January 29, 2016
Well, it's been a while! I got a page on Weebly that I tried to use for several years, but I've pretty much given up, as I can never seem to log in.
Now, and for the most part until June 1, I'm in California, rejoicing in the rain even if it keeps me from walking around the lake and getting my proper exercise, translating lots of books and stuff, enjoying Andrew's and Rachel's concerts, now starting up again after the holiday break -- one last night, another this coming Sunday, and so on.
And campaigning for Bernie! Oh, what a dream of a lifetime!
Friday, January 29, 2016
Sunday, December 06, 2009
New beginnings
Today I began as Interim priest at Calvary Episcopal Church, Underhill, VT. Here's the inaugural sermon:
A Sermon for the Second Sunday of Advent, 2009 (Year C)
Inaugural sermon at Calvary Episcopal Church, Underhill, VT
All I really need to do today is read again the word of Paul to the Philippians that we just heard, and sit down. That passage says everything I would want to say about how joyful I am to be among you, and what a bright example you are to the churches. I believe that as we go forward in this interim time your love will indeed “overflow more and more, with knowledge and full insight, to help you to determine what is best . . . to produce the harvest of righteousness that comes through Jesus Christ for the glory and praise of God.” Let that be our mission statement for the time to come! We might want to think of reading it every Sunday and at the beginning of every meeting!
But today let me also say something about the Advent message found in the Gospel and in the words of Baruch, our first reading.
“A baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of sins.” What does that mean? John the Baptizer was so called, and even sources outside the gospels remember him by that name, because that was his whole idea, his whole purpose: baptizing people “for repentance.” “Repent and believe the Good News,” Jesus says when he comes on the scene, after he himself has been baptized by John. So what do repentance and forgiveness of sins and Good News all have to do with each other?
What you usually hear about John’s and Jesus’ good news is that they called for repentance as a precondition for forgiveness of sins: if you repent, you’ll be forgiven. And I think that’s wrong. The God whom John is preaching, the God who is laying the axe to the root of the tree, sounds like the Spy in the Sky. This God is gonna getcha if you don’t watch out. And if God doesn’t, then the Messiah will separate the wheat from the chaff, when he comes. (You better watch out; you better not cry; you better not pout, I’m tellin’ you why: Messiah is coming!)
And then along comes Jesus, and he really sounds very different. His message is: “The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God has come; repent and believe the Good News!” In other words, God is already in our midst, and our sins are forgiven. There are no preconditions, no hurdles to jump over, no tasks to be completed. No wonder, in another part of the story, John sends his disciples to ask Jesus: "Are you the one who is to come, or should we look for somebody else?"—somebody more like what we were expecting, that is. And once Jesus was off the visible scene, it didn’t take the church so very long to get back to a more “comfortable” religion in which you get what you pay for, so to speak.
“Repentance” is a weak and misleading word for what John was preaching. The Gospel says he preached—and Jesus preached—metavnoia, which means turning your whole life aroundĖ—and as for it being “for the forgiveness of sins,” that preposition, I think, means not “for” but “because of.” The Baptizer is calling all of us to turn our lives around because our sins have been forgiven; in Jesus, the pardon of God is in our midst forever.
Is it fair, this message that Jesus preaches—and John, too, as it turns out? that God doesn’t even wait for us to repent before forgiving us? God sent Jesus to be in our midst, to be one of us, with us forever as God’s living pardon among us. God hopes that we will repent because we have been forgiven, not as a condition of it—as if we could earn salvation by our own doing. As the prophet says, "The Lord has taken away the judgments against you." God has done the atoning for us, so that we can be filled with God’s love and turn away from sin.
The kind of religion where you get what’s coming to you seems so much more satisfying, somehow—unless, of course, you’re one of those sinners that Jesus liked to hang around with. The fundamental problem with the kind of Christianity that calls “repent or else” the Good News—and really, I think this is the religion of America in the 21st century—is that it has no need for that Jesus guy, with his strange ideas and his weird friends.
Of course, the message here is not really that we can be as sinful as we like, that we can say “hallelujah, Jesus done washed my sins away!” and go on doing whatever. God comes to us in Jesus with hands and heart full of love and forgiveness, and if we get close enough to that, we will be swept away and our lives will be changed forever. So we try not to think about it too much; we try not to get too close.
The thing is, God is intent on getting really, really close to us—not in our faces, but in our hearts, up close and personal, skin to skin. God puts on skin so God can be intimate with us. We keep putting on clothes so we can avoid contact.
Sin, I’m saying, is like clothes we put on (at the very worst it’s like body armor). (Remember how, after they sinned, the first thing Adam and Eve did was to put on clothes?) Sometimes we wear scruffy, ragged-looking sins, and sometimes beautiful robes of sin that are just so smooth . . . but always, we do it to keep from getting skin to skin with God. Sin keeps us from God, and keeps us from each other. Sin helps us hide who we really are, hide it from ourselves, from each other, from God (we think—fat chance there!). Repentance, changing our lives, means stripping away sin, going skinny-dipping in the waters of grace.
Take off the garment of your sorrow and affliction, O Jerusalem,
and put on forever the beauty of the glory from God!
And when we do, especially in Vermont in December, it’s so scary, because it feels as if we will freeze to death—and we would, if it weren’t that the flame of God’s love is there, wrapping us in its warmth.
Maybe the reason why Mary is pure, is virginal, is holy is that she is the only one who was absolutely, totally, skin to skin with Jesus. She bore him inside her for nine months; she gave him his human flesh. And then she nursed him at her breast, skin to skin. Let me tell you, until you’ve laid a naked baby in your bosom, you haven’t lived!
There’s some risk involved, even then. There’s a lot of sweet sentimentalism about the Christ Child at Christmas, but you know, naked babies can—well, and they do, too. Getting up close with a baby, or with God, can and will be messy, dangerous to our dignity. Love is always messy. But when you love someone, you want to get rid of everything that keeps you apart, shed your clothes, get close and closer; you’d like to melt inside each other, if you could. Why would you want it to be different between you and God?
