Today with technology and globalization the
'frontiers' are often on the other side of the world. It's not the gritty face
to face type of confrontation the American pioneer faced when dealing with the
indigenous Indians. Though today it looks different, the war for expansion and
new conquests has not abated.
Today, it might be a broker hitting the 'enter' key
that just caused a chain reaction leading to several families in Indonesia
losing their jobs and homes. Two months later they're selling their kids, and a
daughter is forced into prostitution in order to buy medicine and keep grandma
alive.
Did the broker mean to do it? Hey, he's just trying
to make some extra money to pay his $2500 house payment and save up for his 17
year old to go to college. And, he's still paying off the credit card balance
on that holiday cruise he and his wife took last December. Is he wicked? Well,
no...and yes.
On the one hand, he's just a guy trying to provide
for his family, on the other hand he's part of a system, a cog in a machine
that's spreading death and suffering even as it brings life and riches to
others. It's the same with my pioneer ancestors. They were trying to live and
were made of much sterner stuff than we are today. But on the other hand they
were part of a system, a machine that was enslaving and killing people, a
system of theft, taking lands and resources from other people. The pioneer and
the broker don't believe they're guilty because there's always someone else they
can look to that seems more covetous, more aggressive, more grasping. They know
they don't mean to hurt others but they have fooled themselves...
They think they're guilt free, innocent, if they
just look the other way and don't see the consequences of what they're doing.
We are all guilty of this. And 99% of the American
public is guilty of looking the other way. On the one hand it's not their
fault. The educational system and the media have not given them the tools to
examine these questions.
And of course failed parenting has raised
generations of spoiled children pursuing youth culture and materialism. As
adults they never question the system, they’ve never been encouraged to look at
the world around them. And if they do, it's largely with an Americo-centric
mindset. Christian schools and homeschools are often just as guilty in this
regard.
The real danger of the public school is not a lack
of prayer or the teaching of Darwin. The danger is that it is producing
conformists, drones that will follow the establishment order, people who will not
think outside the framework society provides. In some ways Christians due to
their commitments to Establishment preservation (or recovery) are often even
more subject to this than the average public school student.
Conservatism is about rolling the clock back in
terms of society and preserving the American model. If you reject this mindset and I pray all
Christians do…then by definition you are not a Conservative. Does that mean the
only alternative is to be a pro-abortion, pro-homosexual communist? Hardly. But
as a Christian I think it’s essential to reject any kind of restricted model
which forces me to see the world through an American lens. The Kingdom of
Christ and America are not the same thing. You won’t find any American
Christians who will come out and say the Kingdom is America, but it’s hard to
find Christians that don’t in some sense operate this way in pragmatic terms.
And certainly among the more Biblically minded, they are raising their children
to think this way.
Dominionism the present default encourages
Christians to think of the world and all that’s in it as the Holy Kingdom, if
not now…then in the future. It’s a rejection of Christ’s declaration that His
Kingdom is not of this world. And when you talk to most Conservatives they’re
pretty clear if it were up to them, they’d make the whole world into America.
Looking at Christian homeschooling catalogs is a lesson in itself. It’s very
instructive and makes it pretty clear what’s happening with Christian children
and how they’re being taught to think about the world and more specifically the
United States.
The handful of Americans who are encouraged to interact
with the larger world do not come from Christian homes. They become the
anti-globalist protestors at G20 meetings and IMF summits. As I often say with
regard to protesting groups and counter-cultural movements...they're raising
good and valid questions, they just don't have the right answers.
Christians on the other hand have no excuse.
American Conservatism and especially Conservative
Evangelicalism have become suspicious of higher education. Just the other day I
was in a Barnes and Noble and came across the Patriot's Guide to American
History recommended by Glenn Beck no less! Yes, 'Higher Education' is going to
say...the title of the book is more than a little problematic. It shows that
the author is not approaching history as an attempt to arrange, analyze and
interpret facts from the past, instead the author is trying to shape the past
in order to fit a narrative. It's not history, it's propaganda.
