Category Archives: Past as Prologue to Future

Wealth and Taxes

Communism as practiced by Stalin and early leaders of the Soviet Union included forcibly taking land away from owners to be run by collectives. Ukraine, now again in Soviet cross hairs, was a victim of Stalin’s ruthlessness.

For centuries, however, the problem of poverty next to great wealth was part of unrest and rebellion in many parts of the world, from peasant revolts in China to the French Revolution.

Both Hebrew and Christian scriptures allow wealth. The scriptures are filled with feasts and celebrations, often a product of wealth. The problem is not wealth—indeed wealth is seen as a blessing. The problem with wealth is the same as with many other blessings—musical ability, beauty, political success, for example. The problem is the hoarding or use of blessings for oneself alone.

Every so often, according to Hebrew scriptures, wealth is to be curtailed, with part of it returned to original owners or their descendants. Wealth is allowed and to be enjoyed, but within limits.

The problem is not the enjoyment of wealth but the hoarding of wealth. Wealth is to be both enjoyed and shared.

We might look at our taxation as a modern day version of scriptural righteousness. The rich should be allowed the use of their wealth for their own enjoyment, but a responsible portion of it should be taxed for the use of all—schools, child care, low income housing, medical care, and other uses that benefit all of us.

Guilt versus Confession

Some Americans fear remembrance of our past slave-holding days. We might be damaged by too much guilt if we dwell on the slaves and slave holders in our past. Even more, it might damage our country if we admit to imperfections. We certainly don’t want our children suffering guilt over our country’s racism, do we?

As a white American who had at least one ancestor who owned slaves, I don’t fear facing our sins. One of my privileges is to own my ancestor’s sins and to repent of them. I can also repent of those days in my childhood when blacks had to move to the back of the bus after entering and paying their fare like everybody else. Had to drink at separate water fountains.

How would I feel about those days if I had grown up black? The hurt surely is still there.

Somehow, the idea seems to be that the if the United States is deemed less than perfect, it’s like saying God is less than perfect. Somehow, we seem to think the United States is God.

To ascribe to God what is not God is, I believe, blasphemy.

Even more, we can never change for the better if we don’t recognize our sins and repent of them.

More Than Democracy

Perhaps America’s climb to world power is due more to the ability of its ordinary citizens to make a decent living than simply because it practices a form of democracy.

Despite racism and other sins, for most of its history the United States has constantly been renewed by immigrants coming to make a new life, start new businesses, and provide their children with a good education. Yes, they became participants in our political processes, but they also took advantage of the ability to thrive economically.

Surely Americans cannot be faulted for encouraging democracy in other nations as a major part of our foreign policy. Yet our push for democratic institutions has worked best where we have also pushed economic incentives, such as the Marshall Plan for Europe following World War II.

In the Middle East and North Africa, democracy has stalled. Amaney A. Jamal and Michael Robbins write: “It appears that the people of the Arab world have internalized one lesson above all from the revolts of the last decades: democratic change does not necessarily produce economic improvement.” ( “Why Democracy Stalled in the Middle East,” Foreign Affairs, March-April 2022)

Tunisia, where I lived for a few years, appeared to have perhaps the best chance for an Arab nation to develop a democracy. With a low birth rate, an educated population, and a generally homogenous society, Tunisians appeared set for a democratic awakening when the strong man ruler, Zine el Abidine Ben Ali, was overthrown in 2011 in a bloodless coup.

Unfortunately, in July 2021, the current popularly elected Tunisian leader, Kais SAIED, seized exceptional powers, fired the prime minister, and suspended the legislature.

Both Ben Ali’s earlier overthrow, and the powers assumed by the current leader, were occasioned by economic problems, including low job expectations for young people.

Here in the United States, even though our economy is growing, the change in job structure has led to the loss of good jobs for many. Geographically, some areas are thriving while others have suffered.

At the same time, our tax policies favor those who are already wealthy in keeping and growing huge amounts of their wealth, not in encouraging more equitable taxation. Such taxes could be used for programs like child care and education and job training to bring others into the mainstream.

