Comparison

I am enough of a cynic to generally distrust a lot of what I hear and read.  Part of what has been so distressing over the past year or so has been the way that truth has been utterly beggared in our common discourse. I am not naive enough to believe there was ever a time when politicians did not lie or distort the truth, and I understand that reasonable people can sincerely disagree as to what the truth is, but I have to say, when I read this piece in the NY Times this morning I was surprised.
That Donald Trump is perhaps a pathological liar does not surprise me, the sheer scope of it was what was shocking. Politicians all play fast and loose with the truth, even ones you admire don't always tell it like it is.  Fact checking and the virtual verbatim record of who says what has been in full effect for nearly a decade, thus the journalists behind this article have solid ground for comparing Trump and Obama.  You probably know that I am an admirer of Barack Obama, and you probably also know that I am deeply ashamed of the fact that Donald Trump sits in the oval office.  But, even as a fan of Obama, I knew there were times where he must have deliberately lied or where he spun things in a way that was politically expedient.  I get that, there's no way you get elected to a public office without learning to play politics and there must be a certain amount of moral equivocation and flexibility that comes with holding public office.  I assume that all politicians lie to us, but I also observe that this lying is sort of in the same vein as the lies of advertisers and marketers, it's salesmanship, it's part of the game; caveat emptor. What Trump is doing goes so far beyond the pale that we may have trouble keeping our grounding in the safe territory of sanity and reason.
I recommend reading the Times piece in it's entirety and noticing, especially that they have actually been rather kind to DJT, they have not counted a lot of the salesman type lies that he has told, they forgive him imprecise use of numbers, and things that are simply misleading rather than outright falsehoods.  That latter category is where a lot of politicians and advertisers make their living after all.  But after reading the whole thing, do this, go back and find the side by side column of Obama's lies and falsehoods, committed over the course of a whole eight years, next to Trump's first year.  You don't even have to read them all.  Just scroll down and notice how far you have to scroll after the Obama side has gone blank.
Trump voters have told me that they like him because he "tells it like it is." This is a pretty solid piece of journalism that indicates that assumption is not, in fact, true, or anything like true.  I knew it was bad, I just didn't know it was this bad.  Also worthy of note, is the observation that both Obama, and George W. Bush, when they did tell lies or falsehoods, which were revealed as such, modified their later speech to stop telling those lies.  Trump just keeps repeating demonstrably false ideas, again they were kind and did not include repetitive prevarication.
The mendacity of our current President actually makes me nostalgic for the George W. Bush years, at least he eventually admitted that there were no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, Trump would be bragging about how many they found.
Look, I understand if your political perspective is different from mine.  I get that we might disagree about the effectiveness of corporate tax cuts, or the relative merits of single payer healthcare, or even what sorts of gun control measures ought to be instituted, but there is a fundamental attack that is not just about our political system or the liberal/conservative tug of war, it is about our connection to the truth.  In a monarchy or a dictatorship, truth is what the leader says it is, but in a democracy truth needs to be a more sacred ideal.  Our democracy particularly has been built with safeguards against tyranny, even tyranny by a duly constituted majority, certainly against tyranny by a despot.  The truth, self evident truths you might say, are the foundation of our whole system.
To support someone who despises the truth so thoroughly, even if you agree with some or all of his agenda, is utilitarian ethics of the basest sort.  The Dems made that deal with Bill Clinton and it has hamstrung them for nearly 20 years.  One of the Ten Commandments is, "Thou shalt not bear false witness against thy neighbor," which is perhaps a bit more nuanced than "Thou shalt not lie."  But Trump has actually managed to transgress bountifully upon both sides of that semantic division. Not only that but he has sucked a good number of other people right into the bog of eternal stench along with him.
Everyone crosses the border into untruth from time to time, but Trump, unlike most of us, seems to have decided to set up shop and probably has plans to build a golf resort there sometime soon.

Sanity

Alabama, you've got the weight on your shoulders that's breaking your back,

Your Cadillac, has got a wheel in the ditch, and a wheel on the track.

-Neil Young, Alabama

I've heard Mr. Young sing about her,

I've heard old Neil put her down.

But I hope Neil Young will remember,

A southern man don't need him around anyhow.

