"Let Justice Roll"

A sermon by Dave Weissbard

delivered at

The Unitarian Universalist Church

Rockford, Illinois

01/15/06

January 7th—I go to this little place in Oakland,
"Nappy or Not"—it's this tiny hair shop filled with laughter;
filled with memories I associate with childhood—
the comfort of having my hair pulled & tugged on
by my mother or my aunt.
This is a sacred experience for me and...

January 7th—the shop was rich with
teasing, laughter, stories, music...
customers flowed in and out...to the
rhythm of hip-hop, r&b...classic soul
...the tired hum of talk show TV
resting underneath it all.
Five o'clock—the music goes off...a
woman walks in with her son. He has shoulder length dreadlocks—he's
maybe four or five—
they're like a soft halo around his head
these dreadlocks.

The news headlines talk at us and we all stop.
Our voices suspended in mid-conversation.

It is January 7th and in the city of Oakland
you know—not far from where so & so
goes to school? There was another senseless shooting
bringing the number of "senseless killings" for the year
in Oakland on January 7th to six.

And this little boy squirms in the barber's chair
as the stylist takes a pair of scissors and
cuts these long dreads up around his neck.

Cuts these dreads—each one by one—
placing them into a bag for the boy's mother
who says: The other kids tease him
for looking too much like a girl.

There is a moment,
a moment—listening to the story
on the news—when I ask:
what does it mean when a fourteen-year old
holds a gun in his hand and uses it to take life?

There is a moment,
a moment—listening to this mother
talk about her son—when I ask: what does it mean
when at four or five you have to defend your
emerging identity against the violence of words?

There is an ongoing moment in which
I ask myself what kind of world am I creating
with my words, with these hands?

What am I willing to do to make it different?
How is it that I am, like Dr. King, to
"hew out of the mountain of despair, a stone of hope"?
I mean, have you seen the mountain of despair?

in the midst of increasing homelessness,
poverty, racial and economic injustices, job loss

The church has a great responsibility
because when the church is true to its nature,
it stands as a moral guardian of the community
and of society.

It [is our] role,
Our role as a church...to broaden horizons,
to challenge the status quo, to question and break mores....

No more can we wait for the
response—we are the response.
Blessed by the god of grace & glory
with the wisdom and courage to
DO at least one thing as a community,
To DO at least one thing in our daily
living to move us all closer to the
vision of peace

And I'm not talking about the lion lay down with
the lamb kind of peace.
I'm talking about the hungry are fed kind
and the youth supporting each other kind
and kids learning to read kind
and the confronting systemic class issues &
economic injustice kind of peace.

I am talking about the kind of peace
that allows a four year old to grow dreads
and not have to worry about defending his
identity on the playground.

I am talking about doing one thing—as a community of faith.
Challenge the status quo, question—
refuse to give in to the social & cultural pressures to conform.

Start now accepting the call to "set free those who are captive"
Accepting the invitation to become Justice
rolling down like waters.

We—a stone of hope amongst many—inheritors of a vision,
have a major role to play in this ongoing period
of social transformation.

This is the seventy-seventh anniversary of the birth of The Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. It is common to celebrate Dr. King as a leader for the civil rights of people of color. That was, indeed, how he became known, but his horizons were wider than that. He had the vision to look at the world and our nation’s role in it and to speak eloquently and prophetically against the unjust war in Vietnam. At the time of his assassination, he was preparing for a campaign for justice for all America’s poor people.

We look around every day and we see thousands and millions of people making inadequate wages. Not only do they work in our hospitals, they work in our hotels, they work in our laundries, they work in domestic service, they find themselves underemployed. You see, no labor is really menial unless you’re not getting adequate wages. People are always talking about menial labor. But if you’re getting a good (wage) . . . that isn’t menial labor. What makes it menial is the income, the wages.

America is at a crossroads of history and it is critically important for us as a nation and as a society to choose a new path and move upon it with resolution and courage. . . . The stability of a civilization, the potential of free government, and the simple honor of [people] are at stake . . . Affluent Americans are locked in the suburbs of physical comfort and mental insecurity. Poor Americans are locked inside ghettos of material privation and spiritual debilitation. And all of us can almost feel the presence of a kind of social insanity which could lead to national ruin. . . . We have decided to go to Washington and use any means of legitimate, nonviolent protest necessary to move our nation and our government on a new course of social, economic, and political reform.

The religious principles that unite Unitarian Universalists speak twice of justice with our commitments to:

Dr. King knew of our commitment to justice and, as some of you know, while he was studying for his doctorate at Boston University, he visited the headquarters of the then American Unitarian Association and spoke with its President about becoming a minister in our movement. I am inclined to be glad he was not encouraged to do so because he might not have been as effective if he had.

