Tide Tables and Moral Choices

I learn from my beach walks why we moderns so often forget God. We are not many of us farmers or fishers anymore. Our lives and livelihoods are no longer directly bound to sun and rain, weather and seasons, tides and storms—forces we cannot control.

When we are hungry, we buy food at the grocery store; when we want light, we flip a switch; when we want clothes, we shop at the mall. The temporary abundance of the industrialized world has deluded us into believing we are in control and can do as we want.

Before I stroll on the beach, I should consult a tide table. Otherwise I risk, if not actually drowning, a slippery climb up crumbling bluffs to escape rising water. For the tide, as the saying goes, waits for no one. And therein lies its fascination. No matter how the times of the tides inconvenience us, we must abide by their immutable goings and comings.

Consequences of moral choices may not intrude so abruptly as consequences of physical ones. The effects of moral choices can be subtle, over years of tide turnings. For decades we chose bigger cars, bigger houses, mindless entertainment, and instant relationships. Then one day we realize gas is no longer affordable, the house is being foreclosed, world events that we have ignored threaten our country, and the problems of our neglected children overwhelm us.

In my beach wanderings I consider the lessons of history, biblical admonitions, my own choices and consequences over a lifetime. I ponder and am convinced that God’s moral laws are as sure as the running and turning of the tide.

 

Egypt: What About a Public Servant?

I read the news headline this morning: “Egypt: Explosion of anger decades in the making.”

Long-established dictatorships in the Arab world are threatened. Ben Ali, Tunisia’s leader since 1987, has fled to Saudi Arabia. Some take bets on how long before Egypt’s dictator, Hosni Mubarak, will follow Ben Ali. (Still in power as of this writing, but the situation changes hourly.) Others under the microscope include Algeria, Yemen, and even Saudi Arabia.

Does anyone remember 1989, the year countries of eastern Europe, beginning with Poland, threw off the yoke of Soviet Russia? Or a couple of years later when the Soviet Union itself ceased to exist? How about when Germans tore down the Berlin Wall, leading to eventual reunification of East and West Germany?

Is that ancient history now or is the Arab unrest a delayed extension of those movements? And what will it mean to U.S. interests in the Middle East, since Saudi Arabia, Egypt, and Tunisia have been our allies in the fight against terrorism?

Why do leaders become so enamored with longevity, power, and wealth? Ben Ali’s party had been in power since 1956; Ben Ali is only the second leader to run the country. His relatives used the family connection to amass fortunes. Mubarak has been in power since 1981 and reportedly was grooming his son to take over after him. Others come to mind: Robert Mugabe of Zimbabwe, Kim Jong-il of North Korea.

Our own country has seen corruption and political scandals, but through the centuries since its birth, most Americans have professed belief that elected officials are chosen to serve us, not themselves. We often use the term “public servant.”

Perhaps a belief in servant-hood is the key to government that works for citizens instead of ignoring them. As long as most Americans believe this, our government may function reasonably well. And if those Arab demonstrations lead to servant leaders, those young Arabs who wave flags and shout slogans may be responsible for governments truly for the people. If not, the chances are great that the new leaders will be the old leaders with new names.

Of course, servant-hood may be more kin to spiritual grace than political savvy.

 

 

Transformation

A current theory is that religion is the cause of war, murder, terrorism, and the general nastiness that afflicts us.

The truth is, humans have treated each other badly since the beginning of recorded history, with or without religion. In the past, greed and the desire for wealth and power did not have to be explained. People wanted other people’s land, riches, or other possessions and if they were powerful enough, they took them. If you had a god, this proved your god was more powerful than your neighbor’s.

In the beginning, the Hebrews weren’t that different from other tribes around them. However, a new song echoed from the prophets. It was the idea that God favored, not the rich and powerful, but the dispossessed, the marginalized, the widows and orphans. These were to be protected and given a chance, not exploited.

Then Christians further revolutionized this idea. God came as Jesus, they said, not only to show us the way, but to give us the power to live this new way. Finally we have hope that we can be transformed from the old nature that desires to dominate and take. Of course, as Jesus said, calling oneself a Christian is not enough. What one does is the proof that one has or has not accepted transformation..

