Dorothy Day Caucus of the American Solidarity Party A Revolution of the Heart
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by Sarah Field Why is poverty so widespread in a country as wealthy as the USA? Why don’t the poor just get better jobs? Have government programs encouraged laziness? Do we need better incentives to get people off the public dole? Or are people trapped in a system they are powerless to escape? I’m not an economist or expert. But I’ve been following the topic for a few years now, and I’ve come to a few conclusions. Hear me out, and then let me know what you think! People Don’t Stay Poor Because It’s Easy Every now and then, a well-meaning friend will post a meme or an article describing the dangers of government supporting the poor. Poor people are social parasites, getting free food, free housing, free college, and free healthcare, all at the expense of their hardworking, more responsible counterparts! It’s not uncommon for someone to chime in with some corroborating anecdote. I know someone like that—living off the government and begging for handouts, but you notice she’s got a cell phone, eats good food, wears nice clothes, drives a nice car, and keep having kids. These people clearly don’t know what it really means to be poor [insert comparison made to a Third World country or the Great Depression], and certainly not how to practice frugality. At the very least, if they had any self-control whatsoever, they wouldn’t have all those kids! But this is what we get when the government offers handouts to anyone who doesn’t have the gumption to make it on their own. It’s just too good of a deal for these freeloaders to pass up! A whole framework of blame is difficult to take apart piece by piece. But a couple of thoughts are important to keep in mind.
In reality, nobody lives a life of ease at the expense of the government. People get government assistance because they need it in order to survive. They may be surviving at a higher standard of living than their counterparts in Uganda or Haiti, but they could still be precariously close to going bankrupt, living on the streets, suffering from a preventable (and potentially contagious) disease, losing their kids, or ending up in jail because they can’t pay a fine. Poverty Hurts Everyone—Not Just the Poor A common theme among these anti-poverty memes is the role of government. Typically, the assumption seems to be that the less we help the poor, the better… unless you’re a politician. If only the government would stop encouraging these behaviors with so many support programs, we wouldn’t have this problem! If you want to get rid of animal pests, you quit feeding them. How hard is that to figure out? But of course, we are stuck with this horrible blight on our economy because all these freeloaders keep voting for the politicians who support them, and politicians only care about getting votes. Aside from the dubious claims that the poor vote only for politicians who promise handouts, what these memes don’t take into account is the fact that poverty hurts everyone. Think about this. What happens when the poor go bankrupt? Lose their home? Catch a communicable disease? What happens when they end up in jail? Or when their kids end up in foster care? What happens to the next generation when they grow up without a stable home and family? Every one of these “personal” crises ultimately cost society as a whole. To suggest, therefore, that the only reason the government supports these programs is in order to get votes is to ignore real problems that affect everyone. Programs that keep the poor more or less afloat are cheaper, in the long run, than programs to rescue them from circumstances far more dire. But they could at least work hard like everybody else and get a better job! Of course they can’t expect to start out as managers. But that’s how the system works. You save your money, work your way up the ladder, and eventually you have a healthy middle-class income. Unemployment rates aren’t even all that high right now. Surely there is no excuse for anyone to live in chronic poverty. We’re just giving people the wrong incentives! I’ll address these concerns in the next two sections. Means-Based Welfare Discourages Incremental Improvements Suppose you are a currently making $2,000/month before taxes. In addition to your income from whatever job(s) you have, you get $200/month in food stamps, and your family healthcare needs are covered by Medicaid. Now suppose you get a better job or a nice raise, and start making $2,500/month. You go home rejoicing that, finally, things are looking up! Unfortunately, this pushes you right over the limit for assistance. Gone are the food stamps, and you have to go to another form of health insurance, with a regular monthly payment and a hefty deductible. Your tax rate also goes up, so you bring home less of what you make. Oh, and maybe your new position requires new clothes (employees often have to pay for their own uniforms), more expensive transportation, or some other up-front investment on your part. All of a sudden, the extra money has completely evaporated! You were literally more financially stable BEFORE you got the better job. Though these numbers are made up, they illustrate what many people in the grip of poverty face. Sooner or later, an incremental improvement in income is going to hurt, rather than help, them. But suppose you anticipate this, and start scrimping and pinching pennies so as to have a rainy day fund before you take the plunge. Or maybe you just want to save up for a car, so as to avoid exorbitant financing rates. Smart move, right? Well, you have to be careful about doing this, too. If you have too much in your bank account at the next evaluation, you could lose your benefits on that basis as well! Long story short, you may not like being on government assistance, but you may have to do what you can to survive. There’s simply no point quixotically refusing assistance, only to end up on the streets or going bankrupt. The Poor Do Not Control Poverty Rates It’s true that unemployment is not what it was ten years ago. But “having a job” and “not being in need of assistance” are two very different things. Indeed, a good portion of the jobs currently available are barely enough to support a single adult, let alone a family. Let’s take a look at some stats to get an idea of just how many jobs do NOT provide a living wage. Take the $15/hour threshold that many suggest should be the new minimum wage. One source shows that 42.4% of workers make less than $15/hour. It is unclear how many of these jobs are full time, but even at 40 hours/week, that’s less than $30,000 per year before taxes. At 35 hours/week (still considered full-time work) the worker gets less than $27,300/year. Where I live, a single person with no significant debt could probably survive pretty comfortably on this amount. But rural Indiana isn’t exactly known for its high cost of living. And for a couple with three kids, even $27,300 is below the federal poverty threshold. Of course, "less than $15/hour" goes all the way down to minimum wage, and everything in between. According to one Pew Research article “about 20.6 million people (or 30% of all hourly, non-self-employed workers 18 and older) are ‘near-minimum-wage’ workers.” So out of that 42.4% making less than $15 above, only about 12.4% make significantly more than minimum wage. There aren’t too many folks who can survive on $7.25/hour without assistance. Even with two incomes, it’s going to be tough. Finally, in terms of a job being enough to pay the bills, one must also consider that many of these jobs aren’t even full time work. Since many benefits are tied to being a full-time worker, this means that part-time workers are less likely to get paid sick time, let alone health insurance through their employer. The ratio of part-time to full-time jobs has, thankfully, improved over the last several years, but part-time work still accounts of a big chunk of available jobs. And while working two part-time jobs seems like it ought to be doable, many such jobs also require a level of flexibility that is difficult to achieve while holding another job. And you don’t get benefits or overtime by virtue of working two 30-hour-per-week jobs. In conclusion, a huge chunk of the population can only bust through the poverty threshold by either working ridiculously long hours, or having two incomes, or both. If they have children, this means farming their kids out to daycare, which in turn means they have to earn more money to pay all their bills. (There are other options, of course. If the parents work opposite shifts, they can watch their own kids, although they may get very little time to build a healthy relationship with each other. And if they live near family or other willing helpers, or qualify for some kind of assistance, the costs can be lowered… but that doesn’t solve the “social parasite” problem.) Now, microeconomics tells us that any one of these people could work extra hard, maybe get a degree or develop some new skill, and eventually get a better job. But macroeconomics tells us that, for a better job to open up, someone else must die, retire, get fired, or quit. As a general rule, for any person who goes UP the ladder, someone else must go DOWN. Of course there are ways this can be shifted through businesses creating more jobs, or making lousy jobs into better jobs, and so forth. Some people can bust out of the cycle by successfully creating their own business--but that generally requires some kind of starting capital, and success rates are notoriously low. In short, real shifts in the number of good jobs are not something the average person in poverty has the slightest control over. This is why giving the poor better "incentives" to get off the government dole is