-Lynyrd Skynyrd, Sweet Home Alabama

Yesterday, the people of Alabama had a choice.  Were they going to be the people that Neil Young criticized, or were they going to be the people that Lynyrd Skynyrd defended.  Honestly I'll take Neil Young over Skynyrd just about any day, but this morning I'm feeling pretty glad that Skynyrd's Sweet Home Alabama showed up at the polls yesterday.  I understand that this does not mean that Alabama is suddenly going to go blue.  Doug Jones is the only Democrat to win in Alabama in decades, and he may be the only one to win for decades to come.  The election that just ended was more about people saying no to Roy Moore than it was about them saying yes to Jones.  In that way it is sort of similar to the way that last year's race was about people saying no to Hillary Clinton and all that she represents than it was about people really being in love with Trump.

That is where we are at this moment though, we are shaping up into a nation of what one of my Western PA friends called "Aginners," people who were "agin this, and agin that." "Agin," in Appalachia speak means against.  Neil Young's critique of Alabama and the South in general was based on his observation of deep seeded racism and white resentment (because apparently those things didn't appear last year).  While Neil was not unsympathetic: 

Oh, oh Alabama, can I see you and shake your hand?

Make friends down in Alabama,

I'm from a new land, I come to you and,

See all this ruin, what are you doing?

He was decidedly negative in tone. Skynyrd, by comparison, was perhaps naively sentimental about their Sweet Home, they knew something about the character of their homeland that Neil never would.  What they knew was that the idea of Alabama was sacred to people who live there.  While the rest of the country uses Alabama as a punchline to their jokes about rednecks and backwardness, Alabama holds on to its skies so blue and its government true.

I'm hoping that some day soon we will all be able to start being proud of our Sweet Home instead of just constantly having to cry out like banjos playing through the broken glass windows.  I think where we are as a nation is that we do have a wheel in the ditch and a wheel on the track.  Stopping Roy Moore, who was such a conglomeration of negative stereotypes about the south that he would have been unbelievable as a fictional character in novel, was crucial to keeping a wheel on the track, especially for Republicans.

Losing one seat now, is nothing compared to the carnage that would have happened in all those northern rust belt states that brought us President Trump, if Democrats could have put clips of him waving his little pocket pistol and talking about antebellum slavery as the good old days.  Whether or not the GOP takes this defeat as the actual gift that it is and tries to end their nosedive into absurdity remains to be seen, but the common sense and decorum of the Alabamian people has given them a few more months to give it a shot.

Democrats on the other hand, shouldn't get too swell headed about all of this.  Doug Jones is not exactly a paradigm they should follow, but he does demonstrate some necessary truths about politics in the age of social media.  First of all, don't try to be a strict party platform candidate.  Jones toed the party line on civil rights and reproductive choice, but he is also a gun owner and a rule of law former prosecutor.  If the Dems want to compete in red states they're going to need to get a little more Sweet Home Alabama and a lot less New York City elite.  And second of all, the thing Doug Jones did better than a lot of Democrats (especially Hillary Clinton) is avoid self inflicted wounds.  He observed that Roy Moore was growing increasingly unpopular for just being Roy Moore, and he stood back and let it happen.  He didn't so much attack as he simply stood up and said we can do better than that, he didn't dwell on the negative problems of his state, he sung about skies so blue, which honestly is what everyone wants to hear about their sweet homes.

It's easy to get sucked into the swamp of negativity that dominates in politics, because that swamp is about real stuff, important issues, critical policies.  As much as pundits want to shovel the blame for that negativity at the door of Donald Trump, honestly, he didn't make it up.  He makes plenty of of stuff up, but the way that he seized upon the zeitgeist of middle America and the deep south should not be written off as fiction. People are tired of "Aginners," and my hope is that we are beginning to see through the facades of both left and right.  Alabama doesn't have a great reputation for leading in a positive direction, but they may be the first state to give us, as a country, the sanity that we so desperately need.  You might even see this moment as turning of the tide of tribal politics (I think you know where I'm going with this, Lord help me).  If Roy Moore was that stinking, rotting bottom detritus that we had to see at the low ebb, so be it.  Let's hope the tide keeps rolling in.  Roll Tide (I'm very sorry for that, I just couldn't resist).

Inconceivable

Fezzini: "Inconceivable!"

Montoya: "You keep using that word, I do not think it means what you think it means."

