October 23, 2011:

Ponderings of a Pilgrim PASTOR

“Modern Pirates”

I love to watch old movies. One of my favorites is "Key Largo" with a great cast headed by Humphrey Bogart who plays a reluctant hero and Edward G. Robinson as an utterly evil gangster. At an important point in the picture, someone asks Rico (the gangster) what he wants. Bogart answers for him. "Rico wants more." To which Rico responds enthusiastically, "That’s right. I want more!"

Greed like that is still with us although these days it is most likely to be found among high level business executives and corporate managers. Too many of them are, I believe, pirates in pin-stripe suits. Their greed is monumental and it threatens to destroy the American economy. It has certainly undermined "the American Dream."

Clearly something has gone very wrong and two groups have risen up in protest. The older and larger of these groups is the loosely organized Tea Party movement. Struggling with stagnant or declining personal income, they have been persuaded to believe — wrongly, I think — that the source of our nation’s economic woes is a bloated national government and too high — to their minds, at least — taxes to maintain it. Slashing taxes would bring only minor relief to most of us and the loss of essential government services would be a disaster for all of us.

In recent weeks, we have seen another protest movement, the "Occupy Wall Street" and similar protests around the country. These protestors seem mostly to be younger Americans whose jobs are more threatened and income more precarious than those in the Tea Party movement. The "Occupiers" seem to hope that if they can bring Wall Street to a halt, financial reform will follow. That, I believe, is a romantic dream.

The real problem in America is the growing concentration of wealth and resources in the hands of a few. The fond hope that these pin-striped pirates will share some of their swag with the rest of us if only we are nice to them (which seems to me to be the fallacy of the Tea Party Movement) or the mistaken hope of the Wall Street protestors that we can shame the plutocrats into a greater sense of corporate responsibility are both doomed to failure.

What is needed is not persuasion but laws that will compel these "malefactors of great wealth," as FDR called them, to bear their proper share of the national burden. I hope we have the national will to make that happen. As liberals we need to raise our voices.

Love,
Pastor Dave