NOT going to solve this problem! So What Can We Do to Get People out of Poverty? First, let’s stop treating poverty like a moral failure. Most of the poor are working very hard to provide essential services for society. They provide food service, hospitality, and answer telephones. They are cashiers, nurse’s aides, and janitors. Some of them work in local government, keeping your taxes low, and some of them serve in our military. Don’t want to pay more for these services? Then have the grace not to complain when the government subsidizes these industries in the form of welfare! But we must do more than merely acknowledge that we need these people and that we benefit from their hardship. We must do more than turn them into working beggars. Justice demands that we ensure people get a fair day’s pay for a fair day’s work. Again, I’m not an economic expert. But there are ideas that could help. Let’s take a look at a few of them. One popular-but-controversial option is to raise minimum wage. This, at least in theory, reduces the amount the government has to spend on welfare. Thus, it seems like it could lower taxes (although as long as we are operating on a deficit anyway, I'm not so sure). But it does put a considerable burden on the businesses and institutions that can't actually afford to pay higher wages—which could lead to fewer total jobs as owners and managers either fight to stay afloat or go under. And it eliminates lower paying options even for basic entry-level positions ideal for those who are just learning the ropes and don't even need to support themselves yet, let alone a family. Ultimately, it's bound to lead to a higher cost of living for everyone, as higher costs of production eventually get passed on to consumers. It’s only a matter of time until $15/hour in the dollars of the future is no better than $8/hour in today’s dollars. Perhaps one way to mitigate some of these issues would be to generally raise minimum wage, but permit any given company to have a certain percentage of designated “entry level” positions or employees at any given time. This would allow for some jobs to still exist at lower wages, but not to the extent that they do today. Yet another option might be for the government to incentivize smaller ratios between the highest and lowest paying jobs within a company. In this system, CEOs would make less, while line workers would make more. But how much real difference would it make? Would companies struggle to find talent for top positions? Would they find loopholes in the form of more disparate benefits? Are CEOs really the problem, or is it shareholders? Or perhaps the government could simply subsidize certain types of industries with tax breaks and credits for paying higher wages, so that workers could receive fair compensation without overburdening companies, raising prices, or bearing the brunt of the stigma of "living off of handouts." Of course, that assumes, perhaps naively, that such subsidies would in fact be passed along to workers. It also leaves open the question of who would decide which industries would be subsidized, and on what basis. Another option that has been gaining momentum is a UBI (Universal Basic Income) or Citizen’s Dividend. This is an amount the government would simply pay to everybody, regardless of need. In theory, this would cut out a lot of the overhead needed to determine who is or isn’t eligible for other assistance programs, which it would most likely replace. It would allow businesses to continue to pay people what they can afford, while giving individuals more choice in what kind of job to work (or whether to have one parent stay home with the children in lieu of sending them to daycare). Hopefully, it would help to alleviate the animosity from those who don’t get assistance towards those who do. But for those whose greatest concern is that government assistance promotes lazy habits, it is anathema. There are also concerns about how it would be funded. And finally, it is unclear what other unintended consequences could result. Conclusion We may not have all the answers yet. But we must recognize that no government program is making it easy to be poor. We must acknowledge that poverty is as harmful for society collectively as it is for poor people individually. We must stop blaming the poor for a lack of sufficient jobs, and we must stop penalizing them for planning ahead and getting better jobs. Most of all, we must get serious about ensuring that anyone willing to work can support themselves and their families.
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by Tara Ann Thieke
Single-causation does not exist in the pages of history nor does correlation equal causation. Where we dwell space and time assure a multiplicity of factors converging in every event. Though we cannot understand the very first cause, it does not follow that we should stick only to the "how" or to the surface. Far too often emotion governs our responses; rather than untangle the knots we seize upon those immediate signifiers which bolster our personal policy preferences. Like pulling up a weed without the roots, we thus guarantee it will re-sprout in a different place. Why is there such antagonism towards going into the roots of school shootings, especially from those who seek to address the root causes of abortion? To go after guns alone is the equivalent of only going after the provider, the defund-Planned Parenthood approach. I've been attracted to the beauty of the Seamless Garment, though sometimes troubled by the equation of matters of prudential judgment with intrinsic evils. I'm more troubled by what seems a colossal display of bad faith by some advocates: the tactic of attacking fellow pro-life supporters with the idea that "if you're not for this, this, and this, you're not pro-life." Would we do the same to a pro-gun control advocate? "If you're not against drone bombs, the police state, or nuclear weapons you're not really for gun control. If you rely upon goods brought to you at artificially low prices because of foreign wars, you're not really for gun control. If you use any gadget with tantalum (as in your iphone or laptop), you're depending upon the blood of miners and factory workers and furthering the culture of violence." Why not take it further, as so many often do when it suits their position? "If you're not vegetarian, you're furthering the culture of violence. If you're not vegan, you're furthering the culture of death." To some extent there is truth in these arguments: a saint connects the dots and allows God to transform their hearts through sacrifice and prayer. They see how the things of this world are opposed to the Gospel teachings. They manifest the wholeness of truth. Unfortunately these emotional arguments aren't usually deployed to bring someone to a fuller understanding of truth, but to attack someone who disagrees. The pursuit of logical causation becomes a process of emotional hostage-taking arguments, employed with little interest in one's own hypocrisy. If we are to bring people to the truth of the Seamless Garment then we must not reject seeking out the discrepancies and failures to connect the dots within our own worldview. We must scrutinize our motivations and actions, constantly turning away from every opportunity to blackmail an opponent. We must be aware when we ourselves are refusing to look deeper into an issue we support because the truth may upset us. The problem is we don't want to do it. We want our own policies, which we feel virtuous and righteous about already, to be accepted completely, and we don't want to dig into the uncomfortable compromises in our own lives. And we especially don't want to take seriously someone who challenges us to go deeper on an issue where we've already made up our mind. Gun control is an easy issue for a lot of people (I highly recommend Joe Bageant's excellent book Deer Hunting With Jesus at this point. Bageant was a self-described atheist pink-o communist who passed away several years ago after returning to his hometown in rural Virginia). But the roots of violent outbreaks in our communities make us uncomfortable. What if they testify that some of our previous "solutions" don't work? What if they require us to change some of our previously held beliefs? What if we may have to change the fabric of our lives? So those people willing to ask hard questions are dismissed. They take away the easy narrative through their suggestion that we are all implicated by the culture we have created, or at least maintain for a variety of reasons. This is how we have people doubling-down on simplistic solutions with no regards for consequences or complexities: "I've decided this is right, I'm not interested in learning more, and if you disagree with me you're evil." We've acknowledged that to end abortion we must look at it in terms of the Seamless Garment. Why are we unwilling to do so elsewhere? And why do we refuse to enter into dialogue with people who agree with us on so many things, but challenge us on others, or require our patience and goodwill? No one is served well when we refuse to go into the layers of "why" or attack those who seek out deeper causes as being guilty of complicity. When a house is crumbling it does no good to blame the contractor for checking the foundations because he's guilty of not fixing the cracks. How can a person understand the truth of the pro-life cause if they're condemned for examining why abortion happens? How can we end mass shootings if we attack those who look at the environment which they take place in? It is a terrible thing if we allow our own sanctimony to prevent the examination of the roots of violence. If we are to create a culture of life, let us encourage those who have sought out how we enabled a culture of death. By Brent Dean Robbins, Ph.D.
