Founding fathers and religious liberty in Cook County

Dear True,

I'm writing to comment on the troubled and sad column by Mitch Dorr in this week's News Herald, "The Death of Faith, Family and Country." I have some sympathy for Mr. Dorr, as I too recall a time in America that I think was better than today, but I'm not willing to blame the changes on "intolerant intellectuals," radical politicians, or Muslims. Also, methinks I have heard the tune he is singing before, on right-wing talk shows and in emails that sometimes come my way--such as naming Barack Obama a Muslim terrorist and other nonsense claiming to be "God's truth."
I know from Mr. Dorr's other writings that he is a good and loving family man and I don't mean to attack him in any way. But I do feel an urgent need to put forth an alternative view of religion and society.
I want to address the parts of Mr. Dorr's column about religion and try to infuse a dose of historical fact-checking. One of my personal regrets about modern society is the dismal failure of our schools to teach history. When I was a child in the 1950's we were rigorously taught to understand the Constitution and the Bill of Rights. We studied the Revolutionary War and we read the speeches by Washington and Jefferson and the other so-called "founding fathers." Back then we had no problem that there were no founding mothers.
The first thing to remember is that the men who devised the Constitution were, yes, mostly Christians (in fact mostly Episcopalians) but they were even more firmly for freedom of religion, the right to worship or NOT worship as anyone may choose. They were best termed "deists" rather than Christians, however, as followers of the "Enlightenment" philosophies of Locke, Rousseau and Voltaire promoting individual liberty and equality. Of course they were referring to the equality of white men, and several were slave owners but in their time they were visionaries.
Several of them spoke quite firmly on the issue of religion and government, for example:

"I believe in one God, Creator of the universe...That the most acceptable service we can render Him is doing good to His other children...As to Jesus..I have some doubts as to his divinity..."
-Benjamin Franklin

"Every man ought to be protected in worshipping the Deity according to the dictates of his own conscience."
-George Washington

"I do not believe in the creed professed by the Jewish church, by the Roman church, by the Greek church, by the Turkish church, by the Protestant church, nor by any church that I know of..."
-Thomas Paine

"Millions of innocent men, women and children, since the introduction of Christianity, have been burnt, tortured, fined, imprisoned, yet we have not advanced one inch towards uniformity. What has been the effect of coercion? To make one half of the world fools and the other half hypocrites. To support roguery and error all over the earth."
-Thomas Jefferson

"That religion, or the duty we owe to our Creator, and the manner of discharging it, can be directed only by reason and conviction, not by force or violence; and therefore all men are equally entitled to the free exercise of religion, according to the dictates of conscience."
-Patrick Henry

"The civil rights of none shall be abridged on account of religious belief or worship, nor shall any national religion be established, nor shall the full and equal rights of conscience be in any manner, or on any pretence, infringed."
-James Madison
(original wording of the First Amendment, 1789)

In short, the founders were clear and adamant about protecting the rights of all to worship as each one chooses. The Religious Right have made an issue of actual non-issues like worship in public schools or government buildings.
Granted, the founders never specifically forebade worship in public buildings because they never foresaw free public education for all, the great immigrations of many races and creeds that would re-make America in centuries to come, or that one day some people might feel excluded by a government display of one religious viewpoint such as the Ten Commandments. Nonetheless, they foresaw that there would be possibilities they couldn't cover, and so laid down the principle of religious neutrality in the brilliant First Amendment.
But ironically, what has been decreed in the past is subject to change under those same principles laid down by the founders.
And so, a "Unitary Executive" (anathema to the founders), a judicial system stacked to favor the rightest of the right wing, and a gutless Congress have conspired with the right-wing corporations that buy votes, that control our media and that are supported by the Christian right to perpetrate untruths about the role of religion in America.
The right to worship in government buildings and display the Ten Commandments smacks of a state religion. Or, why not the Four Noble Truths of Buddhism instead? Why not face Mecca and chant?
Mr. Dorr, it was not about keeping you from your Christian worship, at home, at church or within the community, but rather about respecting those who are not Christian that the founders had in mind when they decreed there would be no mixing of religion and government. They understood only too well how easily any religious group may drive "unbelievers" to become second-class citizens, refugees, or victims of genocide, as in recent times we were appalled to witness in Nazi Germany.
Genocide, by the way, proceeds unabated today in many parts of our lawless corporate dominated world. Our aid is urgently required and yet the Religious Right is silent.
In Cook County, Christians have many forums of expressions, unlike urban areas. There is a religion page and a column by a minister in both weekly papers and these are exclusively Christian. There are Christmas pageants and activities at school. Perhaps, you say, this does not matter because everybody in Cook County is a Christian? Not so. I am not.
On the other hand I am more than happy to read the thoughts of Christian ministers, SO LONG AS other voices are also heard equally (or at least occasionally). Such as columns about Buddhism, Islam, Judaism, or my own faith of Hinduism which embraces the teaching of the saints and sages of all religions.
And for those who can't bear to make it through the school day without prayer, you can always pray silently, pray with your heart and mind if not your mouth. Pray while taking tests or eating lunch.
The commonality among religious faiths is what tolerance is all about, and tolerance is the very foundation of a free and just society. I don't know how we can co-exist with one another in harmony without it.
If you seriously study Islam you will find its teachings not very different from those of Christianity. The Islamic fundamentalists who believe in jihad or holy war are not all that different from the Christians who slaughtered Muslims during the Crusades.
Any who kill in the name of religion are not practicing the great moral and universal truths of their faiths. The similarities have always been apparent to great religious leaders like the Dalai Lama, Pope John XXIII, Gandhi and Mother Teresa as well as humbler students of comparative religion, like my personal hero, Bill Moyers.
Shortly after reading Mr. Dorr's column, I chanced to read a speech by Moyers made at Union Theological Seminary in 2005 on receipt of the President's Medal, their highest award. Bill is a devout Christian. He begins his speech by, like Mr. Dorr, looking back to happier times when he was growing up but in a very different vein: "At the Central Baptist Church in Marshall, Texas, where I was baptized in the faith, we believed in a free church in a free state. I still do."
Bill goes on to describe the First Amendment as "a remarkable arrangement honoring 'soul freedom'--the inviolate right of each of us to believe and worship as our conscience determines, in a society that honors freedom over conformity." He sees that fundamental right at risk in the rise of a new religious movement that is based in the Republican party, well-funded and organized, and resolved on a "sectarian crusade for state power." "The religious right has become the dominant force in America's governing party," he said, and thereby also complicit in "upholding a system of class and race in which the rich thrive and the poor barely survive."
"This is the crux of the matter: to these believers there is only one legitimate religion and only one particular brand of that religion that is right; all others are immoral or wrong. They believe they alone know what the Bible means."
Bill concludes, "As I look back on the conflicts and clamor of our boisterous past, one lesson about democracy stands above all others: bullies--political bullies, economic bullies and religious bullies--cannot be appeased; they have to be opposed with courage, clarity and conviction. This is never easy. These true believers don't fight fair."
Well, this says it all to me, Mr. Dorr, and it is why I feel obliged to take issue with your view of MY country as a CHRISTIAN country while to me it is still, if precariously, a FREE country.

