Ponderings

Beware the one bearing gifts. Captivated by the beauty of the gift we are tempted to accept not only the carved wooden marvel, but also the destruction that lies inside. In recent weeks we have learned with painful detail about the destructive gift of a mercenary army. Although the devil may reside in the details, I am increasingly concerned that the devilish detail is a mask for the simplest of facts.

Fact 1. The United States government contracts for services with Blackwater USA.

Blackwater USA is a “comprehensive professional military” (www.blackwaterusa.com) that hires and trains soldiers. A lot of soldiers. Although Blackwater USA customers include both governmental and non-governmental agencies, there numbers have grown exponentially with contracts for work in Iraq. The United States government is their biggest client.

We’re not talking chump change, we’re talking hundreds of millions of dollars of business. Some contracts were won in competitive bids, some awarded without bid. Most are for international assignments (eg: soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan), some for work formerly done by the National Guard (eg: public safety and security work post Katrina).

Fact 2. Blackwater USA is a private corporation owned by Erik Prince.

A onetime Navy seal, Erik’s life work demonstrates a passion shared between military conquest, religious dominance, and political savvy. Since he shuns media attention and prefers to ally with groups that meet secretively, information about the individual is scanty. His company, however, came into the glare of the media spotlight with the help of The Nation’s Jeremy Scahill and his book, “Blackwater: The Rise of the World’s Most Powerful Mercenary Army”.

Having sold the family auto parts business, Prince had capital to invest. He recognized a business opportunity as the military downsized in the late 1990’s. With the help of his Navy instructor, Al Clark, Prince purchased land in Virginia and started his first training camp. Now there are several training centers dispersed globally.

Fact 3. Prince uses Blackwater USA profits to support an array of philanthropic endeavors.

Raised in west Michigan’s Dutch enclave, Erik learned about civic responsibility, hard work, and benevolence. Like his parents before him, he gives generously.

Currently Erik is the Vice President of his parents’ foundation, the Edgar and Elsa Prince Foundation, and with the profits from Blackwater USA he also established the Freiheit Foundation.

Erik’s sister, Betsy, married into the political and economic affluence of the DeVos family and the two families (with their associated six foundations) wield a lot of influence as they seek to do good.

Fact 4. These philanthropic endeavors promote free-market economics and religious absolutism. (www.acton.org/about/principles.php)

Although Erik’s family are members of the Christian Reformed Church and his mother an influential (read: generous) board member at my alma mater, Calvin College, Erik’s own faith is now expressed through the Roman Catholic church and I am less familiar with some of his philanthropic targets. The Acton Institute, the Council for National Policy, and a new conservative Catholic college called Christendom College are just a few recipients of his largesse.

Given my lack of familiarity with the Roman Catholic trajectory of the conservative movement in America, I found myself in totally new yet eerily familiar terrain. The connection between the Roman Catholic church and the National Association of Evangelicals is not immediately clear. A shared hatred of homosexuality, abortion, and communism seem to be the primary threads. Scahill studies these groups and concludes that the young Prince, “has been in the thick of (the) right-wing effort to unite conservative Catholics, evangelicals, and neoconservatives in a common theoconservative holy war.” Though I can be persuaded that Scahill may be prone to overstatement, there is no mistaking the public record listing foundation recipients.

Hidden in plain sight, then, is our Trojan Horse. We have a mercenary army which offers the tempting illusion of war making without personal sacrifice. But inside the horse? Call me a cynic, but it seems to me that using our tax dollars to fund the right-wing religious movement promising to outlaw abortion, undermine public schools, and practice laissez-faire capitalism isn’t in our best interest. This is a horse, and a mercenary army, we can do without.

We’re celebrating good news at church today:

September 24, 2007 — The Missouri Foundation for Health announced today a $50,000 grant over two years to Deaconess Parish Nurse Ministries, LLC, to provide a parish nurse to serve both Eden Theological Seminary and Evangelical United Church of Christ in Webster Groves, Missouri. This program will educate clergy about health promotion and access to care, and work within a related faith community on similar issues.

