Before the revolution, the class hierarchies of the community were reproduced inside the church. After the revolution, the ‘middling sort’ of people (the lower/middle class) asserted their equality in a radical cultural revolution that changed everything from the way people dressed (the origin of the dull gray suit) to the way people addressed each other (everyone became a ‘mister’). That happen in all social settings. For example: students went wild on college campuses, burning buildings, mocking their professors, even beating their college presidents when necessary! (Parallels to the Chinese Cultural Revolution.)

But it also happened in church. The lower and middle ‘sorts’ (they didn’t say ‘classes’ yet) pointed to the New Testament’s egalitarianism (Don’t give those good seats to the rich guys!) and demanded equality in spiritual fellowship.

Guess what the rich folk did? They left and formed their own congregations, or became Universalists, or stayed in their old congregations when all the middling sorts left for the new evangelical Methodist, Baptist and other 2nd Great Awakening churches.

The NT paints a picture of congregations that were both egalitarian AND mixed class…doesn’t it? The Catholic Church has always included mixed classes as long as the geography of the parish has. In the reformation, congregations were mixed, but probably not so egalitarian. Is it worth hoping that the American church in the 21st century is a place where people can, to use Shane’s phrase, “fall in love across class lines?”

Americans are freaking out, as they should be, as their society and economy crumbles down around them. If you don’t know that’s what’s happening, then you’re not paying attention. Glenn Beck is one of the few prominent voices who’s connecting full-on with that very appropriate anxiety.

But he’s using a classic, uncreative stunt to do it: demonizing a false enemy — in this case “communists,” a category that includes for Beck everyone from Woodrow Wilson to Obama to Wallis and even to little old me.

But over the past few months he’s gone beyond political attack to almost sexualized sadism (“pounding” the Reverend Jim Wallis “all night long”???). He has been taunting and threatening his targets in breathless whispers and hysterical screams, separated with dramatic pauses and prolonged evil villain cackles. Listen for yourself.

Joker:

One Reason I Will Have Trouble Voting for the Dems in 2010

Tonight, when I read Representative John Larson’s “Top Ten Immediate Benefits You’ll Get When Health Care Reform Passes“, the first thing that came into my mind was the memory of a Pennsylvania worker named James who once told me how he traded his $30/hour job at Bethlehem Steel for a nearly minimum wage job in a nursing home.

In the 1980′s, a company called USX bought up most of the American steel industry with the intention of milking it for cash while gradually dismantling it. Step One was busting the union. The company proposed a deep pay cut in contract negotiations. It cited low wages in the rising Korean Steel industry. At the time, the Korean government was investing billions of dollars to develop steel as a national champion. Today Korean steelworkers make up a big chunk of the high-income Korean middle class. But I digress.

Humiliated, James and his fellow workers voted to accept the pay cut. USX then made it clear that their intention was to provoke the workers to strike, no matter what it took. It immediately came back with a new demand for an even deeper pay cut.

James told me, “Some of the union leaders told us we should accept what they offered — that a $15/hour job was a hell of a lot better than a $5/hour job.” This time, though, he and most of his co-workers voted against the second cut.

“You have to be able to look yourself in the mirror,” he said, “I wasn’t going to be able to do that if I had said, ‘yeah, go ahead, take away everything, I don’t mind.’ Sometimes it gets to a point when you have to say go f–k yourself. Because they’re going to take what they want with or without your consent. They’re only asking your consent because they don’t want to think of you as a human being any more. Only animals walk themselves willingly to the slaughterhouse.”

John Larson’s top “immediate benefit” is: “Prohibit pre-existing condition exclusions for children in all new plans.”

Do I have to spell out what that means? As it stands in the apparent bill they’re going to vote on, the Democrats are not willing to protect all Americans from the “pre-existing condition” scam — but are attempting to win our consent by dangling a promise to cover our children. My best friend in high school lived below the poverty line — something we never talked about until recently. He told me about the terror he felt when his mother could not go to the doctor, and the shame that he felt when she was able to take him thanks to a program that covered children only.

The Dems say we should trust that adults too will be protected, according the current bill, starting in 2014. Why the wait? It is simply a concession to insurance companies who will reap at least an additional few years of super profits and at most get the new rules repealed. Meanwhile, I have several friends with “pre-existing conditions” who are in trouble right now. Larson’s second “immediate benefit” is that they will be put in a “temporary high risk pool”. Will that pool be subsidized? How much will my friends have to pay? What if they can’t afford it?

What can possibly explain why the Democrats would write the bill to protect only children from the pre-existing condition scam and not everyone? Don’t be distracted by talk of campaign contributions or “pressure” from lobbyists. Donations from one industry are not going to make the difference to any candidates. Moreover, any candidate who stood up to insurance lobbyists would find the lost contributions more than replaced by rewards from the grassroots. And finally, you dumbasses, the health care donors are simply going to give you MORE money if you vote against them in hopes of winning you over the next time.