Sincerely,
Nancye Belding
Grand Marais

"Kindness is my religion."
-The Dalai Lama

Obama! The world rejoices, the nutcakes rant

Though you might not know it from reading the MSM, the whole world is rejoicing with the nomination of Barack Obama. Of course as progressives and people of good will we also are happy, but do we really know HOW happy we should be? Consider these awesome words: "America, this is our moment. This is our time:"

America, this is our moment. This is our time. Our time to turn the page on the policies of the past. Our time to bring new energy and new ideas to the challenges we face. Our time to offer a new direction for the country we love.

The journey will be difficult. The road will be long. I face this challenge with profound humility, and knowledge of my own limitations. But I also face it with limitless faith in the capacity of the American people. Because if we are willing to work for it, and fight for it, and believe in it, then I am absolutely certain that generations from now, we will be able to look back and tell our children that this was the moment when we began to provide care for the sick and good jobs to the jobless; this was the moment when the rise of the oceans began to slow and our planet began to heal; this was the moment when we ended a war and secured our nation and restored our image as the last, best hope on earth. This was the moment — this was the time — when we came together to remake this great nation so that it may always reflect our very best selves and our highest ideals. Thank you, God bless you, and may God bless the United States of America. -Barack Obama on claiming the 2008 Dem presidential nomination.

AND NOW.... look at the craziness making the rounds on the Internet. Again you won't see THIS in the MSM or even in the progressive media! Honestly, sometimes True thinks his friends have their heads up their.... er, I mean, in the sand. If you don't think McCain, a Bushie clone, can possibly win because of the 68 percent against failed policies, think again. This kind of Swift-boating stuff is pure poison, the more so because all those folks who send it on saying, "This is interesting" are just dumb enough to believe it. Come on, read it, don't say you don't want to spoil your happy day. Know your enemy:

http://snopes.com confirms this is factual. Check for yourself. Look in the box on the left side of the screen and click on Barack Obama - what they say wil chill you to the core!

IF THIS IS TRUE NOTHING WE CAN DO ABOUT IT. WHAT IS IN THE BIBLE WILL TAKE PLACE .

A man will come from the east...

MAY WE ALL PRAY FOR WISDOM AND DISCERNMENT

AND PRAY FOR EACH OTHER AS WE MAKE THIS DECISION

OF A LIFETIME! OUR LIVES, CHILDREN AND GRANDCHILDREN'S

LIVES WILL BE CHANGED FOREVER BECAUSE OF OUR CHOICE

THIS ELECTION. MAY GOD BE WITH US ALL!

God help us if this man is elected!! But it is all stated in the Bible

and it will happen sooner or later. This is from Darlene Millican,

wife of the pastor of Trinity Baptist Church here in Sun City I have felt

for sometime now that Obama is the one person that 'Frightens Me'.

I believe the Bible has warned us that 'A man will come from the East

that will be charismatic in nature and have proposed solutions for all our

problems and his rhetoric will attract many supporters!' When will our

pathetic Nation quit turning their back on God and understand that this

man is 'A Muslim'... First, Last and always... and we are AT WAR with

the Muslim Nation, whether our bleeding-heart, secular, Liberal friends

believe it or not. This man fits every description from the Bible of the

'Anti-Christ'! I'm just glad to know that there are others that are frightened

by this man! Who is Barack Obama? Very interesting and something that

should be considered in your choice. If you do not ever forward anything else,

please forward this to all your contacts... this is very scary to think of what lies

ahead of us here in our own United States ... better heed this and pray about it

and share it.

Who is Barack Obama?

Probable U. S. presidential candidate, Barack Hussein Obama was born in Honolulu ,

Hawaii, to Barack Hussein Obama, Sr., a black MUSLIM from Nyangoma-Kogel,

Kenya and Ann Dunham, a white ATHEIST from Wichita , Kansas Obama's parents

met at the University of Hawaii . When Obama was two years old, his parents divorced.

His father returned to Kenya . His mother then married Lolo Soetoro, a RADICAL

Muslim from Indonesia . When Obama was 6 years old, the family relocated to

Indonesia Obama attended a MUSLIM school in Jakarta . He also spent two

years in a Catholic school. Obama takes great care to conceal the fact that

he is a Muslim. He is quick to point out that, 'He was once a Muslim, but that

he also attended Catholic school.' Obama's political handlers are attempting to

make it appear that that he is not a radical. Obama's introduction to Islam came

via his father, and that this influence was temporary at best. In reality, the senior

Obama returned to Kenya soon after the divorce, and never again had any direct

influence over his son's education. Lolo Soetoro, the second husband of Obama's

mother, Ann Dunham, introduced his stepson to Islam. Obama was enrolled in a

Wahabi school in Jakarta . Wahabism is the RADICAL teaching that is followed

by the Muslim terrorists who are now waging Jihad against the western world.

Since it is politically expedient to be a CHRISTIAN when seeking major

public office in the United States , Barack Hussein Obama has joined the

United Church of Christ in an attempt to downplay his Muslim background.

Barack Hussein Obama will NOT recite the Pledge of Allegiance nor will he

show any reverence for our flag. While others place their hands over their hearts,

Obama turns his back to the flag and slouches. Do you want someone like this

as your PRESIDENT? Let us all remain alert concerning Obama's expected

Presidential candidacy. The Muslims have said they plan on destroying the

US from the inside out, what better way to start than at the highest level -

through the President of the United States , one of their own! The Bible says

'He will come from among you!'

"My religion is kindness": US MSM strikes out again

The Dalai Lama is the most honored being on the planet, whether the US MSM knows it or not (mostly not). This holy man has sought a peaceful solution for his native Tibet by all nonviolent means for nearly 50 years of repressive rule by China. During that time he has never neglected his students. He has been tireless in his teaching of love for all sentient beings. "My religion is kindness," he once said.
This holy sage is being dissed by the Beijing government: not a new thing but escalated as the Tibetan people rise up against Chinese oppression as the Olympics draw near. The Dalai Lama will never associate himself with violent protest no matter what the Chinese propagandists say.
The US MSM has mostly reported that China is putting down "violent protests" against Chinese rule of Tibet. Although many Americans honor and revere the Dalai Lama, the Bus$cos don't want any interference with trade with China. Several news reports have quoted the spiritual leader of Tibet as barely speaking English. True knows this is bullshit, having read several books he has written about Buddhist philosophy. These erudite tomes would glaze over the eyes of your average MSM American journalist looking for the sleazy angle. They are filled with the wisdom of the Buddha and they aren't sound bites for the evening news.
Look, then, to this UK report on the truth, as mirrored by the rest of the world. No one alive is holier than the Dalai Lama. No one speaks more forcefully on behalf of peaceful dialogue. No one else declares a love for all sentient beings, especially those who Americans like to hunt, kill and eat.

