Which Economy Will You Choose?

(This blog was first published at www.sayhelloadvertising.com/blog. It's an amazing business providing work opportunities and professional growth to folks in the Fresno, CA inner city...check it out!)

Work and the Economy

The American economy is an incredible thing. It provides room for enormous creativity and diversity. Any idea is welcome in the market, it is just up to you as the business person to make it fly! Our economy has led to unmatched prosperity and a heightened standard of living for millions of people.

Unfortunately, not everyone gets to benefit the same.

Access to opportunity builds on itself. Once I get one good job, it is much easier for me to get another good job because of my improved resume. If my father also had a string of good jobs, our family is better able to prepare me for the same kind of future. Now, if everyone in my neighborhood has had great jobs with a history of success and opportunity, collectively our community becomes highly competitive and predisposed to continue building on our success.

Now imagine that you grew up in a community where no one has ever had one of those "good jobs." Your parents worked minimum wage their whole life and struggled with bouts of unemployment when the economy turned down and "low-skill" workers were laid off. Your neighbors were in the same boat. Most of the kids you go to school with have no one in their family who went to college. You have tried and tried to get a job, but you don't have anything on your resume to get you going. Well, your chances of benefiting from this incredible economy we have would be much lower than mine.

The Ever Widening Gap

Over time, these dynamics of opportunity keep compounding on each other. Those who have a history of opportunity and success are able to keep leveraging their pasts accomplishments for ever greater rewards. And those who have less to build on fall farther and farther behind.

At this point in American history, wealth disparities are back to the record levels set during the Great Depression.

Robert Linthicum lays out the progression in his book Transforming Power:

"[Between 1979 and 1995] high school graduates experience a decline of 17 percent in the buying power of their income. And those who did not graduate form high school had a 27 percent decrease. Meanwhile the CEOs of the one hundred largest companies in the United States each went from an average annual income of 1.3 million dollars to 37.5 million dollars--one thousand times the pay of their production crews! According to a 2002 New York Times Magazine article, "The 13,000 richest families in America had almost as much income (in 1998) as the 20 million poorest households." However, the richest gave 35 percent of all campaign dollars in recent presidential elections."

There's a problem here folks.

The Bible's Thoughts on Inequality

We have to take a hard look at how God feels about people who enjoy the fruits of an economy that denies it's goods to those at the bottom of society.

We should carefully consider God’s attitude toward societies that exclude the weak from participation in and benefit from the rewards of their economic system. In the book of Amos, the prophet rebukes Israel and her neighbors for their injustices. Gaza had sold an entire people into slavery. The Ammonites had committed terrible cruelty, mutilating pregnant women to grow their empire. In the face of all these atrocities, Israel is held at the highest degree of culpability. God will not “revoke the punishment” because his people too have sold the poor for the slightest of profits and shown disregard for their suffering. In valuing wealth over the poor, they engaged in idol worship and marred the holy name of the Lord (2:7-8). The businessmen of the nation extorted the poor through the markets and political rulers taxed them into desperation (5:11). The rich grew richer while the poor grew ever more disenfranchised and powerless. God spoke to the powerful of Israel, critiquing their selfish indulgence, declaring:

“Woe to those who lie on beds of ivory and stretch themselves out on their couches, and eat lambs from the flock and calves from the midst of the stall, who sing idle songs to the sound of the harp and like David invent for themselves instruments of music, who drink wine in bowls and anoint themselves with the finest oils, but are not grieved over the ruin of Joseph! Therefore they shall now be the first of those who go into exile, and the revelry of those who stretch themselves out shall pass away.” (6:4-7)

God instructed his people to “love your neighbor as yourself” (Lev 19:18). Instead, Israel devolved into greed and self-serving injustice.

Today's economic world is eerily similar to Amos'. But the Church and all people of conscience can learn from Israel’s failures. We have an opportunity to reject self-centered economies and create new pathways of inclusion and equitable sharing. Businesses like Say Hello--started by a church--are springing up all over our city, nation, and world. They are choosing a caring economy that works for everyone.

Which economy will you choose?

Contexts in Conflict

In the past few weeks we have all watched as protests broke out in cities across the United States. The immediate causes began on November 24 when Darren Wilson (the white police officer who shot and killed unarmed African-American Michael Brown) was acquitted. 

A week and a half later, another white officer was set free by a Grand Jury despite his illegal choke-hold killing of Eric Garner in New York this summer. The death was captured on camera, and our internet-ified world accomplished the bizzare feat of sending a murder video viral. 

I watched it. 

Garner’s gasped out plea, “I can’t breath!” has become a slogan of for protesters along with the tragically basic statement “Black Lives Matter.” That second phrase particularly breaks my heart. For an entire group of people to have to remind their country that they are human is shameful. 

Michelle Alexander's whistle blowing book The New Jim Crow published a few years ago was a slap in America's complacent, self congratulatory "color blind" stance toward race issues. The events of the past couple years have forced people like me to recognize what people of color have always know...

...that African American mothers still have to have conversations about staying safe from the police that white mom never thought about with me.

...that our criminal justice system remains a deeply broke institution unjustly targeting, imprisoning and retaining people of color in a permanent under caste.

...that the benefits of our social and economic systems remain tilted away from our nation's historically marginalized peoples.

We continue live in a racialized society. That much is now undeniable. But the US is not alone in allowing our differences to define us in the wrong ways. The majority of wars since WWII have been intrastate rather interstate, sparked by inter-ethnic tensions. Not to ruin anyone's day, but next to outright racial oppression and the violence it precipitates we can place inequality soaring to the highest levels since the Great Depression (i.e., tied for worst ever), the menagerie of social justice issues that routinely accompany this brand of poverty, and ecological destruction and climate change.

[Pause: It is a highly problematic thing for me to engage this subject matter as a white, educated, Christian male from a very comfortable background. I reek of privilege. Though I will be engaging these themes a good deal in the days ahead, for now I just want to acknowledge how difficult, painful and divisive this all can be. Though I yearn to overcome these inequities and stand in solidarity with people of color though the fight, I know I cannot claim to share or comprehend their experience. Only the truth and love of God can guide us to a future that transcends such deeply entrenched injustice.]

So what's my point? Simply to reassert what we all intuitively know: the world is not as it should be. Shalom yet evades us. 

But this is not our story's end. God is at work refashioning beauty out of brokenness, and he has invited us to join his restorative mission by leading others into his New Creation. We are called to be a force of constructive transformation for a world and its people still worth loving.

God is mighty. Our hope is real. A task lies at hand.