Feeling Blue About Feeling Guilty

November 25, 2007

First UU Church of Austin

4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756

www.austinuu.org

Listen to the sermon by clicking the play button.

Prayer:

We gather here both sincere and flawed. We are interconnected with much of what is good in the world, but also – more than we are comfortable knowing – with what is evil.

Is it really possible that as a nation we have so much more than others without having somehow taken it from them? It felt so much better to believe that we are pure, and the world’s riches flowed naturally to us as rewards for our great purity. Yet we do know better.

We gather here as good people, but not perfect people. We gather not to seek a false purity but a more informed, more nuanced kind of wholeness. For even if we are as poets have said dust of the earth, within the dust there are motes rising to the light – and they too are part of us.

Let us seek grown-up blessings for the dust of our bodies, for it is the dust of Mother Earth, made of stardust. And let us seek the blessings of the “motes rising,” those small but sacred signs of the spirit within us that can be both aware and awake.

For this very human combination of imperfect lives and hopeful, rising spirits, we give thanks, and ask for the blessings of life that flow to all who seek them in honesty and humility.

Amen.

SERMON: Feeling Blue About Feeling Guilty

I’ve spent a few weeks reflecting on some insights from the author John Perkins, one of my current favorite authors. He’s writing about the dark underside of our American imperialism, how empires work, about the slavery always involved somewhere when those in an empire are living much better than those whose labor supports their life style.

In 2004, he wrote the best selller Confessions of an Economic Hit Man, later brought twelve other writers together to write A Game as Old as Empire, and this year wrote The Secret History of the American Empire.

Empire is not about control for its own sake; it is about exploitation of foreign lands and peoples for the benefit of at least the more privileged in the country that controls the economies of others (GOE, p. 17). This is also what I’ve been calling chimpanzee politics: the pursuit of power and privilege for selfish interests.

Slavery may sound like a quaint notion from the 19th century, but it is always part of empires, and our global empire enslaves more people than the Romans and all the other colonial powers before us (EHM, p. 205). we’re Number One.

These are important things for us to know. But as I was putting together this picture of the nature and the cost of our American Way of Life, something else started bothering me, which took me down a very different path.

So I want to start by sketching the dark side of our imperialism, but then take you down the second path, too. The two paths form a dilemma that was expressed by the author E.B. White, when he said, “I arise in the morning torn between a desire to save the world and a desire to savor the world. This makes it hard to plan the day.” It also makes it hard to plan a sermon.

We now have the first truly global empire in history. Most of us aren’t terribly aware of this; but those exploited by it are, and many of them suffer from extreme poverty. On average, twenty-four thousand people die of hunger and hunger-related diseases every day. More than half the planet’s population lives on less than two dollars a day. For us to live comfortable lives, millions must pay a very high price (SH, p. 6).

How have we established our empire? One answer is, through sheer military force. We have military bases in more than a hundred countries, and almost without exception they are not there for national defense. But more importantly, we establish our empire through economic policies that let us control other nations. One measure of this, which I found very clear and helpful, is about the difference between using tariffs to protect your industries, versus using “free trade” to break down and control the economies of other countries.

Our own economy developed behind some of the highest tariff walls in the world. President Ulysses S. Grant reportedly said in the 1870s “within 200 years, when America has gotten out of protection all that it can offer, it too will adopt free trade.” It only took another eighty years, but US tariff rates were not significantly reduced until after WWII. Since then, the most successful developing countries besides ours have been Japan, China, Korea, and Taiwan, which have prohibited the import of any goods that would compete with any of their most important industries. That’s also how we developed our own strong economy. Now under the mantra of “free trade,” the First World has kicked away the ladder, prohibiting Third World countries from using the only economic development strategy proven to work: the strategy of protectionism and tariffs (GOE, p. 21). “Free trade” is neither sacred nor wise; it’s a devastating weapon the strong use to enslave the weak.