Obviously, the wealthy have more money to invest in political campaigns for keeping the status quo than do the non wealthy. Some of those political campaigns may play on falsehoods about election counts rather than on needed changes to our tax system.

Nevertheless, if the U.S. is to endure as an influential nation, those changes must come. The country must be seen as economically fair as well as politically healthy.

China: Now the Senior Partner

China’s stance on Ukraine’s struggle for independence from Russia is of utmost importance. China has reversed its relationship with Russia from Cold War days: from junior partner to senior.

Linda Jaivin, in The Shortest History of China, recounts the multi- millennial history of the country from the beginning of human settlement to the current reign under Xi Jinping.

From shadowed beginnings, China rose and fell under various dynasties until the last one ended in the early twentieth century. Fighting between factions ensued, including the Chinese Communist party, founded in 1921. The other major faction, the Nationalists, opposed to the Communists, was led by Chiang Kai-shek.

The Japanese invasion of China before World War II, despite its horrors, did little to overcome the struggles between the Communist and Nationalist parties. After World War II, the Communist party became ascendant.

Through years of turmoil, including horrible self-inflicted famines, the Communists eventually overcame the disastrous years of Mao Tse-tung. They began to grow the economy into the giant it is today. Meanwhile, Russia stumbled from promises of a democratic government to the current kleptocracy under Vladimir Putin’s oligarchy.

How much freedom will countries enjoy who exist on the margins of Russia and China? Is it possible for Ukrainians to enjoy the independence they desire? To become a partner with the successful countries of Europe? Can Taiwan maintain its independence?

Checkpoint Charlie

October, 1961: Checkpoint Charlie: one of those barely remembered confrontations in the early days of the Cold War.

A few months before, the Soviets, against allied protests, had built the Berlin Wall, effectively sealing off East Berlin from the rest of the world. Western diplomats were refused free access to the area, against earlier agreements that they would be allowed such access.

The confrontation escalated when Americans moved tanks to the border to support the accord. The Soviets responded with tanks of their own on their side. Would someone begin firing, triggering World War III?

Fortunately, neither U.S. President John F. Kennedy nor Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev wished to begin a war. Back channel negotiations were established. Eventually both sides began backing away their tanks. Diplomats on both sides continued to have access to the entire city.

Before these events, before the Wall was even in place, in the mid 1950’s, John Kerry was a school boy in Berlin with his father, a U.S. official there. Kerry, who would later become U.S. Secretary of State, likes to tell of the time he biked over into East Berlin, apparently using his American passport, to explore the area. His father was horrified when he discovered what his son had done and promptly grounded him. Apparently, he had visions of his son’s escapade causing an international incident.

Now, more than six decades later, the world is still subject to crises along that longer divide between east and west.

August 1991

From my job at the U.S. consulate in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, I watched with millions all over the world as a coup attempt played out in Moscow. Were the efforts to finally install democracy in countries of the Soviet Union doomed to failure? Were similar attempts in Russia itself to be overcome?

Mikail Gorbachev had become leader of the Soviet Union in 1985, the youngest member of the Soviet politburo. He had attempted a loosening of the Soviet system, allowing some Eastern European countries to begin breaking away and forming their own governments. He also began instituting changes in Russia’s governance.

However, for a few days in August 1991, while Gorbachev was away from Moscow, hardliners placed him and his family under house arrest and attempted to wrest power away from him.

Countries in eastern Europe, having begun steps toward their independence, watched in horror, afraid that their new freedom would be taken back.

George Krol, a U.S. diplomat serving at a U.S. consulate in Russia was especially concerned. He had traveled into the Baltic republics as they began throwing off the Soviet yoke. Awakening now to the news of the attempted coup, he drove across to Riga in the Baltic republic of Latvia.

