I'm going to comment on a post by Arminian theologian Roger Olson:
The underlying problem that (so far) I have heard no one talking about is our American affluence, including conspicuous consumption and luxury, promoted to the world via movies and television as the result of “the American dream,” combined with our boast to be a “nation of immigrants.” While we do have our own poor in the U.S., most of them are living in the lap of luxury compared with many people in Latin America. And we love to show off our prosperity and affluence, even our luxurious possessions and lifestyles, to the rest of the world—including our neighbors. Then we expect them to stay away. But we are like a magnet to the poor next door. Who can blame them for being drawn almost inexorably to us?
My wife and I often watch a television show called “House Hunters International” on the Home and Garden channel. But my stomach turns when I see U.S. rich people south of our border to spend hundreds of thousands, sometimes millions, of dollars on mansions on beaches in Latin American countries where just a few miles away thousands of children are literally suffering malnutrition, infant mortality (that could be alleviated), lack of education, and are living like animals in hovels.
You question that? A few years ago my wife and I took our one and only vacation to Mexico. We stayed in a very simple, inexpensive “eco-resort” on a beach south of Cancun. In the nearby town and surrounding jungles we saw with our own eyes two shocking things. Lining the beaches near our extremely modest “resort” (not even electricity in the cabanas) were enormous, luxurious gated resorts inhabited almost exclusively by Americans. In the nearby town we saw one neighborhood made up of what looked like animal barns surrounded by mud with pigs and chickens. These hovels were inhabited by women and children. The children were obviously malnourished (hugely extended, bloated stomachs typical of that disorder) and “playing” in mud among the pigs and chickens.
These people “know” that within reach is a paradise of affluence and luxury, free universal education, health care, food and…hope. And yet we who live in the lap of luxury expect them to stay away.
The problem is often framed as “those bad Latin Americans who want to come and take what we have” rather than as “we rich Americans who show off our luxury and want to keep it all to ourselves.”
As a Christian, I ask my fellow Texans and others (many of who consider themselves Christians) to consider Jesus’ parable of the rich man and Lazarus. Who are we, America, in the parable? Who are the Central American children standing or sitting on one side of our border or the other?
Recently a Christian man in my town, very well known, a “pillar of the community,” purchased a partially built mansion on the edge of town with twenty-three thousand square feet of living space.
Notice how he lumps middle-class Americans in with the super rich.
More to the point, there's more than one way to react to the invidious comparison. When Russian communists were exposed to American freedom and prosperity, that caused them to question their own system. "Why can't we do the same thing in our own country?"
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Boris Yeltsin reacted somewhat differently to a Houston supermarket in 1989. He expressed astonishment at the abundance and variety of the products he saw, but in his autobiography Against the Grain he describes the experience as "shattering": "When I saw those shelves crammed with hundreds, thousands of cans, cartons, and goods of every possible sort, for the first time I felt quite frankly sick with despair for the Soviet people. That such a potentially super-rich country as ours has been brought to a state of such poverty! It is terrible to think of it."
After Yeltsin visited that Houston supermarket, says Lilia Shevtsova of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, "he became a reformer." Bill Keller, a former New York Times Moscow correspondent and now the Times's executive editor, sees Yeltsin's visit to the United States in even broader perspective: "The prosperity, the rule of law, the freedom and efficiency [Yeltsin] witnessed in America, catalyzed his notions about the fraud of communism."
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White man's burden. There are plenty of wealthy Mexicans and poor Anglo Americans.
ReplyDeleteHe has tenure doesn't he? This is another case of a limousine liberal advocating for a policy that will have damaging consequences for millions of Americans, but that will have no consequences for him, since he knows he will be insulated from them.
ReplyDeleteIf he's sincere, he should should put his money where his mouth is and join Shane Claiborn. If not he should be more honest about the ethical problems involved with what he's agitating for.