One of the saddest things about the H1N1 virus scare has been that precautions, including those observed in our churches (however necessary they may be) push people apart, prevent us from touching one another. We went through all this before with HIV/AIDS. But people who are suffering have the need, above all, to be touched. And here again, we have to distinguish between prudent precautions and the sinful fear that teaches us to draw back and save ourselves, no matter what the cost to someone else.
That’s the kind of thing we need to repent of—our chronic “me first”ness. We need to do it every day, in little ways that gradually lead to bigger ways. We can start small. Just as people in Twelve Step programs take one day at a time, we can nudge our way toward repentance, not try to do it all at once. For example, we might try this: think about clothes, just ordinary clothes, in terms of sin. Every morning, when you are getting dressed, make a point to look at the labels in your clothes. See where they were made. Try to imagine what kind of wages were paid to the people who made them, what kind of conditions they work under. Hold those people in your heart for a few minutes: ask their forgiveness, reach out to them in your heart, hold them before God.
Do the same with your food: try to learn where it comes from, how it was grown, what it really cost. I am trying to do these things, hoping that all that daily repenting will bring me, one day, to give up some of the things that are cheap for me, but that cost other people so much. If you can’t become a total locavore, limiting your diet to food grown in Vermont or nearby, and paying a fair price for everything, you can still take small steps in that direction: look for local products wherever you can; buy fair-traded coffee and tea instead of whatever’s cheapest this week. And/or you can donate to the food bank, or to the Center for Sustainable Agriculture at the University of Vermont, to help build a better farming future for our state and its people.
That’s the real spirit of what John is preaching, and it is a way of putting ourselves on the road to the manger, where Love itself lies naked, waiting to be taken into our arms, into our hearts. "Love came down at Christmas," as the song says. And not in jeweled garments, but, as the Huron Carol tells it, "a ragged robe of rabbit skin enwrapped his beauty round." He comes to us in a manger, a place where animals feed, and again at a table, as our very food, putting his whole self into bread and wine so he can get not just close to us, but inside us, become part of us, and we part of him.
Come. Come as you are: you are invited. Come.
©Linda M. Maloney+
2 Advent, Year C, December 6, 2009
A Sermon for the Second Sunday of Advent, 2009 (Year C)
Inaugural sermon at Calvary Episcopal Church, Underhill, VT
All I really need to do today is read again the word of Paul to the Philippians that we just heard, and sit down. That passage says everything I would want to say about how joyful I am to be among you, and what a bright example you are to the churches. I believe that as we go forward in this interim time your love will indeed “overflow more and more, with knowledge and full insight, to help you to determine what is best . . . to produce the harvest of righteousness that comes through Jesus Christ for the glory and praise of God.” Let that be our mission statement for the time to come! We might want to think of reading it every Sunday and at the beginning of every meeting!
But today let me also say something about the Advent message found in the Gospel and in the words of Baruch, our first reading.
“A baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of sins.” What does that mean? John the Baptizer was so called, and even sources outside the gospels remember him by that name, because that was his whole idea, his whole purpose: baptizing people “for repentance.” “Repent and believe the Good News,” Jesus says when he comes on the scene, after he himself has been baptized by John. So what do repentance and forgiveness of sins and Good News all have to do with each other?
What you usually hear about John’s and Jesus’ good news is that they called for repentance as a precondition for forgiveness of sins: if you repent, you’ll be forgiven. And I think that’s wrong. The God whom John is preaching, the God who is laying the axe to the root of the tree, sounds like the Spy in the Sky. This God is gonna getcha if you don’t watch out. And if God doesn’t, then the Messiah will separate the wheat from the chaff, when he comes. (You better watch out; you better not cry; you better not pout, I’m tellin’ you why: Messiah is coming!)
And then along comes Jesus, and he really sounds very different. His message is: “The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God has come; repent and believe the Good News!” In other words, God is already in our midst, and our sins are forgiven. There are no preconditions, no hurdles to jump over, no tasks to be completed. No wonder, in another part of the story, John sends his disciples to ask Jesus: "Are you the one who is to come, or should we look for somebody else?"—somebody more like what we were expecting, that is. And once Jesus was off the visible scene, it didn’t take the church so very long to get back to a more “comfortable” religion in which you get what you pay for, so to speak.
“Repentance” is a weak and misleading word for what John was preaching. The Gospel says he preached—and Jesus preached—metavnoia, which means turning your whole life aroundĖ—and as for it being “for the forgiveness of sins,” that preposition, I think, means not “for” but “because of.” The Baptizer is calling all of us to turn our lives around because our sins have been forgiven; in Jesus, the pardon of God is in our midst forever.
Is it fair, this message that Jesus preaches—and John, too, as it turns out? that God doesn’t even wait for us to repent before forgiving us? God sent Jesus to be in our midst, to be one of us, with us forever as God’s living pardon among us. God hopes that we will repent because we have been forgiven, not as a condition of it—as if we could earn salvation by our own doing. As the prophet says, "The Lord has taken away the judgments against you." God has done the atoning for us, so that we can be filled with God’s love and turn away from sin.
The kind of religion where you get what’s coming to you seems so much more satisfying, somehow—unless, of course, you’re one of those sinners that Jesus liked to hang around with. The fundamental problem with the kind of Christianity that calls “repent or else” the Good News—and really, I think this is the religion of America in the 21st century—is that it has no need for that Jesus guy, with his strange ideas and his weird friends.
Of course, the message here is not really that we can be as sinful as we like, that we can say “hallelujah, Jesus done washed my sins away!” and go on doing whatever. God comes to us in Jesus with hands and heart full of love and forgiveness, and if we get close enough to that, we will be swept away and our lives will be changed forever. So we try not to think about it too much; we try not to get too close.
The thing is, God is intent on getting really, really close to us—not in our faces, but in our hearts, up close and personal, skin to skin. God puts on skin so God can be intimate with us. We keep putting on clothes so we can avoid contact.