 

Memories of Tunisia

I lived in Tunisia, the small North African nation now in the news for its civil unrest, from 1997 to 2000. I served at the U.S. embassy in Tunis, the capital city. At that time, a tour there was an enjoyable assignment for U.S Foreign Service officers choosing the sometimes unsettled Middle East.

Young women dressed in the latest Paris fashions. I don’t recall any of them wearing a head scarf. Many were students in Tunisian universities. Our friends and family from the States visited us for trips to the Sahara and to stroll the nearby ancient city of Carthage. We took them to see the desert movie setting for the original Star Wars films. We boarded the train in downtown Tunis for the short ride to Carthage and a visit to the cemetery for American military personnel killed in Tunisia during Second World War campaigns against the Nazis.

The embassy during my assignment was located in downtown Tunis. On weekends, I would drive to the Embassy and park, then walk from there into the old city to worship in a centuries-old Christian church. The walk took me past a Muslim mosque and a Jewish synagogue. The Jewish settlement in Tunisia was ancient; some said it began with refugees from the conquest of Jerusalem by Nebuchadnezzar in 605 B.C.

During the week, work load permitting, I enjoyed riding the bus from my home to work. Once in a while, for exercise, I walked all the way. We ate in local restaurants and visited ancient ruins scattered throughout the country. Tunisia at that time was perceived as a stable, progressive country, its beaches a destination for tourists from Germany and other countries. Golfers played on the links in Tunisia’s mostly sunny weather.

Now the tourists are being evacuated. The U.S. embassy moved to a newer facility in a safer location out from Tunis after the terrorist attacks on U.S. embassies in east Africa. I notice from news pictures that some of the women appear to be wearing head scarves. The train station where my friends and I took the train was burned by rioters. The Tunisian president fled to Saudi Arabia.

What happened? Why the sudden changes?

Unemployment and economic needs are cited as reasons. However, more than the economy is involved. Hard economic times can be endured if all perceive the suffering as shared. In Tunisia, for years, as average citizens struggled for decent jobs, the country’s rulers lived in luxury and used their power to grab wealth in corrupt business deals.

In the over half a century since Tunisia gained its independence from France, the country has had only two presidents, the last, Ben Ali, seizing power in a bloodless coup. Only one political party was allowed to rule, jailing and sometimes torturing any perceived opposition. Now the country has need of leaders not tainted by the old regime, but few have had experience in governing a country or understanding the democratic process.

How much better if those in power govern justly, not using their positions for their own gain, but understanding their responsibility to serve. Best if they rule in humility, allowing others to participate, realizing that no single group is all-wise. Both the political system and the economic one should be perceived as fair.

 

Christian Exile in Babylon

My novel, SINGING IN BABYLON, doesn’t actually take place in Babylon. Much of it takes place in Saudi Arabia. Babylon, however, is associated with exile by readers of the Old Testament, and Kate, a Christian, discovers a feeling of exile while teaching in Saudi Arabia.

In one scene, Kate and Philip are confined to Philip’s car during a dust storm. They have recently worshiped in an underground Christian church. Kate says, “It’s funny. I had to come to a Muslim country to find a Christian fellowship that feels like a resurrection community.”

Philip responds, “Here it’s like we’re exiles coming together.”

Later, on return to America, Kate’s sense of exile continues. Why? Certainly, in the U.S. Kate has freedom to openly worship as she chooses, but her new understanding reveals another kind of exile, that of exile from the values of the culture that surrounds her.

 

Community at Rest

Perhaps the current economic recession is an enforced rest, a kind of sabbatical that may strengthen community. Society now expects all Americans in their prime years to hold full-time, paying jobs. Indeed, our current standard of living requires it. Some single adults find it difficult to live on one income, much less a family. Leisure time for community, reflection, creativity, and caring has all but vanished.

