For the Love of Jimmy

Before I can remember, my family has not been shy about our near obsession with President and Mrs. Carter. (So you're going to have to forgive my assumption that the entire world also thinks everything the man writes is genius!) My grandparents proudly display a photo of themselves with Rosalynn and Jimmy on the front porch of Maranatha Baptist Church, Plains, GA in their family room. My mother has been drafting a personal letter to him for over three years now in an attempt to share her admiration and his positive influence in our lives. She just can't seem to fully convey all that's there...so I think it's been laying dormant on her computer for a while. And well, let's be honest, while Tyler and I were dating, I gave him a Jimmy Carter bobblehead. The exhilaration with which he received the gift was added confirmation that surely our marriage was meant to be. (Here is a picture in case you don't believe me.) Jimmy watches our goings-on from the bookshelf in our living room. And well, we named our first born son after him, Jude Carter Mayfield. We like the Carters. When we met him at a book signing at Vroman's here in Pasadena last year, as he hurriedly signed my book and the publishers literally pushed me out of the way I said, "You're awesome!" He looked up and smiled.

Most of the information in that paragraph was useless to the overall point of this post; I just want you to know that we really admire their work both in and beyond the White House. I mean, he's eradicated diseases! Enough you say, on with it. Well, in his book (no, not the controversial Palestinian one), the I'm-the-smartest-man-ever-so-let-me-tell-you-how-to-change-the-world-from-my-perfect-perspective-one, Our Endangered Values: America's Moral Crisis, he closes with a chapter that underscores the most severe crisis to yet hit all of us: poverty. More specifically, Carter warns, "With little doubt, the greatest challenge we face is the growing chasm between the rich and poor people on the earth." 

The Universal Declaration of Human Rights guarantees that all persons deserve a standard of living adequate for the health and well-being of themselves and their families. Carter writes in the book, "In my speech at the beginning of the new millennium, I outlined a few proposals for meeting this standard [no big deal, right, wait, it gets better], including increased development assistance with fewer strings, forgiveness of foreign debts of the poorest nations, seeking peaceful solutions when there are known threats to peace, getting to know the poor, giving people authority and responsibility over their own affairs, enhancing cooperations among donors, and recognizing the inevitable impact of abject poverty on human rights, violence, and susceptibility to recruitment for violent acts."

Here's the kicker statement, "Our Center's programs have shown that with wise use of even limited resources, extremely poor people demonstrate remarkable intelligence, innovation, and effectiveness." A few pages later he concludes that when rich people grant impoverished people the chance to respond to their lack of resources and poor condition, they improve their lives. That's for all you skeptics out there thinking that poverty is the mere result of laziness or greed.

One glaring element that is contributing to this disparaging assessment about the rich-poor divide is the fact that so few rich do not even know the name of a single poor person. While we all may not be called to establish an organization like Habitat for Humanity in order to heal this unsightly wound, surely we can stick a much needed band-aid on it by shaking hands with the next person we see who is in need, right? Review with me a few verbs Carter used in his surgical procedure --oops, I mean proposal from the quote above: 

1) increase assistance

2) forgive

3) seek peace

4) get to know 

5) give authority and responsibility

6) enhance

7) recognize

Is it just me, or is this solution based on one heck of a definition of what it means to be poor!? It seems he's really viewing poverty as a result of basic human rights violations. And this, my friends, is a huge infringement on social justice. From here, Carter cracks down on our present White House administration, which may dismay a few of you, but when confronted with the startling LOW figures in America's foreign aide budget, one can't help but note our lack of generosity as a nation. It's a problem, folks. On a national level, Carter doesn't let Bush and his posse of the hook either. Enumerating just how many decisions have been made, bills passed, and dollars lobbied on behalf of the wealthy, the chapter becomes difficult to finish. But he ends strong.

"We [America] should be seen as the unswerving champion of freedom and human rights, both among our own citizens and within the global community. America should be the focal point around which other nations of all kinds could marshal to combat threats to security and to enhance the quality of our common environment. We should be in the forefront of providing humane assistance to people in need, willing to lead other industrialized nations in sharing some of our great wealth with those who are destitute...There would be no real sacrifice in exemplifying these traits. Instead, our own well-being would be enhance by restoring the trust, admiration, and friendship that our nation formerly enjoyed among other peoples. At the same time, all Americans could be united at home in a common commitment to revive and nourish the religious faith and historic political and moral values that we have espoused and for which we have struggled during the past 230 years."

