Business and power

Wednesday, September 18, 2024

(click here to listen to or read today’s scriptures)

Business and power

Blessed is the nation whose God is the Lord. May your kindness, O Lord, be upon us who have put our hope in you.

“Ladies and gentlemen, we are now in business.”

I’ve been listening to 24 hours of CBS radio broadcasting on June 6, 1944, D-Day in Europe. Correspondents from Australia, Russia, Canada, Europe and of course many cities in the United States weigh in with thoughts and observations from their parts of the world, in between official announcements from London and New York.

Some of the reporters are embedded in the armed forces, and today I heard one of them speaking from the deck of a US battleship.

“Soon you’ll hear the sound of eight inch guns booming, sending their shells toward shore.”

“Can you hear it, ladies and gentlemen? That was the first salvo.” The reporter’s voice crackled with excitement. “There goes the second! Ladies and gentlemen, we are now in business!”

Well, this was war. Gandhi’s non-violence that resulted in independence for India just three years later had no say that day. Martin Luther King, Jr. was a teenager in Georgia on June 6, 1944. The business of the USA was war, the business of war – the profit-taking, life-destroying, democracy-preserving and government-restoring business of war.

We must fight back. And nearly everyone agreed.

Love does not rejoice over wrongdoing but rejoices with the truth. It bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things.

Today I was caught by two headlines, one from the Associated Press. “Global democracy declines for the eighth straight year.” AP offices around the world reported World War II for nearly every newspaper in America and built a reputation for honest reporting, which still stands today.

The second headline was from a devotion from the Center for Action and Contemplation in Albuquerque.

“Violence begets violence.”

Rev. James Lawson, born in 1928 a year earlier than Martin Luther King, wrote simply:

Violence is ineffective and has been throughout the world for too many years. It drains emotional, psychological, moral, and spiritual energy with no good consequences.

If my own thinking reflects that of other Americans (and I think it does), I would say we are at best double-minded, deriving double messages about our values from advertising, politics, and religion, which leave us confused and exhausted, often wordless. I catch myself waiting for someone else to do something. I am sure I am not alone.

When I was a child, I spoke like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child. When I became a man, I put away childish things.

Twenty years before D-Day in 1925, four years before Black Friday on Wall Street triggered the worldwide Great Depression, President Calvin Coolidge was speaking about the evils of propaganda, and in his speech he too talked about business. “After all, the chief business of the American people is business. They are profoundly concerned with producing, buying, selling, investing, and prospering in the world.”

Nothing about that has changed. American business pursues those goals with cutthroat perseverance. Our own standard of living reflects success, but how we take advantage of others around the world is obscured or invisible, hence that persistent feeling of double-mindedness that accompanies our comfort.

The violence implied in all of this is rarely seen, or even named. But when I read the pleading of the Lord in Isaiah or Joel or in so many of the books called the Major and Minor Prophets, I feel ashamed.

Rev. Lawson continues:

From the perspective of Gandhi, nonviolence is the use of power to try to resolve conflicts, injuries, and issues in order to heal and uplift, to solidify community, and to help people take power into their own hands and use their power creatively. Nonviolence makes the effort to use power responsibly.  

And when Jesus called for us to love our enemies, what he meant was …

… what the Quakers and William Penn pledged to the Native Americans during colonial times: how even though we are very different, and we come from different countries and different cultures with many different languages, we have a common human experience that we can show each other and that we can come to respect.  

In other words, know that we are all baptized into one Body, and act that way.

For now we see a glass, darkly, but then face to face. Now I know in part, then I shall know fully, even as I am fully known.

 (1 Corinthians 12, Psalm 33, John 6, Luke 7)

(posted at www.davesandel.net)

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