Along with the entire nation this past week, I was brokenhearted to read the accounts of the shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland Florida. The death of 17 students by the hand of a young sociopath marks yet another senseless act of violence in our nation’s schools. The shooting, which took place on February 14th of 2018, was one of 30 school shootings within the past year alone. Analyses and commentary in the news have included the usual opportunist calls for politically polarized solutions to gun violence -- from increased gun control to enhanced security at public schools. Yet, somehow it seems, within the mass media at least, I could find no commentators questioning the fundamental premise of compulsory schooling or public schooling, the virtues of which are merely taken for granted without systematic examination. Nevertheless, it seems obvious to me, at least, that our schools are failing our children, not only by exposing them to increasing incidents of senseless violence and loss of precious young lives and teachers, but also by creating the very conditions that seem to foster the resentment of young people prone to violence. In my two decades of experience teaching college students at various universities, I find that students have been largely stripped of their love of learning by the time they exit the dehumanizing and reductive systems of education into which we abandon our children. Students seem to acquire habits of learning that involve rote memorization and a binge and purge style of learning designed for achievement of test-taking. The focus on testing and individual achievement in schools fosters competition to excel in a wide range of activities that leave little time for play, fostering of relationships, or collaborative endeavors in meaningful projects beyond resume building in preparation for the college or job market. Rather than a process of discovery that might foster intrinsic motivation to gain wisdom and knowledge for the sake of transcendent ends – namely, love of truth, beauty and the good life for their own sake -- students are encouraged, instead, to take up learning as mere means to an end. Education has become oriented primarily toward the acquisition of credits and grades in a fruitless and vacuous quest for achievement defined largely in terms of extrinsic and ultimately empty ends such as competition with peers, striving for social status, and/or material wealth. Education geared toward such extrinsic motivations fosters narcissism, sociopathic behavior such as rampant cheating and other forms of academic dishonesty, and especially among the many who fail to excel in comparison to their peers, such learning environments foster resentment and hostility, which sow the seeds of violence. The current call to increase security at public schools will inevitably ramp up efforts to transform places of learning into prison-like cells within which our children will be further dehumanized and scrutinized as potential killers. Today, most schools already resemble prisons more than environments built to nurture learning, and the current rhetoric in response to the most recent shooting indicates that this situation will likely only worsen in the coming years. Most especially in urban public schools in which the most vulnerable and impoverished children can be found, the education system has been transformed into a school-to-prison pipeline, where the poor, racial minorities and the disabled are disproportionately at risk of punishments that ultimately lead to incarceration. Over six years ago, my wife and I found ourselves increasingly distraught as we observed our oldest son grow increasingly despondent as he entered the third year of grade school. Our son had always expressed an early and pervasive love of learning and was especially drawn to reading books well beyond his years. At home, and among family and friends, he was an expressive, talkative young man who never tired of sharing his deep curiosity of the world. Yet, increasingly, we observed our son lose interest in school and become increasingly alienated from his peers. We acutely felt an emotional distance encroaching as he began to withdraw into himself. An acute crisis led us to withdraw him from school, and we decided, against our prior intuitions, that he would be better off homeschooled. It felt dangerous, like we were risking the future of our beloved child. Within a very short period of time, I watched in amazement as my young son returned to us, little by little, and his intellectual curiosity and acumen developed in leaps and bounds. My wife developed a curriculum centered around his interests in art history, through which we introduced him to the history of Western civilization, and took every opportunity to develop his skills in reading, writing and mathematics as he engaged in pursuit of educational projects that drew upon his deepest interests and allowed him to put the values of our family at the front and center of our child’s education. The transformation was incredible to behold, and today, at 14, our son is already excelling at college courses where he is achieving higher scores than his peers well advanced beyond him in age. We joined several home school co-opts where both of our sons had the opportunity to develop close and enduring relationships with peers and where they took genuinely exciting and creative courses taught by parent volunteers. Our boys had the chance to interact with children of a wide variety of ages, and from a diverse set of backgrounds, and those relationships and experiences have proved to be enduring, enriching, and enlivening experiences well beyond anything they would have encountered in formal schooling. With the contrasting experience of my sons in homeschool, and as I watched the news reports of yet another school shooting, I was struck by an insight I hadn’t considered before. Public schools are the only place where the state can coerce a person – an innocent person, that is – to remain in the same room or building with a sociopath, even if the students and/or parent do not consent. Even in a work setting, one can leave and find another job. But if one is poor, or cannot afford private education, the options are few. In my utopian world, poor folks and those with more means would band together to create their own home school co-ops and take education into their own hands. They’d use their social capital and the power of mutual aid to produce a system of education for the people by the people, instead of a system that works for corporate interests mediated by centralized state control. Such projects could afford parents to work together to create a genuinely enriching learning environment geared toward the intrinsic love of learning and the development of social virtues. Rather than emphasize extrinsic motivations for learning, learning could focus, instead, on exploration of intrinsically motiving ends – the pursuit of truth, beauty and goodness for their own sake. Equal emphasis would be placed upon the cultivation of social virtues necessary to foster a generation capable of collaborative and creative learning, compassionate rather than competitive relationships necessary for problem-solving, and egalitarian values necessary to build healthy, thriving communities. Parents in collaboration with one another, and without the imposition of state bureaucracy, are uniquely capable of teaching our children the kind of social virtues necessary for the work we can do together in organically structured networks, in which the community can be empowered to such an extent that centralized, formal systems of state power would no longer appear so necessary in order to create a better world – a world, perhaps one day, we can only hope, violence may become unthinkable. Shifting Norms of Political Discourse and American Utopianism: Can Solidarity Make It in Time?2/20/2018 by Charlie Jenkins