-The Princess Bride

If you only know Wallace Shawn from My Dinner with Andre, I'm so sorry.  If you only know Mandy Patinkin from Criminal Minds, well shame on you.  Rob Reiner's masterwork The Princess Bride is so very necessary for a lot of reasons. Shawn's portrayal of Fezzini, a self styled mastermind who is never quite as smart as he thinks he is, and Patinkin's Inigo Montoya, revenge obsessed, oft besotted master swordsman, not to mention Andre the Giant as Fezzig, rhyme loving strongman, give us so many memorable moments in the movie's first act.  Outside of Yoda's Star Wars dialogue, there is probably not much in the world of cinema that can be both very serious and seriously funny at the same time.

Fezzini's repetition of the word inconceivable is a running gag.  As mastermind and his two thugs execute a kidnapping that is supposed to go off without a hitch, they are pursued by the Man in Black who turns out to be the hero of the film.  Fezzini has built in several fail-safe features in his plan, and none of them turn out to be actually fail-safe.  Each time they do actually fail, he says, "Inconceivable!" Finally Inigo says that famous line, "You keep using that word, I do not think it means what you think it means."

Misapprehension of what words mean is a rampant problem among humans in general, it can lead to everything from a simple misunderstanding to an actual war.  Lately,  have noticed that the political world, where words have been notoriously abused and misused pretty much forever, has been using words to start trying to break apart something that most of us are going to really regret losing if they succeed.

I know budgets and tax codes can be confusing.  I often feel a little like Fezzig and Inigo when the Fezzinis of the world get going on their wonky explanations of thing, but there a few things that I have noticed over the years that are sort of unavoidable truths about our government.  The first is that it is conceptually a lot easier to figure out where the money goes than you might have been led to believe.  There are just three wedges of the pie chart that make up almost 75% of federal spending (both mandatory and discretionary): 

That big blue wedge that is labeled "Health" is essentially Medicare and Medicaid.  To be honest, the numbers that are entailed by even the little wedges can be mind boggling to ordinary folk but the big picture tells you that if we're going to make a major impact on our government spending something is going to have to happen to the big three.  No politician in their right mind will ever recommend cutting defense spending, the closest they ever come is to maybe try and go after wasteful uses of that 16% of the spending, like the billions of dollars poured into a notoriously disastrous fighter plane in an era when the military themselves say the last thing they need is more fighter planes, or the fact that we buy thousands of tanks that we do not need because the manufacture of said tanks is good for enough representative's home districts.

For a while now, certain conservative types have been talking about the need to reform "entitlements" and end the "Welfare State." Both of these words might resonate strongly in the minds of folks who are "tired of footing the bill for people who don't want to work for a living."  As wrongheaded and frankly cruel as the whole "welfare queen," narratives were, there are a good number of people who believed and still thoroughly hold to that idea, that the bulk of our budget problem is people gaming the system, when in fact there is no such reality.  "The Welfare State," is in fact the blue and the red wedges together.

If you know anything about Social Security, you will know that it has it's own way of collecting money.  In years when I was poor enough to have no income tax liability, I still had to pay into the SS system.  It was actually kind of a shock the first year I was employed as a minister, I did my tax return on my fairly modest starting salary, and momentarily I thought I was going to get a $5000 refund, because we just had a child before the end of 2003 and thus had very little income tax liability.  Then I found out that I also have to fill out a schedule SE because Social Security considers clergy self employed, so basically, I watched $5K evaporate from my dreams to pay for Social Security.

This is the reality for almost all of the working class and most of the middle class: Social Security is always going to get theirs.  The hope is though, that when you retire, you will live long enough to get some return on that investment.  Social Security is not, in fact, welfare, it is something you pay for when you're young so that you will have some form of income when you are old.  It's not exactly a savings account though, and the Gubmint has a way of playing shenanigans with this huge chunk of cash.  They have done things that ought not to have been done, like borrowing money from it and floating bonds against it and kicking the can of fiscal responsibility down the road.

Remember this is money that you have paid out of probably every paycheck of your adult life, and it is supposed to be there for you when you age out of the working population or are put out by some disability.  If some political genius starts trying to sell you entitlement reform that includes robbing you of social security, I suggest throwing them off the cliffs of insanity before they lead you any further along in this farce.

I get that we can have disagreements about what the government should and should not do, and I am honestly not always of the opinion that the government should be bigger and more intrusive into our lives, but the thing about SSI is that most of us have already paid quite a lot into the upfront cost of it, with the good faith expectation that it was an investment in our future and in the interest of our nation.  To violate that expectation is not, by definition, reform, it is robbery.

