“In America everybody is of the opinion that he has no social superiors, since all men are equal, but he does not admit that he has no social inferiors, for, from the time of Jefferson onward, the doctrine that all men are equal applies only upwards, not downwards.”
It is never just one thing, is it? You decide to clean a room, and you need to empty the vacuum. The vacuum filter is broken, and you leave to buy another, but the car is low on gas. Because the car is low on gas, you have to find your new debit card, and the PIN doesn't work, so you have to phone the bank, which means you have to dig through a cluttered drawer for the secret answer to your security question that you now can't remember. When you finally return to the room with the new filter, someone has borrowed the vacuum. By the time you find the vacuum, there is no longer time that day to clean the room. However, while you were at the store, the clerk tells you a neat little trick about vacuuming pet hair that makes the job go much faster when you are able to tackle it. And, the cluttered drawer search has unearthed a document you thought you'd lost.
-Bertrand Russell
It's a lot like that to struggle for peace and justice. No task within this effort ever involves just one thing. Even our interruptions are interrupted, only to be interrupted by yet more interruptions. And, because of this, it becomes not concentrated effort toward our goals or objectives, but interruption that comprises the bulk of our quotidian lives.
This uncontrollable and unavoidable phenomenon flies in the face of the cultural paradigm that tells us that the accomplishment of goals requires singular focus. This is not true. Accomplishing goals requires us to widen our lens and include more in our vision. A goal is not abandoned because we have been able to incorporate the interruptions and employed them toward a fuller result.
When I first learned that Pope Benedict had compared same-sex relationships unfavorably with killing the rainforests, it was a draining interruption, but I was inclined to brush it aside. Not because I didn't find the comment painfully ignorant and cruel. I did. Nor, was I reluctant because I was afraid of some possible disapproval or fallout from even members of my own movement if I publicly challenged it. I wasn't. Homophobia and heterosexism have already taken from me lives far more precious than such a confrontation had the potential to levy.
While I may be wrong, I assumed the Pope wasn't much interested in my opinion of his opinion. I wanted to focus on something else, I was in the crux of trying to hone a metaphor, obvious and accessible enough, that it might persuade more people to consider, if not agree, that capitalism (the admiration of wealth) hurts us. I have become convinced that our collective unwillingness to deeply explore this consideration is the root of all war and human suffering, and that human suffering will not only persist but worsen until we do.
It was implicit or inferred permission, too facilely given, for ignoring this that led me to reconsider. Remarks that were intended to support and comfort were instead demoralizing and discomfiting.
"This isn't a 'peace' topic."
"The issue is too divisive."
"People aren't ready to hear this yet."'
"This could derail the good we're trying to do."
"We don't have time for this right now."
The "least of these" is not usually identified by conscious selection but are a revelation by default. The "least of these" are the oppressed among us we are least inclined to help. The "least of these" are the lepers, the "unclean" we will not touch. They are those we ask to hide themselves. They are those of whom we will not even speak. Or, if we speak of them, we do so in hushed tones and whispers, looking around to see who might be listening. When we make excuses for not unabashedly prioritizing a stand against the discrimination and persecution of LGBT people, the Catholic Worker Movement—if not the entirety of Christendom—positions lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender people as the least of these.
Unfortunately, the pain wrought by persecution is not ameliorated because the persecutor didn't know any better. The statement "I wasn't raised that way," or "We all used think that way," may be explanations, but they aren't exoneration. It's one thing to disagree with Wittgenstein's assertion that the avatar (teacher) must come from the affected class. It is another to pretend we value the wisdom and witness of the oppressed more (or at least as much) as those with status and privilege when we're not willing to act as if we do.
This pattern of reluctance to reconsider our evaluation of human life worth cherishing (or the relative importance of people in our lives) draws a template of humanity's rejection of itself. By noticing this, I discovered that heterosexism was a neat metaphor outlining the functional or dysfunctional operatives of capitalism.
Like the Sword of Damocles, the only conclusion greed can reach swings wider and lower toward our necks, but, we risk it rather than walk away from the chance at wealth beneath the blade.
Any human construction (such as capitalism and heterosexism) that requires us to sacrifice our children to it rather than encourage our children to struggle against it is an agent of homicide that has tricked us into fearing the loss of property, public favor, and status more than we fear losing those we love.
The same way parents will turn away from a gay son or a lesbian daughter, we will watch sons and daughters sent to wars based on lies and greed and do little to stop it. The same way we dismissed the nearly 100,000 deaths in the 1980s caused in this nation by homophobia (AIDS, gay-bashings, and executions), we allow 20,000 each year to die from lack of health care. The same way we give money to the United Way, the Red Cross, the Boy Scouts, churches, and other entities that have blatantly homophobic policies, we keep cutting checks to a Health Insurance Industry that thrives in proportion to how much healthcare it denies not how much it provides.
We want to end senseless death and suffering, but we're willing to pay more to perpetuate it than we're willing to pay to stop it. Some, but very few, are brave enough to pull a few branches off this evil tree; even fewer are willing to go after its roots. This apportionment of our resources not only exposes our accepted national routine of serving mammon more than good, it begs a question.
Why are we faithful to those constructions that lead us to do less good rather more? Why do we continue to cooperate with systems that compel us reject one another rather than love one another? Why won't we pull the roots?
