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SAVING THE WORLD, ONE BY ONE |
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Written by scott
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Sunday, 10 June 2007 |
SAVING THE WORLD, ONE BY ONE
Proverbs 8:1-4, 22-31; Romans 5:1-5; John 16:12-15
June 3, 2007
Amy Dalton and I had a long conversation this week. She wanted to tell me about her involvement in and excitement about a New Sanctuary Movement, a faith-based movement to address the terrible pressures being brought to bear on poor people, peasants, and farmers of Central America. A few years back, you may remember, the United States became a part of the North American Free Trade Agreement, NAFTA. The idea behind it was that free trade, without local protections, would improve life for all. The reality is somewhat different.
You see, one of the big provisions of NAFTA is that member states cannot enact regulations and tariffs to protect their local economic communities. That might sound reasonable, if no one has special protection, then the businesses that work most efficiently will thrive and grow and the inefficient ones will wither away and—to use an image from the arguments for NAFTA—a rising tide lifts all boats. Unfortunately, in the real world, that rising tide is drowning a lot of people who don’t have a boat, whose feet are sort of, shall we say, stuck in the mud as the waters rise around them.
To explain, let’s look at a simple crop, corn. We grow it in the US. Local peasants grow it in Mexico and Central America. It is the cornerstone of a poor person’s diet in Central America. For many, many years, small farmers, peasants, have grown corn, ground what they needed for their own tortillas and sold the rest in the local markets to get the money they needed to live a simple life. It was a simple way of being, and no one got wealthy, but also, no one starved.
After NAFTA, the cheapest corn in the markets of Central America is corn grown in the United States, corn subsidized, fertilized, and grown with the economic benefits of very large agribusiness, often to the harm of local small farmers, here and in Central America. So, the local farmers of Central America no longer have a market for their own corn, even as they still have all the debts associated with farming. Sometimes it’s even worse. They may have been convinced at some time to plant one of the new hybrid patented corns, noted for high production, in an attempt to beat the economic margin. But using that corn carries terrible consequences. You see, subsistence farmers have always saved seed from one harvest to plant the next year. But if the saved seed has the new, patented corn genes in it, which of course it will, for that is how seed forms, then to use that saved corn seed to plant the next year is theft—for it is taking the patented genes without paying for them. Moreover, if one farmer decided not to go that route, but continued to plant the lower yield seed he had always planted, the next year’s saved seed might still carry the patented genes, for pollen blows in the air from farm to farm and is carried from plant to plant by bees who don’t distinguish between ordinary corn and patented corn. So now, whether or not the farmer decided to use the hybrid corn initially, it is not legal to use the seed he has saved from the previous year. He must buy seed on the old agricultural plan, debt in the spring, to be paid off at the harvest, when the crop is sold.
Do you see the problem? NAFTA has eliminated the local market for the corn, and without the market, the farmer goes deeper and deeper into debt. Someone may be working land that has been in the family for generations: for the first time, it is not able to provide a simple livelihood for the farmer. To stay on the land is not simply to not have the riches that someone else has; it is to watch your family be destroyed by debt. This is the economic engine that is driving the massive emigration from Central America to North America; this is why the young men and women of Central America are risking so much to move North, legally or illegally, so that they can earn money to send home to keep their families—parents, siblings, spouses, and children—alive. How much impact has this economic engine had in recent years? Between 1994, when NAFTA was passed, and 2004, 1.3 million Mexican small farmers went bankrupt. Mexico has been a net importer of US corn all those years. Many of those farmers and their families moved North. How many? Perhaps this tells us something: in 2005, Mexicans in the United States sent $20 billion home to family members still in Mexico. Their efforts to support their family members bring more money into Mexico that all of tourism, than all of the oil trade, and than all the maquiladoras factories assembling “Made in Mexico” goods for export into US markets. At the same time, workers in the US fear that the presence of so much desperate labor drives wages down North of the border. The great economic engine of NAFTA is pitting workers against each other, all scrambling for the jobs that will keep their families alive, North and South of the border. This is the engine that drives both the vastly increased immigration rates and the profound anger at the numbers of immigrants.
As Amy has learned these facts, she has been moved, I would say, by the act of the Spirit, to speak, to organize, to put her energy and labor into efforts to publicize and resist and try to change the patterns that are destroying lives North and South of the border. She will leave here, next Sunday, to spend her summer in organizing work in Los Angeles, before going on to New York in the fall to attend the school of theology at Union in New York City.
Today, we read scripture, a wonderful passage from Proverbs, that describes the Wisdom of God, Sophia, present from the beginning of creation. At the end of the passage, she proclaimed, “when God marked out the foundations of the earth, then I was beside him, like a master worker; and I was daily his delight, rejoicing before him always, rejoicing in his inhabited world and delighting in the human race.”
The Wisdom of God—that creative, powerful energy that calls all being toward God’s objectives, towards beauty and justice, towards peace and joy, towards the unfolding of compassion and the reenergizing of empathy—this Wisdom of God, this Holy Spirit is alive and active today, now, here.