Sin, I’m saying, is like clothes we put on (at the very worst it’s like body armor). (Remember how, after they sinned, the first thing Adam and Eve did was to put on clothes?) Sometimes we wear scruffy, ragged-looking sins, and sometimes beautiful robes of sin that are just so smooth . . . but always, we do it to keep from getting skin to skin with God. Sin keeps us from God, and keeps us from each other. Sin helps us hide who we really are, hide it from ourselves, from each other, from God (we think—fat chance there!). Repentance, changing our lives, means stripping away sin, going skinny-dipping in the waters of grace.
Take off the garment of your sorrow and affliction, O Jerusalem,
and put on forever the beauty of the glory from God!
And when we do, especially in Vermont in December, it’s so scary, because it feels as if we will freeze to death—and we would, if it weren’t that the flame of God’s love is there, wrapping us in its warmth.
Maybe the reason why Mary is pure, is virginal, is holy is that she is the only one who was absolutely, totally, skin to skin with Jesus. She bore him inside her for nine months; she gave him his human flesh. And then she nursed him at her breast, skin to skin. Let me tell you, until you’ve laid a naked baby in your bosom, you haven’t lived!
There’s some risk involved, even then. There’s a lot of sweet sentimentalism about the Christ Child at Christmas, but you know, naked babies can—well, and they do, too. Getting up close with a baby, or with God, can and will be messy, dangerous to our dignity. Love is always messy. But when you love someone, you want to get rid of everything that keeps you apart, shed your clothes, get close and closer; you’d like to melt inside each other, if you could. Why would you want it to be different between you and God?
One of the saddest things about the H1N1 virus scare has been that precautions, including those observed in our churches (however necessary they may be) push people apart, prevent us from touching one another. We went through all this before with HIV/AIDS. But people who are suffering have the need, above all, to be touched. And here again, we have to distinguish between prudent precautions and the sinful fear that teaches us to draw back and save ourselves, no matter what the cost to someone else.
That’s the kind of thing we need to repent of—our chronic “me first”ness. We need to do it every day, in little ways that gradually lead to bigger ways. We can start small. Just as people in Twelve Step programs take one day at a time, we can nudge our way toward repentance, not try to do it all at once. For example, we might try this: think about clothes, just ordinary clothes, in terms of sin. Every morning, when you are getting dressed, make a point to look at the labels in your clothes. See where they were made. Try to imagine what kind of wages were paid to the people who made them, what kind of conditions they work under. Hold those people in your heart for a few minutes: ask their forgiveness, reach out to them in your heart, hold them before God.
Do the same with your food: try to learn where it comes from, how it was grown, what it really cost. I am trying to do these things, hoping that all that daily repenting will bring me, one day, to give up some of the things that are cheap for me, but that cost other people so much. If you can’t become a total locavore, limiting your diet to food grown in Vermont or nearby, and paying a fair price for everything, you can still take small steps in that direction: look for local products wherever you can; buy fair-traded coffee and tea instead of whatever’s cheapest this week. And/or you can donate to the food bank, or to the Center for Sustainable Agriculture at the University of Vermont, to help build a better farming future for our state and its people.
That’s the real spirit of what John is preaching, and it is a way of putting ourselves on the road to the manger, where Love itself lies naked, waiting to be taken into our arms, into our hearts. "Love came down at Christmas," as the song says. And not in jeweled garments, but, as the Huron Carol tells it, "a ragged robe of rabbit skin enwrapped his beauty round." He comes to us in a manger, a place where animals feed, and again at a table, as our very food, putting his whole self into bread and wine so he can get not just close to us, but inside us, become part of us, and we part of him.
Come. Come as you are: you are invited. Come.
©Linda M. Maloney+
2 Advent, Year C, December 6, 2009
Tuesday, October 07, 2008
Guilt by Association
I suppose it would be totally wonkish and elitist and I don't know what all to suggest that the current craze for guilt by association (William Ayers was a terrorist when Barack Obama was 8 years old! Obama met Ayers 30 years later! He's a terrorist!) is utterly, absolutely, totally contrary to the spirit of our Constitution. But it made me think of bills of attainder.
Now there's a phrase you don't hear much these days. You might hear a lot about the "wall of separation between church and state" (which isn't in there), but bills of attainder? A prize to whoever has even heard of one, much less knows what it is.
But the Founding Fathers (and, I daresay, mothers) were on the qui vive against bills of attainder, so much so that they prohibited them twice, in Articles 1 and 3 -- and that's even before the Bill of Rights was even thought of. A bill of attainder named some particular individual and branded him or her a criminal. It also laid the taint on the "offender"s children, children's children, etc. It was the ultimate in guilt by association.
In Article 3, the Founders even went to the length of spelling out what is and isn't treason, AND THEN they specified that no attainder of treason should attach to the family of someone convicted of that terrible crime, and no penalty beyond the lifetime of the guilty party.
So when I hear that person A is a "terrorist" -- even though person A has never been convicted of a crime -- and person B is likewise a "terrorist" because he knows person A, I get a creepy feeling. And I suspect there are a lot of Founders turning uneasily in their graves.
Now there's a phrase you don't hear much these days. You might hear a lot about the "wall of separation between church and state" (which isn't in there), but bills of attainder? A prize to whoever has even heard of one, much less knows what it is.
But the Founding Fathers (and, I daresay, mothers) were on the qui vive against bills of attainder, so much so that they prohibited them twice, in Articles 1 and 3 -- and that's even before the Bill of Rights was even thought of. A bill of attainder named some particular individual and branded him or her a criminal. It also laid the taint on the "offender"s children, children's children, etc. It was the ultimate in guilt by association.
In Article 3, the Founders even went to the length of spelling out what is and isn't treason, AND THEN they specified that no attainder of treason should attach to the family of someone convicted of that terrible crime, and no penalty beyond the lifetime of the guilty party.
So when I hear that person A is a "terrorist" -- even though person A has never been convicted of a crime -- and person B is likewise a "terrorist" because he knows person A, I get a creepy feeling. And I suspect there are a lot of Founders turning uneasily in their graves.
Thursday, May 15, 2008
Preaching the Gospel: Is it Politics?
On one of my lists we have been having some heavy discussion about whether the preacher, as such, should be promoting political issues. Depends on what you mean by "political," of course.
But it occurs to me that there are probably three categories of "political" (i.e., public) matters about which the churches, as such, should concern themselves in one way or another.