Our nation has more than 47 million uninsured people, and medical debt is the leading cause of bankruptcy. A clergyperson can have a potential impact on the welfare on hundreds, if not thousands, of individuals and families during his or her ministerial career. We are called to “preach, teach, AND heal.” This parish nurse program is designed to support that ministry.

Sometimes the surprise is the surprise.

A sleepy small town in Louisiana, Jena, is in the news this week and lots of important folk are feigning surprise at the apparent injustice experienced by six young teens in Jena. The facts are straightforward. After a black student raised a question about sitting under the schoolyard tree, nooses appeared in the tree. The boys who hung the nooses were expelled but readmitted after a brief suspension. Tensions peaked, accusations followed and then a few skirmishes. The story of Jena is the timeless schoolyard struggle weighed down with added baggage of simmering racism.

When a white boy was beat up at school and taken to the hospital (where he was treated and released), six black youth were charged with attempted murder with bonds set at nearly $100,000. In the intervening months, the charges have been reduced to battery and the one conviction (with an all white jury) has already been tossed. Still, one seventeen year old has not seen the light of day since he was arrested nearly a year ago.

International attention has been directed now at the sleepy town where racial bias was made visible in both the prosecution and sentencing of defendants.

One of the ways in which this bias can be measured is in the number of plea bargains that avoid the death penalty. White defendants received plea bargains 48% of the time, whereas reprieve rates for Black defendants is 25% and for Hispanic defendants, 28%. (2000 Department of Justice, quoted on www.aclu.org)

Another view of the disparity is the difference in federal drug laws regarding possession of crack cocaine and its more refined (and expensive) counterpart, powder cocaine. Just 5 grams of the cheap stuff will net the same sentences as 500 grams of the good stuff. Given the economic disparity in America, it should come as no surprise that Blacks are more likely to get caught with the cheap stuff.

The resulting disparity in incarceration rates is appalling. For every 100,000 Black men in America, 4919 are incarcerated. The rate for White males is 717 per 100,000. Do we really believe that Blacks are seven times more likely to engage in criminal behavior than Whites?

The outrage in Jena is with the glaring injustices of the system charged with meting out justice. No one claims to be surprised at the schoolyard tension and herein lays our problem. We accept the simmering level of tension that charges through the schoolyard day in and day out. Shame and sadness may be appropriate emotions when reading about the “Jena 6,” but surprise?

While the politicians were feigning surprise at the plight of young Black teens, I noted the peculiar silence of the so-called Christian media. In an attempt to read the American religious right on this issue, my suspicious mind went snooping. There isn’t much. The one place that did offer a report, CBN (the granddaddy of the Christian broadcast world), offered sympathetic support to the “many Christians” who had gathered to express their moral outrage.

Perhaps this signals the real surprise of the week - the good news that all Christians can come to the table on this one. Christians can agree that racial bias is not acceptable. Enough is enough. And this, dear friends, is a remarkable bit of grace.

Greg Freeman was a gifted St. Louis journalist who was instrumental in helping me understand this city that I now call home. Perhaps the most jarring of his articles for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch in the years I was reading along was his description of teaching his son to drive. As my own daughter nears her sixteenth birthday, I have often found myself pondering his advice.

Greg pointed out that the important lessons for his young son at the wheel had less to do with how he handled the wheel and more to do with where he kept his hands if an officer approached his car. He described with painful detail the role of black fathers in helping their sons avoid unpleasant entanglements with law officers. It is an occasion, he advised, for old school polite. I admit that my daughters driving lessons have focused more on staying between the lines on the road. ‘Begin with the basics,’ is my justification. But truthfully, my daughter and Greg’s son face distinctly different challenges. Although both are smart middle class kids, one is a white female and one a black male. Greg’s article pointed out that, like it or not, the wise young driver understands that there is a difference.

When my prophet friend showed me the video of Rev. Lennox Yearwood’s arrest during the Petraeus Hearing on Capitol Hill last week, I remembered Greg’s column. Rev. Yearwood, a black man about the age that Greg would be if he were here, had been pulled out of the admission line and was being quietly held along the sideline. When Rev. Yearwood began to demand to know why he had been singled out, his voice assertive but his body non-combative, the officers literally took him down to the floor with with force that necessitated a trip to the hospital. Troubling though the video was, I was curious that the pastor did not offer verbal deference to the law officers. I found myself wondering if he had missed his father’s driving lessons.

