Double Lives

"There are 47 percent of the people who will vote for the president no matter what. All right, there are 47 percent who are with him, who are dependent upon government, who believe that they are victims, who believe the government has a responsibility to care for them, who believe that they are entitled to health care, to food, to housing, to you-name-it." Or so Mitt Romney said during the the 2012 presidential campaign.

Virginia Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli, in his book, The Last Line of Defense: The New Fight for American Liberty, claims that "bad politicians set out to grow government in order to increase their own power and influence." He insists that "their favorite ways to increase their power [are] by creating programs that dispense subsidized government benefits, such as Medicare, Social Security, and outright welfare (Medicaid, food stamps, subsidized housing, and the like)...these programs make people dependent on government. And once people are dependent, they feel they can’t afford to have the programs taken away, no matter how inefficient, poorly run, or costly to the rest of society." His conclusion is that "citizens will vote for those politicians who promise more benefits each year, rather than the fiscally responsible politicians who try to point out that such programs are unsustainable and will eventually bankrupt the states or the nation.” Cuccinelli is the probable Republican nominee in the upcoming Virginia race for governor.

According to Steve Rattner, op-ed contributor in the March 25, 2012 edition of the New York Times, "In 2010, as the nation continued to recover from the recession, a dizzying 93 percent of the additional income created in the country that year...went to the top 1 percent of taxpayers, those with at least $352,000 in income. That delivered an average single-year pay increase of 11.6 percent to each of these households."

Concerning what he refers to as the "super rich," in 2010, "37 percent of these additional earnings went to just the top 0.01 percent, a teaspoon-size collection of about 15,000 households with average incomes of $23.8 million. These fortunate few saw their incomes rise by 21.5 percent. He goes on to say, "The bottom 99 percent received a microscopic $80 increase in pay per person in 2010, after adjusting for inflation. The top 1 percent, whose average income is $1,019,089, had an 11.6 percent increase in income."

This morning, I began my day with a poem from Walter Brueggeman's book, Awed to Heaven, Rooted in Earth. The poem is titled, "We Also Live Double Lives" and reads as follows:

"Power turns and postures and exhibits.

It controls and manages and plots.

We participate in it,

we benefit from it,

we are dazzled by it...and more than a little afraid.

Just underneath, all the while...

Just underneath the dazzling power

sits violence and brutality,

greed and fear and envy,

cunning and shamelessness.

In that too we participate.

Like the ancients, we also live double lives,

public in pageant and role and office,

hidden in meanness and thinness.

We do not do well at bringing this double together.

But we confess you to be Lord of all of our lives.

Give us new freedom about our public lives,

give us new candor about our hidden lives,

Correct what is brutal and greedy and fearful,

chasten what is hidden and mean.

Make us women and men of shalom,

the kind of welfare you will for our common life. Amen."

I confess having succumbed to the easy demonization of those in power who accuse the poor and oppressed of engaging in the sin of entitlement, when, in reality, they are the ones with an unhealthy sense of entitlement and a regular recipient of corporate welfare benefits, tax shelters and loopholes. Sometimes righteous indignation runs amuck and makes it easy to condemn those who condemn others less fortunate than they are; but, i must also be aware of my tendency toward my sinful sense of entitlement. That's why my soul resonated with Brueggemann's. Let us all pray the words together, "Make us women and men of shalom, the kind of welfare you will for our common life. Amen."