The first category consists of things on which Christians are pretty much agreed: Killing and torturing innocent people is wrong; the poor must be cared for. Stuff like that. The world pretty much knows where we stand on those things, and probably a majority of people of all religions and no religion agree, too, though we don't always agree on the means to the right end. Still, we can let our parishioners work out how they want to address things like that in the public realm without having to specify all the time that they should or how they should.
The second category (and I realize there's some category bleed here) consists of things that some of us, as Christians, agree on and think are of the Gospel, but other Christians don't. And since one side or the other may be claiming the headlines, because of or in spite of their numbers, we have to devote a certain amount of energy to letting the world know where we stand. This is especially true in certain cases, such as the treatment of sexual minorities, when people of good will (our allies in category one) are hearing from the press that "Christians" are quite opposed to what seems to them to be the right thing to do. Then we have to find ways of letting people know what are the Gospel demands as we see them, and sometimes that the squeaky wheel is a very small cog in the Christian vehicle (e.g., there are headlines about the "breakup" of the Anglican Church of Canada, but a total of 28 parishes out of 2800 have "seceded").
The third category, though, is where we SHOULD be spending most of our time, if we weren't so burdened by dealing with category two. These are the places where the Gospel really rubs against the world's ways: where what seems good and just in the eyes of the world, even most people of good will, is—as we see it—wrong, unjust, and certainly unloving. As an example, I think of the current world food crisis and the farm bill that has just passed the Congress. It's a bad bill because it subsidizes the rich at the expense of the poor. But from a Congressional point of view it's fine, because it has something for everybody's constituents and adds a little bit to Food Stamps as a gesture to the needy. The Presiding Bishop of the Episcopal Church, may God increase her tribe, wrote a public letter calling for the defeat or veto of the bill. Some think she's meddling in politics. I think she's doing the right thing: speaking up with the church's voice at a place where many people think the church shouldn't be, but where the Gospel says we'd better be, or else.
I don't have a lot of sympathy for the official Roman Catholic Church teaching on abortion or its efforts to impose that teaching on other people. But I have to give them points for making the case to their faithful and sticking with it. I wish more of our churches would focus NOT on that issue, which seems to me more multi-faceted than they allow for (officially), but on the ways in which the world's justice produces injustice for too many voiceless people.
But it occurs to me that there are probably three categories of "political" (i.e., public) matters about which the churches, as such, should concern themselves in one way or another.
The first category consists of things on which Christians are pretty much agreed: Killing and torturing innocent people is wrong; the poor must be cared for. Stuff like that. The world pretty much knows where we stand on those things, and probably a majority of people of all religions and no religion agree, too, though we don't always agree on the means to the right end. Still, we can let our parishioners work out how they want to address things like that in the public realm without having to specify all the time that they should or how they should.
The second category (and I realize there's some category bleed here) consists of things that some of us, as Christians, agree on and think are of the Gospel, but other Christians don't. And since one side or the other may be claiming the headlines, because of or in spite of their numbers, we have to devote a certain amount of energy to letting the world know where we stand. This is especially true in certain cases, such as the treatment of sexual minorities, when people of good will (our allies in category one) are hearing from the press that "Christians" are quite opposed to what seems to them to be the right thing to do. Then we have to find ways of letting people know what are the Gospel demands as we see them, and sometimes that the squeaky wheel is a very small cog in the Christian vehicle (e.g., there are headlines about the "breakup" of the Anglican Church of Canada, but a total of 28 parishes out of 2800 have "seceded").
The third category, though, is where we SHOULD be spending most of our time, if we weren't so burdened by dealing with category two. These are the places where the Gospel really rubs against the world's ways: where what seems good and just in the eyes of the world, even most people of good will, is—as we see it—wrong, unjust, and certainly unloving. As an example, I think of the current world food crisis and the farm bill that has just passed the Congress. It's a bad bill because it subsidizes the rich at the expense of the poor. But from a Congressional point of view it's fine, because it has something for everybody's constituents and adds a little bit to Food Stamps as a gesture to the needy. The Presiding Bishop of the Episcopal Church, may God increase her tribe, wrote a public letter calling for the defeat or veto of the bill. Some think she's meddling in politics. I think she's doing the right thing: speaking up with the church's voice at a place where many people think the church shouldn't be, but where the Gospel says we'd better be, or else.
I don't have a lot of sympathy for the official Roman Catholic Church teaching on abortion or its efforts to impose that teaching on other people. But I have to give them points for making the case to their faithful and sticking with it. I wish more of our churches would focus NOT on that issue, which seems to me more multi-faceted than they allow for (officially), but on the ways in which the world's justice produces injustice for too many voiceless people.
Friday, September 14, 2007
Renewing our farm policy for the sake of the world
This op-ed, requested by Oxfam, will run in the Rutland Herald on Sunday, September 16:
It’s been a summer of bounty in Vermont. Milk prices are up, the strawberries were spectacular, and the apple trees are groaning with a fine crop. Vermont farmers are meeting the energy crisis in creative ways that actually combat pollution of air and water. And Vermont and California dairy producers are working together to develop a sustainable pricing system not dependent on government help.
But across the country, and around the world, the picture is not so positive. Earlier this summer I was in Minnesota and heard small farmers talk about how the 2002 Farm Bill, now up for revision, has been hurting them. In July, I made a personal visit to Washington, D.C. to ask our Senators and Congressman to support reform of the bill, to shift money from harmful commodity subsidies to conservation, energy, and rural development programs—the kinds of things Vermont farmers need to sustain their creative work and grow their incomes. Congressman Welch did vote for an important amendment that would have moved our farm programs in that direction, but it was defeated. Now, as Congress reassembles after the August break, it’s the Senate’s turn at the Farm Bill and I hope they will muster the political will to enact meaningful reform that was lacking in the House of Representatives.