Dalai Lama: "I Am Prepared to Face China. I Will Go to Beijing"
By Andrew Buncombe
The Independent UK

Friday 21 March 2008

As crisis over Tibet deepens, Dalai Lama makes extraordinary offer to negotiate directly with President Hu Jintao.

Dharamsala - Almost half a century after he fled to India, the Dalai Lama has raised the extraordinary prospect of travelling to Beijing and holding face-to-talks with the Chinese regime in an effort to resolve Tibet's most serious crisis for two decades.

Having watched helplessly from exile as his Tibetan homeland has suffered under Chinese rule, the man regarded as a living god by millions of his followers said yesterday that he was ready to negotiate personally with the Chinese leadership. The Dalai Lama, 73, acknowledged the difficulty associated with a face-to-face summit, but said he was even ready to meet President Hu Jintao, notorious in Tibet for his hardline approach when he served as Tibet's local Communist leader. "I am always ready to meet the Chinese leaders, and particularly Hu Jintao. I am very happy to meet," he told a small group of journalists at his office in Dharamsala. "But as I mentioned earlier, to go to Beijing and meet leaders... that would be big news. Many Tibetans would think... may develop some unrealistic expectations. I have to think very carefully."

While a visit to Beijing would leave him open to criticism of appeasing the Chinese, the undertaking the Dalai Lama gave yesterday underlines his desperate wish to avoid further bloodshed in the country of his birth.

Seeking to put pressure on China, he said he was willing to travel to Beijing in a matter of weeks if there was a "concrete indication" that the Chinese authorities were prepared to negotiate and if the protests in Tibet had concluded. His spokesman later confirmed that while he did not wish to simply provide the Chinese with a photo-opportunity that could be used against him, he was ready to discuss a "mutually agreeable solution" to the issue of Tibet.

The remarkable prospect of a summit between the Dalai Lama and the Chinese leadership - either in Beijing or elsewhere - came as China said police had opened fire and wounded four Tibetan protesters in Sichuan province and arrested dozens of others who had ignored a deadline to end the most serious demonstrations to rock Tibet for more than two decades.

Earlier this week, the Chinese leadership indicated it would be prepared to talk to the Dalai Lama if he stopped "separatist activities" and recognised Tibet and Taiwan as parts of China. Gordon Brown told the Commons on Wednesday that the Chinese Premier, Wen Jiabao, had told him he was ready to meet the Dalai Lama if he renounced violence. But assessing the genuine intentions of the Chinese leadership remains at best a guessing game. Beijing is concerned about sullying its reputation ahead of the upcoming Olympic Games, but while giving an undertaking to meet the Dalai Lama, various Chinese officials have continued to demonise him and accuse him and his "clique" of orchestrating the demonstrations in Tibet.

"For the Dalai Lama, we not only listen to what he says, but more importantly, we focus on what he does," said the Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman, Qin Gang. "He has said he is not a separatist. But all of his propositions and actions prove that he has never stopped his splittist words and deeds."

The Dalai Lama knows his only real leverage as head of a Tibetan government in exile is in winning over international opinion to his cause. Today he is due to meet Nancy Pelosi, Speaker of the US House of Representatives, while tomorrow he is scheduled to have lunch with the actor Richard Gere in Delhi. Both have supported him for many years.

Winning the backing of camera-friendly celebrities and power-wielding politicians has long been the strength of the smiling and avuncular 1989 Nobel laureate. Laughing, joking and yet utterly serious all in the space of a sentence, this is a role he continues to play to perfection as the cause to which he has devoted his life receives unprecedented world attention. Never more than now has he needed to stress the importance of non-violent protest and the limited nature of the movement's demands.

"The Chinese constitution already mentions autonomy [for Tibet]. So that should not be just a word on paper but implemented on the spot," he said, sitting in front of a statue of the Buddha. "The whole world knows Dalai Lama is not seeking independence, one hundred times, a thousand times I have repeated this. It is my mantra - we are not seeking independence."

In Beijing, the authorities admitted for the first time that the often violent protests that swept through Lhasa 10 days ago in protest against Chinese rule had spread to other Tibetan communities in additional provinces. Subsequently, the government has dispatched more troops and paramilitaries across the region as it seeks to reassert its control in those areas. It has banned the media and foreign tourists from travelling to the region.

Precisely how many people have been killed or injured as a result of the protests and the subsequent crackdown is unclear. The Chinese government says 16 people have died while the Tibetan exiles say the number stands at 80. On walls and buildings throughout Dharamsala, exiles have posted graphic and disturbing photographs of Tibetans apparently killed by Chinese police or soldiers.

"It's horrible. There are many bodies. The Chinese are holding the bodies," claimed Tenzin Thangh, who was participating in a candlelit vigil through the main street of the town - a procession that has become a nightly occurrence. "The soldiers are going into all parts of Tibet."

>From Dharamsala, a former British hill station established on the peaceful fringe of the Himalayas, Chinese accusations regarding the Dalai Lama's ability to direct events in Tibet and the description of him as "a devil with a human face but the heart of a beast", appear little short of preposterous. Indeed, his cautious "middle way" approach has been criticised by some Tibetans, including the Tibetan Youth Congress which seeks full independence from China. While many younger Tibetans have been outspoken in their criticism of the Dalai Lama's tactics, in recent days they have halted such comments in an apparent effort not to appear divided at a crucial juncture.

What certainly does not seem in doubt is the reverence with which he is held as the community's religious leader. Before meeting reporters yesterday, the Dalai Lama spent time in the flower-filled gardens of the compound receiving and blessing various visitors, including a family who had travelled secretly from Shanghai.

Asked later how he felt about the personal insults that Chinese officials had directed towards him, he said such comments mattered little to him. He also said he did not believe that the international community was taken in by what the Chinese said.

"As a Buddhist monk, it does not matter what they call me," he said with a chuckle. "The outside world doesn't believe that I am [a] devil."

America the Beautiful

"When you look at firecrackers up in the sky
Remember that first Fourth of July."

This maudlin couplet is the only part of a poem written by me, age 12, that I can remember. It's the first time I was published, in an upstate New York weekly, the Monroe County Gazette (not counting the "Brentwood News," hand-written and delivered to my neighbors in the Cincinnati suburb of Brentwood Village when I was all of nine or ten).

