Posted on 09/30/2015 6:47:17 AM PDT by Salvation
The following is a longer version of an article I wrote for the Blog of the USCCB earlier this month. Due to space requirements I had to shorten the article. Here is the full version.
Many years ago I heard an analogy for what has happened in this country and how the sins unhealthy patterns of the elite, the powerful and the wealthy trickled down to the poor, but with far more disastrous effects.
The analogy was the game of “crack the whip” which some of us who are older remember from the school playground. The “game” involved 15 or twenty kids making a straight line. Each kid then reached back with one arm and took the hand of the one behind so that a long chain of kids now existed. The kid in the lead then took off running and everyone behind followed, holding arms. Then suddenly the lead kid would take a sharp turn. The kids immediately behind him could make the turn, but for the kids further back it got harder to hold on and make the turn. The kids at the back of the line didn’t stand a chance and went flying off the line, falling to ground with the centripetal force.
And this is an analogy for the social and economic ills of the last sixty or more years. For there are some who are at the front of the line who are well positioned to take their thrill rides, engage in social experimentation and indulge greed and excess. Among them are some of the Hollywood elite, pop stars, political leaders, wealthy financiers, Madison Avenue marketers, Wall Street Investors, and many other cultural, social, business and government leaders. But at the back of the line, the damage is awful.
Let’s consider two basic areas of life where “Crack the Whip” is much in evidence: Social/moral ills, and Economic ills.
Social and moral ills – Those at the very front of the line are those who have sharply turned towards excesses of every sort: indulging drugs, alcohol, sex, going in and out of marriages and glamorizing all sorts of dangerous and deleterious behaviors, riddled with often terrible personal consequences.
But at the front of the line they can afford (financially and socially, but not morally) what they do. They can afford the treatment centers that are inevitably needed, treatments for STDs, and therapy for their children, traumatized by their divorces and other issues their indulgences cause.
But at the back of the line the flashy, trendy drug use, sexual promiscuity and divorce culture of the front of the line has had far more devastating effects. Lacking treatment programs, the addicted poor go to jail, diseases like AIDs and other STDs spread more wildly and are less treated, and the family is devastated by divorce and sexual promiscuity. Poor children are raised without fathers and the socials ills multiply quickly.
It’s “crack the whip.” At the front of the line, all the misbehavior looks “fun and even glamorous.” At the back of the line, folks go flying off in all directions staggering and reeling.
I do not write to absolve the poor from all responsibility and merely blame the rich and powerful. Being mesmerized by the glamor of evil is a human problem that affects all of us. But in the end we ought to consider how our cooperation (whether by active promotion or by sinful silence) in the glamorization of sin and excess affects others, especially those at the end of the line.
Economic excesses and ills – Those at the front of the line can also afford the lifestyles that greed demands and can generally afford to pay the higher prices of an overheated economy and a lifestyle that increasingly demands and expects more and more.
The poor are fined for not having insurance, and cannot afford to drive, and they often face tremendous economic hurdles, liabilities, even to open small business, or keep their homes. College educations and advanced degrees are unreasonably demanded for many jobs and the cost is prohibitive, leaving many young people in debt for decades and the poor largely locked out of many options.
A few years back it became trendy for many to leave the stock market and enter the real estate market, buying and “flipping” properties. The cost of housing skyrocketed, the market overheated and even upper middle class people were finding it hard to afford basic housing. The “bubble” burst by 2007 and left the economy reeling. The investors took a few hits and got government bailouts, but mainly just went back to the Stock market leaving in their wake devastated homeowners with underwater properties and foreclosures.
“Gentrification” as a result had also accelerated and all the difficulties of social dislocation. The poor are economically and literally being moved to the margins as the disturbances to the housing market are still working out. Here in Washington DC the poor are moved to the margins of what many call “Ward 9.” There are only 8 Wards in DC, and so “Ward 9” is a euphemism for being moved to the margins, outside the city that increasingly loses its economic diversity. Once poor and working class neighborhoods now sport housing prices approaching 1 Million.
