A Christmas Rant and Prayer: I am angry. Not a typical Christmas season emotion, I know, but I attended the monthly meeting of the Ashtabula County Public Health Advisory Team of which I am a member. I am angry because the pattern I am seeing is that funding for programs of social support—and I am not talking about social uplift, I am talking about safety nets here—keep getting cut while demand for such services only continue to rise. I am living on the edge of Appalachia where the poor don’t have much either in physical terms nor in opportunities to get out of the hole they are in, a hole the rich can’t see, a hole filled with lice, roaches, influenza, and a lack of beds, clothing, nutrition, heating fuel and even water, and somehow, plenty of prison space. Let those with eyes to see and ears to hear see and listen! Meanwhile, the disparity between the rich and the poor only widens. There is no incentive for those at the top to doing anything to dismantle to structures of injustice and oppression that keep digging bigger holes for the poor to fall into. So the holes get deeper and wider and more plentiful in order to supply the building materials that keep elevating the rich to places where the poor can be removed and further from their sight. Trickle down doesn’t work since all that happens is that the holes down below fill with waste and leftovers, drowning the already struggling poor. Desperate people sometimes do desperate things, sometime self-injurious things. I see this desperation happening every day and it makes me angry. It need not be. But mostly I am angry because in God’s economy, there is abundance, there is enough for everyone. Not too much, nor too little, but enough. I pray for the day when we can all share in God’s economy and have enough. God, grant us the courage and the love to address the structural injustices that keep your economy from flourishing, to address the structural injustices that feed on the racism and classism which thrive in an atmosphere of hyper-individualism. Help us to see the love of our common bond through birth of a child in Bethlehem, that all may share in your abundance and have real life. Amen.
Posted on: Wed, 17 Dec 2014 13:04:58 +0000
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