The pain of the recession is real. Americans lose their homes, go without proper nourishment, and forgo medical care. Nevertheless, those of us in less dire straights might reflect on the change to a less consumer-oriented society, temporarily at least.

We might ponder the cost exacted by the frantic pace of the past few years. Or we might take a few hours to read about the rest of the world and what America’s place will be in it in the years to come. Or—who knows—we might muse about those shootings in Arizona and what we may learn from them.

Times of hardship and tragedy sometimes uncover our deep needs for family, friendships, and community.

 

Subversives or Exiles?

When SINGING IN BABYLON was published and I began blogging, I considered that my slogan might be: “Subversive Christians on the World’s Stage.” This would be my “brand.” (Brand is a current buzzword, something that identifies you with your “tribe,” another buzzword.)

It didn’t seem to impress an editor at a writers’ conference I attended. Subversive might have connotations I didn’t intend. I certainly didn’t mean subversive in the sense of a subversive movement like al-Qaeda. No insurgency that claims innocent lives. No, nothing like that. Nor do I mean the undermining of core Christian beliefs.

I meant something like Walter Brueggemann discusses in Deep Memory, Exuberant Hope. He talks about the baptized community in the Christian West as being in something like exile ” … in consumer-oriented capitalism in the West, where the church is a cultural problem or at least an inconvenience.” (Page 10.)

Perhaps exile is a better term than subversive. We are exiled Christians on the world’s stage. We’re subversives against the worship of greed, power, and self that sooner or later drags down every civilization. We’re subversives in living lives of self-discipline and compassion against the world’s dominant values of self-centeredness and consumerism. We live intentional lives, not ones of passive submission to our culture.

 

The West and the Rest

My childhood church supported a missionary family in Nigeria. This relationship first stoked my interest in places beyond the Christianity that I knew in America. Now, after sojourns in countries vastly different from my own, I believe the need grows for American Christians to learn even more about the non-Western world.

The phrase “the West and the rest” became popular following the publication in 1996 by Samuel P. Huntington of The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of the World Order. Richard K. Betts discussed this book and two others in an article in Foreign Affairs magazine

Betts states: “The sacred concepts of freedom, individualism, and cooperation are so ingrained in U.S. political culture that most people assume them to be the natural order of things, universal values that people everywhere would embrace if given the chance.”

We no longer can make such assumptions, if we ever could. Best that Christians grow in understanding of the changed world we live in, one that may not be as respectful of our ideals as in the past. We may have to work harder to prove the worth of those ideals.

 

Lessons From Ignorance

When I was about three or so, I thought little people lived inside the radio that grownups listened to and made the voices that I heard from there. At that age, I had no capacity to understand radio transmission waves. Little people inside a radio seemed reasonable based on my knowledge that people made voices.

Perhaps that is why, today, I suspect that all our theories and discoveries and knowledge are akin to those of a three-year-old trying to understand how people speak through a radio. God gave us brains and the ability to explore with our minds. To do so surely is one of our joys. We should advance our ideas, however, with much humility. Whatever ideas we advance are finite explanations dealing with the infinite.

The only thing I’m certain of is the value of what the Greeks called agape love. Jesus the Christ, whose birth we just celebrated, modeled this love. It values another as one values oneself.

One can’t have agape love if one doesn’t love oneself. Do remember, Jesus didn’t want to die. Not for him the self-loathing of suicide bombers or those whose rage leads them to murder fellow workers or strangers in a crowded restaurant or school children. His death was for others, out of love.

Jesus loved life. He turned water into wine so a marriage feast might progress. He spoke of his Father’s kingdom with metaphors of feasting and banquets.

Jesus knew the Father’s love and could love himself and know himself of worth and carry out the purpose God had for him. It seems to me that’s the pattern laid out for us: somebody loves us—God, if we will accept it. When we realize that we are of value, we can love ourselves, then love God, then those around us, and, if we allow God’s love to grow in us, even our enemies.

 

Called TO as well as FROM

Jesus came, not only to call us FROM our sins but TO a new life of purpose, meaning, direction.

Whether from the lure of drugs or prostitution or from the entanglements of anger or envy, Jesus calls us away from them, surely, but he gives us new tasks.