It’s a classic case of “crack the whip.” Those at the front of the line adjust to sudden shifts in the economy and play the market, but at the back of the line the less privileged go flying off, staggering as they fall and off to the “Ward 9s” of our cities.
As a priest, I am not an economist, and I realize that economic realities are very complex. I am not calling for all sorts of government intervention etc. But I do know what I see as a priest working among all social classes. I cannot and should not devise all sorts of policy solutions, I leave that to the experts among the laity. But what I can and should do is to remind the folks in the front of the line to remember the folks at the back. “Crack the whip” is fun and exciting at the front of the line, but devastating at the back of the line.
Somewhere we should rediscover the common good and look to our own behavior, wherever we are in the line. I am my brother’s keeper. His welfare ought to be important to me. It’s about more than money; it’s about taking care to build a culture that thinks more of those behind me, and those yet to be born. What of them? How does my life and lifestyle affect them?
Monsignor Pope Ping!
These games are no longer allowed by Big Brother.
I realized that as I was posting the article. But it sure was fun as a kid. Although I was one of the kids usually near the end who went flying when my legs couldn’t keep up with the circular force.
Planned Barrenhood has a very low view of human nature. (This is in contrast with the true liberation the Catholic Church offers from bondage to animal passions.) The self-appointed experts of this pregnancy prevention establishment should have been out of business many hundreds of millions of dollars ago, if they were doing truly worthwhile service to society.
Their sex education programs are based on the presumption that kids are going to “do it” *. But there are several problems with this approach, revealed by recent studies of the sex habits of real people (not Dr. Kinsey’s warped population samples from the edges of society):
Real life stands in total contradiction, to Planned Barrenhood’s consistent policies of devaluing the influence of parents and the churches. (Perhaps they have something more in mind than just pregnancy and disease prevention?) P.B. is conspicuously ignorant of the looming labor shortage, a normal business presumption in the Human Resources field. (Either you can have a “population-explosion” or a social security crisis, but not both – choose only one of the above).
It would seem to be up to the more business-like sectors of society to start reassessing our priorities. The grievous failures of the “experts’ ” social engineering programs are now broadly acknowledged. (Minority illegitimacy rates were lower before the Pill, than majority rates are now.)
Planned Barrenhood’s low view of humanity betrays its secret service to the Enemy of souls. Their strategy is to get millions of people to forget that they are created in the image and likeness of God. The popular attitude that people are only animals perpetually in heat, first began to take hold with the 18th century enlightenment philosopher Jean Jacques Rousseau, who “made sexual appetite … a criterion of human value.”
The social revolution of the 1960s transformed the deviant attitudes of the elites into standard fare for the masses; the present, everyday implication of this change for human relations, is the attitude that “anyone who is not maximally sexually aroused at all times is some kind of freak.”
Planned Barrenhood is scandalized by the example of Jesus Christ’s total self-giving – their concept of humanity’s ultimate destiny is really that of the stone-age, copulatory demon-idol, reduced to a state of idiocy by perpetual sexual arousal.
*Ode to It: Playboys do it with flair, poets do it with wit; I know I shouldn’t care, but what the heck is “It”?
I remember playing the game, but I see no connection between this priest’s ramblings and reality (or the game). Sin tends to destroy all lives. But when I was poor, my beliefs as a Christian helped set me up for future success.
I’ve watched high ranking officers destroy their lives through sexual sin. When working at minimum wage jobs, I watched coworkers spend their little spare cash on drugs. I’ve seen wealthy and poor go through multiple marriages, often due to a refusal to keep their sex lives limited to their spouse.
Many poor make bad financial decisions. I didn’t even HAVE a credit card when I was poor, but I know poor people with $15K+ in credit card debt. When I made minimum wage, I still tithed. I did not have TV, cable, Internet, smart phones or nice clothes - because I saved.
