I am a dangerous woman: a fight against unbridled capitalism

I am a dangerous woman: a fight against unbridled capitalism December 5, 2016

only-the-rich-and-powerful-I want to be a dangerous woman.

I made that decision after reading this opinion piece recently published in the New  York Times.

There, a philosophy professor, George Yancy of Emory University, speaks of having been placed on the Professor Watchlist. The Watchlist is the place where students apparently indoctrinated in uncritical conservative thought patterns warn other students who want their current ideologies to go unchallenged to avoid identified-as-dangerous faculty.

Yancy decides to own it.

Well, if it is dangerous to teach my students to love their neighbors, to think and rethink constructively and ethically about who their neighbors are, and how they have been taught to see themselves as disconnected and neoliberal subjects, then, yes, I am dangerous, and what I teach is dangerous.

Yes, I thought.”I will be a dangerous woman.”

I will live faithfully to my baptismal vows to renounce the forces of wickedness, reject the evil powers of this world, resist evil, injustice, and oppression in whatever forms they present themselves.

Because I trust that the nature of God has expressed itself most fully in the life, death and new life of Jesus, I will find my model for behavior there. That means an intentional reach into the communities of the cultural untouchables of my day. For Jesus, the leper, the beggar, the bleeding woman. For me, the differently sexed, the victims of religious and political oppression, the captives of those who trade in sex and forced prostitution.

It also means a continued speaking out against a political system that bases itself on the “profit the rich” model only and refuses to accept our larger, communal responsibility to those on the outside of the rewarding forces of unbridled capitalism.

It means that I am aware of my position of privilege in this society and will abide by these words of Jesus, “To whom much is given, much is required.” 

Years ago, I read a powerful and probably mostly ignored book called Coming Out of the Ice: an Unexpected Story.We learn of the life of Victor Herrman, who, with his parents, went to the Soviet Union in the 30’s to help build an auto plant there.

Victor ended up spending 45 years in the Stalin-ruled world, a world we could easily emulate with our own version of the paranoid, too-powerful, unaccountable leader at the helm. Hermann was an astoundingly good athlete and was first seen as a hero. However, he fell from grace and spent most of his later years in and out of Soviet prison camps, subject to many of the same tortures that are used today.

There is one scene, imprinted in my mind, of him at a camp where another prisoner, Red Loon (played in the movie version to perfection by Willie Nelson!) hands him his own cage to catch rats (eaten raw), a necessary survival technique. Red is about to be deported to an even worse camp where he faces inevitable death. He tells Victor that he, Victor, has seen the worst life has to offer. Because of that, he need never be afraid again.

I think we are getting ready to face similar evil and injustice, perhaps some of the worst ever seen in the US. We must stand up unafraid of the consequences of our resistance.

We will see it in the church as the religious far right seeks to eliminate more and more progressive voices who speak out for the marginalized. The conservative arm insists that church growth will be the result of expelling progressive voices. They have crowned Trump as their standard-bearer for “biblical” behavioral standards.

By making unexamined church growth and political influence as primary goals, they pander to the unredeemed need of humanity to define both an ingroup (themselves and therefore good) and an outgroup (the others and therefore bad). These stances are antithetical to the words and life of Jesus.

We will also see evil and injustice on a national and international scale as the political world deals with a constitutionally ignorant President-elect whose only experience is in the business world. He has surrounded himself with the darlings of white supremacists, with those dedicated to taking down the public education system, and with the worst: mega-billionaires who wish to turn control of the public safety net into private, profit-driven hands.

All these forces will culminate in making the poor even poorer.

Please note: I do not advocate nor support socialism as a viable economic model for the US, but do I recognize the evils inherent in unregulated capitalism that is driven only by bottom line results.

I am married to a person in the health insurance business. There is no question but that the private sector can come up with better products overall than what is offered through the Affordable Care Act.

The problems are not with the big middle who are generally healthy and who need reasonable access to decent health care. The problem is that the private sector can and will eliminate from participation the very small percentage of heavy users of health care, i.e, those with pre-existing conditions that need long-term support and often expensive attention to thrive and stay productive.

This is one of the reasons why running a business and running a government are two different tasks. Running a business means fighting for all advantages in a highly competitive a dog-eat-dog world, filled with winks and secret handshake deals. In its unregulated state, that world creates discriminatory practices and policies because they mean higher profits. Their appropriate goal is to ultimately bring financial benefit to the owners and stockholders.

The government, however, is a government of all the people, not just a limited and moneyed few. Everyone has a stake in its proper function. It is for the people, of the people, by the people. Government functions under a mandate to protect all citizens from danger, including the danger of unregulated rapacious corporate aggression.

So, when we privatize the social safety net, dismantling the Affordable Care Act for example, we put that net into the hands of those who have no stake in caring for the least among us. Why? Because the least can’t pay their way, biting into profits.

Simply put, I believe the move to privatize those things will lead to our own version of ethnic cleansing, except it will be financially-based, not wealth based. I predict that, should privatization as suggested so far happen, we will see a massive and tragic epidemic of early and unnecessary deaths of the poor.

Now, hear this: corporate America is not some unmitigated evil force. Again, I’m married to a person in the insurance business. My husband has graciously and patiently taught me more than I could have ever learned otherwise the challenges of working in a highly competitive environment where the bottom line must be considered in every decision. It’s extremely different from my life in the non-profit church world. It is also extremely different from the world of governmental policies.

Because of his willingness to take a lot of risks and to delay for an extensive period of time any financial rewards from his labor, my husband also made it possible for hundreds and hundreds to make a decent living, to support families, to give to their church and communities. I often call him the accidental philanthropist–a label he laughs at, but there is much truth there.

The US needs to create an atmosphere where millions of profitable businesses thrive with the same positive societal effect. If Trump’s policies can help create that atmosphere, then it should be celebrated.

But we should not enact government policy based on private profits. They are two different fields with significantly different values and motivations. Both are needed as well as the non-profit world in order to create a good, healthy society where no one is left out.

Our bottom line? In truth, privatizing could possibly be highly profitable for us personally, although no one can actually predict the outcome.

But I choose to be a dangerous woman and say, “I will do what is necessary to protect the vulnerable in our country.”

Who will stand with me?


Browse Our Archives