Releasing the exploited from the grip of the exploiters is not enough. Many revolts against despotic regimes flounder once the despots are gone. Too often the liberators become the new despots.

To simply “free” people is not enough; they become like the person in Jesus’ parable who was freed of unclean spirits only to have other spirits take over in the vacuum left by the departing evil. We need nurture as well as salvation, to discover, in community, our particular gifts and talents, a lifelong journey.

 

The Idea of Jubilee at Christmas

Wednesday, December 22, 2010

Suppose Christians celebrated Christmas like a Biblical time of Jubilee?

Most of us give to some charity or other at Christmas. Suppose we, perhaps gradually over the next few years, decrease the amount of giving to ourselves and families and friends and give more to the causes outside ourselves that turn us on? Those that inspire us with the ideal of changing humankind through a meeting of physical and spiritual needs.

We hear the old refrain each time at Christmas about too much materialism and the ignoring of the real “reason for the season.” Only, since retailers depend on the holidays for as much as a third of their selling, wouldn’t the economy wreck (further) if we stopped our Christmas splurges? We don’t want to increase our country’s economic woes do we?’

According to economists, the poor and less well-off must spend every bit of money that comes their way. So what we give to the poor is more likely to wend its way into the economy of the country, it seems to me. A true stimulus package. Likewise, the help we give the spiritually needy may reap dividends if they become more useful members of society.

Christmas, a time of Jubilee

 

Why I Don’t Go All Out For Christmas

I spent my first Christmas away from my family when my job took me to an assignment in a foreign country, beginning in early December. Christians were a hidden minority. They didn’t worship openly, but I found a house church.

Our celebration of Christmas was probably nearer the first Christmas than the ones I celebrated as I was growing up. Certainly the scenery resembled the first one. Nobody dragged around Christmas trees or watched movies about a white Christmas or Rudolph or Frosty the Snowman. This scenery included desert scrub and flocks of sheep and even camels if you ventured far enough away from the city.

A British couple invited me to Christmas dinner. I learned about those party favors that you pull apart to make a snap sound. I don’t remember what we had to eat, but it probably wasn’t a turkey, and ham was forbidden in that country. Mainly, I enjoyed the fellowship with new friends who shared my beliefs about the reason for Christmas.

The next year I asked for leave during the Christmas holidays and traveled to the U.S. to spend the season with my family. I couldn’t wait to attend a real Christmas Eve service with carols and a real choir and evergreens and children dressed in bathrobes and all the other trappings of my religion at Christmas.

Being with my family was wonderful, but I was disappointed when I didn’t receive the high I was expecting from the service. It was nice, but I guess I’d built myself up for it too much.

In the years ahead, I spent other Christmases in lands that didn’t officially celebrate the holiday, where, for the local folk, it was just another work day. Forget open Yuletide decorating—not advised because it might offend. I chose gifts from catalogs and let Amazon or Lands’ End send them to family members. No rushing around crowded malls to become jaded by hearing Jingle Bells for the 1,000th time. Instead, I remember a carol sing in a private home and a clandestine Christmas concert.

Today, back home, I just can’t get into the swing of the normal Christmas. I keep remembering celebrations of simple gatherings to fellowship and remember Christ’s birth.

 

Creators and Free Will

Who hasn’t pondered why God, if he is good, allows evil? We, desiring justice, want God to intervene when injustice happens. Our innate wish for good, C. S. Lewis said, and our belief that evil should not triumph is one argument for the existence of God.

Nevertheless, the question remains, why?

As a writer, I have some thoughts.

An idea comes to me. Out of the idea, I create a story. I create characters to populate the story. And then the characters act according to their natures. I have created them, but having done so, I must let them act according to who they are. They are separate from me.

As many writers will tell you, characters take off and do things you did not intend them to do, things you don’t want them to do. Eventually, you finish writing the story, leading to the ends you desire. Sometimes you must bring in other characters that weren’t in the original story to get to the end, or other plots, or other insights—but eventually you, the creator, end the story.