He found government officials there watching in horror as Soviet armored personnel carriers threatened their own country. Krol then met with leaders of the Latvian parliament. As they thanked him for being there, he realized, he said “what it meant to truly represent my country.” He was standing with them, as a representative of America in their darkest hour.

The world watched as resisters under Boris Yeltsin eventually overcame the attempted coup, a victory to be savored as former Soviet nations continued steps toward democracy.

No one, however, should think that some sort of ultimate victory was won. Not all Russians were happy to see their empire fading away. Economic hardships ensued for many.

This stage was part of an ongoing story, still being written, as Putin’s attempts in Ukraine attest.

It was, however, a most important step. As Krol wrote, “On that beautiful summer’s day, as I drove with the windows down through the idyllic Baltic country-side, I thought: I represent the United States of America; I can’t believe they pay me to do this.”

U.S. and Russia: déjà vu?

In 1946, George F. Kennan, a U.S. diplomat stationed at the U.S. embassy in Moscow, examined U.S./Russian relations in what is famously known as “the long telegram.”

The telegram, sent from the embassy to the U.S. State Department in Washington, outlined directions that greatly influenced our relations with the Soviet Union for the rest of the Cold War.

Kennan summarized Soviet ideology as based on its belief that capitalism is evil and will eventually be overcome by the triumph of the working class. However, the early Russian communists had to first overthrow the Tsarist regime. Since the majority of people in the first communist country, Russia, were not inclined to this “necessary overthrow,” a dictatorship had to be established to bring it about.

Indeed, any opposition to this firm belief in communism had to be fought, including any opposition in the rest of the world, including the United States. Soviet ideology must stress the menace of capitalism.

“It must invariably be assumed in Moscow that the aims of the capitalist world are antagonistic to the Soviet regime . . .” Kennan wrote.

Basically, the Soviets saw communist ideology as absolute truth. If democratic ideas inhibit the growth of this ideology, then democratic ideas must be destroyed.

However, whether the Soviet system would triumph would depend on the success of the different model chosen by the United States. “The issue of Soviet-American relations is in essence a test of the overall worth of the United States as a nation among nations. To avoid destruction the United States need only measure up to its own best traditions and prove itself worthy of preservation as a great nation.”

The overthrow of Soviet rule by Soviet satellite states in the 1990’s obviously was a blow to the communist ideology outlined by Kennan. However, the cheering crowds in Germany and other places should not obscure the fact that dedicated communists like Vladimir Putin remained as dedicated to the communist ideology as ever. They bided their time and are now working their way back into power in Russia and other former Soviet states.

This is the background against which Putin operates today. A Soviet operator in the former East Germany, Putin saw the Communist regime in east Germany topple. His world suffered ignominious defeat.

With this background, we can see the challenge posed by a Ukraine desirous of democracy, including connections with democratic nations of Europe.

Yet the stakes are bigger even than Ukraine or a few former Communist bloc countries. The communism of Vladimir Putin is patient. It believes capitalism will eventually implode, overcome by capitalist selfishness.

Perhaps we should understand the importance of the choices we are making regarding the kind of capitalism we choose. That which plays into Putin’s hands, in which the rich get richer and the rest pay more of the country’s taxes? Or a more responsible kind which, among other choices, takes care of its children and vulnerable citizens and is upheld by a fair system of taxation?

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.”

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.

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?

Wretched Refuse

“Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tossed to me,
I lift my lamp beside the golden door!” (Emma Lazarus, 1883)

Once again, the tempest-tossed find their way to the United States. They join a long line of previous refugees—escapees from Europe’s religious wars in the 1600’s; then joined through the centuries by the poverty-stricken, seeking economic opportunity; followed by survivors from Nazi concentration camps; then the “displaced persons” of World War II; then Koreans, Vietnamese, Iraqis, and now Afghans.

In between, the descendants of black slaves and native Americans have fought prejudice. From south of our border, economic migrants added to the mix.

Our population history is a mixture of marvelous acceptance and depraved hatred. Yet, from these struggles, the country has continually been blessed by new life.