Dr. King had a dream of an America that was very different from the one in which we live. In truth, most of us have a vision of a very different America than the one in which we live, except we are often blind to the gap. We are brought up to believe in America as a land of justice and equality. We are taught a laundered, distorted history to which conservatives cling tenaciously, one that is far from an accurate representation of what has happened to the dream encapsulated in our Declaration of Independence and our Constitution. We are indoctrinated with the belief that ours is a classless society “with liberty and justice for all,” and some people wear blinders that permit them to believe it. The truth is that today, there is a greater gap between rich and poor in the United States of America than in any other nation in the developed world, and that gap is growing daily.

What we are not taught in school is that class has operated in our society from its earliest days and remains powerful today. Did your history teacher tell you how the wealthy men in the Continental Congress decided they would honor the paper money with which they had paid the loyal soldiers, but kept it a secret long enough for many of them to buy the money for 10 cents on the dollar from men who thought it was worthless?

We are taught that the Civil War was about freeing slaves, but many if not most historians acknowledge that the war was really motivated by the threat Northern industrialists felt because of the growing economic strength of the southern states.

The facts behind Abraham Lincoln’s assassination have never been revealed. Some believe that James Wilkes Booth was a pawn in the hands of powerful interests that feared that Lincoln was going to be too soft on the Confederates and not restrain the economic growth of the South. That is clearly why they tried to remove Andrew Johnson from office.

I was never taught about the powerful business interests (people from the Dupont and JP Morgan firms, among others) that tried to organize a fascist plot to overthrow Franklin Delano Roosevelt in 1933. They believed he was a traitor to his class because of the programs he instituted to benefit the poor. They made the mistake of approaching Major General Smedley Butler, the most popular military figure of the 30's, to lead the coup, and he, after gathering evidence, revealed their plot to the congress. [http://coat.ncf.ca/our_magazine/links/53/Plot1.html] An investigating committee verified his facts, but was then discharged before it could embarrass powerful people perhaps like George Herbert Walker and Prescott Bush, great-grandfather and grandfather of the current President, both of whom were active supporters of Nazism.[http://emperors-clothes.com/articles/randy/swas5.htm]

We are unlikely to ever learn the truth about the assassination of John F. Kennedy. The mystery novelist, Robert K. Tanenbaum, was a New York district attorney who was employed by one of the congressional committees that began investigating the assassination. He wrote a somewhat fictional account [Corruption of Blood] of his experience which he alleged was only as fictional as was the Warren Report. He maintains there was, again, a whitewash because too many powerful people would have been implicated if the facts came out.

I find it fascinating that Dr. King survived Birmingham and Selma and even Chicago, and it was only when he decided to organize the poor to demand a fair minimum wage that he was assassinated. I find it hard to believe that either his assassin or Robert Kennedy’s were individuals acting alone when their deaths were so beneficial to entrenched powerful elements of our society.

There was evidence during the Iran Contra investigation that George Herbert Walker Bush was personally involved in promising leaders of Iran that if they would hold the American hostages until Ronald Reagan could become president, they would receive American arms. [http://www.consortiumnews.com/archive/xfile1.html] The election of an actor already suffering the effects of Altheimer’s disease, saw the beginning of the great acceleration of the acquisition of obscenely greater wealth by the very rich, and the diminished financial security of the lower and middle classes in America.

The Project for the New American Century, which includes many people who ended up in key roles in the present Bush administration, issued in September 2000, before the presidential election, a report on the need for an American Empire. In order to achieve its goals, the authors said, on page 51, “the process of transformation, even if it brings revolutionary change, is likely to be a long one, absent some catastrophic and catalyzing event like a new Pearl Harbor. [http://newamericancentury.org/RebuildingAmericasDefenses.pdf]

A year later, under very, very strange circumstances, they had on 9/11 their Pearl Harbor, an event which has been used to further their goals and move America closer to fascism. I do not trust the so-called investigation by the 9/11 Commission any more than I do the Warren Report. There is a remarkable list of unexplained anomalies in the events of that day that were simply ignored by the commission. [Do I believe that Americans would do something like that to advance their empire? Yes.]

I do not believe I am becoming paranoid in my dotage. I believe that we live with little understanding of the power plays that have impacted the history of our nation. There is a value in an idealized image, because it gives us something to work toward. The danger in believing the idealized image is real is that when we see the gap between rich and poor, we are likely to blame the victims, rather than understand the injustice is entrenched and not readily ameliorated.

