Down on the Farm

 So it was somewhere in the great flyover mid-section that this farm owner decided it was time to harvest his crops.

The project would be far too big for himself and his family to complete, so he drove over to the nearby town of Lake Wobehoohoo. He parked his old Chrysler in the vast parking lot and walked into the Marketplace Food Court to have some breakfast. 

While consuming there, the farmer was checking out the locals to recruit some help for the upcoming work.

By ’n by, he spotted some guys and gals that he knew to be good workers and waved them over to his table. The farm owner explained to them the project that he needed to get done and asked  if they’d like to get in on the job, for which he would pay each one a hundred bucks for the day’s work.

The wiley crew signed on and headed out to the farm to get started on the work, to be managed by his boss-man.

As it turned out, however, a little while later the farm owner got a text from his manager stating that the his assessment of their progress indicated that the harvest would not be completed that same day unless more labor was brought in to help.

So the farmer went back to the Marketplace to recruit some more help, and sure enough there were some eligible workers hanging out at the Marketplace. So he hooked up with them, made the deal and sent them out to help the other workers complete the project.

But that afternoon, the manager’s text were still calling for more labor. The farmer went back to the Food Court to scope out the scene and recruit yet some more help. Sure enough, there were some young bucks and chicks hanging out and he signed them on.

Long about five o’clock, wanting to make sure the project would be completed, he signed on even more laborers.

It was one helluva long day, but by 6:30 pm. the work was all done.

Thank God. Now the farm owner and his family could relax.

So he paid everybody their agreed-upon compensation, thanked them for their good work and sent them on their way.

By ’n by, as the farmer and his family were settling into their homestead for the evening meal, there came a knock at the door.

A couple of those early guys who had been hired in the early workday hours were standing on the front porch at the front door when the farm owner opened it. 

Long story short . . . these guys were busybodies who were not interested in minding their own business. They started complaining because they had heard through the grapevine online that all the workers got the same compensation, even though the late hires—those good-for-nothin’ doowops—had entered into the project in the waning hours and only toiled for a few hours. Some of them losers even worked for only one hour! and then collected the same equal opportunity-equal outcome-equal this-n-that na na na booboo compensation!

So Jethro, standing at his front door looking disdainfully at these complainers, says to them:

“Friends, I am doing you no wrong; did you not agree with me for a hundred bucks? Take what is yours and go, but I wish to give to these latecomers the same payment. I mean . . . isn’t it still legal for me to utilize my own resources and assets as is appropriate for my enterprise? Can you not mind your own dam business and be content while I do what I need to do?”

And so, in the big picture as it turns out . . . in some cases,  the last shall be first, and the first shall be last. No big deal. 

Y’all be content with your lot in life and we’ll all get along.

Everybody ain’t the same, y'know. But there’s diversity and there’s responsibility and there’s . . . well, you know . . . freedom and equality and all that. Some folks who got a raw deal maybe a few centuries ago may be due a new deal now. Don’t worry your pretty little privileged head about it.

 

Glass half-Full 

Dr. King remembered

I was a white boy growing up in the deep south.
In my life, 1951 . . .  a vivid memory stands out: the remembrance of this brave man:


. . . his life, his work, his service to mankind, his leadership in the perilous project of fulfilling our Creator's call to 

. . . bring good news to the afflicted, . . . to proclaim liberty to the captives and freedom to prisoners . . . (Isaiah 61:1)

In my lifetime, I can think of no other American who demonstrated greater courage than Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. He persisted tirelessly in the sacred call to blaze a trail of opportunity for oppressed people. He persevered in the face of certain death, as he fully understood the vengeful opposition of other men--white and black--who  ultimately took him down.

The name assigned to him at birth, King, was appropriate, as he went on to conduct the life of a true leader, a born leader, an orator, an organizer who truly fulfilled  the declaration of our nation's founding principles:

We find these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal,  that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.

In my lifetime, I can recall no other person who more deserves annual remembrance during a national holiday. Although he had his faults, his own sins as we all do,  he was a man of whom this world was not worthy.  In this world, he helped God and fellowman to "make a way where there is no way." He blazed a trail toward that "equal" status mentioned by Mr. Jefferson and the Continental Congress when they composed our Declaration back in 1776.

I am looking forward to meeting Dr. King in heaven, or whatever you call it. Many years ago, I wrote this song about him and an ancient leader named Moses:

Mountaintop

Equal Incomes and Outcomes?