Nobel prizewinners and philanthropists, inventors and scholars—as well as ordinary business owners and stalwart middle class citizens have descended from this jumble.

May God give us the grace and wisdom to once again be blessed by this newest “wretched refuse.”

Vaccines Then and Now

I grew up in the dark ages. Children died from diseases like polio and measles. I remember attending a funeral for a young girl in my neighborhood who died of complications from measles. Another child died of complications from polio. A classmate was crippled by this disease. We saw images of children in “iron lungs”—large metal tubes they lived in to help them breathe after suffering polio. Measles could be a short childhood illness or it could kill or blind a child.

My parents were constantly worried about my brother or me catching one of these horrible sicknesses. We came back early from a vacation because a polio epidemic had suddenly broken out where we were planning to visit. During the summer, swimming pools required swimmers to get out of the water every hour and rest for ten minutes because overexertion might encourage the disease. Nobody complained about this restriction harming their civil rights.

Of course, we had immunizations against some diseases. Death and serious illness from small pox and typhoid no longer visited whole populations as they once had. My great aunt told of almost dying from typhoid, with a fever so high, she said, that her hair had fallen out.

Immunizations against these diseases were given each year in our public schools. The county nurse would make the rounds inoculating all students against the diseases for which we had vaccines.

When vaccines against polio came out, parents rushed their children to schools to be vaccinated—it was midsummer, as I remember—but schools opened for mass inoculation. Almost immediately, the fear of polio vanished in this country because almost every child had been vaccinated against it. It was a miracle.

If only, I remember thinking, the vaccine had come out a few months or a year earlier, my classmate’s life could have been saved.

With this history and these memories, I have a hard time understanding the massive resistence to vaccines. To me, science and vaccines and modern medicines are a gift God has given us with the power to create good for the world’s people.

Fulbright Scholarships and Segregation

It’s one of those paradoxes—America’s sometimes heroic leadership in the post World War II era and its torturous dealings with its racist sins at the same time.

A recent article in Foreign Affairs about J. William Fulbright, a senator from Arkansas from 1945 to 1974, mirrors this struggle. (Charles King, “The Fulbright Paradox,” July/August 2021).

Fulbright’s name is attached to the famous scholarship awards program begun in 1946. The program has allowed thousands of American and foreign students to study each other’s learning and culture.

Senator Fulbright also led the successful fight to end Senator Joseph McCarthy’s reign of terror. McCarthy’s false conspiracy theories had destroyed careers and people’s lives.

In addition, Fullbright began hearings on the Vietnam war in 1966. Testimony was taken from numerous people, including John Kerry, then a young anti-war veteran of the war. Kerry’s testimony is remembered to this day for his question: “How do you ask a man to be the last man to die for a mistake?”

Here is Fulbright, then, espousing such liberal causes as opposition to the war.

But Fulbright shows another side to his character: “In 1956, Fulbright signed the Declaration of Constitutional Principles, also known as the Southern Manifesto . . . .The document codified southern resistance to racial integration . . .”

The idea of black Americans in Arkansas having as much power through voting as white Arkansans was simply, for him, a bridge too far.

Though he could advance learning and understanding between nations and could see the folly of Vietnam, he, like many Americans today, could not see our own racial sins.

As King writes: “He was a figure who committed his life to global understanding yet found it impossible to apply the same ideals to his homeland. What seems like a contradiction in Fulbright’s outlook, however, is really a blind spot in Americans’ own. Ths combination of open-mindedness abroad and bigotry at home was not unique to him.”

Growing Up Is Always

Organized Christianity since its inception could rate an A or an F, depending on which bits you examine.

One could point to religious wars killing millions.

On the other hand, where Christians have become a force, slavery generally has been abolished. The status of women has improved. The sick and the poor are more often cared for.

Jesus himself said to judge his followers not by whether they say they are his followers. Rather, have well do they follow his examples? Do they feed the hungry, give water to the thirsty, take care of strangers, clothe the naked, and visit the prisoners?

