What Are We To Make of OWS?

In one corner, the disillusioned young people of our country--over-educated, unemployed, and angered by the economic chaos that seems to rule. "If you are not outraged, you are not paying attention" (source unknown).

In the other corner, those who believe that the complainers should be quiet. "A people that values its privileges above its principles soon loses both" (Dwight D. Eisenhower, first inaugural address, 20 January 1953).

Where is the Christian to stand? Most Christians seem to distance themselves from such complicated issues. Undoubtedly, there are problems. Is a protest the likes of OWS fruitful in any way? Is that even the point?

So what is the problem, anyway? I think Calvin and Hobbes explain it best:

So who is at fault?

Big corporations? Banks? The government? Fortune 500 CEO's who demand huge salaries and multi-million dollar golden parachutes? Workers? Ordinary citizens? Passive standers-by?

Yes.

I suggested in my sermon Sunday (Oct. 23) that the OWS protesters were examples of Korahite rebels, driven by envy more than righteous principle.

That is rather simplistic. And, such an illustration suggests two falsities:

1) That the OWS protesters are less righteous than me;

2) That the OWS protesters are not justified in their indignation.

At the end of the day, I must acknowledge that, while surely much of the OWS protest is driven by envy, I am no better, and I am no less envious. My sin simply manifests itself in other ways.

Furthermore, if we are not outraged at the profligate economic practices of a system that is wrongly identified with capitalism, we have surely not been paying attention.

We must acknowledge that the system is broken. Badly.

As Christians, we do bear responsibility in addressing the brokenness of the system in a way that glorifies God.

My concern is that we move to response, believing that we've pinned down the problem (in this case, a broken system) before anyone has articulated the source of the problem (why does the government subsidize profit-obsessed corporations led by multi-million dollar salaried CEO's, for example?) This example is only a manifestation of the brokenness of not only systems, but of each of us. The same brokenness that manifests in protests of every kind.

Suffice to say, all of us are broken. All of us suffer from the sins of greed and envy. OWS is not a response to greed and envy, it is a continued manifestation of greed and envy. Until we take into account the reality of our sinfulness (in cause, effect, and response), the blame is always placed on everyone else except myself.

I close with a quote from Wendell Berry, taken from the Mockingbird Post:

An even greater danger is that of moral oversimplification, or self-righteousness. Protests, demonstrations, and other forms of “movement” behavior tend to divide people into the ancient categories of “us” and “them.” In the midst of the hard work and the risks of opposing what “we” see as public danger, it is easy to assume that if only “they” were as clear eyed, alert, virtuous, and brave as “we” are, our problems would soon be solved. This notion too is patently false. In the argument over nuclear power – as in most public arguments – the division between “us” and “them” does not really exist. In our efforts to correct the way things are, we are almost always, almost inevitably, opposing what is wrong with ourselves. If we do not see that, then I think we won’t find any of the solutions we are looking for.

For example, I believe that most people who took part in the June 3 demonstration at Marble Hill [nuclear power plant] got there in an automobile. I did, and I could hardly have got there any other way. Thus the demonstration, while it pushed for a solution to one aspect of the energy problem, was itself another aspect of the energy problem.

And I would be much surprised to learn that most of us did not return home to houses furnished with electric light switches, which we flipped on more or less thoughtlessly, not worrying overmuch about the watersheds that are being degraded or destroyed by strip mines to produce the coal to run the power plants to make the electricity that burns in our light bulbs. I know, anyhow, that I often flip on my own light switches without any such worries.

Nearly all of us are sponsoring or helping to cause the ills we would like to cure. Nearly all of us have what I can only call cheap-energy minds; we continue to assume, or to act as if we assume, that it does not matter how much energy we use.

I do not mean to imply that I know how to solve the problems of the automobile or of the wasteful modern household. Those problems are enormously difficult, and their difficulty suggests their extreme urgency and importance. But I am fairly certain that they won’t be solved simply by public protests. The roots of the problems are private or personal, and the roots of the solutions will be private or personal too. Public protests are incomplete actions; they speak to the problem and not to the solution.

Protests are incomplete, I think, because they are by definition negative. You cannot protest for anything. The positive that a protest is supposed to do is “raise consciousness” but it can raise consciousness only to the level of the protest.

So far as protest itself is concerned, the raised consciousness is on its own. It appears to be possible to “raise” your consciousness without changing it- and so to keep protesting forever.

The Gift of Good Land, pgs. 164-165