Commodity subsidies are the biggest problem. Originally, in the days of the Great Depression, they were meant to provide a safety net for all farmers when prices were too low. But now they have the opposite effect: These aren’t price supports; they’re price depressors! In a crazy cycle, bloated subsidies for just a few crops, flowing almost entirely to just a few farmers, actually drive down crop prices by encouraging overproduction. To be clear, it’s not a small pot of money. We’re talking $20 billion a year but only one-quarter of U.S. farmers receive these subsidies, and of that one-quarter, the top 10 percent get 75 percent of the payments. The bigger the crop production, the higher the check the producer receives. This drives up the price of land by encouraging large scale producers to gobble up smaller farms and expand production. That, in turn, drives farmers off the land and prices beginning farmers out of the market for farmland. Food production is concentrated in fewer and fewer hands, and in fewer and fewer crops. It’s no wonder the late Senator Paul Wellstone of Minnesota called the 2002 “Freedom to Farm” bill really “Freedom to Fail”!
Such policies discourage conservation and good farming practices. They instead promote excessive production of corn, sending thousands of tons of fertilizer and other pollutants down the Mississippi, resulting in an expanding “dead zone” in the Gulf of Mexico. Subsidies aren’t good for our health either, as they push cheap high-fructose corn syrup into our diet, helping to cause obesity. Worse yet, our agricultural subsidies keep farmers poor in other countries. And don’t think there’s no direct connection between our overproduction of corn and the migration of Mexican farmers into the United States in search of work!
Cotton is the starkest example. Subsidized overproduction here means low prices for farmers everywhere, and in areas like West Africa that depend heavily on cotton exports, those low prices are deadly. A typical cotton-producing household of ten persons in West Africa earns about $200 per person per year. That includes cash from cotton sales plus the value of food and other goods the household produces for itself. There are 365 days in a year. Clearly, people earning $200 a year are living on less than a dollar a day. And we’re helping to keep them in poverty with our tax dollars.
Meaningful reform of cotton subsidies would raise the world price of cotton enough to increase household incomes in West Africa by $46 to $114 a year for the whole family. Sound like nothing? To us, it might not mean all that much, but for a West African family, it could mean enough food for one child for an entire year, in a region where 40 percent of children under 5 are malnourished. Or it could mean that all the children in the household could attend school. After all, nothing fights poverty like education. Or it could mean that the household could have health care.
We now have the opportunity to make change happen, an opportunity that won’t come around for another five years.. If we love life, if we love the earth, we need to act now. We must call and write our Senators, urging them to reform the commodity title, shifting money away from subsidies and into clean energy, conservation, and rural development initiatives that will help our farmers at home and at the same time make life better for farmers around the world. Let’s do it now. Five years from now will be too late.
©Linda M. Maloney
It’s been a summer of bounty in Vermont. Milk prices are up, the strawberries were spectacular, and the apple trees are groaning with a fine crop. Vermont farmers are meeting the energy crisis in creative ways that actually combat pollution of air and water. And Vermont and California dairy producers are working together to develop a sustainable pricing system not dependent on government help.
But across the country, and around the world, the picture is not so positive. Earlier this summer I was in Minnesota and heard small farmers talk about how the 2002 Farm Bill, now up for revision, has been hurting them. In July, I made a personal visit to Washington, D.C. to ask our Senators and Congressman to support reform of the bill, to shift money from harmful commodity subsidies to conservation, energy, and rural development programs—the kinds of things Vermont farmers need to sustain their creative work and grow their incomes. Congressman Welch did vote for an important amendment that would have moved our farm programs in that direction, but it was defeated. Now, as Congress reassembles after the August break, it’s the Senate’s turn at the Farm Bill and I hope they will muster the political will to enact meaningful reform that was lacking in the House of Representatives.
Commodity subsidies are the biggest problem. Originally, in the days of the Great Depression, they were meant to provide a safety net for all farmers when prices were too low. But now they have the opposite effect: These aren’t price supports; they’re price depressors! In a crazy cycle, bloated subsidies for just a few crops, flowing almost entirely to just a few farmers, actually drive down crop prices by encouraging overproduction. To be clear, it’s not a small pot of money. We’re talking $20 billion a year but only one-quarter of U.S. farmers receive these subsidies, and of that one-quarter, the top 10 percent get 75 percent of the payments. The bigger the crop production, the higher the check the producer receives. This drives up the price of land by encouraging large scale producers to gobble up smaller farms and expand production. That, in turn, drives farmers off the land and prices beginning farmers out of the market for farmland. Food production is concentrated in fewer and fewer hands, and in fewer and fewer crops. It’s no wonder the late Senator Paul Wellstone of Minnesota called the 2002 “Freedom to Farm” bill really “Freedom to Fail”!
Such policies discourage conservation and good farming practices. They instead promote excessive production of corn, sending thousands of tons of fertilizer and other pollutants down the Mississippi, resulting in an expanding “dead zone” in the Gulf of Mexico. Subsidies aren’t good for our health either, as they push cheap high-fructose corn syrup into our diet, helping to cause obesity. Worse yet, our agricultural subsidies keep farmers poor in other countries. And don’t think there’s no direct connection between our overproduction of corn and the migration of Mexican farmers into the United States in search of work!
Cotton is the starkest example. Subsidized overproduction here means low prices for farmers everywhere, and in areas like West Africa that depend heavily on cotton exports, those low prices are deadly. A typical cotton-producing household of ten persons in West Africa earns about $200 per person per year. That includes cash from cotton sales plus the value of food and other goods the household produces for itself. There are 365 days in a year. Clearly, people earning $200 a year are living on less than a dollar a day. And we’re helping to keep them in poverty with our tax dollars.
Meaningful reform of cotton subsidies would raise the world price of cotton enough to increase household incomes in West Africa by $46 to $114 a year for the whole family. Sound like nothing? To us, it might not mean all that much, but for a West African family, it could mean enough food for one child for an entire year, in a region where 40 percent of children under 5 are malnourished. Or it could mean that all the children in the household could attend school. After all, nothing fights poverty like education. Or it could mean that the household could have health care.
We now have the opportunity to make change happen, an opportunity that won’t come around for another five years.. If we love life, if we love the earth, we need to act now. We must call and write our Senators, urging them to reform the commodity title, shifting money away from subsidies and into clean energy, conservation, and rural development initiatives that will help our farmers at home and at the same time make life better for farmers around the world. Let’s do it now. Five years from now will be too late.