Ghana, for example, was forced by the IMF to abolish tariffs on food imports in 2002. The result was a flood of imported food from European Union countries that destroyed the livelihoods of local farmers. It seems that the IMF’s economic hit men “forgot” to ensure that the EU abolish its own massive agricultural subsidies. As a result, frozen chicken parts imported from the EU cost a third of those locally produced. (GOE, p. 22)

Zambia was forced by the IMF to abolish tariffs on imported clothing, which had protected a small local industry of some 140 firms. The country was then flooded with imports of cheap secondhand clothing that drove all but 8 firms out of business. Even if Zambia’s clothing producers had been large enough to engage in international trade, they would have faced tariffs preventing them from exporting to EU and other developed countries. And while countries like Zambia are supposed to devote themselves to free trade, First World countries subsidize their exporters through export credit agencies – often with disastrous results for the environment and economies of the Third World. (GOE, p. 22)

The IMF’s structural adjustment program in Peru slashed tariffs on corn in the early 1990s, and corn from the US – whose farmers are subsidized at a rate of $40 billion a year – flooded the country. Many of Peru’s farmers were unable to compete, and so turned to growing coca for cocaine production instead. (GOE, p. 22)

Many IMF programs have required sharp cuts in health and education spending, making it harder to improve the quality and capabilities of work forces with low levels of literacy and few technological skills. In some countries, such as Ghana, the percentage of school-age children who are actually attending school is falling because of IMF-imposed budget cuts. (GOE, p. 22)

John Perkins describes Ecuador – a country in which he helped cause this harm – as typical of countries around the world that we have brought under our control. For every $100 of crude oil taken out of the Ecuadorian rain forests, the oil companies receive $75. Of the remaining $25, three-quarters must go to paying off the foreign debt. Most of the remaining six dollars and change covers military and other government expenses – which leaves about $2.50 for health, education, and programs aimed at helping the poor. So out of every $100 worth of oil taken from the Amazon, less than $3 goes to the people who need the money most, those whose lives have been so adversely impacted by the dams, the drilling, and the pipelines, and who are dying from lack of edible food and potable water (SH, pp. xx). Two weeks ago, I talked of how we lure Third World countries into great debt as a tactic for controlling them.

The cost of servicing Third World debt is greater than all Third World spending on health or education and nearly two times the amount those countries receive each year in foreign aid. Despite current lip service to forgiving it, Third World debt grows every year, currently approaching $3 trillion. It is one of our most effective weapons against countries that have resources or locations that we want to disempower and control.

Why don’t we read about these things? The tactics are brutal, but They’re simple and clear – why don’t we read about this? Perhaps it’s partly because the US was ranked #53 on the World Press Freedom list in 2006 (compared to #17 in 2002) and has been severely criticized by Reporters Without Borders and other non-governmental organizations for jailing and intimidating journalists (EHM, xviii). Using fear to silence criticism is another hallmark of both empires and slavery.

Number 53! Fifty-two countries with greater freedom of the press than we have? This is not the America of our myths, the one so dear to our hearts, is it?

Where else can you see the kind of slavery that supports our lifestyle? You can look at Mexican workers living in shantytowns just south of our border, or Asian children practically chained to their work stations, working 12-hour days, six or seven days a week to make our sweat shirts, tennis shoes, Gap jeans and other cool clothes. You can multiply these stories a hundredfold, but they are all forms of slavery, of people being coerced to work in desperate situations in order to keep us supplied with our way of life. Meanwhile, about 8,760,000 children a year are starving to death (24,000 a day x 365), with millions more dying of treatable diseases because they can’t get treatment. Some of those people may have made the clothes we’re wearing right now.

Where else can you look? Columnist Bob Herbert wrote a disturbing piece a few weeks ago in the NY Times, on the slave trade that is alive and well in the U.S. – the sex slave trade.

He says that over 18,000 foreign nationals are believed to be trafficked into the U.S. each year. According to the State Department, 80 percent of them are women and children, an overwhelming majority of whom are used for sexual purposes. (Bob Herbert, “Today’s Hidden Slave Trade,” 27 October 2007, The NY Times op-ed page).

If you don’t think we have this in Austin, leaf through the Yellow Pages in the Austin phone book as I did this week. Look under “Escorts,” and see if you aren’t a little stunned at the number of listings for 24/7 services. See how many of them advertise international women from all countries, and imagine how many of those women are forced into that work.

But most of our slave traders aren’t involved in the sex trade. They just recruit desperate people and build a factory to produce the jackets, blue jeans, tennis shoes, automobile parts, computer components, and thousands of other items they can sell here, there and everywhere (EHM, p. 181). We get cheap prices; they get lives that are nasty, brutish and short.