Bill McKibben in his column in Sojourners (“A Mad and Dangerous Spell,” July 2021) faults those evangelicals who talk of the power of God to keep them from harm from the Covid-19 virus. For this reason, they say, they don’t need to be vaccinated against the disease.

“These sentiments sound pious,” he writes, “but they’re in fact the opposite—individualism masquerading as faith. God gave us a world that works in certain physical ways, and God gave us the brains to understand it.” Science developed the vaccines that have saved countless lives from Covid.

Against the anti-science of some evangelicals and others today, one must point to the books and learning kept alive in Christian communities during the European Middle Ages.

Ignorance is always being pushed back, for Christians as for anyone. Some of the first Christians owned slaves. Women were often placed in inferior positions. Some Christians (or calling themselves Christians) murdered each other and non-Christians in vicious wars and pogroms and crusades.

But change came. And Christians often led the changes, even against co-religionists.

The apostle Peter had to overcome his prejudice against Gentiles becoming Christians. In every generation since, we fight these battles to grow and overcome. We are always children striving to become the adults God wishes us to be.

Jesus and the Disinherited

Howard Thurman’s book, Jesus and the Disinherited, let me peer into the racial sins we Americans have inherited, as no other book has done.

I was raised a white Southerner by parents and church and culture which was not overtly racist. Ours wasn’t the Ku Klux Clan kind of racism. We were a working class/lower middle class church in a similar kind of neighborhood. I will be forever grateful to that church and its love.

It was only in reading Thurman’s book that I began to understand the less violent kinds of racism. Thurman helped me understand how a black in America, particularly in the South, had to live.

He talked of a visit he made to India. His host, as they prepared for bed, told him he must be careful at night if he got up to go to the bathroom or for any reason. He must always shine a light ahead so that he would not inadvertently step on a Cobra, curled soundlessly in his path.

And that is when I began to understand the insidiousness of racism.

I never had to think, when I left my house, about my white skin. I never considered, as I went into a store or applied for a job, how my white skin might be noticed.

In a white majority society, Thurman showed me, a person with a dark skin has to be aware of it all the time.

Christianity as Default

Christianity is alive and well, but Christendom is not. In the former places of Christendom, many regard it as somewhere between a harmless superstition and a deadly virus.

Christianity bested paganism as the default European religion in the latter days of the Roman Empire. It has endured centuries of peaks and declines since then as it spread throughout the planet, in one form or another.

But Christ is never fully realized in any society. When Christianity is lived by enough of its adherents as it should be, it gains followers and popularity and influence. Then people begin to think they are Christians by default because of the culture they were born into.

But of course, they are not. “Even when Christianity is the default mode of a society, Christ is not.” Christian Wiman writes in My Bright Escape.

Living the Christ faith is never by default. Christ must be chosen deliberately, new in each generation.

World War II Hangover

One of the greatest things the United States ever did was lead Europe to defeat the Nazis in World War II.

Even greater was leading the world against Soviet communism without a major war that would have destroyed the planet.

We have lived on the laurels won in those conflicts ever since.

Every righteous victory has a day after. The Protestant Reformation, unfortunately, was followed by terrible religious wars devastating most of Europe. One of the mistakes was the use of religious ideas in political conflicts.

We run similar risks today. The United States is not Jesus. Criticism of some of the country’s policies is not blasphemy. Recognizing and confessing our sins does not diminish the country but, instead, can be part of its renewal.

David P. Gushee, a professor at Mercer University in Atlanta, Georgia, has spoken about the beginnings of black slavery in America. The practice of slavery after 1619 “required an intensification of white racism. It also required an intentional deformation of other aspects of Christian belief and practice so that Christian people accommodate themselves to slavery.” (“Born in Heresy,” Sojo.net, Sept/Oct 2020. Italics are mine.)

Even after the United States was formed, Gushee says, “. . . we could have followed the British lead and abolished slavery. Instead, we deepened our excuses, weakened our ethics, and denied biblical theology.”

