MIKE PETERS / DAYTON DAILY NEWS
Maybe its the longer warmer days that have me in more amicable spirits, but I couldn’t find a spark of anger when I heard Glenn Beck’s latest protest, encouraging people to leave churches that promote social justice — which all mainline churches do.
You know, Peter, I want to thank Glenn Beck more than scourge him. Maybe I’m banking too heavily on people’s ability to think rationally, but these are the comments for me that write him out. I can’t muster the anger to engage something so incredibly nonsensical. I can, however, see this as an opportunity to draw people’s attention to the term social justice, what it means and how it has become ideologically amorphous to the point that–as you so suitably put it–Glenn beck can throw sewage at it.
The term, though it has many manifestations in multiple socio-political arenas, essential entails an effort to correct those structures that allow for systemic and systematic poverty. Nothing, I would argue, seems more appropriate to the teachings of Jesus. Now, however, the term has become so common place that people confuse it for the likes of charity.
Currently President Obama, in full campaign form that has been absent for far too long, is urging the American people to support healthcare reform. Glenn Beck originally promised he would leave America if it passed. We can only hope, but as my grandfather used to say, “you can hope in one hand and…” I think you know the rest.
What it boils down to for me is classic fear–particularly the fear that accompanies change. For many, America has been a pretty secure place and a term like social justice remains anathema, as does health care reform. As long as I can pay the increasing premiums, why should I care about changing it? The end result is that a country banking on its prosperity will fight for an adulterated form of utilitarian security that neglects the less fortunate. Benjamin Franklin once said, “Any society that would give up a little liberty to gain a little security will deserve neither and lose both.”
Glenn Beck lives in a world of security, the lose of which makes his blonde hair stand on end. Social Justice endeavors on the side of liberty and equity. May we continue to fight that battle and graciously turn the other cheek to those that operate otherwise.
I wish I could share in your optimism about the American public, Preston. Unfortunately, time and again, we’ve shown that we are precisely gullible enough to fall for Glenn Beck’s line of “reasoning”. The position of non-confrontation isn’t serving progress at all. Rather, it plays directly into the hands of those on the Right Wing who see “progress” and “Liberal elitism” as synonyms. When the Left Wing responds with patronizing notions that people “know better” than to believe in the lies of Beck and O’Reilly, they leave the arguments of these pundits–laughable though they may be–absolutely uncontested. There’s no positive content to the Left’s argumentation: there is only passivity.
The central mistake in the mainstream Left is believing that they are fighting a similarly centrist opponent. They are not. Beck and O’Reilly and Fox News are on the extreme of the Right Wing. If they are opposed only by center-Left opinion, the country will stay where we are: in the center-Right. We need to re-energize the radical Left to combat the radical Right. Only then will there be any hope of pulling the country to any kind of truly centrist position. Personally, I’d argue that even THAT is too far to the Right (if I were even to subscribe to the fiction of a linear political spectrum in the first place).
Finally, I’d like to problematize the call to “turn the other cheek”. This notion is invoked far too often in the service of passivity and servility. I think we need to reconsider it as an act of defiance and resistance: it is a way to say that we will not be cowed by the attacks aimed at us.
Someone went to the Left Forum today…
Turning the other cheek is always an act of defiance and resistance, but it is also a pithy expression that intends unbalancing one’s opponent, not playing the game they’ve initiated. It means to disarm, not passively take blows that cow one by the sheer intensity of another.
I suppose this all hinges on the final line of my post. Using “graciously” gave you the impression I meant “passivism” from its pacifist leanings. But I am talking of balancing the love ethic of Jesus with Justice seeking. A difficult dialectical undertaking for sure, but seeking justice in the model of Jesus is to do just that. What have we become when we hasten for the same nails and hammer of our opponent?
This does not mean we become the proverbial mat, but we certainly must be wary of becoming the traipsing feet.
Boston Personalist theologian and social ethicist Walter Muelder saw this misguided fear of government power and state abuse at mid-century. Dictatorial abuses of state power are always to be condemned, “but,” as he writes, “a generalized fear reinforces certain tendencies toward misanthropy.”
I find that comment insightful and prescient.
For some truly alarming parallels, I recommend Cord Jefferson’s piece in The Awl, linked at http://www.theawl.com/2010/04/transcripts-glenn-beck-v-anti-tutsi-propaganda
It is chilling how close Beck comes to the genocidal propaganda of RTLM in Rwanda.