prophetic sequesters and bad examples

... and i thought the fiscal cliff was bad. 

i am tempted to just write a blog post bemoaning the unfathomably ridiculous nature of this sequester, but many have already successfully taken to that endeavor. ie here and here. 

this thing was designed to be so bad that the white house and congress would be forced to come to a deal. yet somehow we have reached a point in american politics that even indiscriminate, senseless, deep, hack job style budget cuts are not enough to allow for the political grand bargaining for which we all long. (at least in theory... we want to “cut spending” but oppose cuts to each specific area... except foreign aid of course. smh)

 oh how i could continue my frustration with this whole thing. 

republicans in the house say the whole thing was the white house’s idea (what i’ve read says it did originate with lew, so they seem to be right there.) 

democrats (and noble prize winning economists) argue that austerity is not the solution; europe seems to agree.

republicans are arguing against revenues, “you got what you wanted with the cliff,” they complain. (true, but come on $400,000 is not middle class, we still have a 16 trillion dollar debt, and mcconell is still saying “read my lips, no new revenues?”) 

how on earth someone could be arguing against a deal and for completely senseless, across the board cuts is simply beyond me. the statistics of this are overwhelming: $30,000 teachers loosing jobs, 70,000 kids may not get head start, over 100,000 people are displaced from low-income housing, and mcconell has the audacity to get up and say “no new revenues” because we taxed people rolling in over 400,000 in january? sequester cuts the bad with the good, but we're just going to take it because revenues are off the table? wake up folks. 

look its easy to tell which side of the debate i fall on, but the “debate” seems to be flawed in and of itself. 

in talking about this nasty little predicament our country has found itself in, the president of my university made a suggestion that we come together and find some common ground. 

sounded like a good idea until he chose to use the most degrading example of political compromise possible. 

there is absolutely no excuse for his choice of example. it was horrible and infuriating. he should not have said it, and i think he probably needs to just stop talking for a little while. 

what's additionally frustrating about this is that, he was actually trying to make a good point. due to his choice of example, he utterly failed to make his argument, and his point was justifiably overshadowed by his awful example. 

in hopes of not-affirming, but attempting to reconfigure his argument... allow me to suggest a couple of non-horrifying ways to say what i hope he was trying to say. 

with the dire stakes of this sequester, both sides are digging their heals in the ground and spewing out the same rhetoric we’ve heard for years. 

we need fresh voices in this conversation. 

in my preaching class we’ve talked out how certain modes of reality cloud out the possibility of a “vertical dimension”. 

an example of a vertical dimension might be the truth and reconciliation commission brought about by president mandela and desmond tutu (hey.... there’s a good example for your piece president wagnor!!!) 

these vertical dimensions are realities, solutions, positive steps forward that we miss when we dig so deeply into our ideologies that the entire political process becomes little more that dragging people begrudgingly closer to one side or the other. 

like this... 

i just drew this online. i am proud of it. you get the point? its like we are arguing from one side or the other, trying to get one another to come a little closer to our side, when there is another reality possible if we’d get off that damn line.

i think this is what wagnor was trying to say, unsuccessfully. he should have just drawn a picture. he needs to hire me. 

here’s another good example that seems more appropriate than the president's...

some of the prophets in the old testament seemed to have been dealing with similar realities. 

the very nature of hope for the exiles in babylon seemed unthinkable. 

the israelites had seen the destruction of their land, been forcibly removed from their homes, and wondered if Yahweh could still be present in a foreign place. 

then along come prophets like isaiah, who were running around telling the israelites that there was still hope in the midst of the chaos of their current predicament. 

theologian walter bureggeman discusses this hope in the prophetic imagination, “the hope that must be spoken is hope rooted in the assurance that God does not quit even when the evidence warrants his quitting... the prophets were not changing external politics but reclaiming Israel’s imagination.” 

the prophetic voices cried out that God was still moving and present even in the midst of what seemed like hopeless destruction, frustration, chaos, and despair. 

perhaps we need some prophetic voices today to call us all to a higher level of thinking, remove us from the confines of gridlock, reclaim our imagination, think creatively about new possibilities, and hope for a new way forward. 

“Remember not the former things, 

nor consider the things of old. 

Behold, I am doing a new thing; 

now it springs forth, do you not perceive it?” 

Isaiah 43:18 - 19