communities of mixed housing (including larger houses with “mother-in-law” apartments), safe walking, and access to mass transit.

Is the automobile, darling of several generations, relinquishing the throne? Perhaps the computer age and the home-office have usurped its crown.

 

Christians and Culture: A Fourth Way

 

Is Christianity on the way out, not to be taken seriously, as some have alleged? Whatever your opinion, few deny that Christian faith does not easily coexist with Western culture at the present time.

James Davison Hunter, a professor at the University of Virginia, wrote To Change the World: The Irony, Tragedy, and Possibility of Christianity in the Late Modern World. Recently, he spoke to a symposium at Seattle Pacific University and suggested three ways Christians wrongly engage our present culture.

The first, the “purity from culture” way, pits Christians mostly in opposition, expressing themselves in anxiety, anger, or fear. Its adherents withdraw from the culture.

The second Hunter called the position of  “relevant to culture.”  This position, he says, risks the church and the world becoming indistinguishable.

The third is similar to the first. Hunter calls it “defensive against” the world. Instead of withdrawing, however, Christians become hostile to the world. They aim to win at all cost, often politically.

Hunter suggested a fourth way: “faithful presence in the world,” which emphasizes the practice of faith. In this mode, Christians become a presence in the world as they live out faith, hope, and love toward all, including their enemies. This presence is lived out in families, communities, classrooms, marketplaces, and workplaces.

In a talk with his disciples, Jesus said that neither he nor his disciples belonged to the world. However, he did not ask that his disciples be removed from the world. Hence the phrase “in the world but not of it,” another way of indicating “a faithful presence.”

Getting Away Has Almost Gone Away

 

We used to “get away” in days when phones did not go with us, and we couldn’t plug in our iPads at Starbuck’s and motels and highway rest stops. Today, getting away requires discipline and planning. My husband and I sometimes take time off the grid. We go to the side of a mountain we know about which has no digital access. I am happy to report that we not only survive these digitless days but actually enjoy face-to-face conversations with each other.

Another discipline of mine is digitless Sundays. Okay, I cheat and play Free Cell and check news and my email once in the evening. But the relaxing day of ignorance is blissful, a time to get it together in slow motion. My husband I converse and sometimes take a walk. I read, think, and note ideas in long hand on my steno pad.

Current research suggests a harmful effect to the brain with too much use of digital media. I can understand, watching my stress level build while I wait impatiently for the latest weather report to come up or the email to delete so I can check the next one.

Consider roughing it on your next getaway. Leave the electronic stuff behind, or at least limit your access to it.

Cyberwar: Gentlemen (and Women) Who Read Each Other’s Mail

 

“Gentlemen do not read each other’s mail.” So Henry Stimson, Secretary of State under U.S. President Herbert Hoover is reported to have said. He closed the code-breaking office in the Department of State in 1929. However, by World War II, code-breaking was an acknowledged part of defeating the enemy, even if it meant reading private mail. Unprecedented changes to the way information is passed today mean that the boundary between public and private information blurs even more.

The American and French Revolutions took years to unfold. The revolutions known as the Arab Spring took days, spurred by Twitter and other social media.

Spies in past wars, like the Napoleonic military campaigns or the more recent Cold War, stole secrets and slipped them to the other side. Information about troop movements or knowledge of the atomic bomb passed to a well-defined enemy. Today’s hackers extract information through cyberspace. Malware is planted on another nation’s computers.

We hesitate, bewildered by what should be allowed and what shouldn’t. For good reasons, we don’t want our privacy invaded or spied upon, yet, we wish we had known more about the Boston Marathon bombers before they left their deadly pressure cookers.

Both the enemy and the new war zone in cyberspace remain shadowy and ill-defined. How do we define them? What are the new rules?

Coups in Tennessee and Egypt

All the ingredients of a political thriller simmered: a corrupt state governor accepts money for political favors. A new governor of another party is elected, but the inauguration is days away. The current governor appears set on transacting as many illegal acts as he can for bribes before the end of his term. Those acts include the pardoning of convicted felons, even murderers.

Then: a coup, of sorts. Members of both parties, those of the corrupt governor and those of the governor-elect, appalled that public safety is threatened, agree that the acts must be halted. They swear in the new governor in a suddenly-called, early ceremony.

The story is true. It happened in 1979 in my native state of Tennessee. Keel Hunt recounts the story in his book, appropriately titled Coup. The governor was Ray Blanton. The governor-elect was Lamar Alexander.

During a day of decision, the leaders of both political parties secretly discussed, parried, and analyzed. Was it allowed by the state constitution to administer the oath to the governor-elect days before the set inauguration? Alexander believed strongly in operating within the law and wanted nothing that hinted of illegal seizure by his party. He refused to be sworn in early unless leaders of both parties agreed to it. Finally, all agreed, and Alexander was sworn in early. Whatever felons Blanton might have released remained in prison.

Coup is heavy on local history, an endless parade of local characters, but fascinating for those of us who grew up with their stories. The memories of a bygone era are bittersweet: courthouse political speeches and face-to-face campaigning before the days of social media, as well as the effective but sometimes questionable old boy network.

Contrast this extraordinary desire to stay within the law, even when public safety is in peril, with Egypt, where power recently was seized by the military. Egypt and Tennessee operate in vastly different spheres. More differences than similarities are involved. Yet, we can be proud of a group of politicians, including one who had just won an election, for their concern for lawful process.

We are a nation of laws and not of men, said John Adams, second president of the United States, who left office after losing election to a second term. No matter that we sometimes fall short. May the Egyptians soon know such a striving for a nation of laws and not of men.