Of Empires

We are about a week away from the latest installment of the Star Wars saga.  Over the past several years this occurrence has helped me remember the excitement of Christmas, in a purely non-spiritual sense.  I mean the waiting for something that I really wanted part, not the birth of Jesus part.  Sometimes I am jazzed about what comes about in a galaxy far far away, other times... well let's just say by the time Obi Wan left Anakin smoldering by the lava river of Mustafar I was pretty much in favor of that whiny little ingrate turning into the Darth Vader that was both cool and terrifying to 10 year old me.  If you don't know what any of that means, bear with me a second, because this isn't primarily about Star Wars, and I'm going to get on with it.
The thing that I think makes Star Wars stories compelling is not the Force, or Lightsabers, definitely not the Jedi, it probably isn't even Han Solo and Chewbacca, it is the presence of the Empire, or in the latest installations the First Order.  The narrative of the Galactic Empire gives real zing to the stories, because it connects them to real stuff in a way that Ewoks definitely do not.  Say what you want about the prequels, but seeing a fictional account of people choosing security over freedom and making deals with Dark Lords to secure power, rings pretty real in 21st century America.
Because let's face it, at the moment we're the only thing that honestly passes for an Empire on our planet, which given the absence of hyper-drives is pretty much what we're stuck with for now. People other than myself have undertaken the thought experiment (a fun thing to do with fictional narratives) of putting the Star Wars shoe on the other foot.  What if Luke Skywalker is a terrorist?  Because blowing up a space station (two actually) with thousands of people on board, only two of which appear patently evil is a pretty terrorist thing to do.  Did you ever wonder who those Stormtroopers were under the helmets?  Did they have families?  Were they clones? Or, even if they were clones, is it really ethical to create sentient beings for the sole purpose of war?  What about all the non-combat personnel that must have inhabited those enormous mechanical planets?
You get the idea, as Obi Wan Kenobi said, "many of the truths we cling to depend largely on our point of view."  I have been thinking a lot lately about how the rest of the people on our planet are looking at the good old U.S.A. lately.  And, no, it's not just because of Trump, I actually think I first started this during the Clinton administration, and did it quite a bit during the G.W. Bush years as we kept tearing off into new wars every six months or so.  Even during the Obama years, where I was proud of having a grown up president, and finally breaking the white guy monopoly on the chief executive, I had questions about our use of drones and the ethics of being able to kill so terribly efficiently with no skin in the game, it seemed awfully like the kind of thing the sinister Trade Federation did with its droid army.
It's a peculiar place for our country to be honestly.  After all we have this foundation story of a rag-tag group of colonists who rebelled against the great and glorious British Empire.  Who would have known that two hundred years later we would be acting as a defacto colonial power with our military apparatus in every corner of the globe and our economic and cultural influence dominant even where we don't have guns and bombs.  We also have the threat of a planet killing arsenal of nuclear weapons at our disposal. It seems sort of false to pretend like we are the underdog in any fight at the moment, but that doesn't stop us from trying.  We may have a serious challenger in China, but I sort of doubt that they would ever try and assume the role of world policeman, even if they do dethrone our economic hegemony.
Empires never manage to be entirely benevolent to those they rule.  In non-fictional worlds though, they are rarely as monolithic and sinister as we try and make them.  Nuances in the behavior of Empires though rarely matter to those on the receiving end of their inevitable brutality.  I don't reckon that the people Rome habitually crucified really had much appreciation for their roads and aqueducts or their experiment with democracy.  Likewise, I doubt an Afghani who had to bury a couple children in pieces thanks to our bombs, will really much appreciate our high ideals of liberty and justice for all.
The scariest parts of Star Wars, are those places where the Sith start to make sense, because then I realize how seductive the Dark Side can really be.  It scares me when I buy the justifications of our Empire hook line and sinker, without trying to comprehend the human cost of our power and might. I don't want to do that, because I am trying to follow a man who rejected the lure of empire and power to an extreme degree.  I want to follow the example of grace and peace rather than violence and power.  So I ask myself, since I'm pretty surely part of the Empire, what does it mean to work for the rebellion from within?  What sort of stand breaks the cycles of violence?  What force needs to be used to resist the dominion that we have a hard time even acknowledging we have?

A Toddler with a Hammer

Now if there's one thing we do worse than any other nation,

it is try and manage someone else's affairs.

