Dividing Up America By Franklin H. Littell
[Dr. Franklin H. Littell, a Methodist minister, college professor, Holocaust expert, scholar, and world citizen is a frequent contributor to Christian Ethics Today.
Our country is being rapidly broken into several parts, so rapidly that much of today`s political debate is about matters that ceased to be important a decade or more ago. Our "leaders" are inviting us to return the balances between the Federal government and the states, and between the states and the counties and cities, to their status before the New Deal radically changed their supposed early and unpolluted relationships.
In the meantime, the real changes going on are quite different and much more substantial. In the economy, we are not being returned to the design that prevailed before the Great Depression and the introduction of social welfare. We are rapidly being returned to the plantation society with its drastic separation between the "haves" and the "have nots" that characterized a major section of the republic before the Civil War, and that still characterizes most of Latin America.
The independent farms and ranches have been replaced by huge agro-industry corporations. The family-owned farm in the Middle West not long ago fed a family and exchanged its surpluses for necessities. The family ranch of the West developed vast surpluses of grain or beef and fell victim to the prices fixed by the cartels. In the 1990 census there were not even enough family-owned farms or ranches left to be entered in the tabulations.
Ill fares the land, to hastening ills a prey,
Where wealth accumulates, and men decay
On the accumulation of wealth: in 1980 there were 16 billionaires in the United States; in 1997 the number was 136. A shamelessly regressive tax policy has since 1980 freed the wealthy of their fair share of the patriotic task of serving the general welfare, has shrunk the middle class year by year, and has greatly increased the number of millions of Americans without medical care, decent housing, or adequate food. All of this has been done to the tune of hypocritical phrases about "protecting the family," when in fact both man and wife must work now to provide a family income equivalent to what the man alone could earn in 1946.
The costs are both individual and social. We are becoming a penitentiary society for those outside the hacienda system, with more money being spent on imprisoning the derelicts than committed to a higher education that could help them move in another direction.
Why does organized religion, in the face of such an apocalyptic social and economic prospect, mute the message of the Jewish prophets and Jesus? Because, while America is being divided between the few very rich and multitude of those sliding into poverty, major religious leaderships are bent on dividing up America in their own way. The plight of the public schools, which in spite of a malnutrition and neglect, are still the best general youth education network in the world, shows what is happening at this level.
An alliance of Roman Catholic bishops, Orthodox Jewish rabbis, and Protestant Fundamentalists has launched the most massive attack on the public schools since they emerged as part of the American dream in the early 19th century. The bishops are pressing desperately for tax assistance because the cheap labor once readily available to them from their religious orders has diminished in quantity. Furthermore the state requirement of educational standards means that the parochial schools also must now compete in quality of instruction. Lay teachers with families, an ever larger percentage of teachers in the parochial schools, have not taken vows of poverty and must be paid.
The Orthodox Jewish rabbis and associated politicians are still living, in basic perception and philosophy, in the "Christendom" that was never a dependable setting and that half a century ago under the Nazis made its most malevolent assault on the Jewish people, through a combination of mass murder and indifference from the gentiles.
The mushroom growth of Protestant Fundamentalist schools can hardly be attributed to a sudden passion for culture and learning, coming as they did after the school integration decisions by the Supreme Court. Although a few token matriculations are allowed by blacks, where discrimination would otherwise be most glaringly illegal, the hidden thrust to get public funding for a white Protestant portion of a divided America cannot be hidden.
Can the rush back to a plantation pattern be halted? Can the vision of an America united in brotherhood, "from sea to shining sea," be regained? The justification of naked greed is far gone in organized politics and in the corporate world: the first pig to reach the trough gets the corn. But how is it that so many of the spokesmen for organized religion have lost the imperative for justice and mercy for all, have accepted in their own way the drive to divide up America?.