For some of us life is a race;

for others it's a spectator event.

While few gather booty with style and grace

many manage only to pay the rent.



Now progressives want to yank everything

towards establishing income equality,

while conservatives hate to support anything

except equal access to opportunity.



Is opportunity our great American playing field,

or is income the gridiron of our success?

Should we rig the system for equal income yield,

or tweak it to assure the same access?



As if such a thing could be done,

manipulating society to evolve a certain way:

everyone marching to the same equality drum,

consuming consumer goodies every day!



This sometimes great notion to level the playing field--

do we apply it toward the start-point or the resultant end:

should we guarantee incomes with diverse outcomes to yield,

or provide equal opportunities that equally pretend?



This question is for each person to decide,

and I know not course most make take.

In which theoretical society will you reside?

Will you excel, or make as everyone the same mistake?



Glass half-Full

Don't go ballistic like Cain did

I'm a meat-eater, but that's neither here nor there. Some people are not, and that's just fine. You do your thing and I'll do mine. People are different; each person has his/her own preferences. This diversity makes human life much more interesting and dramatic than it would be if we were all the same.

In that ancient great Book--the one that is holy and cherished by millions while it is disdained by others--a story is told about two brothers of long ago, Cain and Abel. Cain was growing crops in the ground; Abel was raising flocks of sheep.

Back in those days, men had not yet figured out how cool they were, so they looked to the supernatural realm for inspiration and faith. Many men and women of antiquity believed in offering a portion of their increase to God. It wasn't like today, when folks don't pay attention to such things because they are, you know, on their own.

One day, these two brothers were offering their sacrifices to God, but, as it turned out, with differing results.The book of Genesis reports that God had regard for Abel's sacrifice, but not for Cain's, whatever that means. The common interpretation of this is that God rejected Cain's offering, but received Abel's. If God did indeed reject Cain's sacrifice, the Bible provides no explanation of God's preference in this incident.

In Christian tradition, writ large and writ small, this event has been for a long time a matter of some study and speculation. Some have inferred that God was indicating a preference for meat instead of veggie or grain produce, or simply an acknowledgement that meat has more protein value as food for us humans. Or maybe God's apparent distinction was based not on the foods being offered, but on some difference between the two brothers themselves. Perhaps Cain had offered low quality goods, while Abel had reserved his best for God. Or it could be that Cain just had a bad attitude. We don't know.

What we can see in this story is that God's acknowledgement of one brother's offering was not the same as his regard for the other. That's about it.

Those of us who believe in God, and in the Mosaic revelation about God's attributes, can derive with surety only one lesson from this demonstrative story about God's preference: whatever God does, he does. Or, to put it the other way, whatever he doesn't do, he doesn't do. There is no need for him to justify his acceptances to us. Who are we to question the One who created all things?

And we have to live with that.

Christians and others who value the Genesis revelation have this awareness of the Almighty's sovereignty, which is absolute because God is the Creator who set all things in motion. Our conception if God is fundamentally different from our view of humans, whom we know to be fickle, inconsistent, generally unpredictable, contentious, and sometimes murderous.

The reality of God's sovereign will was not a lesson that Cain was ready to accept. He got upset about God's apparent rejection of his offering. So Cain killed his brother.

Is God guilty of some injustice here? Is God unjust because he did not receive both sacrifices as equal?

No.

Equality, as venerable as it is, is a human notion. According to our Declaration of American Independence, the God who created Nature also created men and women, and created them all equal. This means that we, as men and women who need to govern ourselves, must form institutions that regard all persons as equal if we want to work together toward societal justice.

Let's accept the human idea that all persons should be equal in the eyes of human law.

But we are individuals; that is important. Furthermore, equality of individual persons is a valuable truth for prioritizing our behaviors and institutions.

Once a baby is born, the wonderful dynamic of that person's unique circumstances--nature and nurture and all that--determines what that person is, who they become, and how the work of their hands and mind is received by others, or for that matter, by God.

But this does not mean everyone's input and output will be equal. In that sense, we are not equals. This inequality affords us a thoroughly fascinating human race, with a beneficial diversity of inputs and outputs, and hence a vast range of incomes and outcomes.

Let us make judicial provisions for equality of opportunity for each person. But equality of income and outcome is ultimately a matter that is determined by each person's use of the resources available to him/her.