There really is a lot of suffering, a lot of injustice. we’re not likely ever to do anything about it if we don’t even know about it. I”m not even sure what we can do if we do know about it. And there are hundreds more dark stories like these, as many of you know.

Now here’s my problem: the more of these stories I read, the more depressed I got, and the less I wanted to read any more of them. Did I need to read them all? Was I insensitive if I got sick of feeling depressed? In order to be a caring person, must I be miserable?

Then an insight hit me when I read this week that the United Nations now says that Somalia is the worst humanitarian crisis in Africa, not Darfur. I thought, “My God, have we been hopelessly depressed over the wrong one? Is there a prize for being hopelessly depressed over the right one?”

I have a colleague who really seems to believe that as long as there is injustice anywhere, we should never be happy; we should starve with the hungry, suffer with the suffering, and the rest of it. He’s believed it and lived it for the thirty years I’ve known him, sometimes showing a lot of personal courage – I don’t think He’s going to change.

I know good committed people like this. Their passion is sincere. But this is a philosophy that wants us to believe that as long as one person is suffering, none of us should be happy – as though our being miserable somehow helps the world, or has a positive moral value.

This is like one of my favorite strange stories from religion, a story about the Jains. Jainism is an ancient religion derived from Hinduism, with over ten million followers today. One of their key teachings is their insistence on the sacredness of all life, from humans to bugs and even smaller.

This is a belief that can lead to some very odd behavior, like wearing surgical masks around during the day so they won’t inhale any microscopic organisms. My favorites are the stories of Jains who will carry a mattress infested with bedbugs around the city. Rather than killing the bugs, they want to feed them. Bedbugs feed on our bodies when we lie in bed, so these Jains support themselves by going around yelling, “Who will feed the bugs? Who will feed the bugs?” When someone gives them some money, one of them will lie down on the mattress and let the bugs feed on him. Who will feed the bugs? Who will support my belief that the world needs me to suffer?

If you believe we are morally bound to be miserable as long as there is injustice, you can never stop suffering. So many bugs, so little time! So much suffering, misery, war and injustice to get upset about. How could it ever end? But I think the Jains have missed the point.

Our job is not to suffer, but to live. Don’t feed the bugs. Don’t look for reasons to be miserable just because there is so much misery in the world. The theologian Howard Thurman was right when he said, “Don’t ask what the world needs. Ask what makes you come alive, and go do it. Because what the world needs are people who have come alive!”

So we’re back to that dilemma: Do we spend our days trying to save the world, or savor it?

This is the dilemma that brings to mind a wise statement made by the historian Will Durant some years ago. He had written his massive dozen-volume history of pretty much the whole world as his life’s work. Then he wrote a 100-page summary of those big volumes, The Lessons of History. And finally, in an interview, he was asked if he could sum it all up in half an hour.

He did it in less than a minute, this way: “Civilization is a river with banks. The river is sometimes filled with blood from people killing, stealing, shouting, and doing the things historians usually record, while on the banks, unnoticed, people build homes, make love, raise children, sing songs, write poetry, and even whittle statues. The story of civilization is the story of what happened on the banks. Historians are pessimists because they ignore the banks for the river.”

That river always runs through life, carrying not only the unjust and evil, but also the benefits of the unjust and evil, the good things they bring us. The river has ships that bring us goods from sweatshops where people work in conditions of virtual slavery to support our way of life without making us pay a fair price for it. There are things in that river to which we are addicted.

Because we’re the empire, we’re complicit in most of the major evil in the world. We can’t be pure, ever. And there is no way we can stop being complicit in this, just as Jains kill thousands or millions of micro-organisms every day – just by living, inhaling them, or having them destroyed inside by their body’s T-cells. No one is pure; we’re interconnected with everything, the good and the bad. And that isn’t a “problem” to be solved; it’s the human condition.

This was brought home to me in a wonderful way during a worship service about a decade ago. An activist man in the church seemed absolutely to believe that as long as there is injustice anywhere, we cannot rest, and his Sunday announcements were tedious for almost everyone but him. One Sunday he was on a rant about the destruction of the rain forests – how some large corporations are cutting them down for lumber or to make grazing pastures for cattle, what a crime this is against Mother Earth, and how all decent people must be outraged.