There are no easy answers. Things are reaching the point where even many avowedly feel-good media sites can't help but notice how rapidly the Official Line on a given topic shifts from 'controversial' to 'It Is Decided, You May Not Dissent Or Else.' Some have even described it as 'creepy,' in spite of the fact that American political discourse (note: this is in no way implies political realities before the current time were not horrifying in their own ways) crossed the line from ‘creepy’ to ‘terrifying and Lovecraftian’ sometime back in the 1930s. This isn’t anything new: since the creation of our national media, American political consensus has always ricocheted rapidly from one position to the complete opposite without pause for breath or self-reflection. Here are three examples: -The Hollywood blacklist and McCarthyism. In the early 1950s it was considered subversive to criticize them; by the late 50s it was beyond the pale to even make a hint at possible support for them. -In 1973 the countercultural consensus affirmed the Viet Cong was good and the North Viets were America’s friends. In 1975 they annexed the South of Vietnam and instituted mass terror there. The consensus immediately switched over to being anti-Viet and pro-Khmer Rouge. -In 2002 the media was on the side of the War on Terror and the Afghan War. In 2003 they covered the lead-up to the invasion of Iraq breathlessly. Once the deed was done the consensus immediately switched over to the whole ‘Stop The War’ efforts. The timing of these examples isn’t coincidental, either. During the 1950s the propaganda machines constructed during the 1930s and 1940s reached the upper limit from which they have never since come down, having obtained a monopoly over the collective worldview of Americans. People lost the ability to distinguish fantasy from reality, and the horrors of the previous decade were painted over with feel-good utopian dreams. Probably nothing demonstrates this better than Wernher von Braun (who used thousands of slave laborers at the Peenemünde test facility) designing the ‘Rocket to the Moon’ ride for Tomorrowland in Disneyland. His companion, Heinz Haber, received some perfunctory scrutiny, but who remembers that these days? This total detachment from reality is so pervasive that you have conservative commentators like Bill Whittle castigating the movie Tomorrowland as liberal propaganda. On what grounds? Well, because he went to Tomorrowland as a kid and “socialism” isn’t the way to that promise, “capitalism” is the way. This is essentially a mainstream figure in Conservatism.Inc explaining we need to defeat socialism to be able to achieve a sci-fi universe. ‘But the 60s counterculture! The SDS! The revivification of agonizing about fascism and the Holocaust!’ Well, just to focus on that last point, what was revivified during the 1960s was a sanitized and mythologized version of the Holocaust, just like the sanitized and mythologized versions of the war as whole. What people remember are Auschwitz and Anne Frank and Josef Mengele and Nuremberg and Wiesenthal, whereas the reality absolutely cannot be even *slightly* appreciated without the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising and Aktion Reinhard and the Trawniki men and the Ypatingasis būrys and the Odessa and Bucharest pogroms. Auschwitz and Auschwitz-Birkenau are two separate places, one a physical location in space and time, the other existing purely on the spiritual plane, in the realm of the Great Manichaean Struggle between Good and Evil. So if the 60s and 70s were largely captured by a spirit of phony #wokeness, then consider what came next. I've heard many compare US politics in the 1930s as being far more similar to politics today than to the political atmosphere of the 1920s. And, extending that, there seems to be an idea that politics from roughly 1979 to 2003 bears more resemblance to the 1950s than to our current milieu. It was a more innocent age, before Gitmo or Abu Ghraib or Stop The War. The neocons actually had power, and weren’t mocked or reviled. Everyone lived in the shadow of Reagan and Brzezinski and the Gorbening and Yeltsining. It was the great age of US intervention and democracy-building, with interventions in Granada, Panama, Haiti, Somalia, Bosnia, Kosovo, both Iraqs, and Afghanistan. You had the UN-sponsored coalitions and protectorates not just in Bosnia and Kosovo, but in Cambodia, Somalia, and East Timor. The fall of apartheid, the fall of Suharto! The Oslo peace accords! The democratization of Africa and Latin America, the opening of China, reform in Russia! The End Of History! But of course the Official Discourse Of Politics during this period was extremely naive and childish and full of, well, derp. It’s not just Bush’s ‘compassionate conservatism’ and everything about Clinton; the 1992 campaigns had hardly anything to say about the Los Angeles riots, undoubtedly the most important event of that year. Joan Didion put it down as the Focus Group Effect, the attempt to make politics and public relations ~*~scientific~*~, and it’s no coincidence she was the one to come up with the term ‘Vichy Washington.' The tide has turned again, and the 'halcyon' days are behind us. Instead there is the advent of insistence that “what the people want” is some kind of ‘political revolution’, whether Feeling the Bern, or, I don’t know, more free market reforms; getting 'back to the constitution' or something, and America appears on the verge of more 1960s and 70s- style #wokeness. Only the great Jacksonian beast that is American democracy appears to be bucking under the activists; yet, this isn’t the 1830s, this isn’t the 1930s, this isn’t the 1960s. This an era where the US has already achieved apex predator status, has no serious competition, but now has several centuries worth of technical glitches and declining social trust. At some point, that reality has to come home to roost – the question is, can the body politic believe in anything beyond themselves (individually or collectively) enough to transcend total nihilism when it does? By Zeb Baccelli Are we able to accept that at least a few dozen kids a year will have the desire and the will to commit mass murder against their peers, but will simply lack the means to carry it out? That’s the unspoken message I hear after every school shooting when the right calls for more armed guards and teachers and the left calls for more gun control. If these measures would reduce the body count (and that's a big “if” which remains to be proven), it would indeed be a welcome improvement on the current situation. But to me, the scariest part of these attacks is not that an attacker isn't killed more swiftly by school staff, or that an attacker doesn’t have to resort to a pipe bomb or plowing people down with a car. The scariest part is twenty years after Columbine we’re still raising kids who want to murder their classmates and likely die in the process. The February 14 attack in Parkland, Florida forces us to face this reality once again. There are three levels where we can address social problems like school shootings: the causes, the enablers, and the preventers. Armed guards and teachers would be preventers. It's questionable whether armed teachers or guards are actually effective; Parkland did have one armed guard but he did not encounter the shooter during the attack. And having a plethora of adults able and ready to kill students at a moment’s notice would have numerous costs, not all financial. But even if it did work to prevent shooters from accomplishing much, is that enough? Are we alright with a couple kids a year coming that close to mass murder, but instead killed by staff in front of their classmates on school grounds? So what about the enablers? Guns are the most visible one, but the school itself gathers hundreds of targets into one location. If we got rid of guns would these killers turn to pipe bombs, car ramming, knife attacks? In principle I have no objection to gun control, though I question the effectiveness of efforts to limit access to guns. But perhaps we should also think about decentralizing schooling and not having these visible targets exist in the first place. This brings me to causes. Mental health issues are a common denominator with school shooters, but so is alienation both at school and at home. Again I'd suggest decentralizing schools and really radically revamping the school system to make it more humane. School staff act "in loco parentis," but for legal, cultural, and economic reasons they do not and cannot act like real parents. Your math teacher will not give you a shoulder to cry on or take you away from the other kids for a game of catch or an ice cream if they see something is wrong. From a very young age we remove children from a familial environment and put them into an institutional one. Over half a kid’s waking hours are spent in this unnatural environment where the adults have a very limited responsibility to engage him on a superficial level, and where peers who have no responsibility or interest in his well-being have a far more dominant role in determining his socialization. It's an unhealthy and unnatural set up. So when a child like the Parkland shooter acts weird and scary, the other kids make him a pariah and joke how he'll be the next shooter. The adults may have a parent-teacher conference or two, perhaps giving a detention if he acts out. At home the parents have been encouraged by the culture and simple human weakness to consign the raising of their child to the school, and the child's school life is opaque to them unless he is unusually talkative and self-aware. Meanwhile modern technology and recreation culture continue to drive a wedge between parents and children, and of course modern life fractures any larger community so everyone feels like the kid across the street is none of their business. Decentralizing schools and putting them back in the hands of parents and communities would help reform the social support network that catches kids suffering from mental illness and alienation before they reach the breaking point. As a society we need to address these root causes, and as a party we should be looking for policies that enable and encourage solutions at the root. I strongly believe in policies that make schools smaller and closer to the parents and community. We need more charter schools, private schools, and homeschool cooperatives aided by the state in obtaining funding and resources. And for a public option, have decentralized neighborhood public schools rather than regional mega-schools. by Anthony Resnick