I mention the verse because as a child I loved the 4th of July, the pageantry of the firemen and Masons on parade in Highland Mills, New York, the rousing patriotic speech by my grandfather the mayor, and the fabulous midway games never seen in Cincinnati 'burbs. Simple times, good times, happy times.

BUT. Skipping ahead 51 years, moving halfway across America to Cook County, Minnesota, and much changed from that polyanna child, I am not a patriot anymore--whatever that much-abused word means now after being mangled and disgraced by the criminals who have plunged the USA into a war of aggression for oil, made us hated all over the world, tortured citizens as well as the so-called "enemy combatants" not recognized by any court, listened to our phone calls, read our emails, caged us out of voting, desroyed our environment and the fundamental protections for just-plain-folks in the Constitution and Bill of Rights.... the list goes on. And on and on and on. These guys have to be called to account. They don't have the right to trash our nation on behalf of the ultra-rich. They don't get to do that.

No, I'm not a patriot, nor even a Christian now. I don't pledge allegiance to any flag, or any other thing in this world, and especially not to "one nation, under God." I am a citizen only of Mother Earth, a follower only of the Dalai Lama, who teaches: "My religion is kindness."

I spend hours every day doing the small things I can to bring more peace and harmony to the planet. I work steadily but civilly against war, torture, spying, caging, media conglomeration, abuses of workers and women and children, global warming, cruelty to animals, rainforest destruction and most every other little thing including corporate profiteering that "my" country stands for under BushCo in the opinion of the rest of the world. Everybody hates us. Happy 4th of July, citizens of the land of the free!

Yet again, BUT... There IS something here that I love: America the Beautiful, the land (spacious skies and fruited plains) and the dream: gleaming alabaster cities populated by kindly and noble folks, a shining brotherhood of goodness stretching from sea to sea. A "Patriot's Dream," if you will, dreamed in better times but not forgotten, at least not by me. Yes, THIS America I love and cherish.

True

Bill Quigley | Injustice in Jena as Nooses Hang From the "White Tree"

Freedom for all? Born on the Fourth of July? Hmmm, not if you are black and living in Mississippi. Children are being threatened with lynching, and condemned to life in jail when they try to win in a fair fight that was unprovoked according to many witnesses.
Must the underclass simply lie down and serve as slaves, more than two centuries after slaves were liberated? Oyez, okay, according to the Buschco hubris supported by the unconsionable rich who count coup with every peon destroyed.
Wake up people, wake up and stand up for your brothers and sisters in chains. Like Jesus did.

Bill Quigley | Injustice in Jena as Nooses Hang From the "White Tree"

Cheney Power Grab: Says White House Rules Don’t Apply to Him - CommonDreams.org

How remarkable. Bushco has authorized war under false intelligence, torture, spying on Americans, signing statements refusing to obey the law, unprecedented corporate corruption disguised as no-bid government contracts, refusal to obey the Bill of Rights including separation of church and state and freedom of the press.... the list goes on, but True is stunned by Cheney's latest: the rules do not apply to him.
Still, a guy who can shoot his pal with impunity, a guy who can trash gay rights even though his daughter is a lesbian, a guy who can plot against Americans who just might vote against him.... well, what else might we expect?
Declaration of being Emperor is just the next step.


Cheney Power Grab: Says White House Rules Don’t Apply to Him - CommonDreams.org

Catholics, Baptists dominate Congress

By a wide majority, Catholics are the most represented group in Congress (155 members), followed by Baptists (59 members). For us Minnesotans, there are only 17 Lutherans! Can you believe it? Still, there are 37 Episcopalians and despite some criticism these two Protestant sects have merged to some extent. (Think, Garrison Keillor: I've got nothing against Episcopalians, but I'm a Lutheran till I die.")

True was just wondering about the demographics of Congress. In a country where freedom of speech and religion are guaranteed, this should not matter.... but, today, we have presidentially sanctioned limits on both speech and religion..... True himself adamantly supports freedom of religion and separation of church and state. But that's a sword that cuts both ways.

Today the pope reiterated the Catholic position on abortion. Baptists are not really well known for ecumenical thinking, or even reconciling congregations. True just wonders to what extent the religious makeup of Congress determines its vote, no matter what the religious or non-religious makeup of its constituency. Just wondering, just asking.

True



FCNL: Legislative Action Center

Army Extends Iraq Tours to 15 Months

Where is the rage? Who voted last November to get out of Iraq?
This administration has forged full speed aheads with its disastrous escalation. Who will hold it accountable? NOT the newly elected Congress, who has put Impeachment off the table. NOT the legislature who lack the gumption to stand up for what 2/3 of the American people want. Too bad it is not 3/4, the super-majority required to over-ride a veto. BUT, the one-third of fools who think they are pre-ordained by God to control the planet and also get chosen during Armageddon have, unfortunately, the power to prevent a peaceful resolution to this conflict and a mission of peaceful work in our troubled world.

Follow this link to ponder True's latest passionate urge toward activism for peace:

Army Extends Iraq Tours to 15 Months

Where are the mothers? sisters? wives? children? Stem cell bill approved by Senate - Yahoo! News

Where have all the mothers gone?
Most Americans recognize that an eight-cell blastocyst is not a human being.
Dear Cook County residents,
Please follow this link....

Most, like me, have known the loss of loved ones that might have been avoided by stem cell therapy and perhaps even worse, the pending death sentence overhanging those who are denied live-saving treatment because of this stupid president beholden to so many special interests that he has no longer a face of his own, this upper-class pawn so willing to cave to any interests that might give money to his party.
As loved ones all over the planet die when they might have lived,
I wish and hope that some good souls might speak out.

Nancye Belding
Grand Marais

Stem cell bill approved by Senate - Yahoo! News

A Time For Anger, A Call To Action

Dear readers,
On this Good Friday which also takes place during Passover, I am taking the unusual step of posting the entire text of this passionate and spiritually inspiring speech made by Bill Moyers in February. He urges us to look to the teachings of Jesus as well as the roots of our democracy and then do our part to bring America back on the right track.
If you like this speech, check out one made just over a year ago, called "A Time for Heresy" at http://alternet.org/story/33958/. You may have to first go to the Alternet website archives to access this story.
True


A Time For Anger, A Call To Action
By Bill Moyers

-
The following is a transcript of a speech given on February 7, 2007 at Occidental College in Los Angeles.
-
I am grateful to you for this opportunity and to President Prager for the hospitality of this evening, to Diana Akiyama, Director of the Office for Religious and Spiritual Life, whose idea it was to invite me and with whom you can have an accounting after I've left. And to the Lilly Endowment for funding the Values and Vocations project to encourage students at Occidental to explore how their beliefs and values shape their choices in life, how to make choices for meaningful work and how to make a contribution to the common good. It's a recognition of a unique venture: to demonstrate that the life of the mind and the longing of the spirit are mirror images of the human organism. I'm grateful to be here under their auspices.