If you have something to offer to God, or to the world, do not go ballistic if it is ignored or overlooked. Just find the lesson in that rejection; then go back and try again. You will have better results than if you, like Cain, get mad and kill someone.

As for Cain's fate after his crime, God spared him the death sentence, and allowed him to wander away to the land of Nod, east of Eden, where he took a wife. Perhaps her feminine influence, coupled with the Lord's chastisement, mellowed him out a bit.

CR, with new novel, Smoke, soon to be published

The Notion of Equality

To say that God created all men

equal,

Now that is one thing. But

to apprehend the throne of God and then

set up men as his replacements, in order to

equalize

all the inequality, that is another.

It just aint natural to try and make

everybody equal.

I mean

Lenin tried that, right? And then Stalin and

look what happened there.

Oh they had a great idea, right.

To rip down the palatial pile of czarist wealth and

redistribute it, so everybody's got the same.

Looks good on paper but then

the working out of it, the the the i mean the

blood

the gulag and the schmulag and the ragtag

enforced

equalization of it, well it . . .

you tell me.

What about Mao's millions

laid upon the altar of

the people's perfect plan,

some great hungry leap forward to revolutionize culture

like some vulture

would do, and then cometh Pol Pot,

with the common pot, and a head shot

and oh what an income redistribution hotshot.

I mean, you

may think I'm oversimplifying this but hey

that's the point.

Filling God's shoes with human ruse now

that's a tall order.

How's that workin out for ya?

Glass Chimera

Redquity, Whitequity, and Bluequity

From the moment of our bloody birth

this equality thread's sewn a sturdy seam;

it flaps red dream stripes across our flagg-ed earth,

as justice in a dream.

That sanguine color was borrowed from French egalit'e;

yet runs red on American soil,

so every man and woman's own unique regalit'e

might flourish bright in blood, and sweat, and toil.

Now the extremities of our ruptured economic wounds

draw social sympathy for Occupy Red Square,

while our banner stripes flap o'er flagging glooms.

Does anybody care?



'cause t'was like a row of stony marble whites

set upon each soldier's devotion given wholly,

we laid our solemn hopes and fights

on Arlington ground made holy,

while all across this manifest destiny quest

sprang picket-white fence, and courtly documents

to assure each citizen's effort best

to prosper and to thrive, in enterprising sacraments,

as white stripes snap o'er our flaggy threadbare cares;

they're new as the driven snow,

and prosperity blooms bright on our equity shares

with wealth and health to grow.



We always held high that true blue hope

from mom and pop, of limitless expanding sky,

of deep blue ocean, and work, and cleansing soap,

purple mountain majesty and blueberry pie.

Oh, mister bluebird on my shoulder,

do you still sing with America singing?

Can we whistle and rhyme and yet grow bolder

with our cracked bell of Liberty still ringing?

Hey Bo, can you thump us that delta thang?

But don't tread on my blue ragtime shoes.

Go set yo'self down on the front-porch swang.

Flap us your red, your white, your field of starry blues.



O, say, does that star-spangled banner yet wave?

Does it fly high o'er the level playing field,

while our anthem's strains cry out to save

opportunities to knock and profits to yield?

We're not making equality here,

'cause Nature's God done created that;

we're merely holding these principles dear--

of freedom to blog and liberty to chat!

To gather on the public square,

to prosper, to invest, to build on equity that grew,

to pray and to love and forever to care,

to flow red, flap white, and shine like the starry blue.

Glass half-Full

Equality, divinely inspired

About 27 centuries ago, a prophet named Isaiah lived in the Jewish home-city, Jerusalem. He spoke presciently to his countrymen about the dire condition and future direction of their waning theocracy. Among the many figurative utterances that Isaiah spoke to his people during those turbulent times was this cataclysmic declaration:

"Every valley shall be exalted, and every mountain and hill made low, the crooked straight, and the rough places plain."

Two and a half millenia later, the composer George Frideric Handel appropriated this mountainous prophecy for the the introductory elements of his classic musical oratorio, The Messiah.

In any venue where the piece is performed, Handel's masterpiece of Messianic fervor begins with a dynamic, stringed baroque overture. Then, in clear, declarative recitative, the bold tenor voice announces that Jerusalem's warfare is done, divine absolution is on the way, and now is the time to "make straight in the desert a highway for our God."