This illustration is merely that, an illustration. I do think, though, that God, having created us, must give us the freedom to act, else it’s not a story. And God has created a story of sorts, with us as characters who have the freedom to be sub creators and choose our own story.

But, I believe, the story is God’s. He will lead it to the end he desires. We may decide to choose to be a part of the end God is leading toward, or not. We are free to choose.

 

Renaissance, Reformation, and New Atheism

Secularism is today’s Renaissance. The first Renaissance, which brought the European Middle Ages to a close, moved man into the center in place of God. The challenge of the Renaissance led to the Reformation of the 1500’s in the Christian church. Those of us who remain in that church, formerly identified as “Christendom,” struggle toward a new Reformation in response to the challenge of secularism.

I remember a course in my college days, Renaissance and Reformation. We studied the two movements together. The Renaissance began, so we learned, in Italy in the 1300’s. The Reformation began later. The watershed year was 1517, when Martin Luther nailed the famous Ninety-Five Theses to the church door in Wittenberg, Germany.

Why was the Renaissance first? Did most Christians accept the excesses of their church in the late Middle Ages as okay? Accept them because they were afraid if they messed with the church they were going against God? Worshiped the church as God?

Reformers worked before the Reformation, men such as John Wycliffe in England and John Hus in Bohemia. Monastic movements like the one led by Francis of Assisi called Christians to a simpler religious practice. Spiritual and secular leaders were aware of wrongs within the church during the 1200’s and before, but it took the challenge of the Renaissance and new inventions like the printing press (a revolution akin to today’s Internet) to create the Reformation.

Who knows? Today’s New Atheism might challenge Christians toward a rediscovery of their faith. Emergent churches, contemporary churches, and those movements in Africa, Asia, and South America indicate that Christianity is thriving, seething, roiling.

Perhaps we do not recognize the new wineskins into which it has been poured.

 

A View from Saudi Arabia the Day the Twin Towers’ Fell

Like most Americans on September 11, 2001, I watched the television, horrified, as the twin towers toppled in New York City. Unlike most Americans, I watched the unfolding scene from one of our U.S. consulates in Saudi Arabia, where I worked for the U.S. government.

Though we did not know at the time that most of the hijackers were from that country, if asked why Americans were hated with such brutality, I could have told you that very day.

Part of my job was visiting Americans in jail. Most Americans I visited were jailed because they sold illegal liquor in that conservative Muslim country. Selling alcohol, X-rated movies, acting in ways considered offensive to the Saudi conservative interpretation of Islam were the reasons most Americans were arrested.

To some devout Muslims of that country, Americans were a decadent lot who brought in booze, drugs, and pornography. And, they believed, Americans not only were decadent but brought their decadence to Saudi Arabia and corrupted the country with their petrodollars. Then, to protect their oil, the Americans brought thousands of their soldiers to the Middle East to fight Muslims. So it appeared to many. They wanted us out.

There are no excuses for 9/ll. Nothing excuses the actions of the hijackers, who chose to act out their anger for the threats to their culture by committing an act of pure evil. We might, however, redeem that awful day of sorrow and hurt. We might reflect on the suffering caused when those threatened by changes to beloved cultures choose to fight with hatred.

In our own country, citizens of different viewpoints sometimes appear to want to vanquish the opposing side as the hijackers wanted to vanquish America, giving in to hatred as they react to perceived threats to their way of life. No one in a democracy gets everything they want. Our best memorial to those who died in New York City nine years ago this month might be to honor our differences. We might look for ways to fuse our differences into a bridge, an arched bridge, stronger than any part by itself.

If we do not learn to use and even celebrate our differences and to respect those who disagree with us, we may cause our own destruction, more tragic than what those hijackers did on 9/11.

 

BFF Electronically

Fax machines became popular about the time I served in my first working assignment overseas in the early 1990’s for the U.S. Department of State. My family, friends, and I enthusiastically embraced the ability to communicate without the necessity for waiting on physical mail.

