[blind-democracy] Re: It's Not About Trump - Our Political Culture Is Corrupt

From: Miriam Vieni <miriamvieni@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
To: blind-democracy@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Date: Sat, 19 Mar 2016 12:12:57 -0400

Carl,

As you know, I consider myself to be an atheist, by which I mean that I see
no evidence of a being or an all knowing intelligence, that is regulating
the universe, although I certainly don't know how things came to be as they
are or what keeps them going. And how or why, is not my concern. However, I
think that how people behave in relation to each other and to animals and
plants, has to do with their individual personalities rather than the
particular belief structure to which they adhere. For example, the author of
this article appears to be a warm, open, inclusive person. I've heard him on
Democracy Now and that's how he comes across. As he points out, people with
the same religious leanings, interpret the religious teachings very
differently and tend to be judgmental and devisive. Then there are those who
say they are agnostics or atheists, socialists or liberals, but have
authoritarian personalities. They derrogate those who think differently from
them. They insult people who are members of various religions or racial and
ethnic minorities. Some of them support wars and are ethnocentric. I think
that just like you can't lump all Muslims together, or all Catholics, or all
African Americans, you can't make generalizations about people for whom
religion is important. Chris Hedges is a believer. I believe he attended a
theological seminary and could, if he chose to, minister to a congregation.
But his religious beliefs haven't stopped him from thinking very similarly
to the way that you think, nor have they stopped him from acting on behalf
of others. Then there is the American Friends Service Committee, Quakers.
This group works actively for all the causes in which you and I believe, and
it is a religious organization. I think we need to look at what people do in
their lives rather than focusing on what they claim their belief systems to
be.

Miriam

-----Original Message-----
From: blind-democracy-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
[mailto:blind-democracy-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of Carl Jarvis
Sent: Saturday, March 19, 2016 11:13 AM
To: blind-democracy@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: [blind-democracy] Re: It's Not About Trump - Our Political Culture
Is Corrupt

What The Rev. Dr. William J. Barber II points out in the following article
is spot on.  But I would include Religion as one of the corruptions in our
crumbling American Corporate Empire.  Even though I am an Agnostic, I do
have an oar in these muddied Religious Waters.
It is long past time for us to throw off the oppressive chains of Religion,
any religion, and declare that each of us, to the best of our individual
ability, is responsible for our own life.  We need to take ownership for our
actions, not putting them onto the back of some All Knowing God.  We have
been trained for centuries to duck our share of the burden by pretending
that we are given Divine Guidance from Above.  Of course our political life
reflects this deep seated conditioning.  We turn over our lives to the
current strong man, hoping that this time he will lead us to a better life,
and learning too late that he is leading us to support His Good Life, not
ours.
The marriage between Religion and Earthly Government has left us with no
ability to steer our own ship.  Nor are we any longer able to gather in
support of one another.  Our Leaders have so driven hatred, fear, suspicion,
and mistrust toward others that we are left to the mercy of our Masters.
And since our Masters proclaim themselves to be the Chosen Ones, well above
the Common Masses, they have little mercy to shed upon us.
And yet, we turn to their God, seeking mercy.  We need to turn inward for
mercy, and then learn to trust one another and unite.  Our hope for a better
life will only come when we have the numbers and the strength of our
convictions to take command of our own lives.

Carl Jarvis

3/19/16, Miriam Vieni <miriamvieni@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