Every time a populist politician begins to speak of the need to address the gap between rich and poor, the people in power scream, “Class Warfare!” It’s like spouse abuse where the abuser denies he or she is doing anything wrong. I believe there is indeed intense class warfare going on, and the poor especially, and the middle class are its victims.

This history, this reality does not mean nothing can change. It means that in order to change things, we need to understand what we are up against.

The United States House of Representatives will be voting at the end of this month on one of the most cruel and inhumane budgets in our history. Programs that have at least offered some support to those in the greatest need are slated to be cut in order to provide yet another tax reduction to the richest, most powerful among us. It is an abomination.

How has this state of affairs come about? The short answer is simple: greed. In the last five years, 76 more millionaires have become billionaires. Soon the Forbes

Magazine list of the 400 richest Americans will be composed exclusively of billionaires. During the same period, the number of Americans living in poverty has grown by 5 million. Today 13% of Americans live under the official poverty level, and 31% live under the more realistic figure of twice the poverty line. In 1980, the average CEO in the United States made as much as 97 minimum wage workers. In 2004, the average CEO made as much as 952 minimum wage workers. According to the Economist magazine, executive pay in the US is 455 times average worker pay. In Great Britain it is 22:1, in Japan, 11:1.

In 1994, Michael Eisner, the president of Walt Disney received total compensation of $8,312,373, which is several times my lifetime earnings. He, however, is a piker alongside Terry Semel, president of Yahoo who last year alone received $230.6 Million. Numbers like that make no sense. We cannot comprehend them, but you can be sure Eisner is very aware of the difference.

There are many reasons for inequality, but it is ensured in an unfettered materialistic society by a celebrated style of acquisition we call greed. Greed is not just the whimsical excess of the individual. Its most virulent forms are displayed by business groups and corporations – aggregated, it is an antidemocratic force. Greed demolishes equity.

The center of Adam Smith economics is a paradox. It says, what’s good for the selfish individual is also the common good. Secondly it says, when you and I are in competition, what’s good for me is good for you. The notion is . . there is only one system, the free market, so we are all in the same boat, so we all must be the same. In practice, of course, history shows us a boat or ship of state with sweating galley rowers down on benches in the bilge, and with people up on deck all dressed in colorful finery, their faces upturned into the glorious sun. Yes, we are all in the same boat and what is different is supposed to be the same. . . . Try to fit greed into the hedonic calculus and watch the ethics. Greed is the outstanding moral wrong because it reverses the utilitarian ethic, with greatest happiness for the smallest number.

It was suggested after Hurricane Katrina that the reality of America had finally been revealed for all to see. We quickly tuned back into our unreal “reality” programs on TV and blocked out the lessons that were available.

My title, “Let Justice Roll” comes not only from one of Dr. King’s favorite bible verses, Amos V, “Let justice roll down like waters and righteousness like a mighty stream.” There is a coalition of more than 60 justice-seeking groups, including the Unitarian Universalist Association, which is using that name, “Let Justice Roll,” encouraging that this year’s celebration of Dr. King’s birthday emphasize the need for a fair minimum wage. Sermons are being preached this weekend in pulpits of every faith across the nation which are focusing attention on the miserable state of the federal minimum wage. I will wager that little or no media attention will be paid to this movement because it is not in the interest of the owners of our media to have word get out. Perhaps we will feel isolated. Believing no one else really cares, we might go away because the challenge is too enormous. That is why a charismatic figure like Jesus or Dr, King is such a threat to the status quo: they attract attention to the issues, they gather people and inspire them.

The federal minimum wage was first established in 1938. The current figure, which has been in effect for eight years, is $5.15 per hour. When Dr. King spoke at the Lincoln Memorial, the minimum wage, adjusted for inflation in our terms, was $8. Since the current minimum wage was established, Congress has voted itself seven pay raises and adjusted the minimum not at all.

Someone who works all year at the minimum wage earns $10,712. A single parent with one child would need more than two full-time minimum wage jobs to keep their heads above water. The economic policy institute has calculated what a basic, no frills, family budget requires in 400 American communities. They show that a family of two parents and two children living in Rockford, for instance, needs $37,176 per year to provide basic housing, food, child care, transportation, health care and other necessities – again, no frills. While the official poverty level for a family of four is $19,157, nationally, the average for basic expenses is twice that - ranging from $31, 080 in Nebraska to $64,656 in Boston.

The kind of propaganda that is spewed out when the subject turns to raising the minimum wage is that only teenagers living with their families earn the minimum wage. That is not true. Most minimum wage earners are adults. The Bureau of Labor statistics says that about two million Americans work at or below the minimum wage. An increase in the minimum would, however, result in increases for many workers above the minimum because their salaries are a function of the minimum.