I have come across the continent to talk to you about two subjects close to my heart. I care about them as a journalist, a citizen and a grandfather who looks at the pictures next to my computer of my five young grandchildren who do not have a vote, a lobbyist in Washington, or the means to contribute to a presidential candidate. If I don't act in their behalf, who will?

One of my obsessions is democracy, and there is no campus in the country more attuned than Occidental to what it will take to save democracy. Because of your record of activism for social justice, I know we agree that democracy is more than what we were taught in high school civics - more than the two-party system, the checks-and-balances, the debate over whether the Electoral College is a good idea. Those are important matters that warrant our attention, but democracy involves something more fundamental. I want to talk about what democracy bestows on us?the revolutionary idea that democracy is not just about the means of governance but the means of dignifying people so they become fully free to claim their moral and political agency. "I believe in democracy because it releases the energies of every human being" - those are the words of our 28th president, Woodrow Wilson.

I've been spending time with Woodrow Wilson and others of his era because my colleagues and I are producing a documentary series on the momentous struggles that gripped America a century or so years ago at the birth of modern politics. Woodrow Wilson clearly understood the nature of power. In his now-forgotten political testament called The New Freedom, Wilson described his reformism in plain English no one could fail to understand: "The laws of this country do not prevent the strong from crushing the week..." He wrote: "Don't deceive yourselves for a moment as to the power of great interests which now dominate our development... There are men in this country big enough to own the government of the United States. They are going to own it if they can." And he warned: "There is no salvation in the pitiful condescensions of industrial masters... prosperity guaranteed by trustees has no prospect of endurance."

Now Wilson took his stand at the center of power - the presidency itself - and from his stand came progressive income taxation, the federal estate tax, tariff reform, the challenge to great monopolies and trusts, and, most important, a resolute spirit "to deal with the new and subtle tyrannies according to their deserts."

How we need that spirit today! When Woodrow Wilson spoke of democracy releasing the energies of every human being, he was declaring that we cannot leave our destiny to politicians, elites, and experts; either we take democracy into our own hands, or others will take democracy from us.

We do not have much time. Our political system is melting down, right here where you live.

A recent poll by the Public Policy Institute of California found that only 20% of voters last November believe your state will be a better place to live in the year 2025; 51% say it will be worse. Another poll by the New American Foundation - summed up in an article by Steven Hill in the January 28th San Francisco Chronicle - found that for the first time in modern California history, a majority of adults are not registered with either of the two major parties. Furthermore, writes Hill, "There is a widening breach between most of the 39 million people residing in California and the fewer than 9 million who actually vote." Here we are getting to the heart of the crisis today - the great divide that has opened in American life.

According to that New American Foundation study, frequent voters [in California] tend to be 45 and older, have household incomes of $60,000 or more, are homeowners, and have college degrees. In contrast, the 12 million nonvoters (7 million of whom are eligible to vote but are not registered) tend to be younger than 45, rent instead of own, have not been to College, and have incomes less than $60,000.

In other words, "Considering that California often has one of the lowest voter participation rates in the nation - in some elections only a little more that 1/3 of eligible voters participate - a small group of frequent voters, who are richer, whiter, and older than their nonvoting neighbors, form the majority that decides which candidates win and which ballot measures pass." The author of that report (Mark Baldassare) concludes: "Only about 15% of adult people make the decisions and that 15% doesn't look much life California overall."

We should not be surprised by the consequences: "Two Californias have emerged. One that votes and one that does not. Both sides inhabit the same state and must share the same resources, but only one side is electing the political leaders who divide up the pie."

You've got a big problem here. But don't feel alone. Across the country our 18th political system is failing to deal with basic realities. Despite Thomas Jefferson's counsel that we would need a revolution every 25 years to enable our governance to serve new generations, our structure - practically deified for 225 years - has essentially stayed the same while science and technology have raced ahead. A young writer I know, named Jan Frel, one of the most thoughtful practitioners of the emerging world of Web journalism, wrote me the other day to say: "We've gone way past ourselves. I see the unfathomable numbers in the national debt and deficit, and the way that the Federal government was physically unable to respond to Hurricane Katrina. I look at Iraq; where 50% of the question is how to get out, and the other 50% is how did so few people have the power to start the invasion in the first place. If the Republic were functioning, they would have never had that power."

Yet the inertia of the political process seems virtually unstoppable. Frel reminds me that the chairman of the Senate Budget Committee can shepherd a $2.8 trillion dollar budget through the Senate and then admit: "It's hard to understand what a trillion is. I don't know what it is." Is it fair to expect anyone to understand what a trillion is, my young friend asks, or how to behave with it in any democratic fashion?" He goes on: "But the political system and culture are forcing 535 members of Congress and a President who are often thousands of miles away from their 300 million constituents to do so. It is frightening to watch the American media culture from progressive to hard right being totally sold on the idea of one President for 300 million people, as though the Presidency is still fit to human scale. I'm at a point where the idea of a political savior in the guise of a Presidential candidate or congressional majority sounds downright scary, and at the same time, with very few exceptions, the writers and journalists across the slate are completely sold on it."

Our political system is promiscuous as well as primitive. The first modern fundraiser in American politics - Mark Hanna, who shook down the corporations to make William McKinley President of the United States in 1896 - once said there are two important things in politics. "One is money, and I can't remember the other one." Because our system feeds on campaign contributions, the powerful and the privileged shape it to their will. Only 12% of American households had incomes over $100,000 in 2000, but they made up 95% of the substantial donors to campaigns and have been the big winners in Washington ever since.

I saw early on the consequences of political and social inequality. I got my first job in journalism at the age of 16. I quickly had one of those strokes of luck that can determine a career. Some of the old timers were on vacation or out sick and I was assigned to cover what came to be known as the 'Housewives Rebellion.' Fifteen women in my home town decided not to pay the social security withholding tax for their domestic workers. They argued that social security was unconstitutional, that imposing it was taxation without representation, and that - here's my favorite part - "requiring us to collect (the tax) is no different from requiring us to collect the garbage."

They hired themselves a lawyer - none other than Martin Dies, the former Congressman best known, or worst known, for his work as head of the House Committee on Un-American Activities in the 30s and 40s. He was no more effective at defending rebellious women than he had been protecting against Communist subversives, and eventually the women wound up holding their noses and paying the tax. The stories I wrote for my local paper were picked up and moved on by the Associated Press wire to Newspapers all over the country. One day, the managing editor called me over and pointed to the AP ticker beside his desk. Moving across the wire was a notice citing one "Bill Moyers" and the News Messenger for the reporting we had done on the rebellion.

