A New Housing Policy

Cleaning up after the fight

They have this really good idea at The Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem: "If you clean it, you own it!" As a consequence, the Greek Orthodox, Armenian Orthodox, and Roman Catholic priests clean as much of the floor as they can, every year.

Actually, each of the three groups think they own it, but they have worked out a rough, but contested, agreement about who cleans what part of the floor. They have also worked out rough, and contested, attempts to clean a little bit more of the floor, each year. The result is not pretty.

They get into broom fights. And fist fights. And they say damnable things to each other.

This year, again, the police had to get into the church through that little door of humility to break up the fight. The police said they didn't arrest anyone because all of the participants were priests.

The roof leaks, too, and has done so for a long time, but the priests can't agree who should pay to fix the roof, so the art work is going to hell in a hand basket. A lot of it has already gone, as have a lot of the priests.

But we shouldn't scorn the men of God who are just doing their best to protect what is said to the the location of Jesus' birth. We should, instead, recognize that the principle, "If you clean it, you own it!", might be a way our of our housing crisis. Our cities are littered with empty houses, not exactly owned by the banks. The banks have bundled the mortgages into those magical-money-making-derivatives that nobody seems to own.

Maybe we should take a lesson from the holy men in Bethlehem, and say, "If you want to move in and clean it, it's yours! And if you won't keep it clean, you can't have it!"

Of course, we would have to work out a better roof policy. But that is probably not insurmountable, either, if we can keep the Greek Orthodox, and Armenian Orthodox, and Roman Catholic priests out of the way. They aren't good at roofs.

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The Sea is Rising

Let us just step back: two hundred and fifty years ago, or so, the ships of England and Spain had drifted onto a whole new continent, as they saw it, from far north to a savagely cold south; pole to pole, as if there were such things. Millions of people already lived here, some of them still hunters and gatherers; some of them very wealthy, indeed! Gold and silver stolen from the southern Americas funded Spanish and English dreams. There was land, lots of land, under starry skies above, rich land, and oil and coal and iron ore. The whole western world learned how to build industries not on simple muscle power, but on steam and oil. We farmed, too, of course. All we needed was cheap labor--slave labor from Africa, mostly, so the ships came with slave labor. Chinese labor built railroad beds where there had been rock cliffs. Europeans, long used to killing each other for good, religious reasons, brought their religious savagery with them. Even when all they wanted to do w

That's all we want: fairness! Not more guns and more war! Fairness!

The five police officers who were killed in Dallas are certainly not the officers who killed innocent citizens. There is more than enough tragedy to go around. "What is happening to our country?", Mari asked this morning. I had no answer. We do have an answer. We do not want to say it. There are lots of answers, all of them pertinent. We are a racist society, like most human societies. We are a society in the midst of enormous changes-- social, political, economic--and we do not know what to do about it. We are divided unsustainably into absurdly rich, and an enormous number of crumbling middle class families, and poor. We have guns everywhere; military guns, guns just for killing people, cheap guns, heroes carrying guns into churches and supermarkets, idiots who think guns ought to be allowed in bars and schools and ball games and beauty parlors and political rallies. Our political process is almost useless. There are good people in Congress, but there

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