Another mass shooting, and again in a school. Another round of recriminations. Another call for more gun control. And, as seems to be increasingly the case, another wave of tying the call for greater gun control to ridicule of those offering thoughts and prayers instead of joining the call for gun control. Personally, I think greater regulation of firearms possession would be a good thing. I share the scorn for the NRA and the contempt for politicians who seem paralyzed by its political influence. However, tying these sentiments to a condemnation of the offering of thoughts and prayers is wrong and, ultimately, deeply destructive. There are two general formulations to the anti-"thoughts and prayers" sentiment. The first is "forget thoughts and prayers, do something about our gun laws." This is mostly directed at Republican politicians who make public statements of thoughts and prayers but stand in the way of new gun control legislation, but it can also be directed at anyone offering thoughts and prayers instead of calling their legislators. The tying of offering thoughts and prayers to action on gun control legislation is a non sequitur. Nobody is claiming that the reason we shouldn't enact new gun laws is because thoughts and prayers are sufficient to reduce gun violence. Politicians oppose new gun laws because of a mixture of ideology and political calculation. That opposition should be met with persuasion and building political pressure on the other side of the equation, but everyone, regardless of their politics, should be encouraged to respond to tragedy with sympathy. The second form of ridiculing "thoughts and prayers" is along the lines of "your thoughts and prayers literally do nothing." This is wrong for at least two reasons. First, it is based on a childish view of religion, as if the purpose of prayer is to bring about some earthly outcome. Second, even if you don't believe in a higher power, things like saying "please," "thank you," "good morning," and "I love you" also "literally do nothing", yet (for now) nobody is arguing that we should do away with basic human decency altogether. The ridiculing of "thoughts and prayers" is not just wrong, but destructive. Several years ago, following the Senate's failure to pass gun control legislation inspired by the Sandy Hook school shooting, I wrote an essay arguing that the "politicization" of tragic events is appropriate. My argument then was that minimizing human suffering is an appropriate aim of public policy, and the wake of mass suffering is an appropriate time to talk about whether any changes in policy could have avoided or minimized that suffering. I stand by that argument, but it is incomplete. It is incomplete because it leaves out just how much of our world is beyond the reach of public policy, and how much power we have to collectively shape the world in ways that have nothing to do with who we elect and what laws they enact. There is something deeply unhealthy about a country where, with such regularity, people are moved to kill as many of their fellow humans as possible. The many causes and symptoms of this sickness are far beyond the scope of this essay and far beyond my capabilities to diagnose, but responding to great suffering primarily with righteous condemnation strikes me as one of the symptoms of this sickness -- many magnitudes different from mass murder, but not entirely unrelated. I suspect that the "forget your thoughts and prayers" half of the formulation does more harm than the "pass better gun laws" could ever do good. We need better gun laws. We need better mental health services. We need campaign finance reform that doesn't allow the side that's able to raise the most money to dominate a particular issue. But if our politics (in the broadest possible definition of that term) has decayed to the point that we cannot pursue those goals while putting everyone's basic humanity at the center of all that we do, then I despair for how far even the best laws can take us. By Amar Patel
Since the beginning of humanity men and women have had to work. Our earliest ancestors hunted and gathered to survive. Scientists speculate the reason you want an afternoon nap so badly is because for far longer than farming has been a way of life, people would work all morning to obtain food after which they would feast around noon. They would follow this meal with a long nap. After the nap they would eat the remaining food and prepare to sleep for the night. Without refrigeration or cupboards they could store little foodstuffs for any length of time. This continued for many generations, imprinting the behavior into our DNA through natural selection. Then came farming and domestication of animals. Along with consistent food sources we found ways to store grains which would ensure food through difficult crop seasons. This didn’t lessen the amount of work people did. It only changed it. As society progressed and specialization began, other occupations sprouted up. Towns became cities and massive farms produced enormous amounts of food so that few people needed to work their own land and had non-agrarian jobs. It seems to me that the purpose of a job seems to be to do it long enough so you don’t have to do it anymore. Then you can rest and relax. The thing about rest is you have to work first. Technology is driving society to a point where many people will not be able to find work and/or we just won’t need them to do it. It may not happen in our lifetimes, but I can conceive of a time where automation will relieve the necessity of labor. What then? Can we rest and relax all the time? I think we need to address this future now. We need to educate people about S and S, solidarity and subsidiarity. Solidarity is the idea that we should act to benefit our common goals and interests. Subsidiarity is an organizing principle that matters ought to be handled by the smallest, lowest or least centralized competent authority. Currently our daily lives revolve around work that occupies most of our time and attention. We make money to support our families, obtain choice for entertainment, etc., but the main goal is to eventually retire and not work. What if the goal of work could be to create a better world around us? What if we could collectively agree that by improving our local community we would have a greater comfort than we could enjoy in our insulated bubble? Unfortunately, I don’t think this could happen organically. Culture acts in exact opposition to both solidarity and subsidiarity. Despite technology allowing for greater connection between neighbors we end up with less. Look at the popularity of Netflix and similar binge streaming channels. I am guilty, like most, of entering a cave of entertainment on many nights where one show turns into four and I get to bedtime having accomplished nothing. My own children have built connections with their devices that rival relationships with peers. The world steps more into isolation while we all hunger for connection. What are S.M.A.R.T. goals the American Solidarity Party could have with respect to these issues? They need to be Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, and Time Limited. I propose that we should stick to the most centrist of issues and focus on local resource structuring. Three specific goals I would put forward are supporting of pregnant women through their delivery and for a transition time after birth, coordinating the efforts of local food banks and shelter to reduce hunger and homelessness, and provide after school support for poor children to improve educational prospects. We should be able to measure how many people are helped, how many people are contributing, and what cost it takes for the action to be implemented. The documentation of these