-Will Rogers

Jerusalem.  Everybody knows it's the capitol of Israel, except for the fact that it probably shouldn't be, for an awful heap of reasons.  The Trump today took another one of his signature dumps in the middle of our collective living room carpet by declaring that we would recognize Jerusalem, instead of Tel Aviv (a perfectly good capitol city city) as the capitol of the nation state of Israel.  I do not doubt that this is the sort of thing that the Donald does to appease a lot of those "evangelicals" who mysteriously support his serial fornication, outright mendacity and shameful braggadocio. See there's this sort of nut-job fringe among the fundamentalist types that subscribes to Zionism, not because they really love the Jewish people or the State of Israel, but because they believe that, somehow someway, the on-going catastrophe that is happening in the Middle East is going to lead to an apocalyptic final struggle between God and the Devil and Jesus is going to come back.

Historically speaking there is a plain in northern Israel near the town of Meggido that, if you look at the lay of the land, is kind of a good spot to stage an all out slobberknocker of a battle for all the marbles, I mean at least if you're fighting with chariots and ranks of spear wielding Philistines.  The place is called Har Meggido, which you can see might be rather conveniently morphed into Armageddon.  If we had only had the good sense to follow the advice of several early church fathers and left the Apocalypse of John out of the canon of the Bible, we might never have noticed that the decisive battle between good and evil is "supposed" to take place in that fragile little finger of land that God promised to Abraham and his descendants.  But because we left all that stuff in there, because we just love riders of the apocalypse and great whores and seven headed dragons (generally dragons improve just about any story), we now have a bunch of people who want to take it literally.  That happens when you let any story sit around long enough.

So now we have a very real problem, the world's two biggest religions and one of the world's most determined ethnic groups now consider Jerusalem to be sacred.  Christians consider Jerusalem sacred because of the Jewishness of Jesus and the fact that he was killed (and resurrected) there.  Muslims have the Dome of the Rock there, which while it's not exactly Mecca is still pretty important to them.  And the Jews, well it is after all David's city, since he kicked out the Jebusites fair and square.  But the thing is, the Jewish claim is only partly about religion, sure they have the temple mount and the western wall and all that, but to conflate political Zionism with religious Judaism does a disservice to Judaism as a faith and I think also to Jewish people as a whole.

Anyway Jerusalem is more complicated than any of us really comprehend, least of all Donald J. Trump, but he gets his advice from sinister types like Mike Pence who is definitely the kind of millennialist nut-job who wants it all to go boom so Jesus can finally take the wheel.  As you probably can guess I do not subscribe to that point of view, but today I'm going to pray for Jerusalem particularly, because we may have just thrown a match on a some gunpowder.