After getting worked up and trying to guilt-induce the entire congregation – something that almost never works – he said that well, those who really care about the earth can join him and his group for a meeting after church. Then he said, “We’ll meet at the Burger King.” He seemed not to know that Burger King was one of those corporations that had cut thousands of acres of rainforest to make pastures where they grazed the cattle that produced the hamburger he was going to be eating. we’re complicit. we’re interconnected. You can’t get away from it. If you can only be happy when You’re not complicit in evil, You’re doomed.

We have these two paths: living in the river or living on the banks. Deciding to save the world or deciding to savor it. And it does make it hard to plan a day!

So what do we do? I don’t think we’ll agree on this.

Should we honor the tried and proven tactics of willful ignorance & denial? They’ve worked wonders for many centuries. “Don’t tell me, I”m happier not knowing how the world really works? I also don’t want to know how politics works or sausage is made.”

Should we suffer, feed the bugs, and bank on some kind of salvation by purity? That’s a bus stop at which no buses stop.

One solution is to act locally in simple ways that don’t drain our life force, but which strengthen it. Last week I challenged you to write letters to the editor about the nearly burlesque bad behavior of the leaders of the Hyde Park Baptist Church, in refusing at the last minute to allow the 23rd annual Austin Area Interreligious Ministries Thanksgiving service to take place in a gymnasium they owned, because it involved non-Christians – particularly, Muslims. “Interreligious” doesn’t seem to be a word in the vocabulary of that church’s leaders. I don’t like to ask you to do things I”m not willing to do, so I wrote a Viewpoint piece on it, which the paper printed yesterday. I don’t know how many of you wrote letters, but this is something that we can do. we’re this well-educated bunch of liberals, and one thing we owe the larger community is our voice in trying to help others see a nuanced responsible moral path more clearly. It is also empowering for us. And writing some of these pieces can be a lot of fun. Let’s take care of ourselves and our gifts first, then feed the world with the overflow of our gifts.

Of course, this isn’t new advice. You’ve all heard this wisdom before, if you’ve flown commercial airlines. When They’re giving you the pre-flight instructions on the oxygen mask, they say that in the event of an emergency, put your own mask on first, and then help others. Give oxygen to yourself first, or you may not be able to help anyone else. It’s the same rule in life.

Your job is to live more fully, not to suffer, not to feed the bugs. Ask what makes you come alive, and go do it. For the world needs people who have come alive. Then, from your own fullness, let it spill over. If you have joy, spread it. If you have extra money, help out. Just finding those organizations with people devoting their lives to improving the lot of the less fortunate is a noble thing to do. They are living much closer to the river than most of us are who just read, talk and write about it. we’re not doing the work, they are. But they can’t do it without financial support, and it isn’t wimping out to write a check. Twenty-four weeks a year, we split our collection plate with different non-profit organizations doing just this – and I hope we can move toward sharing every week’s collection. This isn’t feeding the bugs, it’s feeding the de-buggers.

Supporting the efforts of those who live and work much closer to the river than we do or would want to is one way we can live on the banks while remaining creatively aware of the greater suffering that must be attended to by people who can do that day in and day out without – I hope – losing their own joy in life.

And yet it isn’t this simple. Just the act of acknowledging our complicity in the world’s largest and most rapacious empire changes who we are. Our complicity in the world’s major evils of slavery runs deep. We show it at Wal-Mart, Sears, and at exclusive shops – many of which are now reportedly getting their name brands made in China. We show our complicity in our technological gadgets, our cars, everywhere. We wear our complicity in our clothing; we drive it, use it in laptops and cell phones. We are dipped in complicity with the evils of our American empire, all the way down.

So what now? Where from here? I don’t have that answer, but I know how I must begin, and I invite you back into the attitude of prayer with which we began:

We gather here both sincere and flawed. We are interconnected with much of what is good in the world, and also with what is evil.

For this very human combination of imperfect lives and hopeful, rising spirits, we give thanks, and ask for the blessings of life that flow to all who seek them in honesty and humility.

Amen.

—————-

(NOTE: I’ve used three of John Perkins’ books for this sermon: Confessions of an Economic Hit Man, A Game as Old as Empire, and The Secret History of the American Empire. To make the references shorter, I’ve abbreviated them as EHM, GOE, and SH.)