Published on Alternet (http://www.alternet.org) Home > It's Not About
Trump - Our Political Culture Is Corrupt
________________________________________
It's Not About Trump - Our Political Culture Is Corrupt By Rev. Dr.
William J. Barber II [1] / The Nation [2] March 15, 2016 Trumpism was
created in the crucible of the "Southern strategy." We have sown to
the wind, reaping the whirlwind.
We can't isolate Donald Trump and his supporters, because that is a
simplification. When you unpack the policies of all of his
competitors, most of their disagreement is in tone, not substance. It
is not as though they are moderate and he is extreme. Trump is not the
problem; it's all of the xenophobia and racist innuendo and othering
of immigrants that is the problem. It is all of the coded language
about people who want free stuff, from the Southern-strategy lexicon
of Wallace, Nixon, Reagan, and Atwater that has been spewed for years.
That is the problem. Add to it the more recent rhetoric that says
President Obama is unfit. Long before Trump, all of this rhetoric
created a kind of us-against-them mob mentality, which after it is
loosed can manifest in the violence that we now see.
These were tactics used to end the first Reconstruction in America,
too, when many white elites began to fear a black-white coalition. And
they were used in the late 1968, to create the so-called solid South
and push back against the gains of the 1960s, brought about by black,
white, Latino, and interfaith relationships. We need to understand all
of this as we approach this election and think about about kinds of
questions we ask the candidates.

Recently, Senator Ted Cruz was in Raleigh, North Carolina's Calvary
Baptist Church when FOX News anchor Megyn Kelly asked him about his moral

values:

"How do you manage to keep your integrity working in Washington?" Cruz
said as president, he intended to "pass a simple flat tax and abolish the

IRS,"

"prosecute Planned Parenthood," and end the Common Core educational
standards instantly.

Presidential candidates of all political stripes have long courted
what the media calls the "evangelical voters" in the South, using the
language of morality. Well, I am an evangelical. I have been born
again. I don't think it is because I have African and Native American
and some European blood flowing in my veins that I have a different
view of evangelism. Yes, I learned my evangelism from my father, a
Disciples of Christ minister. But I also learned it from Duke Divinity
School, from Union Theological Seminary, and from great philosophical
thinkers and Biblical scholars across this country. I learned that
persons who claim to be evangelicals are anointed to preach good news
to the poor.

As the Gospel of Luke says, "The Spirit of the Lord is upon me for he
hath anointed me to preach good news to the Poor." The word poor here
is "ptochos," a Greek word that means those who have been made poor by
economic exploitation. Evangelism always starts with Jesus' words:
"When I was hungry did you feed me? When I was naked, did you clothe
me?" In North Carolina, even our state constitution notes, in Article
11, "Beneficent provision for the poor, the unfortunate, and the
orphan is one of the first duties of a civilized and a Christian
state."

So as the presidential campaign comes to North Carolina on Tuesday, we
in the Forward Together Moral Movement and the North Carolina NAACP
urge the media not to take a positive or negative stance toward
specific candidates, but to ask deep moral questions of all of them.
We encourage media and voters to ask about public morality-determined
by policy choices and budget choices, by concerns like Medicaid expansion,

voting rights, and poverty.

Ask them how they "manage to keep their integrity" when 500,000
low-income North Carolinians-including roughly 30,000 veterans-have no
health insurance because Governor Pat McCrory and the legislature have
chosen not to expand Medicaid. Medical authorities at UNC Hospitals
estimate that as a result of this immoral choice, each year 2,500
North Carolinians will die unnecessarily due to lack of health care.
Most will die because a lack of preventive care leads to needless
strokes and heart attacks. Ask them why they place their political
ideology over human needs.

Ask state legislators how they manage to keep their integrity when
they passed a voter suppression bill the afternoon after the US
Supreme Court gutted the Voting Rights Act in the morning. Their voter
suppression law made dozens of changes to voting policies, aiming to
hold down turnout. Ask candidates what they are doing to expand
voting, not restrict access to the ballot.

Ask them what they will do to raise real wages, which have dropped
steadily since the 1970s, leading to the greatest economic inequality
in America since the Great Depression? Ask them if they support the
fundamental principle of all great religions and ethical systems in
the world: To love one's neighbor. Ask them whether they can name
three or four policies that they believe would be the logical
outgrowth of a social ethos grounded in love for one's neighbor. How would

they act to bring those policies about?

