How the World Works

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“If you want peace, seek justice.” – Pope Paul VI

“That’s not how the world works.” – Many of the world’s leaders.

“Life’s most persistent and urgent question is, “what are you doing for others?’” – Martin Luther King Jr.

“That’s not how the world works.” – Many of the world’s leaders.

"The Peacemakers"

“Blessed are the poor in spirit…the meek…those who hunger and thirst for righteousness…the merciful…the pure in heart…the peacemakers.” – Jesus

“That’s not how the world works.” – Many of the world’s leaders.

You get the point. Cynics, including national and international leaders, are quick to point out to people who believe in justice, truth, honesty, and integrity that “that’s not the way the world works.”

I guess it depends on what you mean by “world.” In my world, most of the people I deal with daily are believers in the above values and try to put them into practice. And in my nearly 85-year lifetime, most of the leaders of my country and my state also tried to practice them.

That doesn’t appear to be the case now.

Christ of the Bread Line
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CNN’s Jake Tapper had a recent interview with Stephen Miller, White House deputy chief of staff and homeland policy and homeland security advisor. Said Miller in a conversation about the capture and imprisonment of Nicolas Maduro of Venezuela: “We live in a world in which you can talk all you want about international niceties and everything else, but we live in a world, in the real world, Jake, that is governed by strength, that is governed by force, that is governed by power.”

And who has been the biggest contributor to this kind of world? I think we all know the answer.

With the exception of some “modern” horrors, we often think that the worst injustices and instances of inhumanity occurred in pre-modern times. The ancient world sort of assumed that might made right.

“Christianity,” writes Leighton Woodhouse in a recent issue of the New York Times entitled “Donald Trump, Pagan King,” “upended these assumptions. Christianity took the Jewish God, who cared for the weak and knew the difference between good and evil, and made his message universal.

"It taught that all humans are God’s creation. To oppress any person, even a slave, is an offense before him. Even more than that: The weak are closer to God than the rich and the powerful. This moral instinct is so ubiquitous today that we barely recognize it as Judeo-Christian, or even as religious.”

Nuremberg

And so, in international relations, the U.S. after World War II was heavily involved in the Nuremberg Trials, which provided a legal basis for moral outrage about the atrocities of the Nazis. Then you had the Marshall Plan, also after the war that helped the nearly destroyed Europe – including our former enemies – rebuild. And in the 1960’s, you had the Alliance for Progress, a program launched by President Kennedy to help Latin American countries overcome poverty.

On the domestic front, state and federal U.S. governments have tried – not always successfully - to provide help to those left behind economically.

Now it appears that that religious/humanitarian mind set is evaporating. Believers, and people searching for God in the Judeo-Christian tradition, must do all we can not to let that happen.  

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