Jan
16
By Peg
Categories: Occupy Love, Spiritual heroes, Uncategorized
Tags: big dreams, Civil disobedience, Hope, Spiritual heroes
Jan
16
Who is our prophet today?
Who is leading us out of this wilderness in which we find ourselves today? Who is pointing the way to a promised land that seems at least as far away today as it was 40 years ago?
When I was growing into young adulthood in the 1960s, the world was a frightening and dangerous place. A place of war and violence in the streets and hatred based on fear of the unknown and the different. In other words, it was a lot like today. The biggest difference may have been that we had prophets who were pointing the way out of the wilderness.
We had Bob Dylan, who sang to us about a different way to live in that dangerous world. We had Bobby Kennedy, who vowed to help us build a different kind of world.
And, of course, we had Martin Luther King, Jr., who reminded us that God had a different plan from the plan we were living out.
On this day of celebrating the life and legacy of Martin Luther King, Jr., I scroll down my Facebook news feed, read the messages King left us and I teeter between hope and despair. Hope because he spoke with the authority and the authenticity of one who had inded been to the mountaintop, had seen the promised land. And if it was true then, if there was a promised land then, surely there must still be one today.
And despair, because in these 40-plus years since his death, so much of the progress we had made seems to be eroding. It is eroding at least in part, I believe, because the voices that dominate today’s conversation are the voices of self-interest and antagonism and sarcasm.
Where are the voices of hope and reconciliation? Where are the voices that lift us out of our small lives and onto the mountaintop? Who is urging us to act with courage, to live from that place inside us where we are kinder and braver and more compassionate than our fear or complacency or pettiness? In 50 years, who will we remember as the voice we followed out of this wilderness?
Are we without prophets today? Or do we choose not to listen when they speak?
Jan
8
What did Karl Marx know that we need to learn?
Who were the 100 most influential people in history? Astrophysicist Michael H. Hart gave the world his list in a 1987 book, The 100: A Ranking of the Most Influential Persons in History.
It’s an interesting read of short essays, beginning with Hart’s number one choice, Muhammad, and ending with Leonardo da Vinci, who came in as an honorable mention/near miss. (Remember, this book pre-dates Dan Brown.) Jesus came in #3 on Hart’s list and people I’m ashamed to admit I don’t even recognize fell into the bottom 50. People like Ashoka (#52), Mani (#83) and Niels Bohr (#100).
Of course, Hart might make changes in his list based on the 25 years since his book was published. Steve Jobs, anybody?
In 11th place is Karl Marx, who developed economic theories that became the basis for Communism. Of course, Communism has taken quite a hit since 1987. But at the time the book was written, Communism seemed to have carved out a permanent place in the world economy.
Still, Hart made the point that not all of Marx’s predictions proved to be true; he zeroed in on two. Marx apparently predicted that in capitalist economies:
- working people would become progressively poorer as time went on;
- the middle class would be eliminated, with only a few rising into the capitalist class.
Hart wrote, in 1987, that neither of these predictions about capitalism had proven to be accurate. In 2012, I can only say, “Wow.”
Maybe it’s time to read Das Kapital again, if only to find out what we might be up against as capitalism lurches into at least two of the very pitfalls Karl Marx predicted a century and a half ago.