Learning from Mistakes

The only thing that is smarter than learning from your own mistakes is learning from the ones others make before you.  The advancement of society depends upon it. Over the past several years the GOP has steadfastly exploited a mistake made over two decades ago by their opposition.  But exploiting that failure in others is a different tool than learning from it.  The mistake I'm talking about is none other than William Jefferson Clinton.  The Democratic party, after two terms of Reagan and one term of George Bush the elder, after watching Jimmy Carter, Walter Mondale, and Michael Dukakis FAIL to win the hearts and minds of the American people, saw Slick Willy with his Saxophone and his teflon coating as a renaissance of the JFK era.  I remember this because it was the first election in which I was old enough to vote.
People who paid attention knew that Billy-boy had some baggage, Paula Jones and Jennifer Flowers were out there, and Whitewater. But he seemed so perfect a totem for the ascendancy of the Baby Boomers, finally taking the reigns from the "Greatest Generation."  Sure he didn't have the military background the GHW Bush had, but he could be the Democratic version of Ronald Reagan if not the second coming of JFK.  So the Democrats, who had pretty much given up on the religious right and the moral majority ever voting blue again, decided to hitch their wagons to a man they knew had moral failings, but who had political gifts.  They sold whatever conscience they had in order to win.
I'm not talking political ideals here at all, I'm talking personalities, because I am beginning to suspect that, in the years I have been voting, it is personality and not ideology that wins these things.
Caveat Emptor: The Democrats got 16 years of not being able to pretend to have a moral bone in their body, ceding the high ground on any question of principle to an opposition who honestly had no better right to claim it than they did.  I thought that perhaps the Obama Presidency, eight years of what now seems a blissful, scandal free administration led by a man that reasonable people were almost forced to admire for his composure and decorum if not his policy, might finally lift the Dems out of the moral dumpster fire of Mr. "I did not have sex with that woman."
Then they ran Hillary, who for all her qualifications is still, for some reason, a Clinton.  I thought that maybe, despite all good sense, perhaps the Republicans were actually moral enough to reject Trump, con man extraordinaire, and they probably would have been against almost anyone else besides a Clinton.  I know, people try to say it was more complicated than that, maybe it was the fact that she was a woman, maybe it was Comey, maybe it was Benghazi, the emails, whatever, but most of the people I know who voted for Trump did it with their noses held and voted against Clinton.
People remember things longer than we generally acknowledge and having the President of the United States of America make a mockery of your whole system (moral, legal and ethical) stings pretty bad. So what better way to take revenge on the Clinton machine than by electing a Republican version of him over his wife.  I really do think that Trump is a lot like Bill Clinton, with the added frosting of political incompetence and borderline mental stability.  Both of them probably deserve to be impeached at some point (Bill survived his, Trump might too).
The thing is though, while we are paying attention to the orange haired ignoramus, political stuff is happening that's going to really hurt our country.  We are ceding our nation to oligarchs and plutocrats and engaging in the worst sort of identity politics.  Charles Grassley and Orrin Hatch, both long term fixtures in the US Congress made statements over the past several days that absolutely personify the worst stereotypes of heartless right-wing snobbery. This sort of blatant, haughty, disdain for poor and working class people reveals that the GOP doesn't fully understand the populist sentiment that inflicted Trump upon them (and us).  The fact that Trump is about as populist as Andrew Carnegie is irrelevant, the people who voted for him did so out of a very populist sentiment and it is not one of the better angels of populism either.  The reason why Donald J Trump still holds an approval rating even in the 30s is because he continues to be inflammatory. And what a lot of people wanted from Trump was to simply have him break stuff. I think we need to understand that a good portion of Trump voters would like Mitch McConnell and Orrin Hatch to get hoisted by their own petard as much as they would enjoy Chuck Shumer and Nancy Pelosi getting tarred and feathered. Because large numbers of people simply hate Washington D.C. and assume that all politicians are crooked, bottom-feeders, and they have ample reason for that; Bill Clinton was the head hyena, and as we are finding out now, he had quite a pack of fellow predatory scavengers.
Bill Clinton had his famous, "it's the economy stupid" line about how he was managing to remain popular despite scandals.  The current day administration ought to know though that their plutocratic policies are going to be like gasoline on a fire of outrage if they don't work. If the people who believe in what the Trump sold them wake up to find that they have actually been betrayed into the hands of robber barons, they are not going to be happy with you, and thanks to the interweb, your Mr. Burns imitations are now out there, so that everyone can witness your own little "let them eat cake moment." One commentator referred to it as "riding a hungry tiger," good luck when the tiger notices that you are moist and delicious.
I can't say I'm happy about the prospect of things going sideways and south, schadenfreude only goes so far, I live in this country too.

Unsettling Dialogue (part 3)

We have been wrong to believe that competition invariably results in the triumph of the best.

Divided, body and soul, man and woman, producer and consumer, nature and technology, city and country are thrown into competition with one another. And none of these competitions is ever resolved in the triumph of one competitor, but only in the exhaustion of both.

For our healing we have on our side one great force: the power of Creation, 

with good care, with kindly use, to heal itself.

-Wendell Berry, The Unsettling of America

What if I told you that the most important Biblical concept outside of: Love God, Love each other, is that we ought to live within boundaries; would you believe me?  I know it sounds heretical to various sorts of people; people who believe that God is like a super-blessing machine that just wants to give you everything you ever wanted; also people who believe that God wants us to keep on filling the earth and subduing it, and even people who believe that God is cheering us on past every obstacle we face in the world.  What if I told you that God is a big fan of limits and boundaries and absolutely a fan of the word "enough?" And it's not because God is a big cosmic killjoy either, it's because God knows, better than any of us ever will, how Creation works.

In the past week certain clergy from around the country have been protesting what the GOP is calling "Tax Reform" with the tag #2000verses, which of course means 2000 verses of Scripture.  What the 2000 verses refer to are verses from Genesis to Revelation that exhort us to care for the poor.  There is a remarkable amount of material that is founded on a simple idea that was put out in the laws of Leviticus 19: 9-10:

When you reap the harvest of your land, you shall not reap to the very edges of your field, or gather the gleanings of your harvest.  You shall not strip your vineyard bare, or gather the fallen grapes from your vineyard; you shall leave them for the poor and the alien; I am the Lord your God.