We even fought a Civil War. Technically, slavery was abolished after that, but the refusal to atone for our sins led to Jim Crow laws justifying segregation and denying black Americans the right to vote.

This is not ancient history. In the South where I grew up, blacks rode in the back of the bus and sent their children to underfunded black schools. As a child, I remember the separate water fountains in department stores neatly labeled “white” and “colored.”

Some white Americans seem unable to understand that centuries of racism continue to exert influence. The George Floyd murder by a white police officer is a reminder of the deep need for both repentance and change.

New Order Passing

We live in a new jobs age. The factory based model (husband goes off to work in a factory, assured good wages and healthcare, while his wife stays home with the children) is fast passing. Manufacturing jobs still exist, but they tend to be more specialized, requiring more training. Machines perform more and more of the old labor intensive, repetitive work.

Office work also is changing. Back in the twentieth century, as office workers grew in number, they adapted to the old manufacturing model. Companies created worker bee hives in office towers. Wives and mothers stayed in newly created suburban enclaves.

Then women began returning to the more ancient model: contributing to economic activity as they had always done. As women joined the work force in increasing numbers, the job/home separation became harder to maintain. Long commutes, automobile expenses, and child care problems illustrated the shortcomings of job/home separation.

The pandemic allowed us to try new models, including “office” work done at home, often on a schedule not tied to set hours at a set time. Some loved the new arrangement; some hated it. Many probably would like a combination.

The new model is more like the ancient model. For most of recorded history, work was tied to the home. Everybody worked in one form or another. Neighborhoods offered more than mere lodging.

That is not to see this period as idealistic. It included abuse and class privilege. Those who were different sometimes were shunned and bullied.

Nevertheless, the extreme separation of work from home caused by the industrial revolution is an aberration. The pandemic has allowed us the beginning of newer, more adjustable models.

Democracy’s Fallout

What if, in the United States, the majority passes laws we don’t believe in? What if representative government skews opposite from some of our chosen ideals?

If we are on a losing side, we face temptations. We may try to work the system so that only our kind of voter can actually make it to the polls.

Or we may go to extreme lengths as happened on January 6 and storm the capitol building, perhaps with the intent of physically harming those with whom we disagree.

Instead, perhaps we should begin with the understanding that governments are created by imperfect human beings. Thus, they are going to be imperfect.

In the year 1776, men who believed they had a right to self-government risked their lives, fortunes, and sacred honor to declare their colonies free and independent states.

Of course, these first callers for self-government were not only all men, but all white men. Some of them, calling for this freedom, owned fellow human beings.

The struggle that began in a hot summer in Philadelphia in the 18th century was, we have to understand, only a beginning with much imperfection. To assume that our founding documents and beginning actions were somehow blessed by Jesus like holy writ, borders on apostasy. The founders were sinful men who had some good beginning ideas.

Our history is sometimes glorious and sometimes hideous, like the inability to get rid of slavery, leading finally to a ridiculous war. (Interestingly enough, if we had remained in the British empire, we would have seen slavery abolished in that empire in 1833, presumably without the Civil War.)

The length of time it took to give all citizens voting rights is shameful, as are today’s attempts to curtail recent gains.

We have known some redemption. We led democracies after World War II to stand up to the atrocities of the Soviet Union without a major war. The Marshall Plan, bringing aid to exhausted allies as well as defeated enemies, showed us at our best—and led to strong alliances.

The point is to see our country, not as some god, but as a journey with all kinds of temptations and all kinds of possibilities. Not surprising that we imperfect humans sometimes pull in different directions.

Reacting responsibly to the pulling, as it sometimes goes the way we want and sometimes not, includes refusing violence, even when we’re on the losing side. Somehow, we have to listen. We have to sympathize, while stating our own beliefs clearly but without violence—over and over if necessary.

Our republic is imperfect. We have to live with that. If we cherish beliefs that others don’t, we keep on speaking them, while never giving way to violence. Our black sisters and brothers surely can teach us .