Tea and Occupy -- Sightings


The Tea Party and the Occupy Movement are in many ways two sides of the same coin.  Both have grass roots origins.  Both represent voices of frustration.  Both have conflicting messages.  And of course, both are subject to manipulation by political forces.  This week Martin Marty lifts up the issue of how the story of the American worker gets told.  He tells the story of two communities that had good workers, but lost manufacturing jobs due to a loss of market.  He wants, in this essay, to help shift the conversation away from the "lazy American unemployed worker" that gets lambasted in the press (mostly conservative) to the reality of the times and invites us as people of faith to work to set the story straight.  So, take a read and offer your thoughts.
**********************************

Sightings  11/21/11
  
Tea and Occupy
-- Martin E. Marty
  Twice in the last four years I have spied Benton Harbor, Michigan, a once flourishing factory town that has suffered all manner of ills: bad leadership, racial conflicts, and more. Its downtown is ghostly. The most devastating blow occurred when Whirlpool abandoned it and its workers some years ago. Friday’s Wall Street Journal has a déjà vu inspiring headline: “As Whirlpool Exits, Job Hunts Begin.” This time the victim is Ft. Smith, Arkansas. It shows “Grit Among Loss” and has “A Knack for Marketing Area’s Low Costs to Manufacturers.” Applause, please, seconded by tears.
           
James R. Hagerty tells how in 1962 the city held a parade welcoming Whirlpool, but now the company announced it will close in mid 2012, stranding more than 1,000 workers, noting “sluggish demand” in the American market. Note: “The fault wasn’t with Fort Smith or its workers,” a Whirlpool spokesperson insists, “It is a great work force.”  Stop here: what follows is not an analysis of markets and management; better informed people can and do comment on such. The interest here is in “the great work force” that is left behind in much political discourse but more often thought of among religious commentators. What goes on?
           
Listen to the rhetoric of those political commentators who blast the unemployed and underemployed and go on to criticize any mention that governmental moves might help change things. Listen to political campaigners on cable news networks or in close-ups on National Public Radio or read them in newspapers, and hear them deceive. They couldn’t be more clear: “Everyone in America can get a job and can succeed. Look at me! I did!” Then think of Benton Harbor and Ft. Smith and another city any day. Stories featuring welfare cheats, as they have been called for a half century, are also true: there are (perhaps) millions who work the system and do not seek employment. But they don’t deserve all the space in stories about the economy.
           
At this point in columns like this, one faces the question: where is the voice of the churches, of all the faiths, to protest such inhumane distorting if not outright lying? Much is going on; much is being said. But the sympathizers and empathizers don’t get the big forums in pop culture as they go about analyzing, speaking, motivating, cheering, organizing, often in little-noticed local efforts. Where are the denominations? They are not and maybe never were effective instruments for making judgments and mobilizing, though one can make the case that they have had their innings in the Civil Rights and anti-war struggles, and they can keep the issues alive for their constituencies. Independent national magazines speak up, but they reach only thousands. Thus The Christian Century cover banners “The Case Against Wall Street” by an eloquent Gary Dorrien. In liberal Protestant style, his article comes associated with an editorial introduction by John Buchanan, who raises a few credible reservations. And there is Commonweal with David O’Brien’s cover, “Economic Justice for All?” which mournfully revisits the Bishops’ Economics Pastoral on its 25thanniversary.
           
The Tea Party and Occupy movements are hardly effective fronts for analysis or providing direction. But they get their hearing as voices of frustration. They may be officially “secular” but they echo the more and more “religious” voices. In political as in religious ethical talk, it’s “the economy, ” but not only that.

 Martin E. Marty's biography, publications, and contact information can be found at www.memarty.com.

----------
 In this month's Religion and Culture Web Forum, Eliza Slavet considers Freud's theory of Jewishness as it emerges from his final book, Moses and Monotheism. Slavet argues that Freud, writing on the eve of the Holocaust, proposed that Jewishness is constituted by the inheritance of ancestral memories, which Jewish people are inexorably compelled to transmit to future generations, whether consciously or unconsciously. As in her book, Racial Fever: Freud and the Jewish Question, Slavet ultimately argues that Freud's racial theory of Jewishness allows us to think about the dynamics of race as a concept, beyond the realm of physical variation, and to consider racial thinking without reducing it to racism.
 ----------
  Sightings comes from the Martin Marty Center at the University of Chicago Divinity School.

Comments

Popular Posts