Real Change News | Rev. Rich Lang: This holiday, take a look around

November 26, 2008
Vol: 15 No: 49

Rev. Rich Lang

Rev. Rich Lang: This holiday, take a look around

by: Rev. Rich Lang

Faith, Culture, Politics

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This Thanksgiving, many will gather to celebrate the promise of commonwealth. Surrounded by family and friends who make our lives safe and secure, we will eat very well, we will laugh together and share stories about the good times. But there are many others who will not have similar Thanksgiving celebrations.

The unemployment rate is rising. Well paid white-collar professionals, along with decently paid blue-collar laborers and those barely surviving with low-end jobs, are finding themselves looking at an anxious, grim future. As the nation gathers around the table for its annual Thanksgiving, we are also gathering as a very vulnerable people. Twenty eight years of free market looting of the commonwealth has come home with a thunderous thud.

As unemployment rises, we as a nation have a decision to make. Are we still capable of seeing ourselves as in this together? Or, will we look at every person as an autonomous other, an independent contractor fully responsible for his or her own life? We have been conditioned through 28 years of selfishness to think of ourselves as Lone Rangers. But I would like to lift up the memory that it was not always so. There are narratives within the American experience that teach us that the pursuit of happiness is a journey that connects us with our neighbor. There are narratives that teach us that responsibility is intimately connected with the whole of society — commonwealth, not segregated wealth.

When folks have no job, and have spent their savings, and have lost their assets, when a once safe, secure life comes unraveled, what then is to be done? As we enter 2009 this question will press itself more firmly on us all. We will all be affected either personally or through a family member or a friend. We will witness the scars of what has been done to the national economy and the national character. Indeed, the damnable result of unemployment, particularly for men, is a great loss of self-respect and dignity. This wound to the soul damages relationships, particularly those with whom one is closest, like one’s wife and children. A man burdened with shame is like Samson shorn of hair, captured and blinded, the object of both his own and society’s ridicule.

As our nation gathers around the table of Thanksgiving, I hope that we will look a bit deeper into the eyes of those who surround us. I hope that we will take a walk, after the great stuffing, all around the neighborhood and look a bit deeper at those whose homes and lives surround us. I hope that we will glimpse that we don’t have to keep repeating the mistakes of segregated economics. I hope that this Thanksgiving we will dare to dream, once again, that we are in this together for commonwealth. A change whose time has come.

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