results should be shared in order to promote similar action in other locales. None of these goals require massive capital outlay. They require volunteerism and the passion of hopefully a growing number of individuals who want to make a difference in their communities. The difference made would be relevant as it would target the neediest and most vulnerable of our neighbors. There should be hard targets set for how long programs have to take root. It would be acceptable to reassess timelines if agreement exists that original plans were too optimistic but dates should be set for goals to be completed. If we could focus on these issues and make connections we could create the voice for solidarity by utilizing our communities to show subsidiarity in action. Make a difference in the neighborhood under the flag of ASP to really show others what we are about. Ivan Illich, The Right to Useful Unemployment and Its Professional Enemies (Marion Boyars,1978; republished 1996) by Dr. Stephen Beall The life of Ivan Illich (1926-2002) is a bundle of contradictions. Born in Austria of a Croatian father and a Jewish mother, he pursued studies in histology and philosophy, theology and history. After completing a doctoral dissertation in Salzburg, he served as a Catholic priest in one of the poorest Puerto Rican neighborhoods of New York City. At age 30, he became the vice-rector of the Catholic University of Puerto Rico, but he lost that job a few years later for his support of Luis Marin’s Popular Democratic Party. In Mexico, he founded the Centro Intercultural de Documentacion (CIDOC), which simultaneously functioned as a language school for missionaries and a mecca for progressive intellectuals. Having attained the rank of monsignor, he resigned from the priestly ministry, although he still considered himself a priest. He completed his life as an itinerant professor in the United States and Europe. A missionary who distrusted missionaries, a cleric at odds with the clergy, an educator who despised educators, an intellectual who heaped scorn on ‘experts’, Illich would have been fun to have around the DDC. As it is, we must be content with reading his books, which are thankfully still in print. The Right to Useful Unemployment is a short book (95 pages), which Illich composed as a postscript to one of his major works, Tools for Conviviality (1973). It reprises his thesis that industrial society has ‘disabled’ nearly all social classes by making them dependent on goods and services that they do not need or could make for themselves. Borrowing Marx’s distinction between exchange-value and use-value, he multiplies examples of commodities, such as automobiles and processed food, that have not only replaced, but virtually criminalized the unrestricted use and enjoyment of the human body, the soil, and community. The loss of these values is what Illich calls ‘modernized poverty’, and its negative ‘internalities’ strike much deeper and broader than the unequal distribution of wealth. While the super-rich and the desperately poor can unplug from consumerism, most of us are jerked like marionettes in the constant pursuit of imputed and artificial ‘needs’. Illich saves most of his ammunition for the people who pull the strings. The villains of this piece are not the plump capitalists of classic leftist cartoons, but a vast array of ‘disabling professionals’, including educators, health-care providers, social workers, and scientists. Together with the apparatchiks of government and industry, our new patrons have acquired the power not only to package and distribute needless goods and services, but to proscribe and even ration them to their admiring and gullible clients. In the political sphere, the imputation of ‘needs’ leads to the creation of ‘rights’, such as the right to public transportation, which arises only when it is no longer possible to walk to the market or ride a bicycle to work. As such ‘rights’ proliferate, personal freedom and democratic control are reduced, since we must rely on technocrats to secure and regulate these new entitlements. Eventually, the professions themselves are absorbed into bureaucratic systems, which determine from a remote and mathematical perspective precisely what we ‘need’ and how much of it we can get. The evolution of health care is a perfect example of this dynamic. Eventually, people are bound to notice that they are neither happier nor healthier in a world where rest, exercise, and a good diet require so much supervision. The disabling professions must therefore rely on a set of cultural controls to maintain their dominant position. One of these is the manipulation of language. Illich recalls a time when ‘problems’ was a word found mainly in textbooks of mathematics. Now it denotes any aspect of life that requires a technical ‘solution’, from production quotas to strained relationships. Readers will be able to add their own examples; I myself have witnessed the shift from ‘erudition’ to ‘productivity’ as the standard measure of scholarship. Manipulated language can be used to build a mansion of illusions, such as the ‘technological imperative’ (we *can* do x, therefore we *must* do x, in just this way) and the cult of academic credentials (which has descended to the absurdity of granting credit hours for ‘equivalent’ work experience). Last, but not least, there is the increasing identification of useful employment with holding a job or, worse yet, with pursuing a career. Employment no longer includes things like growing your own food, raising your own children, or building your own house. We have ‘people’ for that. Illich’s style is rhetorical and pedagogical rather than organized and systematic. He often makes the same point in different ways, and so readers should be prepared to go with the flow and enjoy his memorable anecdotes and striking metaphors. Who better to illustrate our reliance on professionals than the obstetric nurse who pushed an emerging baby back in the womb because ‘Dr. Levy has not yet arrived’? As an example of Illich’s language, let the following quotation suffice: ‘People are told they need their jobs, not so much for the money as for the services they get. The commons are extinguished and replaced by a new placenta built of funnels that deliver professional services. Life is paralyzed in permanent intensive care.’ Illich’s analysis will resonate with members of the American Solidarity Party, particularly those who have been involved in the recent battles over leadership and branding. We have our own version of ‘credentialism’, which goes hand in hand—not coincidentally, from Illich’s perspective—with a preference for centralized and bureaucratic policies. When a JD or Master’s degree (or ‘equivalent’ professional experience) is required for a seat on the National Committee, we will know that our party has joined the others on the royal road to a dystopian future. If we wish to embark on a different road, however, what are the alternatives? In this respect, the present book is less helpful, since it merely directs the reader to Illich’s earlier study, Tools for Conviviality. In general, he foresees ‘a post-industrial economy in which people have succeeded in reducing their market dependence and have done so by protecting—by political means—a social infrastructure in which techniques and tools are used primarily to generate use-values that are unmeasured and unmeasurable by professional need-makers’. In other words, we would create a social space in which we could determine our own needs and satisfy them with tools and resources equally available to all. The creation (or re-creation) of such an infrastructure will require time and experimentation. In the short term, it is not easy to see how much we can or should opt out of the industrialized and professionalized world in which we live. It is true, for example, that the health care ‘system’ has subjected us to an increasingly invasive regime of medical supervision. But for all that, should we take a pass on the next scheduled colonoscopy? This points to another problem with Illich’s analysis: to what extent are we ourselves implicated in the technocratic ‘march of progress’, not only as dependent consumers, but as specialized providers? There is plenty of blame to go around. Nevertheless, the march has accelerated so much in recent years that nearly all of us can all remember life before the invention of this gadget or that procedure. If we cannot stop the train, we can at least slow it down by relearning old habits and skills and teaching them to our children. We should also hold the ‘experts’ in our orbit accountable for the results of their prescriptions—medical, legal, and political. The proof is in the pudding; if it doesn’t taste better, let’s make our own. by Tara Ann