That hooked me. In one way or another - after a detour through seminary and then into politics and government for a spell - I've been covering politics ever since.

By "politics" I mean when people get together to influence government, change their own lives, and change society. Sometimes those people are powerful corporate lobby groups like the drug companies and the oil industry, and sometimes they are ordinary people fighting to protect their communities from toxic chemicals, workers fighting for a living wage, or college students organizing to put an end to sweatshops.

Those women in Marshall, Texas - who didn't want to pay Social Security taxes for their maids - were not bad people. They were regulars at church, their children were my friends, many of them were active in community affairs, and their husbands were pillars of the business and professional class in town. They were respectable and upstanding citizens all.

So it took me awhile to figure out what had brought on that spasm of reactionary rebellion. It came to me one day, much later. They simply couldn't see beyond their own prerogatives. Fiercely loyal to their families, to their clubs, charities, and congregations - fiercely loyal, in other words, to their own kind - they narrowly defined membership in democracy to include only people like them. The women who washed and ironed their laundry, wiped their children's bottoms, made their husbands' beds, and cooked their families meals - these women, too, would grow old and frail, sick and decrepit, lose their husbands and face the ravages of time alone, with nothing to show from their years of labor but the creases in their brow and the knots on their knuckles.

In one way or another, this is the oldest story in America: the struggle to determine whether "We, the People" is a spiritual idea embedded in a political reality - one nation, indivisible - or merely a charade masquerading as piety and manipulated by the powerful and privileged to sustain their own way of life at the expense of others.

We seem to be holding our breath today, trying to decide what kind of country we want to be. But in this state of suspension, powerful interests are making off with the booty. They remind me of the card shark in Texas who said to his competitor in the poker game: "Now play the cards fairly Reuben. I know what I dealt you."

For years now a small fraction of American households have been garnering a larger and larger concentration of wealth and income, while large corporations and financial institutions have obtained unprecedented power over who wins and who loses. Inequality in America is greater than it's been in 50 years. In 1960 the gap in terms of wealth between the top 20% and the bottom 20% was 30 fold. Today it's more than 75 fold.

Such concentrations of wealth would be far less of an issue if the rest of society were benefiting proportionally. But that is not the case. Throughout our industrial history incomes grew at 30% to 50% or more every quarter, and in the quarter century after WWII, gains reached more than 100% for all income categories. Since the late 1970s, only the top 1% of households increased their income by 100%.

Once upon a time, according to Isabel Sawhill and Sara McLanahan in The Future of Children, the American ideal of classless society was 'one in which all children have roughly equal chance of success regardless of the economic status of the family into which they were born. That's changing fast. The Economist Jeffrey Madrick writes that just a couple of decades ago, only 20% of one's future income was determined by the income of one's father. New research suggests that today 60% of a son's income is determined by the level of his father's income. In other words, children no longer have a roughly equal chance of success regardless of the economic status of the family into which they are born. Their chances of success are greatly improved if they are born on third base and their father has been tipping the umpire.

As all of you know, a college education today is practically a necessity if you are to hold your own, much less climb the next rung. More than 40% of all new jobs now require a college degree. There are real world consequences to this, and Madrick drives them home. Since the 1970s, median wages of men with college degrees have risen about 14%. But median wages for high school graduates have fallen about 15%. Not surprisingly, nearly 24% of American workers with only a high school diploma have no health insurance, compared with less than 10% of those with college degrees.

Such statistics can bring glaze to the eyes, but Oscar Wilde once said that it is the mark of truly educated people to be deeply moved by statistics. All of you are educated, and I know you can envision the stress these economic realities are putting on working people and on family life. As incomes have stagnated, higher education, health care, public transportation, drugs, housing and cars have risen faster in price than typical family incomes, so that life, says Jeffrey Madrick, "has grown neither calm nor secure for most Americans, by any means."

Let me tell you about the Stanleys and the Neumanns, two families who live in Milwaukee. One is black, the other white. The breadwinners in both were laid off in the first wave of downsizing in 1991 as corporations began moving jobs out of the city and then out of the country. In a documentary series my colleagues and I chronicled their efforts over the next decade to cope with the wrenching changes in their lives and to find a place for themselves in the new global economy. They're the kind of Americans my mother would have called "the salt of the earth". They love their kids, care about their communities, go to church every Sunday, and work hard all week.

To make ends meet after the layoffs, both mothers took full-time jobs. Both fathers became seriously ill. When one father had to stay in the hospital two months the family went $30,000 in debt because they didn't have adequate health care. We were there with our cameras when the bank started to foreclose on the modest home of one family that couldn't make mortgage payments. Like millions of Americans, the Stanleys and the Neumanns were playing by the rules and still getting stiffed. By the end of the decade they were running harder but slipping further behind, and the gap between them and prosperous America was widening.

What turns their personal tragedy into a political travesty is that while they are indeed patriotic, they no longer believe they matter to the people who run the country. They simply do not think their concerns will ever be addressed by the political, corporate, and media elites who make up our dominant class. They are not cynical, because they are deeply religious people with no capacity for cynicism, but they know the system is rigged against them.

"Things have reached such a state of affairs," the journalist George Orwell once wrote, "that the first duty of every intelligent person is to pay attention to the obvious." The editors of The Economist have done just that. The pro-business magazine considered by many to be the most influential defender of capitalism on the newsstand, produced a sobering analysis of what is happening to the old notion that any American child can get to the top. A growing body of evidence - some of it I have already cited - led the editors to conclude that with "income inequality growing to levels not seen since the Gilded Age and social mobility falling behind, the United States risks calcifying into a European-style class-based society." The editors point to an "education system increasingly stratified by social class" in which poor children "attend schools with fewer resources than those of their richer contemporaries" and great universities that are "increasingly reinforcing rather than reducing these educational inequalities." They conclude that America's great companies have made it harder than ever "for people to start at the bottom and rise up the company hierarchies by dint of hard work and self-improvement."

It is eerie to read assessments like that and then read the anthropologist Jared Diamond's book, Collapse: How Societies Choose to Succeed or Fail He describes an America society in which elites cocoon themselves "in gated communities, guarded by private security guards, and filled with people who drink bottled water, depend on private pensions, and send their children to private schools." Gradually, they lose the motivation "to support the police force, the municipal water supply, Social Security, and public schools." Any society contains a built-in blueprint for failure, warns Jared Diamond, if elites insulate themselves from the consequences of their own actions.

So it is that in a study of its own, The American Political Science Association found that "increasing inequalities threaten the American ideal of equal citizenship and that progress toward real democracy may have stalled in this country and even reversed."