Before I left my last overseas assignment, we delighted in email and cheaper long distance telephone service. Cell phones were coming into popular use. We shopped “online” with our credit cards, eliminating time-consuming orders of clothes and other merchandise by mail and check (though we still had to wait for the packages to arrive in the traditional way).

Social networking appeared after I returned to the U.S., but I’m well aware of its potential to enhance long distance relationships. Instant communication with the whole family? Close friends that you only see every year or so? Marvelous!

Further additions to the electronic menu multiply so fast that spell checkers can’t keep up with them. Texting and blogs allow for instant communication with like-minded individuals. We interact and let the world know our opinions.

I do have one concern. What if our electronic networking becomes a substitute rather than an enhancement of face-to-face interaction? The word “friends” has become corrupted. Facebook and Twitter are often used as tools for advertising rather than sharing.

Anything I write on the “walls” of my “friends” I sift through a filter: How much of my inner self should be broadcast to the world? Communicating the depths of my soul? Maybe not.

Social networking allows us instant interaction with multitudes. Like many blessings, if used wisely, it serves us well. It has the potential to dilute our relationships, however, if it becomes a substitute for the intimacy of face-to-face sharing.

 

God’s On Our Side, Right? Well, Maybe Not.

The question for the TV panel, a collection of famous Americans, including one religious leader, was: “Whose side is God on if the different religions all say God is on their side?”

The panel members stumbled to answer, but I think the question is invalid because it assumes we have a “side” and God comes at our beck and call to join us.

The question, it seems to me, should be “Who is on God’s side?”

We don’t set up our own little worlds and invite God to bless them. It’s God who sets up the universe and we either choose or don’t choose to go along with his way of doing things.

So what is his way of doing things?

As a Christian, I’d say we’re headed in the right direction if we judge a society by how well it takes care of the widow and the orphan, that is, those on the margins, those with little power.

Amos is one of many prophets of the Old Testament who castigate a society where the rich loll in luxury and slant the rules their way so the poor don’t have a chance.

Jesus appears to be concerned about the vulnerable as well. Remember his story of the rich man and the poor beggar, Lazarus? The rich man ignored Lazarus’ needs and was condemned for it.

Another rich man thought only of building bigger barns to store his wealth. God called him a fool.

In Jesus’ parable of the last judgement, justice is meted out on the basis of whether one
has fed the hungry, given drink to the thirsty, welcomed the stranger, given clothes to the naked, and visited the sick and imprisoned.

I see nothing wrong with material success for work well done, for new ideas and entrepreneurship.  But what do you do with your wealth? Is it just the wealth and what it can buy, ad infinitum? Once you have food, clothing, shelter, and a few toys for fun (nothing wrong with an occasional banquet), why more? Warren Buffett and Bill Gates (senior and junior) have the right idea, I think. Once you reach a certain level, use the wealth for the good of society, for our fellow creatures.

How well do we take care of the vulnerable, those with little power? If we’re concerned that our society be on God’s side, that’s a good place to start.

 

Oil Gushers and Community

I just looked at the news to find that the Gulf Coast oil gusher still pours its ooze into the water.

While blaming British Petroleum for the catastrophe, one person suggested that Americans also might consider curbing their oil addiction. Lots of luck. I’m not sure black-gummed marine animals, despoiled beaches, and destroyed livelihoods will do the trick. So far, the only thing that caused us to drive less was when gasoline sold for four dollars a gallon. I’m sorry for those who suffered as a result of our changed habits, such as gas station and motel owners, but is less driving in itself a reason to mourn?

When I worked overseas, I would come home and marvel at the increasingly clogged freeways, the new malls, where before cows had chewed their cud in pastures, and, of course, more housing developments further and further out in the hinterlands. To my mind, the automobile had morphed from symbol of independent individualism to enslaver.

That which made us independent now constricts our choices. Children no longer can walk safely to school, to a friend’s house, or to a movie. They must be driven. The elderly must sit home alone or be warehoused into senior citizen dwellings of varying degrees of comfort when they lose the ability to drive even to the store for groceries. The less well-off, not being able to give up limited resources to buy and maintain a car, must content themselves with whatever jobs are accessible by walking or mass transit.