I couldn't have said it better myself. In fact, I'm not nearly this patriotic, nor do I care to be. But one thing is certain, the path our country is now walking does not seem centered enough on generosity, forgiveness, or peace. I have to claim security then, not in my American heritage, but in another kingdom that surpasses even the potential goodness of America. A kingdom to which Jimmy, too, first claims allegiance. (The End.)

Sondra Wheeler Writes,

"Bluntly put, there must be some idea that a commitment to Christ might take the form of being called upon to do something concrete and distinctive, rather than (for example) simply to believe something, or to live a conventionally decent life. Without the idea of a call to be obeyed, poverty cannot be of instrumental value, as welath cannot serve as a practical obstacle...The text can (and does) operate in this way in the present time across a great diversity of circumstances for those who understand their situation as one of sacrifices made for the gospel. What is crucial is the self-understanding of the community."

With no agenda or rhetorical finesse, I sincerely ask in response, is this self-communal-awareness possible in an American suburb? or in an American suburban church?

Blessed are the Poor, Damned are the Rich

Jesus began his Sermon on the Mount with an audacious statement, "Blessed are the poor, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven." I like Luke's version better. Matthew waters it down a bit in my opinion when he says, "poor in spirit." Speculation thinks Matthew may have been writing to a more middle-class Jewish audience who was currently in the midst of their divorce from the synagogue, or in the early stages of grief and recovery following the divorce. Where as, Luke is in touch with his poverty-stricken brothers and sisters a bit more and already finished with life in the synagogue. Luke, feeling a bit more free in what he can and cannot say, chops off "poor in spirit," and also truncates Matthew's desire to keep this beatitude more focused on attitude and posture. Luke's spirituality, then, seems to veer down a different path than Matthew's right from the get-go.

Oddly enough, then, Matthew doesn't shy away from the story of the rich young ruler which is fully disclosed in chapter 19. "if you wish to be perfect," so reads the NRSV, "go, sell you possessions, and give the money to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven; then come, follow me." yikes. This pericope is present in all the synoptics. double yikes. Mark 10's reading of the rich young ruler highlights ongoing structural and social sin going on the culture. So we see Jesus loving the rich young ruler more fully and the young man greatly grieved at what he has been challenged to do. Does this show a great divide between the haves and the have nots of Jesus' days in Palestine? Did the rich young ruler acquire his possessions and stature by exploiting others, cheating people in the market place, or not offering full health benefits to his employees? 

This seems to make sense with my reading of the text right now, and I'm also following West's ideas in his book, "The Academy of the Poor" which is listed on the right hand column of the blog. Until the young man makes restitution for his earnings and success, in other words, his contributions toward the social and structural sins of his society, he cannot earn enough merit to store any of his treasures in heaven. He was missing the entire point of the law.

So too, don't we miss the entire point of the beatitude when Jesus said, "blessed are the poor?" I don't think he meant blessed are you when you live on student loans, have only a mediocre paying job, or just generally don't feel vibrant and enthusiastic about life these days. Albeit, I think we are all stilled blessed, but the point I'm making is that the poor, and well, those darn camels going through the needle eye too, have an easier time getting into heaven than the rich because God's heart is with them. God loves societal outcasts. Jesus' attention and ministry was repeatedly to those who were lacking stature, monetary comforts, and the disenfranchised (women, children, and immigrants). And with those qualifications, I don't think any of us reading this blog qualify as poor. So, again, blessed are the losers, the societal outcasts, (dare I say it, the illegal Mexican immigrants) because God loves and cares for them because they need God and they need access to more resources for better quality in living. The rich young ruler, not so much. He just wanted to be sure to get a golden ticket into paradise. Too bad God never had a chocolate bar ticket voucher campaign. 

When will we be more willing to admit that our practices contribute to structural sins in society? (I don't even like the word sin much anymore, but there doesn't seem to be an adequate synonym for it in this context.) Better yet, will we ever be willing to sell the aspects of our lifestyles that on a daily basis, depending on how honest we're really being, contribute to social and structural sins that degrade, exploit, and hurt those that God works to save? No wonder the ruler left grieving. Following Jesus is not for pansies.

Am I wrong?   