Since a highway requires some earth-moving preparatory work, the tenor's exposition continues with Isaiah's earth-shaking analogy that I mentioned above:

"Every valley shall be exalted, and every mountain and hill made low, the crooked straight, and the rough places plain."

But there is much more going on here in the scriptural proclamation than a proposal for highway construction. Isaiah was enunciating a foundational principle of Jewish identity, and later Christian hope: Justice. And not just any old legal notion of justice, but a divinely-appointed equality among God's people that is achieved when their societal field is providentially leveled and everyone has opportunity to live bountifully.

Now, what I'm wondering is: Will this God-sanctioned hope for justice on earth be accomplished through the Almighty's sovereign mandate upon his people, or do we, as God's people (if you count yourself among that group as I do) need to get busy and make the righteous vision happen?

If Isaiah's echoing, metaphorical call to level the playing field resonates in your soul-- if you can glean from his prophetic vision a possibility that someday the lowly will be raised up, and the high and mighty humbled--if you can catch a glimpse of a coming kingdom in which mercy and grace obliterates oppression and injustice--then you may someday be singing that Hallelujah chorus with Isaiah and Handel in the Messiah's grand finale.

I Hope to see you there.

Egalit'e

When the noble ideal of egalit'e among men leads to state-enforced egalitarianism it degenerates to tyranny. This historical truth is seen in the bitter collateral damage of the French revolution and the Russian revolution.

The proper function of government in regard to equality is to protect equal opportunity, not to impose an institutional egalitarianism. Where Marxism went wrong, and degenerated utimately to Stalinism, was in force-feeding societal equality to all citizens. Likewise, among the Chinese, the reign of Maoism following their 1949 revolution degenerated to oppressive governmental structures from which the people are still striving to free themselves. The Russians too.

The earlier revolution, the one that happened here in America, presented equality as a God-given attribute of the human race. That has made quite a difference in the playing-out of it. Jefferson, Franklin, and the many leaders who followed them were breaking new ground on an undeveloped contintent. That has also made quite a difference in the flowering of American equal opportunity among men and women.

The French revolutionary model, established soon after the American one, was encumbered from its inception with the weight of millenia of societal baggage, heaped upon the people mostly by the Church in Rome. When French republicans succeeded in freeing themselves from the bondage of the ancien regime, their progress was quite different from the wild and wooly American experience.

About a century later, Marx took a remnant of that French egalite principle and ran with it; it later developed as historical Marxism. Under the brutally communist hands of Josef Stalin, it enslaved and murdered millions of Russians and east Europeans.

Thus the revolutionary ideal in old Europe developed quite differently than the American experiment. Our working out of it emphasized equal opportunity instead of enforced equality. That had a lot to do with our continent-wide abundance of undeveloped land. This is the heart of American exceptionalism; Such swift and wide incubation of democratic conditions will never happen again in the history of this world.

But these days, the old Western debate of democratic republicanism vs. authoritarianism is being rendered irrelevant due to the forceful power of Islam.

What was previously a philosphical debate, then a multi-faceted political division and military wars, has now retrograded to a more fundamental debate among homo sapiens: a religious struggle.

The Protestan Reformation, and the humanistic Enlightenment that accompanied it, eclipsed a millenial Roman Catholic domination of European culture and its institutions. One result was a vast power vacuum. The revolutionary ideals that bloomed as political movements thereaftere drifted further and further from their religious moorings, and back toward archival Greek philosophic underpinnings.

Now western revolutionary zeal, having wrested itself from authoritarian Catholicism, has bankrupted itself of spiritual stamina. Its wantonly amoral end now renders us culturally weak as compared to the heavy legalistic hand of Islamic fundamentalism.

So we in the post-European world will be playing catch-up ball to recover a principled spiritual heritage. This is a situation analagous to that in which Churchill and the British were struggling to prepare their defense against the onslaught of Nazism and Fascism in the late 1930s.

Oh what a dear price the people of Britain and their Allies paid. Never had so few sacrificed so much for so many, said Mr. Churchill, about the hardly-won defeat over authoritarian tyrrany in Europe.

Our generations probably face similar upheavals in the years ahead.

I know not what course others may take. I take my refuge, and my inspiration in the One who, having decided not to participate in the prolonged skirmish, chose instead to spread his arms and allow the powers of this world to crucify his body so that spiritual rebirth could begin for all mankind.

Resurrection is better than insurrection.