By Ted Braun / Chronicle contributor
Each day in our world, an estimated 150,000 people die. The reason may be old age, illness, injury, or a lack of what is necessary to sustain and nourish life. Although these 150,000 individuals are bound together by a common leave-taking experience, each of them represents a unique, never-to-be-repeated human experience.
Our uniqueness comes from many factors. It makes a lot of difference where a person is born, and into what nation, class or ethnic group. Differences result from the kinds of basic equipment such as genes and chromosomes we start out with. And it makes a lot of difference what kind of support, such as health care and education, we are provided as we grow.
Fortunate, indeed, are those citizens who are so valued and supported in their nations that they are able to enjoy access to adequate shelter, meaningful employment, free health care and education through university, and a variety of cultural opportunities. They are fortunate to have governments that consider these to be basic human and social rights and not special privileges for those who are more wealthy.
Of course, this does not always happen in the real world. In our own country, the gap between rich and poor is greatly increasing. Wealth determines who gets to run for, and be elected to, public office; what we get to see on television and read in our newspapers; where the best public schools are located; who is able to enjoy the best kind of health care and afford adequate housing, if not McMansions.
Some of the early Fourth Century church leaders, such as Basil and Ambrose, had strong words to say about the economics of privilege. Both of them shared the view that the world had been created as common for all, but that the rich had appropriated this commonwealth as their own. When human owners can exercise their claim to this wealth as their "right," they said, this legitimates unlimited greed in place of communal responsibility. Things are given more attention than persons.
Our nation is presently experiencing a serious financial crisis. Our current economic system, with its predatory, non-transparent and unregulated financing, has turned into a disaster. Our system of privatizing profits and socializing costs is bringing ruin to families and communities. To help in trying to solve this problem we have turned to those same greedy financial magnates, institutions and corporations that were causing this problem. In addition, we have turned over to them huge amounts of unsupervised taxpayer funding.
Some people believe that when we join the group of 150,000 taking leave of this earth, we will then move into a better habitat. But others are convinced that we need to work on some serious reforming of our economy before we take that leave.
There are several steps we can take to begin reforming our system, such as re-installing regulatory mechanisms, and making the meeting of human need rather than profit-making the bottom line. Perhaps this is an opportune moment for some directions in social and economic democratizing. One approach would be to create publicly owned banks to provide important financing for cooperatives, start-up projects in green technology, and mixed forms of worker-community enterprises that have been spurned by the traditional banks.
As Gary Dorrien, professor of Social Ethics at Union Theological Seminary in New York, has pointed out, "Economic democracy is a brake on human greed and domination; the whole point of it is to fight the universal propensity of dominant groups to hoard social goods and abuse disenfranchised people."
This fight against the "universal propensity of dominant groups to hoard social goods" is probably one of the most important battles on earth today. It's a challenge especially confronting each advancing group of 150,000 before their turn comes to leave.
Not only is this a political and economic challenge but a religious one, as well. If we believe in a God of the whole human family, and not just a tribal deity who relates to a part of that family, then we come to a radical new understanding. Each member in that global family is valued by God. And therefore we are also to value each member of that same global family: they are our own brothers, sisters, fathers, mothers, and children.
We have a lot of work to do before we join our group of departing 150,000.