 

The 11th Hour

This is a trailer for the film, The 11th Hour, which was released sometime in late 2007. Did anyone see it? Granted, the writing behind it is a bit cheesy at points, but the message 

is clear. It's narrated by Leonardo DiCaprio and speaks to the environmental horrors that are left in the wake of our environmental and cultural footprints. However, I want to see this film because it looks like it speaks well to the idea of our need for new and creative design in all aspects. We need new technologies to save us from dependence on oil, over consumption 

of all natural resources, among other travesties. What is more, the film addresses the possible 

massive quantities of environmental refugees the world can expect to encounter if we do not 

begin changing our ways and living less excessively. Again, I think good design can help us see 

this more clearly, along with films such as this. If we are going to completely change this world,

and I would like to argue, save this world, like the film claims our generation has the power to do, 

first we need to acknowledge and embrace all of the issues that are currently at stake, and then 

we need to begin accepting all of the new designs that will enable us to either heal the damage 

or begin treading along new and uncharted paths of responsible living (read: caring more for 

others and consuming less junk in the meantime).



I'm still trying to figure my way around this website, but it looks fascinating. It's about

normal and professional designers working together to create dialgue about how and why

we should call upon design to begin changing the world for the better.

Developing Nations Skipping Modernity?--Rant #2

A fascinating comment made by one of my favorite professors in a class a few quarters back was on the nature of the third world and their apparent cursory regard for the modern era (the Enlightenment up through the mid-twentieth century?). Did Indonesia skip the onset of rantionalism, and India the quest for absolute Truth? I'm not claiming this happened fully and completely, but it is curious that teenage shepherd boys isolated in the middle of a Bengali field are often carrying cell phones. Regardless of whether or not the signal is alive and working, the fact of the matter remains, new businesses are emerging throughout developing countries that insinuate there is a growing use of technology that is providing many the opportunity to work and earn a living.

This article published in the NY Times a few days ago highlights such a concept. It discusses Jan Chipchases' job as a marketing researcher for Nokia, a Finnish cell phone company. He travels the world taking pictures of where and how people are using their phones. Consider this bit from the article: 

Last summer, Chipchase sat through a monsoon-season downpour inside the one-room home of a shoe salesman and his family, who live in the sprawling Dharavi slum of Mumbai. Using an interpreter who spoke Tamil, he quizzed them about the food they ate, the money they had, where they got their water and their power and whom they kept in touch with and why. He was particularly interested in the fact that the family owned a cellphone, purchased several months earlier so that the father, who made the equivalent of $88 a month, could run errands more efficiently for his boss at the shoe shop. The father also occasionally called his wife, ringing her at a pay phone that sat 15 yards from their house. Chipchase noted that not only did the father carry his phone inside a plastic bag to keep it safe in the pummeling seasonal rains but that they also had to hang their belongings on the wall in part because of a lack of floor space and to protect them from the monsoon water and raw sewage that sometimes got tracked inside. He took some 800 photographs of the salesman and his family over about eight hours and later, back at his hotel, dumped them all onto a hard drive for use back inside the corporate mother ship. Maybe the family’s next cellphone, he mused, should have some sort of hook as an accessory so it, like everything else in the home, could be suspended above the floor.

How intriguing is this? I love design and I especially love to celebrate it. I am beginning to think it is an essential part of unearthing enough stamina to continue living joyfully in such a degraded and haphazard world sometimes. God called us to be co-creators. But when is the line crossed that demarcates creating useful products to help ease the hardship of life verses selling more crap to people who cant' afford new crap by making them think that they need new crap in order to live a less crap-filled existance? Not that people in Mumbai live crappy lives, that's not the point. The point is, does this guy really need a phone that hangs on a hook? If so, by all means I want to be the first to praise Nokia for their anthropolgical astuteness and willingness to go to the corners of the earth to help ease the trouble of poverty. But, pardon my skepticism, I just don't think that's their goal. So what is to be done then? 

Because I do think it's cool that this is creating business ventures and other opportunities for "success" outside of any materialism it may or may not be promoting.  The article reports that 80% of the world's population lives within cellphone range, and 68% of worldwide cellphone subscriptions are in the developing world. 

