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World Poses Growing Challenge to Generosity of Our Hearts
What shall we give to the Child in the manger?
(Catalonian Christmas carol)
On a cold starry night in an old timber-and-mud shelter for livestock on a rocky, barren hillside somewhere in Asia Minor, a traveling stranger gives birth, helped by hospitable local elders and shepherds. They rejoice and share what food and comforts they have.
photo: Todd Blaisdell
...until a Hellfire missile fired from a drone controlled from thousands of miles away blows them all up.
Of course, those shepherds might have been terrorists, and the baby would probably have grown up to be Al-Qaeda or Taliban. Or even become (as a recent slogan said) "a brown-skinned antiwar socialist who gives away free health care." The Romans knew what to do with troublemakers like that, but they at least waited until the child had grown up.
Worldwide, the number of people killed yearly by terrorists: 456. (CIA estimate) Starvation or related conditions kills close to a billion – 925,000,000 (UN estimate) In 2010, 7.6 million of them were children under five.
Economic sanctions against Iraq in the 1990s resulted in the death of 500,000 children and was called by one critic "infanticide masquerading as policy."
What shall we give to the Child of today?
Don’t even ask. Although half of Americans are presently poor or low income, our overriding public question is:
What shall we give to the Men with the Money?
This week Congress approved a military budget of $662 billion for 2012 – for killing, maiming, destroying, for UAVs, cluster bombs; for surveillance and prisons, for mercenaries.
Congress has cut taxes on the rich, and made cuts in unemployment benefits, in Medicare, in programs for prenatal care, good nutrition, clean air & water, making sure the undeserving poor don’t get any tax-dollars. They make sure we punish children for the folly of parents who get sick, use drugs, lose jobs, or don’t have health insurance.
As a nation we provide less and worse education to the economically disadvantaged; we disdain teachers, disempower them. We allow the private sector to profit at the expense of public schools.
We punish women. A recent survey finds that 1 in 4 women report having been raped or abused – half of them saying it happened when they were 17 or younger. But the Obama administration has denied younger rape victims the right to an OTC drug to prevent conception.
We don’t protect children from sexual predators. More and more cases are coming to light, while major organizations still try to protect the adults rather than the children.
We price college at the maximum possible, saddling our young with enormous debts in order for banksters to profit; we pay university administrators as much as 10 times what we pay the President of the United States. We cheat our youth of jobs by allowing jobs to go overseas, and by forcing seniors to keep working.
We use law enforcement against the young. When they peacefully protested injustice in 1970 we called out the National Guard and shot them (Kent State). Today, we torture them with hi-tech "non-lethal" weapons like pepper spray and sound cannons.
And now we have a system in which private sector corporations can use the money they extract from us as "free speech" to buy politicians and legislation to run our schools and communities for their continuing profit. GE spent $5.65 million in the 3rd quarter this year to lobby the federal government for policies to their benefit.
* * *
What’s a manger? It’s a food trough, a place to eat, a lifeline for creatures who depend on one another.
The Catalonian carolers knew what to give the child in the manger: Raisins and olives and nutmeats and honey,/ Candy and figs and some cheese that is mild.
Food first, then. But after that we have to start acting like humans with hearts -- like parents, neighbors, friends.
We have to recognize that we are more alike than we are different, and we are irreversibly connected to one another by the fundamental tragedies of creation: hunger, sickness, hatred, fear, injustice and war. If we don’t teach our children about our shared humanity we – and they – have no future at all. It is only our generous hearts that make humans worth saving.
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10 Comments so far
Show All"Do you have an answer. I don't and I don't like letting them loose in society where my grandkids are"
First off, don't have kids. If you insist on having them, don't raise them in a society that glorifies war, rape, and murder!
Seriously, if you don't want to "let them loose", keep your legs closed.
"First off, don't have kids. If you insist on having them, don't raise them in a society that glorifies war, rape, and murder!"
This is imo a meaningless post. Children will continue to be born, and whether you think bringing them into the world is responsible or not, they certainly have a right to a decent life, at least as much as we had. The question is how to help them once they're born, and saying "they shouldn't have been born anyway" is not an answer to this question. And of course it's also a pretty fucked up thing to say to someone already born.
Also, if there are 800'000 registered sex offenders, there may be something else wrong with how society handles sex. Don't know, it just feels a bit too much, even for such a big population. The problem is definitely much deeper than just keeping "unwanted elements" away from your kids.
The first step is to stop tolerating sexual exploitation of children. If the Catholic Church and our educational institutions won’t enforce a strong position against any kind of sexual contact with children, what chance do kids have?
One of the things that concerns me is that children are sexual creatures – as are all living things. But our young don’t develop the psychological and social maturity to deal with sexuality until long after they reach physical maturity. (It can be argued that many never do)
I also worry about the commercialization of sex – fashions for sexually provocative clothing for pre-teen girls, for example, as well as the obsession of (supposedly) grown-ups with sex, gay marriage, abortion & contraception, and the emphasis placed on sex by the entertainment industry.