My friend came to see me again this week, even more troubled than last. It had happened again, he reported, this time to a university kid in Florida. Senator John Kerry was entertaining questions after a speech at the University of Florida and one eager young journalism student allegedly pushed his way to the front of the line. The events that followed were recorded on video cameras and were quickly put online. In fairness to the event organizers and law officers, the video shows that Meyer’s question was shaping up more like a persuasive speech than an honest question. According to my mother’s driving lessons, it would be fair to characterize Meyer’s behavior as bad form. Not outright belligerent, but certainly not deferential.
But Meyer must have had at least some driving lessons because though his tone continued to be demanding, he kept both hands raised high in the air in the sign of surrender. His posture not withstanding, his voice was clearly not welcome by the officers. As the officers surrounded him, steering him away from the microphone and toward the back of the room, he could be heard asking “Why can’t I ask a question?”. Although he was moving with the police away from the stage, his verbal insistence continued. Correct body language, bad mouth. Soon he was pinned to the ground by four armed officers and then, while pinned and pleading for mercy, tasered (read: electric shock). The screams on the video are chilling.

The veil of white privilege has rent and I realize that a wise mother would offer her daughter more comprehensive driving lessons, lessons that include keeping your hands in clear view and your mouth shut. She is pretty feisty and extremely verbal, I need to make sure she understands the liability of back talk. Though I find little solace in the “misery loves company” new world order in which all of our children need driving lessons, I am grateful to Greg for the wisdom shared that endures.

Still, I have to wonder if we ought not to change the rules of the road.

When your teenager is scheduled for a sleep-deprived study, a warning should be issued to the parents. The entire household will be sleep deprived. The experience is a not-so-cheery trip down memory lane to those new baby wake up calls. All of the slogginess and none of the sweet baby smell.

Which is all to say that, when my daughter was scheduled for a “sleep deprived” study yesterday, I should have known I was going to have a bad day. The problem, of course, is that the primary symptom of sleep deprivation is obliviousness. So rather than a helpful warning beep, my first clue was being locked out of my house at 8:30am. I lost the show down between my husbands’s, “we always lock the back door” and my, “we never lock the backdoor”. The last one out the door wins, and I wasn’t. (Given that he had to drive home from work to let us in, we’ll call that one a draw.) Twelve hours later, I was searching for my office keys to no avail. My son, who had borrowed them, was furious with me in a bizarre twist of adolescent illogic. How can the one who did the losing blame the one who is now experiencing the loss? In between the key challenges was a debate with the contractor at my house, a chastising conversation with a friend, and the normal pile of work and taxi-mom chores.

All of this is ample explanation of why Americans seem oblivious. It’s not that we don’t know that things are awry, we just don’t have enough focused energy to offer a reasonable response. We recognize that trillion dollar debt is problematic, that wars of aggression are mean spirited (read: wrong), that both polar bears and homeless men deserve safe haven, and that big brother eavesdropping on this conversation is unnerving. We are fully aware but not fully functional.

Mass media is bane and blessing in this regard. We are so much more aware of the warts and simultaneously overwhelmed by the magnitude. I confess that the unprocessed sound-bytes of war and conflict duel in my dreams, only contributing to the cycle of sleep deprivation. As we mark another 9/11 anniversary, now our sixth, the messages are ever more complex and confusing. Osama bin Laden is back in the news (wasn’t he at least one war ago?) and infringements on our freedom (in the name of freedom!) continue to expand. Explanations are fine as far as they go, but explanations are not excuses and the gravity of our current path warrants focused response.

Last night I went to bed promptly at 9pm and didn’t stir until my son was singing at 7am. Today I’m ready to tackle the world. As I’m typing these words comes a CNN News Break and my resolve to read and respond. “One officer dead, three wounded in Miami shoot-out.” One mother grieving, three in mortal fear. No amount of REM’s prepare one to respond to that kind of senseless slaughter. Senseless shedding of human blood is, of course, the same moral ellipse that fuels the endless warring in Iraq.

But today is drawing to a close. Let’s pray that Scarlett is right about tomorrow.