Conservatives are largely more interested in myth
and propaganda than in honest discussion....like what I was just doing with
regard to my own family history in the previous chapter. There are more than a
few liberals who fall into the same trap, but there's one difference. They're
arguing against the Establishment view, or at least the narrative long provided
by the Establishment. While I can hardly agree with all their methods or
viewpoints, the rejection of Establishment myth is in itself an important step.
Ward Churchill, the now infamous University of
Colorado professor did little to help the fight against Conservative
anti-intellectualism when he said the people in the World Trade Center on 9/11
were 'little Eichmann's'. Those who remember this will also recall the outrage
and backlash from the public. It wasn't the most prudent thing to say especially
in the wake of those events.
Others like Chalmers Johnson and even Ron Paul talk
about Blowback. This is a more vague and less offensive way of talking about
the same general set of ideas...that our policies as a nation even when we the
public are largely ignorant of them bring about consequences. Though we feel
innocent going about our business, our system is really at war with people in
other parts of the world. They have little means to fight back and when they
do, we profess shock and outrage. The attackers believe they are responding to
evil.
Churchill was trying to express the fact that people
sitting in skyscrapers tapping keyboards can still be guilty of murder and
other crimes. They're not SS storm troopers gunning down women and children, or
forcing people into gas chambers. They're bureaucrats and planners. They're
looking at numbers and flowcharts. They're moving money from one account to
another. Eichmann wasn't ignorant of what he was doing. As he worked out train
schedules he knew what it was for, but he approached it as a bureaucrat. He wasn't
getting his hands dirty. He wasn't personally killing anyone. And yet the world
acknowledged that he was guilty of war crimes. He played his part and was
executed for it.
Brokers and lawyers in the World Trade Center
weren't deliberately trying to wipe out populations in Latin America, Africa,
the Middle East and the Asia-Pacific rim, but they represented one arm of a
machine that was deliberately or not...accomplishing that task.
You don't always need Gas Chambers to destroy
people. Sometimes you can just look the other way while people are starving.
Sometimes you can make the conditions even worse and make it look innocent.
Sometimes you can take the long view and instead of destroying a people over
the course of a few years, you can slowly bleed them and weaken them over the
course of generations. Often the people committing these crimes don't see the
whole picture, they're just seeing a small part of it.
But they're still guilty in some sense. For example
if you work at a car factory and you (and others) know there are some problems
with the design, some potential safety hazard, you complain about it and
nothing is done. The management insists it’s fine, you’re mistaken. It bothers
you but you say, 'that's not my department,' and you go on building the car.
Years later it comes out that dozens of people died because of this. Were you
responsible? Certainly not in the same way deliberately blind executives are or
the engineers who ignored the problem. But you knew about it. You didn't
realize just how serious it was, but you knew. Are you guilt free? What were
you supposed to do? Confront the management and get fired? Quit your job? You
could have, but the price is a heavy one. You've got a mortgage, your health
coverage which includes the medications for your asthmatic daughter is also tied
to the job, and they've got a great pension plan. What's a Christian to do? How
are we supposed to look at the world and the things in this life?
Churchill's comment was inappropriate in that it
applied cognizant guilt to the people in the World Trade Center. I think
there's more cognizance than many people realize. I’m reminded of the audio
tapes of Enron executives rejoicing over Californian wildfires and what it was
doing to their electric bills. Did they start the fire? Did they do something
wrong? People found it offensive they were making money on the suffering of
other people. It happens every day in our society but few see it.
I do think many powerful people do know something of
the effects of their actions...and they simply do not care. But most of the
people under them neither realize nor think about what they're doing. They're
in their own little worlds.
The guilt comes in the fact that they never stop and
question the system they're part of. They never stop and question what the
system is doing. They go along with it in the same 'banal' fashion Eichmann
did. And like Eichmann they say...I did nothing wrong. I didn't shoot anyone.
Churchill's comment was too simple but not entirely
untrue either. To get what he's saying would mean Americans would have to
really look at themselves in the mirror...something our culture will not even
entertain.