Dog eat dog: how to be a cannibal.

Now the Republicans are lining up to argue that unemployment benefits encourage unemployment. The theory seems to be that hunger and homelessness are really a way to encourage people to apply for a job at Chrysler Corporation, where all the jobs are. Right? Sleeping in a car is a grand way to encourage job creation!

Is something bass-ackward here, or is this the most callous disregard for human well-being we have heard in a long while?

It is something like arguing that madness is inherited. You catch it from your kids.

I am shameless, so I shall say that once upon about fifty years ago, I was a parish pastor in California. I wanted to join Social Security, but there were just a fine, large number of religious people who thought that any form of such insurance was an admission that God would not take care of his children when they became old and poor and badly in need of health care, so special provisions had to be made for people like me who dearly loved the Lord, but who dearly hated the idea of being old and poor and sick and homeless. So I was able to "buy in" while the church closed its eyes.

Something like that.

This madness is inherited, but not from our kids. We inherit it from the people who think we are not all in this together. Screw the poor! They aren't trying hard enough! If you feed them, they will not feed themselves at our cost! When they come to apply for a job, tell them that these are tough times, and that they have to pull themselves together.

In some wandering way, human history is a story of how we have recognized that it is not simply about ourselves, or our family, or our clan, or tribe, or nation, but that we are all in this together.

Teilhard de Chardin once said that we have come to the point where we look up and see ourselves coming over the horizon, toward us. They are what we are. The enemy is our relative. The relative is not our enemy. The human race has come to face itself.

How can our politicians suggest that those without work are at fault? How can they say that they must pay the price? It is our system! And, if in the system we have devised, while some are hurting, how can we say that offering help is a stupid mistake?

Maybe Darwin was wrong. Maybe the fittest are the people who care the least, or who think in shallow pools. Maybe not giving a damn is the way out of hunger. Maybe we are not all in this together.

A strong nation feeds its people, educates its people, tends to the old, the sick, and the helpless. A strong nation cares for its people, because if it does not care, it is sick and rotten at the core.

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