Live, the People

We live only if we are connected.

The FaithHealth networks in Winston Salem were so woven into the neighborhoods that somebody on the team knew every single homeless person by name. And where the Mayor ate lunch (West End Cafe). Thin filaments of trust, subtle as the forest mycelia, threaded every neighborhood including even into the Sherriff’s Office and, yes, ICE. Every now and then we’d host a lunch with ICE agents and Hispanic clergy so that the humans knew each other, not as cartoon characters.

The very first of the Leading Causes of Life is connection because all life flows across relationships, as real as the grittiest street in the toughest neighborhood.

Once, local ICE agents rescued a woman being trafficked and didn’t know where to put her safely. FaithHealth paid for a hotel (I didn’t ask the hospital CFO!). And when we convened the undocumented, we had enough trust to tell the ICE folks which church to stay away from. I am sad for these friends’ as they are debased by venal “superiors.”

Every human structure—church, hospital, university, Marines and ICE exists like honeycomb for the bee to help us attain our God-given capacity to thrive. This behavioral structure is hard-wired in the bees; no queen ever goes rogue to subvert her hive. Humans go rogue all the time debasing themselves and those with less power they coerce. Jonas Salk wrote, The Survival of the Wisest, about how our lack of hard wiring made us capable of adaptive choice. And, of course, it makes possible the corruption of power you can now see at your neighborhood Home Depot. Bees don’t have to think about being true to their purpose; we do.

Walter Wink observed that a) all human structure is designed with a Spirit for good that b) always tends to be corrupted and twisted against good so that c) the work of every human is to redeem and restore the structure to make mercy and justice possible.

When a damaged person obtains power, they can debase structure built for good and twist it to serve perverse ends. Social Security—one of the moral icons of the last two centuries—can be twisted into a weapon against vulnerable working people whose payroll deductions leave a trail. This is what Musk was doing. In the same way, our highest principle of free speech makes it possible for Journalists trained to articulate the truth debase language to confuse, distort and inflame. Marines trained to risk their lives to defend democracy become like Halloween clowns, threatening citizens who are protesting the violation of the Constitution they swore to defend.

This happens. Most of us just didn’t think it could happen in the constitutional democracy of the United States. At least most of us who are white. I don’t know anyone Black or Hispanic who is even surprised by the amoral vacuity of Musk/Bannon/Miller/Marco, serving a guy who hasn’t even read the constitution, much less a whole book about it. They have seen this for centuries.

This happens. But it never sticks.

TC and I live for now, for a season, in northern England on a canal dug by shovel 250 years ago by poor people who were valued little more than the sheep shorn for wool. The workers were guided by exquisite engineers working for rich families. They were digging for the same reason the container ships come to LA and deliver all the Chinese tools and Canadian lumber to the Home Depot that is put on shelves by people who mostly speak Spanish. I doubt if anyone in the White House has ever shopped in one personally. But they might wonder where their golf balls come from. Same ship.

It was—always has been—one world. But in the last two hundred and fifty years, the pace and scale has escalated profoundly. Even in those simpler times the relationships were woven in cotton and tobacco. Slave grown cotton from the Carolinas traveled to Liverpool on the same ships that had brought them from Africa to work the clay soil. Just west of Winston was the largest plantation in the state developed by British bankers from Liverpool. Our canal is known as Leeds to Liverpool, but it really runs to the hot fields of the Carolinas, across the South to Mississippi. A Manchester cotton company still owns thousands of acres of cotton land surrounding where TC was born, including the barn where Emmett Till was killed by some thugs way down the debased food chain of power.

We grow ever closer to each other, which makes some afraid and thus easy for those who twist power to inflate those fears. LA shows us one structure of power in a last desperate ill-considered rush to hold on to its privileges, debasing all and everyone to the very last Marine.

Webs of power never last because the soil wears out or some technical gizmo changes everything again. The Belle Vue Cotton Mill behind our boat dominated everyone for miles around, spinning slave cotton into thread that was shipped around the world, even unto India where they conspired to make it illegal to spin cotton themselves.  The rich built big houses thinking they would be lords of industry forever but did not imagine Gandhi who taught the people to spin for themselves and be free. Today the mill is full of flats and offices with people wearing shirts made in Vietnam spinning little bytes around screens built in China.

Human structure dissolves when it ceases its proper work and is bent to evil. The Marines pointing guns against citizens violate their own oath and become something else, sadly. Many in my family took that same oath, some buried at Mt. Vernon. They swore to serve only the People. So did all the people in Our White House, but you expect more from a Marine.

Why such a rush to scour the Home Depots anyway? There is more violence at an average English soccer league game. The desperation is so obvious as to be sad. They have already lost when they have to pretend that Home Depot needs the Marines.

They have to finish their debasement quickly before the People can vote again. Once we get within a year of voting, even the most emasculated Republicans will hesitate to risk everything for a 79-year old lame golfer. So they are right to hurry. It is said that if you go at the King, you must kill him. And what if the wanna-be king goes after democracy? He must kill it, too; and so completely that we will not remember it. Our job is to follow the Constitution and make it clear that the only insurrection is the one behind the Resolute Desk in the People’s House.

Things that cannot continue don’t.

But they do until people look up from the screen, move into the physical world and behave differently. Find your local Interfaith Alliance witness and act like a citizen.

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If you or a family member are in the National Guard or active-duty military and you believe you are being ordered to violate the constitutional rights of U.S. citizens, call the GI Rights Hotline for advice and support, at 877-447-4487.