When Jesus said, "The love of money is the root of all evil," he may have meant that the love of money is the root of all evil. It is pathological denial to think we can compromise our morality for the acquisition of money without loving money. Heterosexism is primarily driven by fear of being associated with a lower social caste. Capitalism, on the other hand, is even less kind. It not only encourages the love of money (or caste superiority), it requires it. By these prerequisites capitalism isn’t merely vulnerable to evil, but is the root (cause) of all contemporary evil. A less hubristic, Bill Clinton might have said, "It's not the economy; it's the economic system, stupid."
It is an insidious evil that has convinced us that we are dependent on it for survival, when it is the thing that threatens human survival. It is a sadistic stimulus that will sentence a poor woman who has cheated the system out of $100 in food stamps to more years in prison than a rich man who has stolen billions and has a $100,000 toilet. It is insanity that prizes the risk of the coal mine owner who only risks money, more than the risk of coal mine worker who risks his life in that mine.
The domination of heterosexism and capitalism requires we accept (or least cooperate with) three compelling lies.
Property is more important than people.
It is blasphemy of the human spirit or the potential for anything sacred to propagandize that people are more inclined to work for property than for the good of others. History has proven we do our best work when we are motivated by love and the satisfaction of accomplishment rather than material gain. Jonas Salk didn't invent the Polio vaccine for the cash. Martin Luther King, Jr., didn't spend a night in the Birmingham jail because he was auditioning for the million dollar Nobel Prize. When it's only for money, we do only enough to get the money. When we’re motivated by love, we give as much as we can give.
We know who or what we love by how we calculate the return on our investment. Love is measured by how much we’re willing to give regardless of what we get in return. Contempt is propagated by wanting as much as we can get for giving as little as possible.
It is epidemic social insanity when one will not risk one’s job or social status to save a life, but will take one’s own life after losing a job and its status. Human suffering will not end by learning ways for ourselves and others to acquire more, but by striving together to teach each other how to be content with less.
Some people are more worthy than others.
Heterosexism, like all, human oppression, sprouts in the roots of human greed and grows into a clinging vine of superiority. Both heterosexism and capitalism are constructed to rationalize why some things in life should be denied to others.
Sacrificing human beings to protect property is exercised not so much by witting acts, but by blind acceptance of a scale of human worthiness. Every construction that justifies one human being having a better quality of life than another is an indirect, if not direct, act of violence.
The American Dream is a human nightmare. This “dream” of success determined by material gain is the most powerful provocateur of human isolation. The fact that few routinely socialize with those outside their economic class proves we view our monetary income as the best informant of whether we have “things in common” with each other.
Capitalism and heterosexism disparage mutual human regard simply on the basis of being human because they need cultural hierarchy and the admiration of wealth and exceptional favor in order to grow wealth for wealth’s sake. Oppression controls the privileged with the threat of the same treatment given to the underclass unless the privileged do not shun them from their intimate or private lives. (E.g. “If you don’t mistreat them, we’ll mistreat YOU.”)
We size each other and ourselves according to a silly nightmare of meaningless criteria—the clothes we wear, the cars we drive, and the china we set on our tables—whether we fall in love with someone of the same or the opposite sex. We awaken from the nightmare by daring to reconsider, by daring to question our paradigms of human worthiness. (E.g. “How can Italian china make me feel more sophisticated?”)
Silence will protect us.
This delusion emerges as the most dangerous to the human condition and our survival. Silence is the best guarantor of maintaining the status quo. The idea that if we “keep our heads down” and everything will be okay can never come true because it is not based on anything true.
The lies and corruption recently revealed in the financial crisis have shown us this. When we spin, as shrewd or talented, the ability to lie convincingly, we exaggerate fear and mistrust and ultimately collapse into the complete disintegration of human character.
Why do we teach children that it’s impolite to talk about sex, politics, and religion, when sex, politics, and religion frame every reality? If being polite is an act of mutual consideration, why isn’t it impolite to not discuss these things?
Heterosexism clearly demands silence and often shames LGBT people for openly identifying themselves—”Why do they have to talk about it?”
Tragically the damage done by this worsens as acceptance of LGBT people improves. Twenty years ago to expect silence was to be normative in an environment of silence. Today it is a proactive choice that requires a lot more malice and cruelty. Yet those influences remain not only powerful, but dominant.
To disclose or discuss one’s economic class if one is working class or poor in “mixed company” is met with no less social derision. Common accusations of “victim-hood” for such disclosure are most ironic, because it is, in fact, a capitulation to “victim-hood” to keep quiet about it.
While we all may be “equal” in the eyes of God, the realities of the privileged and the oppressed are very different. Silence or pretending things are the same—may make the privileged feel more comfortable—but it does not and will not make them the same.
Our lives together are superficial and phony until we talk openly about these differences and decide together what to do about them.
It is also wrong-headed to think that the affluent or those who enjoy any form of societal privilege necessarily have less character than those with less privilege. They do not. Greed/generosity, honesty/duplicity, kindness/cruelty are truly equal-opportunity phenomena and present among us all.
Still, the time has come for us to sit together at the human table and talk about how privilege affects us individually and collectively. Now more than ever, we particularly need to talk about capital or money—what we think about it, what we do about it, and what it does to us. To study war-no-more is to intentionally study humanomics, a system that puts people before profits.
Our species and our planet will not survive if we don’t.
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