Believing in God will not make you financially secure. But many of the things a Christian does to obey God will also help lift you out of the worst poverty - work hard, tithe, be careful of spending, live modestly, be careful who you marry in hopes of staying married for life, avoid drugs, don’t sleep with co-workers, etc.
The problem with society is SIN, and it affects ALL.
I remember that back in the 1960s this was called “urban redevelopment” of replacing the slums with high rise apartment buildings for those on welfare. Thus the monster of the Cabrini Green complex in Chicago that was hailed as a triump and ignored that the gangs took it over and no one did any repairs. The entire complex was finally destroyed a few years ago.
For DC, one has the public and low rent housing in Southwest by the Navy Yard and Ft. McNair. that area is now being redeveloped with the National’s baseball stadium and new high end retail and apartments replacing the old semi-industrial area and former blocks of low rent housing that have been cleared.
Go to this website to see all of the construction in this area over the last dozen years: http://www.jdland.com/dc/index.cfm
So, the priest also blames real estate investors & “flippers”?
Just wow. No comments from His HolyAss about about mortgages literally given to those who had no business borrowing, nor any intention of paying it back. That’s what drove up demand & prices. He’s bitching about fake money loaned to pretend buyers as a pretext for theft, then complains when the scheme didn’t achieve his goals. F Him & his Commie ways.
Real estate, even just undeveloped dirt, is a tangible asset, unlike stocks & bonds. You can put your hands on it. You might even be able to defend it. It will rarely have zero value, which will always make it attractive to buyers & investors when everything else goes crap up.
Someone ought to cut this guy off from his daily dose of Krugman.
This is why we used to have high standards of ethics and morality applied to the elite. High character was a part of qualifying for high positions in all professions. You could not be a criminal and an NBA or NFL player. You could not be a loud and proud psychopath ripping everyone off and be a CEO. You could not be known to have children out of wedlock and rise to the top.
People were not all perfect and they hid uncomely aspects of their behavior and lives from their peers and the public. But as a society, Americans knew right from wrong and fair from unfair, and it was important to be as right as we could muster. When someone went off the rails and repented, we often forgave them. We were a society of second changes but we were not chumps to be taken advantage of.
We operated under Western morals and ethical standards. Humanism is dog eat dog and the people at the middle at bottom of the economic scale get whip lash. Children get mauled.
They can not afford to live the unethical, amoral and unfair cultural norms set by the elite and be a civil and free society. Being moral and ethical is basically social and economic survival and independence.
But it is the “liberal” elite who culturally cleansed our American culture so they could indulge themselves in any degree of sin and rip-off scam and name it cool; encouraging the middle class and poor to do the same through gutter entertainment and exposure. They ridicule the good; look down on the moral and ethical. Their central message is that the biggest and only sin is to judge - to discern good from evil.
Yes, those with more social or other capital—and the brains to be “smart money”—generally do better than the dull poor.
But house flippers didn’t cause gentrification or the housing bubble.
I do! When I saw the title the first thing I thought of was the Winslow Homer painting.
I thought this might be about overprotective parents worried about their precious darlings getting skinned knees.
Yes, I remember playing Crack the Whip.
And although I usually love Msgr. Pope’s articles, I think this one is based on a bad analogy, and fails to look at where the problems are really coming from.
I don’t think he is blaming them. It’s just that people switched to real estate to make money. I have a daughter still in the business.
Agreed. He makes the point that those of us who have to one degree or another “made it” can adjust to changes in the outside forces. Those who, for one reason or another have not “made it” and probably will not make it are the most damaged. I know people who are damaged and fragile. Sometimes it’s that persons fault, sometimes not. Either way, that person is a child of God and needs to be considered in the entire culture.
What he is saying is that in the DC area, certain people with lots of money would buy properties, improve them, and then sell them. This has the effect of pushing prices for housing up. As a consequence of the price going up, poor people could no longer afford to live there.
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