Thieke The Dorothy Day Caucus began last summer with little identification beyond "social conservative" and "radical." Unintentionally (but happily) a phrase used by namesake and patroness Dorothy Day has come to define the temper and principles of the group: Revolutionaries of the Heart. Here people who may be described as left-wing, right-wing, centrist (and some other very interesting labels) have come together with more than civility: they have met with genuine openness towards listening to one another. Those willing to pay attention and listen to their neighbor have had their openness repaid with the joy of encountering new approaches and ideas. As this has happened, the quality of openness and commitment to hearing the word of our neighbor has shifted the identity and mission of the DDC; surely one of the most promising indications of building meaningful relationships ASP Ohio Vice-Chair and The Kitchen Table contributor Christopher Zehnder shared a post several weeks ago discussing the danger and failure of the left-right-center dichotomy. With the awareness of how toxic that paradigm has come to be in our culture, I'd like to talk about how the Dorothy Day Caucus offers more than yet another alternative label, but a fulfillment. Division is writ into what is most frequently seen as a left-right binary, though this occasionally branches out into graphs with axes or even evolves into a horseshoe. To embrace any of these classification systems is to fall into an "othering" process where identity dominates and living persons and ideas wither. One can try to escape the prison by bounding into the wild forests of anarchism, but that too becomes a launching ground for purity tests; woe to the anarchist who thinks they can escape the identity markers of horseshoes and binaries! From anarcho-syndacalism to anarcho-monarchism to anarcho-capitalism, all attempts to break out of power structures inevitably involve recreating power structures. What is there to do with our brave taxonomers of human beings but stand at the door with Whit Stillman and offer some variation upon: "Good luck with your Fourierism!" Yes, there is truth to be found in these structural analyses, and many good ideas as well. But this is only because these paradigms encompass everything: swallowing, naming, and dividing us so completely that nothing is left unclaimed. It is of little use trying to grow out of the binary and into the horseshoe. The point and problem are intrinsic to these labels. "Authoritarian, centrist, neoliberal, socialist, capitalist;" all of these describe attitudes towards the world that are not necessarily contradictory. An individual may comfortably possess a neoliberal foreign policy, a socialist domestic policy, and a libertarian morality; as long as our attention is drawn to the things of this world, the deep choices will be ignored. The Marxist accelerationist and small-business owning luddite may both, in their own way, be determined to immanentize their different visions of the eschaton. For those unfamiliar with the phrase, "immanentize the eschaton" was used by the 20th century political philosopher and refugee from Nazism Eric Voegelin; it was subsequently popularized by William F. Buckley. It refers to the attempt to build Utopia on earth: some via the Marxist proletarian revolution, others through technological developments, still others through Francis Fukyama's "End of History." Those familiar with the phrase may have heard it used so often that its force has grown dull. This is a tragedy. To hear it afresh is to face the choice always before us: to pursue our own will, or to put down our will and open our eyes, ears, and hearts to God and His creation. Binaries, axes, and horseshoes will always fail and lead to squabbling because they are rooted in our own will to self-creation. They put the identity of ourselves first and our neighbor, who is Christ to us, second. Liberalism is the governing system for managing these different identities. Define yourself in terms of this world. Commodity capitalism loves this: leave personhood behind and instead adopt an identity which can always be added onto, a fantasy with ever new tastes before us. Lost in the quest of pursuing our own Utopia, our gaze firmly upon our desires, the labels mutate and expand. How much dialogue is possible between the xenofeminist-marxist-wolfkin-accelerationist and the radical-traditionalist-neothomist-Luddite? The definitions divide us entirely, and we've seen the people of the world ravaged in their name. What reconciliation is possible when the world is at stake, when the truth of your heart (as sold by Disney) is at stake? In the quest for the earthly kingdom, all people are doomed to become objects standing in the way of the expansion of their personal paradise onto all (yes, libertarians, you too.) Liberalism is all that is left to shield us from the weight of one another's identity. The word I've used most often to oppose such divisions is "radical," which is ironic for a word that summons to mind divisiveness. It's etymology (Latin), though, refers to roots, the origins of things. But it is too difficult to get people to drop their association with the word; rather than revisiting first principles and final ends, it often summons the image of hateful discontent (though instead of attempting to reclaim "radical," one could switch to "radish," which shares the "radix" root and has a certain feisty humility.) In the end, "radical" is not enough. It still defines itself by the terms of this world, even if in revolt rather than identity. It still searches for a place in this world to stand against the rest. While its uses are many and valuable, it is not the word that helps us lay down our swords or slow the fingers of keyboard warriors. The true way, which gently speaks out dissolving all labels by calling them to raise their eyes, is more than a label. It is a way of life, it is to be a follower of Christ. Why Christian? Why not pantheist, universalist, or agnostic? During the days of bloodshed in ancient Rome, the word "atheist" was invented as a slur for Christian. A Christian was one who did not believe in the gods of Rome, who did not kneel before the idols. Those ancient martyrs reflected the heart of what it means to be Christian: to refuse to kneel before false idols that promise to immanentize the eschaton, leading us away from God and our neighbor. Our obsession with labels, from Myers-Brigg personality types to political spectrum quizzes, are idols. No matter how many subcategories are delineated, each one heralds the triumph of the self and the gods of this world. We focus on our desires, our diagnoses, our vision, our desires, our griefs. Liberalism, as it has guided us since the Enlightenment, possesses great talent in helping us navigate these conflicting identities. But there are yet better principles. They are found in the Gospels. The Dorothy Day Caucus will always welcome members who feel comfortable using labels. They can be helpful signposts and there will always be times when they help clarify ideas. But our call is to transcend liberalism, to rise above the bonds of this world, to see one another as fellow children of God rather than the branded product of a label. These political labels place us in opposition to our neighbor. They capture our heart and cause us to wage war against others in pursuit of our personal Utopia. Even if this war manifests in no more than the comfortable use of violent rhetoric, the result is the same: we remain governed by our own broken hearts and desires. A revolutionary of the heart must lay down their personal idols. They must accept they do not know all things, cannot see all things, nor can they understand all consequences. They must accept the risk of never convincing everyone to go along with their private agenda of universal prosperity. In turn, the "metanoia" of their heart (the old Greek term for repentance), can point them to true peace, true love of their neighbor. All things are political. All things are also theological. Politics and theology begin in the heart, move to the tongue, manifest in the home, and spread to the world. True political change begins by orienting our hearts to Christ's teachings and the message of His death and resurrection. St. Paul, as he stood before his judges in Jerusalem, said he was on trial for his hope in the resurrection of the dead (Acts 23:6). Not for his hope in flying cars. Not for his dream of never suffering. Not for his wish in having his every desire or scheme granted. Not for recreating the Shire. Not for his plans of perfecting the Roman Empire and instituting global governance. He was on trial for his hope in the resurrection of the dead. What was the manifestation of this