Month: June 2008

The Election and Race

Steven Woolley2 Comments

Here is a letter to the editor I just sent off to our local paper.  See what you think.

The long primary season is over, and the nation is about to enter into an unprecedented general election campaign for the presidency.  There are many legitimate reasons to consider voting for one candidate or the other, and they will, no doubt, declare their differences in strong enough language to give each of us enough fodder for decision. But troubling issues are raised in this first ever election in which one candidate is of mixed race and commonly labeled as an African-American.  Media election analysts have made a big deal out of the difficulty that Sen. Obama has had, and will have, in attracting voters in the “white working class,” and that smacks of racism pure and simple.  We’ve seen it raise its ugly head in a couple of the primary fights between Sen. Obama and Sen. Clinton in places where it was commonly understood that few “white working class” persons would vote for a black candidate no matter what he stood for.  And it also cuts the other way.  Who exactly are the members of the “white working class?”  Just on the surface it sounds contemptuous and demeaning of some part of our population without actually saying who they are but leaving it up to our most prejudicial imaginations to put them in a pigeon hole.

I don’t know what will happen throughout the nation, but I am deeply concerned about our own community.  Whatever our politics and however we decided to vote, race has no place in it.  We have many churches in this town attended by thoughtful believers, so to put the seriousness of this into perspective, let me share with you a statement from the National Council of Churches adopted forty years ago, which, I believe, applies to everyone of every religious faith and to those who express none at all.

Racism is a blatant denial of the Christian faith. (i) It denies the effectiveness of the reconciling work of Jesus Christ, through whose love all human diversities lose their divisive significance; (ii) it denies our common humanity in creation and our belief that all men are made in God’s image; (iii) it falsely asserts that we find our significance in terms of racial identity rather than in Jesus Christ. 

Let us make our political decisions in any way we want but not on the basis of race, and if we do then shame, shame on us.

Cheating

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A 2007 Canadian study (Canadian Journal of Higher Education, Feb., 2007) reported that 53% of undergraduates confessed to at least some cheating in class, and 73% of them said they cheated in high school.  Two years earlier an ABC poll reported pretty much the same for American students.  The business school community, spurred on by the 2007 Fuqua scandal at Duke where 34 MBA students were caught cheating on an exam, is beginning to look at the quality of the product they are producing.  But it doesn’t end there.

David Calahan wrote The Cheating Culture in 2004 and has managed to parlay it into an entire business devoted to uncovering and teaching about cheating in our society.  Uncovering is not that hard to do.  Noted journalists see their careers extinguished over plagiarism.  Each spring the IRS tells us again how much tax cheats cost the rest of us.  The sub-prime mortgage debacle was brought on by a ponzi scheme of enormous proportions reaching into the very centers of the American financial industry.  The current administration has revealed itself to have been built on deception and lies, and the previous one certainly played fast and loose with the truth. 

It is not a pretty picture, and so it should be no surprise that the Democratic parties of Michigan and Florida felt no compunction about flouting the rules of the game to do what they wanted to do, the way they wanted to do it, and when they wanted to do it.  Now, having cheated the system at the start, they are without guilt or remorse in demanding that their cheating be honored by the full counting of their votes, and that those who obeyed the rules be, in effect, penalized for having obeyed them.  The Rules Committee compromise is probably the best that could be expected, but it also sends a signal of toleration for cheating.  I am afraid it is a toleration that pervades the American psyche to the point where we don’t really see much wrong with the sort of cheating that has become an everyday affair.  To be sure, we will get on a variety of high horses over some aspects of sex, reproductive rights or the environment, but when it comes to the ordinary events of everyday life we are curiously silent.  Is that because we don’t even know when we have crossed the line into unethical territory?

What does the Church have to say about that?  What do you have to say about that?