c. 2005 Religion News Service
(UNDATED) Our group of emerging community leaders was divided into four teams for an exercise called “Simulated Society.”
Three teams were given assets such as money, travel passes, a newspaper, production capacity. I was assigned to the “Red Team,” which had no assets whatsoever. We were shown to a stuffy room and told to remain there.
The challenge in this all-day exercise was to build a functioning society using available assets and leadership skills.
In our closed room, we quickly realized that other teams would try to co-opt us to suit their purposes. They would offer just enough to divide us, yet keep us powerless.
We resolved to use the one asset we had: the power to say “no.” When representatives of other teams came to our room to offer deals, the transparency of their self-serving efforts was laughable. Are all attempts to manipulate the powerless that crude? With increasing delight in solidarity, our group of aspiring careerists said no again and again.
When the exercise ended, our Red Team felt exuberant, and other teams glowered at us for ruining the day. We hadn’t “played fair.” But the question remained: how do you build a functioning society when so many have nothing? When all that is allowed to them is the power to say no, what good can come?
This was the dilemma facing our forefathers in July 1776. Wealth was concentrated in a few hands. Some 25 percent to 30 percent had virtually nothing. The poor had been in rebellion for more than 20 years: tenant riots in New Jersey and New York, Stamp Act riots, Green Mountain rebels in Vermont, regulators in North Carolina, ropemakers in Boston, impressment riots in New York and Rhode Island, as well as slave uprisings.
Property owners formed groups such as the Sons of Liberty, which sought to appease the poor with revolutionary rhetoric without actually shifting the balance of ownership. The poor cheered the Declaration of Independence, then rioted days later when they learned that the wealthy could avoid a military draft by paying for substitutes. After independence, British wealth was distributed to wealthy patriots. The poor returned to sullen rebellion, and slaveowners intensified their whippings of restive slaves.
We Americans rarely tell such stories about ourselves.
We forget that slaves were specifically excluded from the July 4 Declaration and, therefore, we would have to fight a far bloodier war to end slavery. We rarely examine the many small rebellions that continued to disrupt and yet shape American life after the Revolution, as freedom-minded slaves, tenant farmers, women, immigrants, industrial workers and the urban poor refused to cooperate.
In our understandable admiration of the Founders’ courage and ideals, comparative openness to immigrants, and economic success, we rarely consider the corruption of those ideals and the deterioration of daily life that occurred as wealth served itself first: profiting from war, seizing land, callously causing financial meltdowns, and fighting every effort to ease the suffering of tenement-dwellers, miners, freed slaves, meatpackers, factory workers, immigrants, even returning soldiers.
Now wealth is more concentrated than ever, and the Red Team, as it were, is growing exponentially. Diversionary tactics like culture wars and sexuality fights are in full deployment, sapping what little unity we have. Naming these larger issues is deemed negative and unpatriotic, and seeing the religious wars as diversions is deemed non-Christian.
The question, however, still remains: What happens to an open, idealistic society when a large and growing portion of its population has too little to survive, when the only power remaining to them is the power to disrupt? If history is a guide, what happens is this: disruption does occur, and then open turns to closed, idealistic turns to cruel, freedom turns to repression.
Freedom has several prices. One is war. One is sacrifice. One is dissent. One is justice. And one _ needed now more than ever _ is honesty.
MO/JL END RNS