This is a marked turn of events for a country whose mythology embraces "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness" as part of our creed. America was not supposed to be a country of "winner take all." Through our system of checks and balances we were going to maintain a healthy equilibrium in how power works - and for whom. Because equitable access to public resources is the lifeblood of any democracy, we made primary schooling free to all. Because everyone deserves a second chance, debtors, especially the relatively poor, were protected by state laws against their rich creditors. Government encouraged Americans to own their own piece of land, and even supported squatters' rights. In my time, the hope of equal opportunity became reality for millions of us. Although my parents were knocked down and almost out by the Great Depression, and were poor all their lives, my brother and I went to good public schools. The GI Bill made it possible for him to go to college. When I bought my first car with a loan of $450 I drove to a public school on a public highway and stopped to rest in a public park. America as a shared project was becoming the engine of our national experience.

Not now. Beginning a quarter of a century ago a movement of corporate, political, and religious fundamentalists gained ascendancy over politics and made inequality their goal. They launched a crusade to dismantle the political institutions, the legal and statutory canons, and the intellectual and cultural frameworks that have held private power. And they had the money to back up their ambition.

Let me read you something:

When powerful interests shower Washington with millions in campaign contributions, they often get what they want. But it is ordinary citizens and firms that pay the price and most of them never see it coming. This is what happens if you don't contribute to their campaigns or spend generously on lobbying. You pick up a disproportionate share of America's tax bill. You pay higher prices for a broad range of products from peanuts to prescriptions. You pay taxes that others in a similar situation have been excused from paying. You're compelled to abide by laws while others are granted immunity from them. You must pay debts that you incur while others do not. You're barred from writing off on your tax returns some of the money spent on necessities while others deduct the cost of their entertainment. You must run your business by one set of rules, while the government creates another set for your competitors. In contrast, the fortunate few who contribute to the right politicians and hire the right lobbyists enjoy all the benefits of their special status. Make a bad business deal; the government bails them out. If they want to hire workers at below market wages, the government provides the means to do so. If they want more time to pay their debts, the government gives them an extension. If they want immunity from certain laws, the government gives it. If they want to ignore rules their competition must comply with, the government gives its approval. If they want to kill legislation that is intended for the public, it gets killed.

I'm not quoting from Karl Marx's Das Kapital or Mao's Little Red Book. I'm quoting Time Magazine. From the heart of America's media establishment comes the judgment that America now has "government for the few at the expense of the many."

We are talking about nothing less that a class war declared a generation ago, in a powerful polemic by the wealthy right-winger, William Simon, who had been Richard Nixon's Secretary of the Treasury. In it he declared that "funds generated by business... must rush by the multimillions" to conservative causes. The trumpet was sounded for the financial and business class to take back the power and privileges they had lost as a result of the Great Depression and the New Deal. They got the message and were soon waging a well-orchestrated, lavishly-financed movement. Business Week put it bluntly: "Some people will obviously have to do with less... .It will be a bitter pill for many Americans to swallow the idea of doing with less so that big business can have more." The long-range strategy was to cut workforces and their wages, scour the globe in search of cheap labor, trash the social contract and the safety net that was supposed to protect people from hardships beyond their control, deny ordinary citizens the power to sue rich corporations for malfeasance and malpractice, and eliminate the ability of government to restrain what editorialists for the Wall Street Journal admiringly call "the animal spirits of business."

Looking backwards, it all seems so clear that we wonder how we could have ignored the warning signs at the time. What has been happening to working people is not the result of Adam Smith's invisible hand but the direct consequence of corporate activism, intellectual propaganda, the rise of a religious literalism opposed to any civil and human right that threaten its paternalism, and a string of political decisions favoring the interests of wealthy elites who bought the political system right out from under us.

To create the intellectual framework for this revolution in public policy, they funded conservative think tanks that churned out study after study advocating their agenda.

To put muscle behind these ideas, they created a formidable political machine. One of the few journalists to cover the issues of class, Thomas Edsall of the Washington Post, reported that "During the 1970s, business refined its ability to act as a class, submerging competitive instincts in favor of joint, cooperate action in the legislative area." Big business political action committees flooded the political arena with a deluge of dollars. And they built alliances with the religious right - Jerry Falwell's Moral Majority and Pat Robertson's Christian Coalition - who gleefully contrived a cultural holy war that became a smokescreen behind which the economic assault on the middle and working classes would occur.

From land, water, and other resources, to media and the broadcast and digital spectrums, to scientific discovery and medial breakthroughs, a broad range of America's public resources have been undergoing a powerful shift toward elite control, contributing substantially to those economic pressures on ordinary Americans that "deeply affect household stability, family dynamics, social mobility, political participation and civic life."
What's to be done?

The only answer to organized money is organized people.

Again:

The only answer to organized money is organized people.

And again:

The only answer to organized money is organized people.

I came to Occidental because your campus has a reputation for believing in a political system where ordinary people have a voice in making the decisions that shape their lives, not just at the ballot box every two or four years in November, but in their workplaces, their neighborhoods and communities, and on their college campuses. In a real democracy, ordinary people at every level hold their elected officials accountable for the big decisions, about whether or not to go to war and put young men and women in harm's way, about the pollution of the environment, global warming, and the health and safety of our workplaces, our communities, our food and our air and our water, the quality of our public schools, and the distribution of economic resources. It's the spirit of fighting back throughout American history that brought an end to sweatshops, won the eight-hour working day and a minimum wage, delivered suffrage to women and blacks from slavery, inspired the Gay Rights movement, the consumer and environmental movements, and more recently stopped Congress from enacting repressive legislation against immigrants.

I believe a new wave of social reform is about to break across America. We see it in the struggle for a 'living wage' for America's working people... Last November, voters in six states approved ballot measures to raise their states' minimum wage above the federal level; 28 states now have such laws. Since 1994, more than 100 cities have passed local living wage laws that require employers who do business with the government - who get taxpayer subsidies, in other words - to pay workers enough to lift their families out of poverty.

Los Angeles has led the way, passing one of the nation's strongest 'living wage' laws in 1997. And just the other day the LA City Council voted to extend that "living wage" law to the thirty-five hundred hotel workers around the Los Angeles Airport - the first living wage law in the country to target a specific industry and a specific geographic area. But it took last fall's march down Century Boulevard - organized people! - to finally bring it about and it took the arrest of hundreds of college students, including several dozen from Occidental.

The great abolitionist Frederick Douglass said that "if there is no struggle, there is no progress." Those who profess freedom, yet fail to act - they are "men who want crops without plowing up the ground. They want rain without thunder and lightning, they want the ocean without the awful roar of its many waters... power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will. Find out just what people will submit to, and you have found the exact amount of injustice and wrong which will be imposed upon them."

