personal piety and global despair
While I was parked on CNN.com last Tuesday waiting for Lake County, Indiana to post their results, the people of Myanmar had just begun to count their dead.
As I sat between the surreal story of tens of thousands of people destroyed and the nail biting politics closer to home, I found myself noticing a tab on the page called “issues”. I clicked and discovered that the issues of this election year are, again, abortion, same gender marriage, guns, and stem cell research. The economy, immigrants, Iran and Iraq also appear, but the dominant concerns are clearly ones of personal piety. Me and mine.
While we squabble about issues of personal morality, tens of thousands of people whose lives were already tenuous have now been literally washed away. The hundreds of thousands who survived the storm are now perishing in the devastation that remains. Pouring salt on the wound is the bitter reality that even as the world wakes to the sound of crisis, the government of Myanmar has already expressed reluctance to open its closed doors. Although a lover of irony, the tragic proportions of this irony are haunting.
Public media can be misleading but in the case of what captures our American interest they seem to be sadly on point.
The Missouri Secretary of State’s office (conveniently found at www.sos.mo.gov) lists the ballot initiatives now circulating in our state. The list is not dissimilar from that at CNN.com and includes abortion, affirmative action, and stem cell research. And though there are a couple of initiatives dealing with more communal issues (renewable energy and health care), the only initiative on the approved list thus far is one limiting our official discourse to English.
Similarly the Christian Coalition announces that the seven political issues facing people of faith are: “conservative” judges, limiting stem cell research, protecting tax cuts, ensuring ‘Christian’ access to the internet, banning non-heterosexual marriage, and protecting Christians in the military.
All of these issues are worthy of our consideration and perhaps our vote, but none of these address the gross inequities of the distribution of wealth (and food) in our world that have rendered the people of Myanmar unable to cope with the devastating cyclone.
We ‘invest’ millions of dollars, hundreds of millions in fact, to debate sound bites and defend personal piety while entire regions of the world are without food and subjugated to the desperation of the most vicious junta.
The fiery words from the prophet Amos (ch 4-6) echo in my mind:
Woe to you “cows of Bashan” who “lie on your ivory beds” while the “widows and orphans starve”.
Of course, such teaching is deemed a distraction and can quickly earn a public roast. If we learned nothing else from Jeremiah Wright, certainly we learned the importance of sticking to issues of personal piety and not questioning the balance of wealth and power. If only our still speaking God wasn’t.