And in that context, what would a moral, comprehensive immigration
policy look like?

Few moral issues are more pressing than public education. We might ask
candidates if they support the use of public money to pay for private
schools, including voucher or tax credit programs. Do candidates
support the unlimited replacement of traditional public schools with
charter schools and how do they see the impact of charter schools on
public education? What are some ways that candidates would support
public school teachers?

Most citizens increasingly support equality and justice for all
citizens, including those of different sexual or gender orientations.
One moral question for candidates is how they would safeguard the
rights of LGBTQ citizens to be free of discrimination or attack
because of their sexual or gender orientation.

These are a few of the moral questions the Forward Together Moral
Movement and the North Carolina NAACP believe the media should be
asking candidates today. If we are to "prosecute Planned Parenthood,"
what will we prosecute them for? Would we prosecute those who
slandered Planned Parenthood with doctored film footage? What kind of
educational standards would best serve our children and nurture them for

the world in which they are growing up?

It
is time that we asked serious moral questions of all of our candidates.
The Rev. Dr. William J. Barber II is co-author of The Third

Reconstruction:

Moral Mondays, Fusion Politics and the Rise of a New Justice Movement
[3], published in January 2016 by Beacon Press. In January 2016 he
also began filing regular dispatches from the southern movement for
racial justice for The Nation, resuming a role Martin Luther King Jr.
once filled for the magazine. Rev. Barber II is the architect of the
Forward Together Moral Monday Movement, president of the North
Carolina NAACP and pastor of the Greenleaf Christian Church (Disciples
of Christ) in Goldsboro. He is also president of Repairers of the
Breach [4]. In 2015, he was the recipient of the Puffin/Nation Prize for

Creative Citizenship.

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________________________________________
Source URL:
http://www.alternet.org/election-2016/its-not-about-trump-our-politica
l-cult
ure-corrupt
Links:
[1] http://www.alternet.org/authors/rev-dr-william-j-barber-ii
[2] http://www.thenation.com
[3] http://www.beacon.org/The-Third-Reconstruction-P1139.aspx
[4] http://www.breachrepairers.org/
[5] mailto:corrections@xxxxxxxxxxxx?Subject=Typo on It's Not ;
About Trump - Our Political Culture Is Corrupt [6]
http://www.alternet.org/ [7] http://www.alternet.org/%2Bnew_src%2B

Published on Alternet (http://www.alternet.org) Home > It's Not About
Trump - Our Political Culture Is Corrupt

It's Not About Trump - Our Political Culture Is Corrupt By Rev. Dr.
William J. Barber II [1] / The Nation [2] March 15, 2016 Trumpism was
created in the crucible of the "Southern strategy." We have sown to
the wind, reaping the whirlwind.
We can't isolate Donald Trump and his supporters, because that is a
simplification. When you unpack the policies of all of his
competitors, most of their disagreement is in tone, not substance. It
is not as though they are moderate and he is extreme. Trump is not the
problem; it's all of the xenophobia and racist innuendo and othering
of immigrants that is the problem. It is all of the coded language
about people who want free stuff, from the Southern-strategy lexicon
of Wallace, Nixon, Reagan, and Atwater that has been spewed for years.
That is the problem. Add to it the more recent rhetoric that says
President Obama is unfit. Long before Trump, all of this rhetoric
created a kind of us-against-them mob mentality, which after it is
loosed can manifest in the violence that we now see.
These were tactics used to end the first Reconstruction in America,
too, when many white elites began to fear a black-white coalition. And
they were used in the late 1968, to create the so-called solid South
and push back against the gains of the 1960s, brought about by black,
white, Latino, and interfaith relationships. We need to understand all
of this as we approach this election and think about about kinds of
questions we ask the candidates.

Recently, Senator Ted Cruz was in Raleigh, North Carolina's Calvary
Baptist Church when FOX News anchor Megyn Kelly asked him about his moral