A Different Perspective

Let them eat cake

This morning at Mass Father talked about threats to the Sacrament of Matrimony and to the survival of the family.  The Gospel was Herodias’ anger at John the Baptizer for telling her “husband” that he shouldn’t be shacking up with her because she had been the wife of his brother.  OK I get it.  And we need to look at the threat to the survival of marriages and families.  But Father gave us the usual stuff, the Party (as in Republican) Line.  Same sex marriage is the overwhelming destroyer of the traditional family.  Hmmm.  Maybe Father needs to wake up and smell the manure. 

When a kid graduates from College or Grad School with 200,000 or 300,000 dollars in school loans, how is he or she going to even think about marriage?  And when the job market is so closed that he or she ends up back home with Mom and Dad (the Boomerang generation), how is he or she going to think about marriage?  And should he or she marry at some point, when it takes both partners working full time outside the home, and there is no paid parental leave, how are they going to think about having a kid?  A kid, we are not talking about three or four much less six or seven.  And when to make 60,000 or 70,000, or 80,000 a year—the minimum it takes to live in a metropolitan area like Washington DC or Atlanta or San Francisco or Chicago or Boston or Dallas or Saint Louis or wherever—one parent or the other has to work a 50 or 60 or 70+ hour week and gets home at 8 at night or later—how is a family going to have dinner together or the other activities that bond spouses to each other and children and parents?  The biggest threat to the family is an economy where 1% of the population holds 40% of the wealth; expand that to 5% and they control 82% of the wealth; and the bottom 80% of the population hold only 11% of the wealth. 

I went to a fascinating workshop last Saturday at the Stamford Church of Christ where Tony Keating who coordinates their adult education forum gave a fascinating presentation on Income Inequality.  This is a subject that has recently been addressed by leaders as varied as Pope Francis and President Obama.  I had been expecting a presentation from the moral/ethical perspective but when the problem was presented from an economist’s perspective, I was blown away to see the sociological chaos resultant from an obscenely lopsided distribution of resources.  As a Christian I cannot but recognize the sinfulness of such a structure; as a historian I can only fear the consequences: Qu’ills mangent de la brioche. 

Time For A Rant

Sorry, guys, we got more
important things than you

As I only listen to the radio when I am driving, I probably should not listen to NPR as my particular brand of road-rage has nothing to do with other drivers (dim-witted as they can be) but in how dense, even stupid, the American public can be, something that NPR seems to spotlight in show after show.  So this past week I find out that the United States is the only industrialized nation in the world that does not require paid parental leave.  It is too expensive!!!  Yes, I realize how expensive it would be to offer.  Like Health-Care—another staple of “First World Nations”—and like universal health care I keep hearing people say “we can’t afford it.”  Well, why can’t we afford it?  We have the money.  Or, we would have the money if we (or our elected representatives) didn't  think that an unbounded supply of military helicopters, tanks, submarines, destroyers (the very word is loaded), jets, carriers, missiles, bombs, and whatever were a greater priority than our children.  And of course included in that priority over the welfare of the American family are the destabilizing wars in Iraq, the war in Afghanistan, the blank-check to our Israeli friends to defend themselves while despoiling Palestinians of their homes, orchards, and farms, the Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation (formerly know as the School of the Americas), and assorted other forays into international oppression.  Now you may say that I am departing from my concentration on the Church and entering the realm of politics, but let me put in this context: I don’t want to hear any of that “family values” crap from any “Christian”—pseudo evangelical or neo-traditionalist katholic—who opposes family leave while supporting a “defense” budget that is larger than that not only of all our allies combined, but of our combined allies together with Russia and China.  Let’s just be honest where our priorities are—and they aren’t with our families.  And the biggest danger to our the stability of our families is not from same-sex marriage but from a socio-economic-political structure that puts support for married couples and their children low on the list of fiscal priorities.   WWJD?  I bet he would just ****.