The hard truth is that the Democrats, as a body, don’t care if you have health care. They are just as much on the side of the insurance companies as James’ sold-out union was on the side of USX.

Over decades, insurance companies have worked together with corrupt and careless politicians to make super profits while bleeding America of nearly one fifth of our total economic product. It would be wrong to blame the insurance companies for this — because, after all, their purpose is to maximize profit. Politicians — both Democratic and Republican — wrote the regulations that give a handful of companies an oligopoly and prevents a normal competitive market from developing. Single payer or Medicare For All would be great — but baring that, I’d settle for a normal insurance market over this Soviet-style oligopolistic bureaucracy that stands between us and our doctors today. Instead, what we have is a cancer that’s devouring the whole American economy.

Just ask yourself why the price of computers falls by half every few years and the price of health insurance doubles every few years? In the information age, you’re telling me that there’s no way to arrange for the sharing of health care costs that more efficient than how our health insurance dinosaurs do it now?

That’s not it. We’re simply being taken advantage of. And our elected representatives are the ones handing us over for the slaughter. And now, the 2010 elections are coming up. And the Democrats are going to be asking us to vote for them again. I’m not voting for the bastards. I’m going to do what James did. I’m going to tell them to go to hell. And don’t say to me it’s because I’m covered. I’m right in the middle of worrying about health insurance coverage for my family. Last year we had to pay Cobra because we had the “pre-existing condition” of a pregnancy. And now I’ve got a baby girl to worry about who may go un-covered for a couple months now that our Cobra is running out.

What the Democrats are doing is wrong. It’s not a “compromise” with anyone but the American people. It’s a defense of the Insurance industry — an industry in which a number of the execs are actually embarrassed about how lavishly they’ve been protected at the expense of the American people. Of course they have an army of lobbyists. It is their job to lobby for rules that benefit them. And it is the peoples’ representatives to say, “Sorry, no.”

And it is the American people’s job to say, “Sorry, No” to any political party who asks us to casts votes in favor of our own demise.

His explanation starts at 5:00 in this clip.

As it happens, I’ve come to know a widow here in Kansas city. She is raising three happy, brilliant children. She is a refugee who’s been resettled to Kansas City by the U.S. government. She doesn’t speak English. It’s very difficult for her to find work. She has the disadvantage of appearing as though she just walked out of the pages of National Geographic. I’m just saying…that’s how she looks to potential employers: Teeth stained black from chewing beetle nut, wearing a sarong and handwoven blouse, and one missing eye (probably from the war that took her husband). After spending many hours looking for jobs for refugees who are much closer to what employers are looking for than she is, I’m confident there is no job for her here. And anyways: her kids have a hard enough time in this society as it is. I’d hate to see them left alone in their public housing project all day, and/or all evening, as their mom worked in some far off factory or warehouse.

She’s collecting welfare, which will last another few years. Then she will have no support (thanks to the limits on welfare passed by that tax and spend liberal Bill Clinton).

Would any Christians out there like to help take care of this widow and her children? My family can pitch in $100 a month. But that’s only enough to make our relationship with her extremely complicated — not enough to actually give her any stability. If anyone wants to join in helping, let me know and I can share more information about the family and their needs.

Esther was born May 31. It’s been awesome.

Typically, something as interesting as that would inspire me to write more, not less. But one side effect of Esther’s arrival was that I had to take over some of Elizabeth’s responsibilities to friends in need. She was eight months pregnant but calls kept coming in from refugee families needing help with medical, legal, financial and paperwork emergencies. So I finally crossed the line that I had been resisting for 20 years: I started getting wrapped up in the messy details of other people’s hard lives — as opposed to “organizing” them, or advocating for “policy” to help them.

Finally getting my hands dirty in various hopeless situations stunned me into silence. What it actually did was give me TOO MUCH to say, and left me tongue tied.

For the past 20 years, I witnessed and condemned systemic injustice. I thrived on the drama of “organizing” against it. But I carefully avoided ever getting my hands dirty in the messy business of merely surviving in the face of it. I hope it takes me another 20 years to get over the humiliation of having to admit that.

At the same time, I’m angry in a whole new way about the Democrats bailing out bankers while barely leaving crumbs to people suffering out here. And I’m angry in a whole new way about Christians who say it’s the churches’ responsibility and not the government’s, but who do nothing but donate a little money, or show up somewhere one Saturday morning a year.

See how easy it was for me to go from humiliation to self-righteous anger in two paragraphs? That’s why I’m not fit to be writing publicly.

There’s another reason I can’t write publicly about the stuff I’m doing now though: simple privacy concerns. And it kills me because I’m meeting the most amazing characters. I’ve always talked about “organic leaders” who sustain communities and make the world go ’round. As an organizer, I saw only one of their dimensions up close. I always liked to think my strength was that I knew they had many other dimensions. But I only caught glimpses of those from a distance. Now I’m getting to see all those brilliant, radiant dimensions up close and at length. The American People are fantastic.

OK, so now it’s time for me to shut up again!