Tag: Compassion

Jesus Comes Home-To What?

I’m no longer a Christian in the formal sense of the word. But I love the scene in Luke when Jesus returns home to Nazareth and in the Shabbat service reads from Isaiah:

  • The spirit of the Lord has been given to me,
  • For he has anointed me.
  • He has sent me to bring the good news to the poor,
  • To proclaim liberty to captives,
  • And to the blind new sight, 
  • To set the downtrodden free,
  •  to proclaim the Lord’s year of favor.

Luke says that he “won the approval of all, and they were astonished by the gracious words that came from his lips” (Luke 4:22). And then it all blows up.

Why?

“They said, ‘This is Joseph’s son, surely?’” (How many of us have been condemned without a trial because of our families?)

“But he replied, ‘No doubt you will quote me the saying, “Physician, heal yourself,” and tell me, “We have heard all that happened at Capernaum, do the same here in your own countryside.” And he went on, “I tell you solemnly, no prophet is ever accepted in his own country.’” (Luke 14, 23-24).

I love how Jesus ignores his towns peoples’ astonishment and their assessment that his words are “gracious.” No ingratiating for him, when they marvel at him in what he obviously takes as rejection, he erupts immediately in a blistering condemnation of his townsfolk.

But why?

Well, we don’t know. But we can guess. His condemnation is couched obliquely: Israeli widows were suffering during a famine, but the prophet Elijah was not sent to them, but to an Arab widow. Likewise, the prophet Elisha was not sent to cure Israeli lepers, but Syrians (Luke 4:23-24). “You Nazarenes,” he might have shouted, “don’t deserve my teaching, nor the Torah that I read to you this morning.” Is he saying that the natives don’t get how important the foreigners are?

He might have been shouting at us.

Ouch.

How do we treat Syrian “lepers”—or Hispanic immigrants? We return them to the desert.

How do we accept asylum seekers or displaced persons at our border? We reject them, sending them back to the horrors they hoped to escape. Or (some say this is us being compassionate), we cage their children.

Do we try to cure the sick? If they are immigrants without full documentation, we have until now deferred their deportation, a small moment of compassion. But no longer. Boil down the confusion around the medical deferred action program, and what do you see? Abandonment, not compassion. To the sick children and adults with life-ending illnesses, we offer thirty-three days to leave the county—for what?

To die.

To let a cowardly president with no soul, a man who plays golf and feigns strength while enormous hurricanes attack our neighbors and our coasts, boast of his compassion, while families with dying children try to encompass the enormity of the devastation his government has wreaked upon them.

A strongman-bully leads us.

Spirit help us. 

An Emerging Republican Meme: Harming Americans is Merciful and Compassionate

Merciful and Compassionate–redefined

After preliminary scores suggested that the Republicans’ plan to replace the Affordable Care Act would take away the health insurance of between ten and twenty-four million Americans, Paul Ryan went on the offense—literally.

Paul Ryan

He described the repeal-and-replace bills as “an act of mercy.” Sure. Taking health insurance away from millions and reducing Medicaid even more (which pays, albeit poorly, for health care for the poorest, and often sickest, citizens) is merciful—but only to the wealthy, who will get huge tax cuts as a result.

Next, Mick Mulvaney, the White House budget director, defended the draconian budget cuts to social, scientific, diplomatic, medical, educational, cultural, and humanitarian programs this way:

“And I think it’s fairly compassionate to go to them [the single mom in Detroit or the coal miner in West Virginia] and say ‘Look, we’re not going to ask you for your hard earned money any more.

‘Single mom of two in Detroit.  Give us your money.

‘We’re not going to do that any more… unless we can guarantee to you that that money is actually [going to] be used in a proper function.

‘And I think that is about as compassionate as you can get.’

Really?

It’s better for the country if cancer survivors die faster

After that, HHS Secretary Tom Price took the Orwellian doublespeak to a new, appalling low (read the full article here). When a cancer survivor told Price that the repeal-and-replace plan would end his Obamacare and jeopardize his survival, Price said this: “At the end of the day, it’s better for our national budget if cancer patients pass away more quickly, it’s a lousy way to live anyway, and I’m sorry to say it out loud, but it’s the truth.”

The reference “it’s a lousy way to live anyway . . .” was to something he’d said earlier: “I know it’s not pretty, but at the end of the day, even people who are able to fight off cancer . . . they can’t lead 100 percent normal lives, ever again. What kind of an existence is that, to have to survive instead of live?” Remember 1984? “War is Peace, Freedom is Slavery, Ignorance is Strength”? 

No doubt there are cancer survivors who have a lessened quality of life, who survive but suffer. Still, of the many cancer survivors I know, nearly all are living meaningful, active, and enjoyable lives, and want to continue doing so, even if they are not 100%. But Ryan, Mulvaney, and Price are advancing the notion that repealing the Affordable Care Act and advancing a cruel budget are compassionate acts–people with diminished health should die faster. This is not only Orwellian, it is hateful propaganda, party line disguised as truth.

Here is their compassion: Take away people’s health care insurance and replace it with, uh, access to insurance—which all scoring agencies (e.g., the Congressional Budget Office and Standard and Poor’s) believe will cost up to twice what their insurance costs now. Let cancer patients die faster (because surviving cancer means you’ll have a lousy life, and if you die, it helps the budget). Or let the known benefits of social programs for the elderly poor lapse (because the programs really don’t “serve their proper function”). Let school lunch programs be cut or eliminated because “there’s no shown link between free lunch and improved test scores.” So die, sick people. So starve, old people. So go hungry, kids.

An emerging Republican meme

This perverse logic—that taking away people’s health insurance is merciful—seems to be an emerging meme in the Republican propaganda. There are other dishonest memes too—such as this gem from Price: Obamacare has so “weakened the U.S. economy” that without repeal “we’re looking at nationwide riots and another economic recession.” What economy is he talking about? The one that has recovered from the Republican-created Great Recession better than any other developed nation? (Read the Wall Street Journal’s article about that.)

But focus with me on the “merciful act of compassion” meme for a moment. Another adjective I would use for it is obscene.

Follow the logic: Mulvaney says his budget-cutting sword has two sharp edges: He looked at the recipients of federal money (such as the poor single mom in Detroit), and he looked at the people who paid taxes to support federal programs. Since the “single mom in Detroit” or the “coal miner in West Virginia” pay taxes, his “compassionate” budget “has mercy” on them by reducing the programs they may well be depending on (for instance, Title IX protections for the single mom’s daughters or the Coal Miners’ Assistance Program for Appalachian communities). The only compassion in this nonsense is for the very wealthy who will profit, yet again, from tax cuts the poor don’t get.

Mulvaney and Ryan and Price and a whole gaggle of Republican gangsters are saying it, loud and proud: We’re going to steal what meager aid we already give poor people, sick people, old people, and kids, and we’re going to tell them we’re doing it as a kindness to them. All to pay for a whopping jump in the defense and homeland security budget and a massive tax cut for the wealthiest. George Orwell got it right.

Compassion? Mercy? No. It is economic violence. This government is no more merciful and compassionate than the father who beats his child “for your own damn good.”