What America needs is a broad bi-partisan movement for democracy. It's happened before: In 1800, with the Jeffersonian Democrats; in 1860, with Radical Republicans; in 1892, with the Populists; in 1912, with Bull Moose Progressives; in 1932, with the New Deal; in l964, with Civil Rights activists - each moment a breaking point after long, hard struggles, each with small beginnings in transcendent faith.

Faith! That's the other subject close to my heart that I have come talk about. Almost every great social movement in America has contained a flame of faith at its core - the belief that all human beings bear traces of the divine spark, however defined. I myself believe that within the religious quest - in the deeper realm of spirituality that may well be the primal origin of all religion - lies what Gregg Easterbrook calls "an essential aspect of the human prospect." It is here we wrestle with questions of life and purpose, with the meaning of loss, yearning and hope, above all of love.

I am grateful to have first been exposed to those qualities in my own Christian tradition. T.S. Eliot believed that "no man [or woman] has ever climbed to the higher stages of the spiritual life who has not been a believer in a particular religion, or at least a particular philosophy." As we dig deeper into our own religion, we are likely to break through to someone else digging deeper toward us from their own tradition, and on some metaphysical level, we converge, like the images inside a kaleidoscope, into new patterns of meaning that illuminate our own journey.

For most of our history this country's religious discourse was dominated by white male Protestants of a culturally conservative European heritage - people like me. Dissenting voices of America, alternative visions of faith, or race, of women, rarely reached the mainstream. The cartoonist Jeff McNally summed it up with two weirdoes talking in a California diner. One weirdo says to the other. "Have you ever delved into the mysteries of Eastern Religion?" And the second weirdo answers: "Yes, I was once a Methodist in Philadelphia." Once upon a time that was about the extent of our exposure to the varieties of Religious experience. No longer. Our nation is being re-created right before our eyes, with mosques and Hindu Temples, Sikh communities and Buddhist retreat centers. And we all have so much to teach each other. Buddhists can teach us about the delight of contemplation and 'the infinite within.' From Muslims we can learn about the nature of surrender; from Jews, the power of the prophetic conscience; from Hindus, the "realms of gold" hidden in the depths of our hearts," from Confucians the empathy necessary to sustain the fragile web of civilization... Nothing I take from these traditions has come at the expense of the Christian story. I respect that story - my story ?even more for having come to see that all the great religious grapple with things that matter, although each may come out at a different place; that each arises from within and experiences a lived human experience; and each and every one of them offers a unique insight into human nature. I reject the notion that faith is acquired in the same way one chooses a meal in a cafeteria, but I confess there is something liberating about no longer being quite so deaf to what others have to report from their experience.

So let me share with you what I treasure most about the faith that has informed my journey. You will find it in the New Testament, in the gospel of Matthew, where the story of Jesus of Nazareth unfolds chapter by chapter: The birth at Bethlehem. The baptism in the River Jordan. The temptation in the wilderness. The Sermon on the Mount. The healing of the sick and the feeding of the hungry. The Parables. The calling of the Disciples. The journey to Jerusalem. And always, embedded like pearls throughout the story, the teachings of compassion, forgiveness, and reconciliation:


Love your enemies, bless those who curse you, do good to those who hate you, and pray for those who spitefully use you and persecute you.

Whoever strikes you on the right cheek, turn the other to him also... and whoever compels you to go one mile, go with him two.

If you bring your gift to the altar, and there remember that your brother has something against you, leave your gift before the altar, and go your way. First be reconciled to your brother, and then come and offer our gift.

Judge not, lest ye be judged.

In these pages we are in the presence of one who clearly understands the power of love, mercy, and kindness - the 'gentle Jesus' so familiar in art, song, and Sunday School.

But then the tale turns. Jesus' demeanor changes; the tone and temper of the narrative shift, and the Prince of Peace becomes a disturber of the peace:
Then Jesus went into the temple of God and drove out all those who bought and sold in the temple, and overturned the tables of the moneychangers..... and he said to them, "It is written, 'My house shall be called a house of prayer but you have made it a den of thieves.'"


His message grew more threatening, amid growing crowds right on the Temple grounds. In his parable of the wicked tenants, he predicted the imminent destruction of the Jerusalem elites, setting in motion the events that led to his crucifixion a short time later.

No cheek turned there. No second mile traveled. On the contrary, Jesus grows angry. He passes judgment. His message becomes more threatening. And he takes action.

Over the past few years as we witnessed the growing concentration of wealth and privilege in our country, prophetic religion lost its voice, drowned out by the corporate, political, and religious right who hijacked Jesus.

That's right: They hijacked Jesus. The very Jesus who stood in Nazareth and proclaimed, "The Lord has anointed me to preach the good news to the poor" - this Jesus, hijacked by a philosophy of greed. The very Jesus who fed 5000 hungry people - and not just those in the skyboxes; the very Jesus who offered kindness to the prostitute and hospitality to the outcast; who raised the status of women and treated even the hated tax collector as a citizen of the Kingdom. The indignant Jesus who drove the money changers from the temple - this Jesus was hijacked and turned from a friend of the dispossessed into a guardian of privilege, the ally of oil barons, banking tycoons, media moguls and weapons builders.

Yet it was this same Jesus who inspired a Methodist ship-caulker named Edward Rogers to crusade across New England for an eight hour work day; called Frances William to rise up against the sweatshop; sent Dorothy Day to march alongside striking auto workers in Michigan, fishermen and textile workers in Massachusetts, brewery workers in New York, and marble cutters in Vermont; who roused E.B. McKinney and Owen Whitfield to stand against a Mississippi oligarchy that held sharecroppers in servitude, challenged a young priest named John Ryan to champion child labor laws a decade before the New Deal, and summoned Martin Luther King to Memphis to join sanitation workers in their struggle for a decent wage.

This Jesus was there on Century Boulevard last September, speaking Spanish. And it is this resurrected Jesus, in the company of the morally indignant of every faith, who will be there wherever Americans are angry enough to rise up and drive the money changers from the temples of democracy.

To you students at Occidental, let me say: I have been a journalist too long to look at the world through rose-colored glasses. I believe the only way to be in the world is to see it as it really is and then to take it on despite the frightening things you see. The Italian philosopher Gramschi spoke of the "the pessimism of the intellect and the optimism of the will." With this philosophy your generation can bring about the Third American Revolution. The first won independence from the Crown. The second won equal rights for women and for the sons and daughters of slavery. This third - the revolution of the 21st Century - will bring about a democracy that leaves no one out. The simple truth is we cannot build a political society or a nation across the vast divides that mark our country today. We must bridge that divide and make society whole, sharing the fruits of freedom and prosperity with the least among us. I have crossed the continent to tell you the Dream is not done, the work is not over, and your time has come to take it on.