What finally brought down slavery was that society no longer tolerated it. Smoking and overt racism have lost social acceptability in the last 25 years. With an aging demographic, our society is turning against persecution of gays. A political effort is currently being mounted to make society ban abortion.
Other hotly contested issues include capital punishment and gun control. We don’t agree whether we as a society or as individuals should be able to take the life of an offender. We’re also raising questions about war, and whether we have the right to impose the death penalty on humans anywhere in the world.
A rant (sorry, not completely on topic, to say the least):
I don't think it's really about "tolerating sexual exploitation" of children, or mostly even about "commercialisation of sex". Those are "only" the most obvious symptoms of the bigger problem, which is that the entire current (capitalist) culture is based upon limitless predation and exploitation. Children are absolutely consciously targeted by advertisers and marketing people (among other predators) and their most vulnerable traits are used against them. Everyone is a target, there are no limits to whom and what you're allowed to prey upon, with the obvious exception of money and power, the sacraments of capitalism. (Also, just try bringing up the question of regulating to any extent media and most importantly advertising aimed at children, you will be branded an authoritarian, anti-free speech fascist/commie on almost any forum even slightly to the right to CD, because of course advertisements, mainstream video games costing tens of millions of dollars, corporate web sites and so on are all "free speech"...also an "anti-individualist", because we all know that marketing individualises people, it's what makes all of us unique...seriously, the idiocy otherwise intelligent people can manifest when discussing this is boundless.) Sex and violence are of course two very important tools for this, they are and will be used for this as long as possible. But the centre of the problem is Western "individualism" that says "everyone is responsible for themselves and only for themselves" (and btw, this so-called "individualism" produces some of the most pathetic homogenous assembly-line human lives and super generic ways of thought...it's incredibly ridiculous that spending a lot of money on generic, thoughtless, mass produced crap is considered "individualism" - even if people earn the right to this "individualism" through spending most of the best part of their lives in shitty cubicles doing thoughtless, top-down designed "work", generally not even understanding its results and implications and costs).
But most of the edifice of commonly accepted ideology is just totally fucked up. As one simple, downright primitive example, just look at the image of the (mostly "neutral") professional, one of the most accessible moral prototypes in modern Western civilisation, a self-image and a way of thinking that young people are supposed to aspire to. But isn't the ultimate professional someone like Rudolf Lang? Isn't professionalism basically just conscious ignorance of the complexity of reality? Isn't it mostly just the externalisation of responsibility - nothing more than saying "I only care about this and this and this type of effect of my work, the rest, I ignore"? But still, this is what young people are supposed to become - if they're lucky and have the possibility to become intellectuals. How could this "professionalism", which is nothing but a convenient form of divestment from responsibility, be an ideal to young people in any decent society?
Of course this "professionalism" is what allows countless fucked up nameless assholes creating children's advertising (and entertainment and "education") to live with what they're doing and not realise that they're just doing something despicable: preying on the weaknesses of children. Not raping them physically (although I think you could consider subjecting kids to 40'000 ads a year "mental rape"), of course...just teaching them a completely fucked up reactionary "morality", which is based on insulation and alienation and a destruction of organic communities - replaced by nationalism and jingoism, ie. a sense belonging to non-existent fantasy "communities"; conscious ignorance and respect of official "opinion" regardless of reality (basically, a super retarded version of subjective idealism); an incredibly distorted interpretation of "responsibility" and material consumption oriented "individualism" and of course a subservience to power and authority and internalised hierarchy, as opposed to moral and intellectual autonomy. I mean, choose a morality you respect, whether Christian or Enlightenment or Marxist, and current operating Western morality is guaranteed to be in complete opposition (maybe not in words, but no one cares about that).
Also, sorry for the swear words. But this way of thinking and the people behind it make me really, really angry.
thank you, Caroline, for bringing back the motion of 'caring and sharing'.
years back i was a head of department at our technical university. i insisted on a 'care&share policy' ...and was disciplined for bringing up such 'non-academic nonsense'.
>>>> Starvation or related conditions kills close to a billion – 925,000,000 (UN estimate)
This can't be an annual figure (population problem solved!), so what time frame is being referenced here?
Yes -- that has to be 925,000 almost a million. It is my error.
Thanks for pointing it out
Uh.... which begs the question: who taught us these ways?
Could it be...(in my best Church Lady / Dana Carvey voice) ACADEMIA?
Well?
""What’s a manger? It’s a food trough, a place to eat, a lifeline for creatures who depend on one another.""
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It's also a tool used to distract people's attention from the real problems you so eloquently spelled out in your article. Keep pandering to a mythology and you will miss the world as it goes on by.
On the winter solstice the sun dies. For the next 3 days it lays in its tomb and on the next day it is reborn. It is better to stay in touch and worship nature.
I intended to write sooner. The 'almost a billion' (925,000,000) number is the United Nation's estimated number of malnurished people in 2010. The power of your statement is in equating personal morality with corporate morality. As individuals we are compassionate and caring, but at the corporate or governmental level we reject compassion and see violence and destruction as necessary. The Christian Church made the same mistake when Rome became Christian under Constatine.