“You don’t even need to own a cellphone to benefit from one,” says Paul Polak, author of “Out of Poverty: What Works When Traditional Approaches Fail” and former president of International Development Enterprises, a nonprofit company specializing in training and technology for small-plot farmers in developing countries. Part of I.D.E.’s work included setting up farm cooperatives in Nepal, where farmers would bring their vegetables to a local person with a mobile phone, who then acted as a commissioned sales agent, using the phone to check market prices and arranging for the most profitable sale. “People making a dollar a day can’t afford a cellphone, but if they start making more profit in their farming, you can bet they’ll buy a phone as a next step,” Polak says.

So this highlights a different point. Technology designed to boost our convenience levels in life can actually be life-saving devices for people who need more efficient ways to acquire knowledge and information in other places on our planet. So if this is the end result of Nokia and other companies--more power to 'em! This can serve as a great example of business truly helping consumer, and of that, I am a fan.

Here's an example to finish the post.  

A “just in time” moment afforded by a cellphone looks a lot different to a mother in Uganda who needs to carry a child with malaria three hours to visit the nearest doctor but who would like to know first whether that doctor is even in town. It looks different, too, to the rural Ugandan doctor who, faced with an emergency, is able to request information via text message from a hospital in Kampala.

Go here to donate your old cell phone(s). If it doesn't work anymore, they will donate a cash equivalent to the phone's current value. Cool!

Dabbling and Babbling

"Forgive me father for I have sinned..."

Well, maybe not really, but I do have a confession. Each time I begin a post for this weblog I can't help but feel a bit queasy just before hitting the "publish post" icon. The little devil on my should raises his pitchfork in triumph shouting, "You are working really hard here to make everyone think you know what you're talking about. You sure are painting a big picture like you care about all this." Then the voice gets a little sarcastic, "You even think you're doing your part now, caring for the poor and all on your blog." Then the little halo-ringed character opposes from across my neck, and while I won't continue the mock conversation, lest you think I've really flipped my schizophrenic lid, I will say I disagree with the little red man on this one. 

While my contact with the poor right now is limited, which is something that honestly keeps me awake at night as I try to figure out how to let that change, my intentions here are not a result of me thinking I've got the problems of global hunger or absolute poverty solved, or that I even understand all of them. That's why I am taking a class exploring what Jesus has to say about all of this. In fact, in the short time I've been posting here, God is transforming me from the inside out on the issue. I'm understanding better the historical implications behind poverty in the first century, along with political implications surrounding poverty in the twenty-first century. And surprisingly, the causes aren't all that different, but that's an entirely different conversation and beside the point. My point, then, is that if you're feeling a bit reticent as well to click that "publish comment" icon at the bottom of the page, I challenge you to go ahead and share yourself a bit. I invite you to contribute to this conversation. I find that's how I learn best these days, anyway. Know that I will work to continue to keep posting as well, espcially on the days I remember to take my psychotropic drugs, only kidding. 

And with that, my sins of arrogance and fear have been absolved. (Since I'm feeling a connection with my Catholic brothers and sisters today, I think I'll still do a few hail mary's nonetheless. Blame it on the nearness of the pope.)

Religion--An Opium for the People?

There is a new website in the cyber world  that once discovered leaves little time for other daily chores as a result of its highly addictive content and presentation. Consider that a warning, especially if contemporary forms of spirituality peak your interest. Dear God is an interdenominational, interreligious, already global site dedicated to God's people who wish to share needs, confessions, and desires in an online prayer format. It's amazing! Plus, the art associated with each prayer, which can be addressed to any diety (one prayer calls upon Oprah for help), can induce worship in and of itself; the images are beautiful. The prayer accompanying this one is moving:

Dear God,

Every feast of the Nazarene in a place here called Quiapo, thousands of people trample each other just to touch the statue of you being paraded outside the church thinking it will bring them luck or cure their ailments. Many do die in this event. During holy week they flagellate and crucify themselves to atone for their sins.People flock to masses when the lottery hits the high marks, praying for signs of what the winning combination will be. In this country where most people live below the poverty line, most people turn to you during their suffering. So much so that they do nothing for themselves and solely depend on you.

I don’t blame you God. But I wonder why you created religion when it just serves as an opium of the people and as a vehicle for violence?

Karen, Philippines

What do you think about her final question in the prayer? Based on reading almost every posting on the site, it seems like it is quite easy for us (I use that term in the most collective sense possiblt) to blur the line demarcating that which God creates and that which comes from humanity's hands. As a whole, I would lump poverty and homelessness into this fuzzy category of confusion.