Hear this, you who trample upon the needy and destroy the poor of the land! "When will the new moon be over," you ask, "that we may sell our grain, and the sabbath, that we may display the wheat? We will diminish the ephah, add to the shekel, and fix our scales for cheating!
Among the several excellent articles of the 1619 Project, was an essay describing how deeply slavery is still embedded in our present American institutions. Many of today's practices, customs and expectations of our banking, accounting, and labor management were created for the purposes of slave plantations. The goals were efficiency, maximum profits and minimum costs, and always within the context of cutthroat competition. As profitable as they were, and despite the savage violence and killing pressure upon the laborers who received no profit for their toil, plantations faced a constant, eminent threat of bankruptcy. Even their human souls were mortgaged.
If the institution of slavery collapsed with the Civil War, the spirit persists today, and not only in the underground sex industry and migrant sweat shops. We take for granted attitudes about work, leisure and race that were formed during our peculiar institution's three centuries. "Standard operating procedures," (SOPs) were not, and could not be, rewritten by a "proclamation" in 1865.
The same article cited the questions Americans hear from our European kin. "Why are you so anxious? Why do you take only two weeks vacation when we work more efficiently and profitably with six weeks vacation? Why are your lending practices so severe?"
Perhaps we are still unconsciously trying to atone for the sin of slavery; but, like the wretched Lady Macbeth, we cannot erase the damned spot. The 1619 Project studied the long reach of slavery and its impact upon our daily lives. It could only suggest methods of reparation.
More than a century and a half after the Civil War, some American churches are seriously studying the question of reparation. When it was discovered that the Jesuit school, Georgetown University, had sold 272 men, women and children in 1838, to pay off its debts two-thirds of Georgetown students voted to establish a semesterly fee to fund reparations for their descendants.
The issue is deep, complex and controversial, as this Wikipedia article details. But it must be addressed. It will not simply go away. History does not delete itself, even when it appears in no history books.
"Never will I forget a thing they have done!" God warned his people three thousand years ago, through the prophet Amos. The same ones who oppose reparation might argue there is no god who can remember the tragedy. They're wrong on both counts.
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I love to write. This blog helps me to meditate on the Word of God, and I hope to make some contribution to our contemplations of God's Mighty Works.
Ordinarily, I write these reflections two or three weeks in advance of their publication. I do not intend to comment on current events.
I understand many people prefer gender-neutral references to "God." I don't disagree with them but find that language impersonal, unappealing and tasteless. When I refer to "God" I think of the One whom Jesus called "Abba" and "Father", and I would not attempt to improve on Jesus' language.
You're welcome to add a thought or raise a question.