©Linda M. Maloney
Wednesday, June 27, 2007
National service -- why not now?
The following is a position paper I prepared independently on the need for a genuine national service program, and presented to Congressman Peter Welch for his consideration. Many people have asked to see it, so I publish it here.
Day by day the faces of the dead flash past on the screen: the youngest “adult” Americans, almost all of them from small towns, from minority groups: As in the Vietnam war, these are the faces of Americans with no other way out of poverty, the young, ambitious, and striving, selling their lives for the hope of something better. And, safely insulated from actually having to do what they are doing, the rest of America lionizes them: “our troops” has become a sacred phrase. We give the same lip service to the cult of warfare that we do, most of us, to the cult of Jesus: It’s a wonderful thing they are doing, but I wouldn’t—don’t have to—do it myself.
These are the young people I see passing my kitchen window every day, going to and coming from the high school next door. We have “Junior ROTC” now; it teaches them leadership, we are told; it is “not a military program,” but it teaches them to drill, to shoot, and to idolize military service. It tracks them toward ROTC scholarships (a few of them), and toward enlistment in one of the services, or in the National Guard, where they join their fathers and uncles. They are promised that they will learn trade skills, money for college . . . but never enough, and in wartime the hurried-up training prepares them to kill and be killed, not much else.
To withdraw the lifeline—too often a deathline, or a route to serious maiming—would be cruel, it is said. This is their chance to serve their country, and to make something of themselves. Their only chance. And that is immoral. We used to think we were purchasing security by using our young people this way, just as we purchase our affluence by exploiting low-wage workers in America and abroad. The Iraq war has shown what a disastrous mistake it is to confuse bullying with security.
We can do better. We can turn that youthful energy and idealism to a benefit for our own country and the rest of the world if we will call them to serve their country in constructive ways, and make them as proud of that kind of service as they are supposed to be of serving in war.
If we can’t have compulsory national service (and that might be a hard sell right now!), we will have to make service so attractive that young people will jump at the chance, at least as readily as they now jump at the chance to be warriors.
A renewed program of national service should include:
• A variety of opportunities and entry points.
• Genuine training for skills that are marketable and socially beneficial.
• Adequate pay and benefits so that the program will be genuinely accessible to the poor.
• A guarantee that no one will be forced to serve in unacceptable ways—transferred into overseas military service, let us say, the way our National Guard has been.
Some details:
1. People should be able to enter the program out of high school, with a guarantee of full college or trade-school benefits (not the measly aid that military service now provides) after two or three years of service. This would be helpful to young adults whose interests are not yet determined and who want to try a few avenues before settling on one. Or students could go directly from high school to college or vocational training on a widely-expanded “ROTC” degree program to prepare for careers, provided they serve two or three years after college or school. Each such program should include foreign language training to enable the graduates to work overseas or in underserved parts of American society. Third, the program should be open to displaced workers who need retraining and are willing to spend some service time. The program should include some hours of specialized training each week (in lieu of “drill”) to prepare the individual for service placement.
2. The training and re-training and/or educational program must be genuine, and not the kind of thing offered to displaced manufacturing workers presently. There should be a thorough analysis of skills and directions needed for a healthy American society, and a healthy world society, in the twenty-first century, and opportunities should be provided that will help to fill those needs. The private sector should be enlisted as well. (Example: in Germany, industrial firms participate in the educational/vocational program of the schools, providing training for the workers they will one day hire. The following win-win example comes to mind for our own purposes: There is a firm in Vermont that manufactures solar panels and installations; it is now one of the major producers in the U.S. Suppose that firm were to train a certain number of technicians, engineers, etc. each year to install, maintain, and teach the use of small-scale solar power stations in Third World countries—or, indeed, in parts of the United States that need them. On the model of the Marshall Plan, the U.S. could purchase the installations from the manufacturer, thereby compensating them for their share in the training costs, and pay the service volunteers during their service time overseas or in country; this would be a major aspect of U.S. foreign aid.)
In a different example, many public agencies could benefit by extra man- and womanpower for such relatively simple, but time-consuming tasks as helping poor people obtain the benefits to which they are lawfully entitled. (See David K. Shipler, The Working Poor: Invisible in America [New York: Knopf, 2004] 226–30.) Interns working with lawyers, doctors, nurse practitioners, social workers, and public health officials would get a first-hand look at the burdens of poverty, the kinds of laws now in place, and what needs to be done; they might be moved to pursue these much-needed professions.
American educational institutions would benefit from the additional funding for scholarships, and young people would no longer embark on their careers under a crushing load of debt.
3. At the present time, volunteering for the Peace Corps or a variety of private volunteer organizations is mainly a middle-class luxury (this seems to be less true for Americorps-VISTA, but the quality of training offered is likewise different). I have never forgotten the Senate hearings on Americorps when it was established. (I had a special interest, because my son participated in the Summer of Service that inaugurated the program.) Senator Grassley of Iowa offered the dictum that “people should not be paid for volunteering.” That means, in effect, that poor people need not apply. To enter a service program that pays only a subsistence requires a lot of backup: a family to bail you out, to maintain your medical benefits, to pay the tuition and fees you won’t be saving for in your volunteer placement. You can’t afford it if you have a backlog of student loans.
People must not be driven into service, either military or social, by economic need, nor should they be denied the opportunity to serve, and to learn while serving, by economic need. Volunteering may, and often does, inspire, but poor people need more than that. This program should pay a living wage, should provide full educational benefits (like the G.I. Bill, the engine of America’s postwar prosperity), AND full medical benefits: an enhanced V.A. or “Medicare for all who serve” would be a good vehicle for introducing truly universal medical benefits, since the initial pool would consist mainly of those least expensive to insure. And, like the V.A., it should be a lifetime benefit (and not restricted to “service-connected” injuries or illnesses!).