I subscribe to a magazine, Ode, published in the Netherlands and calling itself a magazine for “intelligent optimists.” Last month’s issue had an article by Paul Hawken, who has written a book, Blessed Unrest. Hawken has been an activist and speaker for environmental issues for more than a decade. Each time he spoke about environmental issues, and he has done so more than a thousand times in the last 15 years, people would come up afterward to talk with him, to tell him about the small acts of environmental stewardship or healing that occupied their minds and hearts. They would give him their cards, and he would take them home and put them into an ever-growing pile of cards on his desk. After a while, it grew deeper than he could keep in a pile, and still the cards kept coming. He began to sort them in different ways, by country, by age, by commitment, and to notice that some of the cards were from people who focused on “healing the earth” and some were from people who focused on what I would call “healing the world”—that is, he was getting cards form people who cared about the planet and from people who cared about and for issues of justice and peace and poverty and wholeness for all the peoples of the earth. Soon, he had thousands of cards, cards from people like Amy, maybe like me, maybe like you. Not big-name “important” people, but people who knew that things weren’t right and began to look for small ways, local ways, their own ways to make it better, if even a little bit, if only in their own neighborhood.
As the cards piled up, thousands of them, he began to realize that they represented a vast movement, a coming together of more people than have ever worked toward a common goal, a tremendous gathering of people, each intent on “Healing the world.” They didn’t know each other, mostly. Most of them had no sense of being a part of something new and huge, They were just common people, doing what they could. One of them could have been our neighbor Susan Landauer, who devotes time and effort to planting trees in North Portland. One of them could have been Dotti Swenson, who volunteers at the Children’s Relief Nursery, caring for the smallest and most vulnerable of children. One of them could have been Lisa Horne, who builds affordable housing for people who live in North Portland. One of them could have been Trena Klohe, who provides legal counsel for victims of domestic violence. One of them could have been Paul Swenson, who devotes his days to transporting blood for the Red Cross so that there will be blood available when any of us need it for medical care. One of them could have been Dick Burdon, who volunteers time with Basic Rights Oregon, devoting his own life energy to the idea that basic rights are important for all of us. One of them could have been Bev Read, who has been providing transportation for Bev Heginbotham as she goes to her chemo treatments. One of them could have been Scott Jensen, who puts energy into making the Portsmouth neighborhood a good place to live. One of them could have been you, doing whatever it is that you do because it’s “the right thing to do.” What he was observing is that the number of people who are deciding, on their own and without any particular sense of being in a “movement” is growing immensely, rapidly, and off the radar of those who watch social movements. You won’t pick up the newspaper and read that thousand of Portlanders are taking action to heal the world, or millions of Oregonians, or billions of people in the world. But it is happening. He drew a comparison to the way our immune systems work—when there is a danger, a threat to my health or yours, our body mobilizes T cells and proteins, immunoglobulins and monocytes, macrophages and antibodies, all working independently and yet in common to heal my body, or yours. The immune system, he claims, is the most diverse and complicated system in our body, functioning everywhere, dispersed through lymphatic fluids and localized in lymph nodes scattered all through our bodies. And it works. Without it, I wouldn’t live three days from right now, for it takes on bacteria and funguses, parasites and viruses, all the time, everywhere, so effectively that we never think about it, except in those rather rare moments when it is temporarily overwhelmed.
Paul Hawken identified an immune system of the biosphere, a growing, dispersed, and ever-present gathering of individuals who serve the common good where they are, as they can. This movement gives him hope, he claims, that there is a force at work that can help us heal from the environmental degradation, economic injustice, and destructions of the lives of vulnerable peoples. He claims that it has three basic and intertwined roots: environmental activism, social justice initiatives, and the resistance to globalization put forward by indigenous cultures. “Collectively,” he writes, “it expresses the needs of the majority of people on Earth to sustain the environment, wage peace, democratize decision-making and policy, reinvent public governance piece by piece, . . , and improve the lives of women, children, and the poor.”
Does that excite you? Do you see it, as I do, as a moment when we can see, with our own eyes, the working of the Spirit of God, alive among us, doing something about what we all know needs to be addressed, and doing it, as God always does, by working inside human hearts, inspiring, leading, calling, pushing, nudging, and bringing us, one by one and all together, to do what we can, where we can, to heal the world.
On Mother’s Day, some of us listened to a story of fictional grandmothers and moved ourselves out of our comfort zones to stand outside and pray for the healing of the world. Today, I tell you, it is happening. God is at work in us, leading us from suffering to endurance and from endurance to character—courage and compassion and a willingness to give of ourselves—and from character to hope, hope which does not disappoint us, “because God’s love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit that has been given to us.”
This is real; this is true; and this is happening in and all around us, the love and justice and creative Wisdom of God, alive in the world right now, calling us forward and giving us hope. Thanks be to God. Alleluia! Amen.
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