If the economic downturn ends, shall we return to building another super highway, another mall, swap another farm for development? More than the environment is at stake. We don’t know our neighbors. How could we? We have no time. Our commutes grow ever longer. A car in the shop for repairs is a nightmare. We can’t even buy a loaf of bread without it, let alone pick up the children from after school daycare.

In some of the other countries where I lived, walking was the main form of transportation, supplemented perhaps by a bus. I noticed people out and about, however, children on the way to school, the elderly sitting and keeping an eye on things. Small businesses catered to their walking customers.

We might think about it. Have we given up a precious commodity for the luxury of stewing in traffic jams? Or have we decided that community is optional, but the car is not?

 

The Tension Between Jamestown and Plymouth

The earliest permanent English settlements in what was to become the United States gave us two skeins that twist together throughout our history. The settlers of Jamestown, begun in 1607, by and large wanted to reap the riches of the new world. The Plymouth colonists, settling in 1620, for the most part hoped for a more spiritual harvest. Both included the wise and the foolish, the selfish and the generous.

The Jamestown settlers found that one did not reap riches as automatically as they envisioned. They went through a starving time as the wilderness taught its own brutal lessons. Eventually, the colonists began importing slaves, a practice that haunts us to this day. One can see the seeds of slavery—the desire to want wealth so much as to enslave fellow humans to obtain it for their masters—in the Jamestown settlement. Tobacco would became a cash crop, a crop which has no real value in meeting human need but requires intense labor.

This early settlement became Virginia and gave us founding fathers like George Washington, who courageously led us to victory in the war for American independence, and Thomas Jefferson, who wrote the Declaration of Independence. This document declared that all men were created equal, but both Washington and Jefferson owned slaves.

The Plymouth story has been told so many times that it has become a caricature of its original. We have gone from hero worship of the sober pilgrims to outright scorn, reminded today of the white man’s selfish exploitation of the native American. The New England Puritans have a bad reputation: forbidding games, requiring a tedious Sabbath, finally, burning women they claimed were witches.

Neither Jamestown nor Plymouth was an Eden on earth, but the coming to America of religious refugees, which the pilgrims were, foretold a nation which would grow strong by accepting “the wretched refuse” of the old world and giving these castoffs opportunity. New England, with all its faults, developed some of the greatest institutions of higher learning in the world. New England also was a seed bed for the movement to abolish slavery.

The strands of Jamestown and Plymouth are woven together in our history, from the hurts of raw greed  to the altruistic impulses that guide our attempts to help others.

We still make those choices today

 

Taxation with Representation

The young George Washington led a troop of American colonists to war in the mid 1750’s.  No, this was not the American Revolution. The Revolution would be fought more than twenty years later. The Americans weren’t fighting against the British but with them. They supported British operations to defeat the French for control of North America in the conflict known as the French and Indian War. Americans, many of British descent, preferred British rule rather than French. The British/American efforts were successful, and the American colonists remained under the British, as was their wish.

Wars must be paid for. Protecting an empire doesn’t come cheap. At the end of the war, the British empire was one of the largest in the world, but also had one of the largest debts, about half of which was incurred in defense of the American colonies. The British government passed certain measures to raise taxes and pay off the debt, including a tax on tea. Certain American leaders pointed out that Americans had no representation in the British Parliament that decided on those taxes. Differences led to the American Revolution, with its rallying cry “no taxation without representation.”

At the beginning of the twenty-first century, Americans, through their representatives in Congress, voted to reduce taxes. Shortly afterward, terrorists launched the World Trade Center attacks. Americans strongly supported military action to deal with the terrorists.

The time arrived to pay for the actions against terrorists, as well as for programs like Social Security, Medicare, and the replacement of the country’s aging bridges and highways. Americans made their displeasure felt against any restoration of taxes. It seems we don’t like taxation with representation anymore than we do taxation without representation. This appears to be true even if the taxes are for the support of programs we have voted for through our elected representatives and that are quite popular.