4. This must not become a backdoor military draft. That should be a clear and irrevocable commitment.
But, as many people have told me, it could never work! Here are the major objections I have heard:
• The military establishment won’t let it. They are having a hard enough time recruiting; they can’t afford for people to have other choices. I don’t think I need elaborate on the cynical immorality of that statement. There may in fact be fewer young people who will choose military service if they are not coerced into it by poverty or propaganda, but in all likelihood it will take several generations for a service corps to develop the kind of esprit, comradeship, and pride that even the younger branches of the military services have. That will always be the more attractive option for some.
• It will cost too much. True, it will cost a lot. But whether a thing is “expensive” or has high “costs” depends on what one regards as the true cost of that thing. What is the cost of having thousands of young people killed before they have begun to realize their potential? What is the cost of throwing away millions of lives, here and abroad, by condemning them to extreme poverty? What is the cost of destroying the environment because we lack the means or the will to apply our skills and ingenuity where they need to be placed, because at the moment it is not “cost-effective” and does not enhance the corporate bottom line? I needn’t go on. The examples of the Marshall Plan and the G.I. Bill both point to the ways in which this program will profit the American economy and advance the peace of the world, as those two programs did. I doubt that anyone, looking back on those, would say they were “too expensive.”
• Not enough people will sign up to make it work. This is potentially the most serious objection and the most likely to prove true. After so many years of incredible prosperity (much of it purchased by borrowing and by transferring the burden to the backs of impoverished people all over the world), after being told even in time of crisis that no sacrifice is necessary, the zeal for change that marked the Vietnam generation has evidently waned. This program will need to be sold with at least the same enthusiasm (and investment) given to military recruitment, and as I have stressed above, the incentives will have to be real, and so will the service: real work, not make-work. It must not be perceived as a handout, but as a genuine avenue for—to begin with—less-advantaged people to do good and do well, until such time as it becomes an attraction, and almost a given that the first leg up in life is to be earned through service to one’s country and to the needs of the world.
One way to introduce this program would be to start with a pilot in a single state (Vermont?). With federal dollar matching (the proportion to be determined), it could be put in place as an expansion of the National Guard, state by state, with scholarships to UVM and other state colleges and training centers (and in private enterprises, as above), and service projects located in Vermont or in other regions or countries with which Vermont partners.
“Some . . . see things as they are and say why. I dream things that never were and say why not.” (RFK). Why not, indeed? And why not now?
©Linda M. Maloney+
April 2007
Ending the Economic Draft: National Service
Day by day the faces of the dead flash past on the screen: the youngest “adult” Americans, almost all of them from small towns, from minority groups: As in the Vietnam war, these are the faces of Americans with no other way out of poverty, the young, ambitious, and striving, selling their lives for the hope of something better. And, safely insulated from actually having to do what they are doing, the rest of America lionizes them: “our troops” has become a sacred phrase. We give the same lip service to the cult of warfare that we do, most of us, to the cult of Jesus: It’s a wonderful thing they are doing, but I wouldn’t—don’t have to—do it myself.
These are the young people I see passing my kitchen window every day, going to and coming from the high school next door. We have “Junior ROTC” now; it teaches them leadership, we are told; it is “not a military program,” but it teaches them to drill, to shoot, and to idolize military service. It tracks them toward ROTC scholarships (a few of them), and toward enlistment in one of the services, or in the National Guard, where they join their fathers and uncles. They are promised that they will learn trade skills, money for college . . . but never enough, and in wartime the hurried-up training prepares them to kill and be killed, not much else.
To withdraw the lifeline—too often a deathline, or a route to serious maiming—would be cruel, it is said. This is their chance to serve their country, and to make something of themselves. Their only chance. And that is immoral. We used to think we were purchasing security by using our young people this way, just as we purchase our affluence by exploiting low-wage workers in America and abroad. The Iraq war has shown what a disastrous mistake it is to confuse bullying with security.
We can do better. We can turn that youthful energy and idealism to a benefit for our own country and the rest of the world if we will call them to serve their country in constructive ways, and make them as proud of that kind of service as they are supposed to be of serving in war.
If we can’t have compulsory national service (and that might be a hard sell right now!), we will have to make service so attractive that young people will jump at the chance, at least as readily as they now jump at the chance to be warriors.
A renewed program of national service should include:
• A variety of opportunities and entry points.
• Genuine training for skills that are marketable and socially beneficial.
• Adequate pay and benefits so that the program will be genuinely accessible to the poor.
• A guarantee that no one will be forced to serve in unacceptable ways—transferred into overseas military service, let us say, the way our National Guard has been.
Some details:
1. People should be able to enter the program out of high school, with a guarantee of full college or trade-school benefits (not the measly aid that military service now provides) after two or three years of service. This would be helpful to young adults whose interests are not yet determined and who want to try a few avenues before settling on one. Or students could go directly from high school to college or vocational training on a widely-expanded “ROTC” degree program to prepare for careers, provided they serve two or three years after college or school. Each such program should include foreign language training to enable the graduates to work overseas or in underserved parts of American society. Third, the program should be open to displaced workers who need retraining and are willing to spend some service time. The program should include some hours of specialized training each week (in lieu of “drill”) to prepare the individual for service placement.
2. The training and re-training and/or educational program must be genuine, and not the kind of thing offered to displaced manufacturing workers presently. There should be a thorough analysis of skills and directions needed for a healthy American society, and a healthy world society, in the twenty-first century, and opportunities should be provided that will help to fill those needs. The private sector should be enlisted as well. (Example: in Germany, industrial firms participate in the educational/vocational program of the schools, providing training for the workers they will one day hire. The following win-win example comes to mind for our own purposes: There is a firm in Vermont that manufactures solar panels and installations; it is now one of the major producers in the U.S. Suppose that firm were to train a certain number of technicians, engineers, etc. each year to install, maintain, and teach the use of small-scale solar power stations in Third World countries—or, indeed, in parts of the United States that need them. On the model of the Marshall Plan, the U.S. could purchase the installations from the manufacturer, thereby compensating them for their share in the training costs, and pay the service volunteers during their service time overseas or in country; this would be a major aspect of U.S. foreign aid.)