hope? It was the love of his neighbor, his dogged pursuit of reconciling human beings to God and one another rather than to the gods of this world. St. Paul was a revolutionary of the heart. The DDC seeks to follow him, recognizing we are political and theological creatures at every moment, and our lives are our witness. Liberalism is a theological view as much as any other religion or political philosophy; we are all theocrats of a sort. What does our religion testify to? Does it look to the geodesic dome of the futurist city? Is its highest end speed, the pursuit of a horizon of pleasure which ever recedes from our fingertips? Does it look to perfectly plan and manage our existence? Or does our religion call ourselves to break free of the shackles of our appetites, to escape the chains of the utopias of a million would-be tyrants? Our redeemer calls us beyond self-pity to encounter the suffering of our neighbor, to pay attention. The novelist Iris Murdoch wrote: "It is in the capacity to love, that is to SEE, that the liberation of the soul from fantasy consists. The freedom which is a proper human goal is the freedom from fantasy, that is the realism of compassion. What I have called fantasy, the proliferation of blinding self-centered aims and images, is itself a powerful system of energy, and most of what is often called 'will' or 'willing' belongs to this system. What counteracts the system is attention to reality inspired by, consisting of, love." The revolutionary of the heart pays attention. They stand silently beside St. Paul, placing their hope with him in the truth of the world-shattering Resurrection they've opened their hearts to receive. They allow the label-makers and Utopians to rend their garments and wage war; meanwhile they professing their love of their neighbor through ceaseless devotion and commitment to a truth older, higher, and bigger than any earthly end-of-history project. They pursue the truth and do good while refusing to break other human beings in pursuit of the good. The revolutionary of the heart can see their neighbor because their vision is not clouded by a furious need to preserve one's self-image. The revolutionary of the heart lays down the will to power. Let idolatrous labels wither, thanking them for the good they have done and forgiving the evil, and then orient our hearts back towards their proper home. Let politics begin in the heart, kneel beside the broken-hearted, and let them end in God. by Dr. Skylar Covich On Saturday, November 18 I attended the Caring Not Killing conference, a gathering of those opposed to assisted suicide and euthanasia, at Biola University in Los Angeles. Assisted suicide is becoming legal in more and more jurisdictions. Not only is the increased acceptance a problem in itself, but we are seeing troubling problems in places where it has been legal for some time: reports of patients pressured to commit assisted suicide, or patients allowed to commit assisted suicide even if they are not terminally ill. These practices are grave threats to civilization and liberty, and no political party wants to speak out. The American Solidarity Party, fortunately, condemns assisted suicide and euthanasia strongly in its platform, but has not focused on these issues as much as I would wish.
The arguments presented at the conference can be divided into three major types; Christian, medical, and disability rights. From a Christian perspective, assisted suicide is the taking of a life unnaturally. Put most simply, because man is made in the image of God, it is immoral to end a human life prematurely. All of the speakers who made arguments from Christian ethics also spoke out in favor of the rest of the pro-life movement, and there were numerous organizations in the display room linking opposition to assisted suicide with opposition to abortion, which is also the taking of a life prematurely. Yet, while for many of us, Christian truth guides our final decisions on these matters, the movement against assisted suicide needs the insights of those grounded in practical medical professionalism. The speakers with medical experience, most of whom professed a Christian background, presented indictments of unethical practices now common to the medical profession, including hospices providing substandard care and defrauding the government of funds meant for patients, and hospital emergency rooms turning off life-saving care when there was still reasonable hope of saving the patient. The medical speakers also tried their best to dispel concerns that patients are being kept alive by machines only to preserve life for as long as possible out of a misguided quest to avoid death at all costs. Some wonder whether medical technologies, by keeping patients alive artificially when they would have died a more peaceful natural death, are incentivizing people to consider assisted suicide in order to avoid increased suffering. The medical professionals at this conference argued that human bodies generally die fairly quickly when, in some unquantifiable sense, they are ready to. Furthermore, they can recover to a surprising extent, even if not completely, with the right medical treatments, often when hope seems lost. Determining the specific point at which care will end is not easy, either for the average person creating a living will, or for a medical professional, but the medical community must remember its oath to do no harm, and return to a spirit of care for each patient as a person in the image of God. This ethic of care for each individual patient, especially those persevering amidst suffering, brings us to the disability rights arguments. When some claim that assisted suicide prevents suffering, groups such as Not Dead Yet reply that even in the midst of suffering, life is worth living. When people are allowed to choose to end their suffering, inevitably others will be pressured to make that same choice, which essentially becomes a civil rights violation. Like the Christian theologians and medical professionals, disability rights activists would like to see a revitalization of the local community as a safe space for the disabled, and a mobilization of volunteers to help the disabled in varieties of ways, especially independent living centers, that improve their living conditions. Disability rights activists, though, were more likely than other speakers at the conference to argue that federal programs, including the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, are necessary to protect the disabled, and somewhat alleviate the pressure they might otherwise face to partake in assisted suicide. Whereas much of the Christian Right and some of the pro-life movement arrive at the conclusion that such programs do more harm than good because of their inefficiency and their lack of pro-life commitments, disability rights activists see the need to protect these programs no matter their shortcomings or additional costs. In critiquing these programs, and the progressive politicians who keep them running, we need to understand their immediate importance to the disabled. Would disability rights activists who do not adhere to a conservative Christian perspective ever be likely to fit into the American Solidarity Party? There are some who adopt an anti-abortion position, through secular pro-life and Consistent Life perspectives. However, it became clear based on my experience at the conference that many tend to be rather politically progressive on social issues, except end of life care. In speaking to one representative, we discussed that even though disagreements on LGBT issues have the potential to strain the coalition between disability rights activists and socially conservative Christians, the disability rights activists are often also unwilling to commit to a strict anti-abortion position. While they are concerned that women might be pressured into abortions, many fundamentally accept pro-choice arguments on abortion if safeguards are in place. Despite these disagreements, Christian Right and politically progressive disability rights activists have succeeded in forming coalitions. In what may be a good lesson for many of us, it is telling that they do so by avoiding interference in each other’s organizations, and with an acknowledgement that their efforts are, for the most part, separate, yet also complementary. Those of us who adhere to principles of solidarian politics and Christian democracy can hope to build bridges between the different movements opposing assisted suicide by further examining the ways in which legal challenges, governmental programs, reform of the medical industry, and efforts to build local community can stop the tragic practice of prematurely ending lives. |
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