We are told that many businesses would go under if they were forced to pay their employees more. The reality is that seventeen states and the District of Columbia have set higher minimums, always with predictions of impending doom by the business community. Oregon, which has a minimum of $7.25, one of the highest state rates, has twice the rate of job growth of the rest of the country. Research has shown that businesses in states that have increased their minimum wages have not experienced negative effects, and in fact, there has been employment growth. Oregon, Washington, Florida and Vermont are tying their minimum wage automatically to the rate of inflation. The reality is that more money in the pockets of workers means more money spent in the community. Bizarrely, the president of Wal-Mart has called for an increase in the minimum wage because consumers do not have enough money to spend. Surveys show that most Americans favor an increase in the minimum wage, but Republican lawmakers do not.

The discussion in some progressive communities is beginning to turn to a “living wage,” rather than just a minimum wage. In Santa Fe, NM, the minimum wage is $9.50 an hour, the highest in the United States, and it has not hurt Santa Fe. San Francisco and the state of Nevada have also moved toward living wages, and it is pending in Chicago.

According to an article in today’s New York Times Magazine, which I accessed on the internet earlier this week, in Santa Fe the increase in the minimum was seen, appropriately, as a moral issue. Monsignor Jerome Martinez, the most influential Roman Catholic priest in the city, when asked if it had been a difficult decision to support the minimum wage proposal responded, “It was a no-brainer. You know. I am not by nature a political person. I have gotten a lot of grief from some people, business owners, who say, ‘Father, why don’t you stick to religion?’ Well, pardon me. This is religion. The scripture is full of matters of justice. How can you worship a God that you do not see and then oppress the workers that you do see?”

The ordinance passed the city council by a 7-1 vote. Business owners sued to block the increase, but the court ruled in favor of the city. A study by the University of New Mexico’s Bureau of Business and Economic Research found that overall employment increased each quarter after the living wage went into effect - especially for those businesses that employ the most minimum wage workers. At the same time, the number of people needing temporary assistance decreased.

The reality is that it is complicated for individual cities or states to enact a rate that is undercut by nearby cities or states. This is truly an issue of national policy that gets back to the greed issue. Is it morally acceptable for some to bask in luxury while other citizens are starving? 229,000 minimum wage employees could have their income doubled if the president of Yahoo had been paid “only” $1million last year.

It is not a coincidence that the United States has the highest percentage of its citizens incarcerated, that we have rampant problems with alcohol and drug abuse, that families are disintegrating, that mental illness is a major problem. These problems correlate with the results of greed both on those who succeed and those who fail.

As the rich get richer and the poor get poorer, we drop our pretenses to humanitarian democracy, instead salute material excess, accept Darwinian business ethics, and pin up as our national polestar the most powerful corporations.

Money and effort maintains a particular way of seeing and evaluating our society: we focus on the topmost members, cover current inequalities with a rotating blur of nearly a trillion dollars of advertising a year, and by not paying attention to the lowest, we deny them. But they are there. Invariably, as our economic tree reaches up, its roots go further down.

It is not enough to say hopefully we accumulate layers of experience from error and progress. Technology will not deliver us equity. Logic has not delivered us equity.

The American Friends Service Committee’s working party on Global Economics asserts:

We have ample evidence that other ways are possible, that good wages and worker satisfaction make for a healthy and vibrant economy, that socially responsible business can be both beneficial and profitable, that cooperation as at least as important as competition, those harmonizing standards in an upward manner can take place at a national, regional and international level, that nonviolence is an economic and not just a moral imperative, and that dignity and economic rights can and must lie at the heart of the global economy.

The true measure of a civilization is how its weakest members are treated. As people who affirm our belief in the “inherent worth and dignity of every person,” we are challenged to demonstrate that belief in more than just words.

Two small but important steps would be the rejection of the proposed federal budget and the enactment of the Fair Minimum Wage Act of 2005 which would provide an increase to $7.25 over two years, which would result in increases for 15 million workers. We need to speak up and be heard! I believe our representative sometimes listens.

I am talking about the kind of peace
that allows a four year old to grow dreads
and not have to worry about defending his
identity on the playground.

I am talking about doing one thing—as a community of faith.
Challenge the status quo, question—
refuse to give in to the social & cultural pressures to conform.

Start now accepting the call to "set free those who are captive"
Accepting the invitation to become Justice
rolling down like waters.

We—a stone of hope amongst many—inheritors of a vision,
have a major role to play in this ongoing period
of social transformation.