In a different example, many public agencies could benefit by extra man- and womanpower for such relatively simple, but time-consuming tasks as helping poor people obtain the benefits to which they are lawfully entitled. (See David K. Shipler, The Working Poor: Invisible in America [New York: Knopf, 2004] 226–30.) Interns working with lawyers, doctors, nurse practitioners, social workers, and public health officials would get a first-hand look at the burdens of poverty, the kinds of laws now in place, and what needs to be done; they might be moved to pursue these much-needed professions.
American educational institutions would benefit from the additional funding for scholarships, and young people would no longer embark on their careers under a crushing load of debt.
3. At the present time, volunteering for the Peace Corps or a variety of private volunteer organizations is mainly a middle-class luxury (this seems to be less true for Americorps-VISTA, but the quality of training offered is likewise different). I have never forgotten the Senate hearings on Americorps when it was established. (I had a special interest, because my son participated in the Summer of Service that inaugurated the program.) Senator Grassley of Iowa offered the dictum that “people should not be paid for volunteering.” That means, in effect, that poor people need not apply. To enter a service program that pays only a subsistence requires a lot of backup: a family to bail you out, to maintain your medical benefits, to pay the tuition and fees you won’t be saving for in your volunteer placement. You can’t afford it if you have a backlog of student loans.
People must not be driven into service, either military or social, by economic need, nor should they be denied the opportunity to serve, and to learn while serving, by economic need. Volunteering may, and often does, inspire, but poor people need more than that. This program should pay a living wage, should provide full educational benefits (like the G.I. Bill, the engine of America’s postwar prosperity), AND full medical benefits: an enhanced V.A. or “Medicare for all who serve” would be a good vehicle for introducing truly universal medical benefits, since the initial pool would consist mainly of those least expensive to insure. And, like the V.A., it should be a lifetime benefit (and not restricted to “service-connected” injuries or illnesses!).
4. This must not become a backdoor military draft. That should be a clear and irrevocable commitment.
But, as many people have told me, it could never work! Here are the major objections I have heard:
• The military establishment won’t let it. They are having a hard enough time recruiting; they can’t afford for people to have other choices. I don’t think I need elaborate on the cynical immorality of that statement. There may in fact be fewer young people who will choose military service if they are not coerced into it by poverty or propaganda, but in all likelihood it will take several generations for a service corps to develop the kind of esprit, comradeship, and pride that even the younger branches of the military services have. That will always be the more attractive option for some.
• It will cost too much. True, it will cost a lot. But whether a thing is “expensive” or has high “costs” depends on what one regards as the true cost of that thing. What is the cost of having thousands of young people killed before they have begun to realize their potential? What is the cost of throwing away millions of lives, here and abroad, by condemning them to extreme poverty? What is the cost of destroying the environment because we lack the means or the will to apply our skills and ingenuity where they need to be placed, because at the moment it is not “cost-effective” and does not enhance the corporate bottom line? I needn’t go on. The examples of the Marshall Plan and the G.I. Bill both point to the ways in which this program will profit the American economy and advance the peace of the world, as those two programs did. I doubt that anyone, looking back on those, would say they were “too expensive.”
• Not enough people will sign up to make it work. This is potentially the most serious objection and the most likely to prove true. After so many years of incredible prosperity (much of it purchased by borrowing and by transferring the burden to the backs of impoverished people all over the world), after being told even in time of crisis that no sacrifice is necessary, the zeal for change that marked the Vietnam generation has evidently waned. This program will need to be sold with at least the same enthusiasm (and investment) given to military recruitment, and as I have stressed above, the incentives will have to be real, and so will the service: real work, not make-work. It must not be perceived as a handout, but as a genuine avenue for—to begin with—less-advantaged people to do good and do well, until such time as it becomes an attraction, and almost a given that the first leg up in life is to be earned through service to one’s country and to the needs of the world.
One way to introduce this program would be to start with a pilot in a single state (Vermont?). With federal dollar matching (the proportion to be determined), it could be put in place as an expansion of the National Guard, state by state, with scholarships to UVM and other state colleges and training centers (and in private enterprises, as above), and service projects located in Vermont or in other regions or countries with which Vermont partners.
“Some . . . see things as they are and say why. I dream things that never were and say why not.” (RFK). Why not, indeed? And why not now?
©Linda M. Maloney+
April 2007
Tuesday, June 05, 2007
The good ones go . . .
On Sunday, June 3, the Episcopal Church suffered a grievous loss with the death, in a car accident, of Bishop Jim Kelsey of Northern Michigan. Early in his ministry he was rector of Holy Trinity Church in Swanton, VT, and there will be a memorial service for him there on Friday, at the same time as his memorial in Marquette.
I never met +Jim, but I certainly knew OF him, because I was involved with Total Ministry in Minnesota, and +Jim was the most intensely committed bishop in the movement. The report was that he did not invite seminary-trained priests to Northern Michigan at all; rather, his parishes all raised up their own clergy and educated them locally as part of parish ministry teams.
I'm moved to wonder why these great, forward-looking young men and women are so often snatched from us before their time, while the wicked go on forever (I'm with the psalmist here). George Bush, smirking his way through life while he condemns thousands to death daily; Dick Cheney, lying to children in Wyoming about the origins of the war in Iraq and plotting to force a war with Iran. The most depressing thought -- or is it the only hope? -- is that perhaps these people will be with us until we learn to love them as intensely as we love the ones, like +Jim Kelsey, whom we so deeply mourn.
I never met +Jim, but I certainly knew OF him, because I was involved with Total Ministry in Minnesota, and +Jim was the most intensely committed bishop in the movement. The report was that he did not invite seminary-trained priests to Northern Michigan at all; rather, his parishes all raised up their own clergy and educated them locally as part of parish ministry teams.
I'm moved to wonder why these great, forward-looking young men and women are so often snatched from us before their time, while the wicked go on forever (I'm with the psalmist here). George Bush, smirking his way through life while he condemns thousands to death daily; Dick Cheney, lying to children in Wyoming about the origins of the war in Iraq and plotting to force a war with Iran. The most depressing thought -- or is it the only hope? -- is that perhaps these people will be with us until we learn to love them as intensely as we love the ones, like +Jim Kelsey, whom we so deeply mourn.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