This section of Leviticus has lots of fun rules in it, some of which we absolutely disregard, and some of which we like to hold on to in a highly selective manner, but the thing about how you treat others that is defined here rises up out of the random commandments about types of cloth, haircuts and tattoos and gets enshrined in the words of the Psalms, the Prophets and Jesus the Christ.  What is being reflected in the Law is the Creation concept of margins.  Margins are the "solution" that Berry offers up to many of the woes that afflict us, and I have to say I rather strongly agree.  Giving yourself and your neighbors room to breath, and some cushion from calamity.  Living within a set of boundaries where you are not constantly "up against it," isn't that what many of us would define as happiness?
Most of us live our lives in search of that goal, to have enough, to have a home, and a certain number of material things, to have a job that gives us access to those material things but also allows us some "free time." This is not a modern materialist invention, but rather the goal of human endeavor from the beginning of time, even back in the early days of hunter gatherer human society, before books, and even before agriculture, humans took time to paint things in caves and carve things into rocks, these were not necessary endeavors, they were "marginal" activities, things done in the extra space and time life provided.
Tribal societies, where life could be decidedly brutish and short, developed traditions of storytelling that were as important to their identity as passing on practical knowledge about how to hunt and make tools. I think it is fair to say that a fulfilling human life must be about more than just survival.  Margins provide us with that capability, and in a complete understanding of the Scriptures you will notice that margins are supposed to be for everyone, not just the lucky few.  Whether it is the legal codes about gleanings, or prophecies of woe to those who allow their greed to afflict the world, or Jesus telling Martha that Mary did the right thing by just sitting and listening instead of being busily efficient, margins are a big deal in the Word.
If your theology doesn't deal with margins and if your ethical practice idolizes efficiency over compassion, you are not living according to the Word.  Notice too, that these laws were not just challenges for individuals, they were codified into a set of practices that were meant to shape a community.  The prophets are pretty clear that the king was supposed to play by these rules as well as the common shepherds, thus when we shape our societies, it would behoove us to consider margins, not maximum efficiency.
This is a fatal flaw in unmitigated capitalism.  As Wendell says, this endless competition leaves us all exhausted eventually.  We have wisdom that tells us this is not a good thing and it goes back a very long way, but even more recently in the very Constitution that so many who rabidly endorse capitalism practically treat as holy canon, we find the following at the very top of the page:

We the people of the United States, in order to form a more perfect union, establish justice, insure domestic tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general welfare, and ensure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and to our posterity, do ordain and establish this constitution for the United States of America.

You can read that and focus on liberty that allows you to look out for number one if you want, but I think the framers of that document, flawed though they may have been, had a higher goal in mind: Commonweal, it's an old word, but it's a word that I think we need to come around to once again.  This is about more than just tax reform, but it is reflected in the self-admitted goal of the direction the GOP has been moving us: market driven, lean government, less taxes, less regulations and ultimately fewer margins, survival of the fittest, the ultimate dream of capitalism, and a brutal way of being a human society.
Friedrich Nietzsche, not exactly a man known for his sunny sentimentality even recognizes that human life needs to rise above this sort of nihilism:

Imagine being like nature, wasteful beyond measure, indifferent beyond measure, without mercy and justice, fertile and desolate and uncertain at the same time; imagine indifference itself as a power, how could you live according to this indifference? Living, is that not precisely wanting to be different? 

Margins are human way of dealing with nature's wastefulness and her indifference. We use margins, in our spiritual lives, in our communities and in our use of the natural world in order to be healthy.  We need margins so that we have some shock absorption when we run into a limit. In the story of the Garden of Eden, God prescribes a limit for Adam and Eve, which they promptly violate.  It was only one limit and they could not live within it, which sets up a rather epic scale for this whole debate.  There were no marginal trees in Eden, only good and evil, and we proved ourselves incapable of dealing with that sort of hard boundary.
If we do not leave ourselves margins we will always be cast out of the garden. Margins have always been a good idea for promoting commonweal. They provide for people on the margins for sure, but they also insulate us all from the precarious uncertainty and indifference of nature.  We are all better off with margins than without them.