Death of Hope

It's a sad day today. It's sad to acknowledge the death of hope and our own complicity in that death.

I care about the world, and I care about my country's place in the world and I care about the poor and the oppressed. For me at least, I seem to have woken up this morning to that feeling of "acceptance" when you realize you've lost, or when you know you aren't going to get that thing you want or hoped for.

I was a soldier and I think I have some sense of what the soldier wants - he wants to protect his buddies; he wants to protect the innocent; he doesn't want to kill anybody; he wants to survive. But he also signed up to serve and is willing to make the ultimate sacrifice for the people he loves and things he believes in. I haven't done a survey, but I've talked to enough and I'm friends with enough to have to believe our American soldiers consider it a privilege to go fight on behalf of the poor and the oppressed around the world - not just in our own back yard. It's in our DNA and in our training.

I've never been in a war - thankfully. I was in the military on either side of the wars in Iraq. But I can't imagine how demoralizing it is to see your friends and family die in a war where there's no likely good outcome, ala Afghanistan over the last 20 years, or the second Iraq war, for examples.

We (I say "We" intentionally) started down the path of losing Ukraine when we let Putin walk into Crimea unobstructed. We lost Eastern Ukraine when we let Putin take that territory while we sat and watched and doled out a few dollars and a few weapons that were always too little and too late.

I don't know what the ratio is these days, but it used to be that when you were attacking a well-defended position, the attacker needed three times as many resources (soldiers, weapons, etc) to succeed. There is no way we would ever stomach investing the resources required to take back what has become Putin's well-defended position in Ukraine. 

That's the sad "acceptance" I woke up to this morning. It's embarrassing to me as an American and a former soldier that we've gotten to this place. And it didn't have to be this way - that's what's even worse. If our leaders cared more about people than politics, we would have dropped the 82nd Airborne Division into Crimea as soon as Putin crossed the border and we would have said, "you shall not pass!" And it would have been done right there and then. We could have done the same in Rwanda in 1994 and prevented a genocide that killed millions.

I'm a bit of a realist I suppose, at least when it comes to international relations. I don't believe in getting into or fighting or having our soldiers die for unwinnable wars. But I would fully support my son or daughter going to fight and potentially die to be part of saving the Ukrainian people from the fate they are living through now. Sadly, now we are at a place where taking back Eastern Ukraine is virtually an unwinnable scenario. So, the best we can do is try to end it and negotiate whatever structures need to be put in place to avoid it restarting in the future.

It didn't have to be this way.

Beneficiaries of Injustice

Every homeowner and every business owner (anybody with shares in a company via private or public markets), or descendant thereof, living in the developed world, has blood on his hands.

The US (and the rest of the developed world to a lesser extent) controls the global economic system. Because the value of all other currencies, whether based on fixed or floating exchange rates, are implicitly at least at a secondary or tertiary level, a function of the value of the dollar. When we "print" more or less dollars, we increase or decrease the value of the dollar and as a result, all the other currencies in the world are affected.

The value of the currency ties to inflation, unemployment, net exports, defense expenditures, etc. In other words, manipulating currencies creates poverty and wars. So, the ones who control the world's currency control the world. It's that simple.

I have a 3.625% 30-year fixed mortgage rate while friends in various places in the developing world are lucky to get a 20-year mortgage at less than 20% per annum. I have virtually unlimited opportunities to earn returns on a range of diversified investments that generate 5 to 10% real annual returns while my peers in the developing world are limited to highly speculative investments in subsistence agriculture, real estate and small family-owned start-ups. Fuel costs and other basic goods in the developing world can easily be two to five to many more times higher than in the US. This measure of disparities is endless.

Virtually everybody in the US, even the poor and oppressed in the US, are the beneficiaries of a system where the richest and most powerful people and nations simply accrue more and more power and wealth. Whether I earn my living mining rare earth minerals in Congo or trading foreign exchange or from a US defense contractor or healthcare institution or a local government agency or a mom-and-pop shop down the street, I'm a participant and beneficiary of a system built to bring greater and greater benefit to those who have more power and wealth.

Does it really matter how close I am or how many levels removed I am from the injustice? It seems pretty cut-and-dried that it's bad to be the one directly perpetrating the injustice. But if that person shops at my store and buys his food from me, then am I just as guilty? Or maybe if I supply the lumber that he uses to build his ships, that's worse because I'm enabling his bad behavior, even if I do it unknowingly.

We should understand the injustice all around us and endeavor to make it right where we can. At the same time, we shouldn't be so arrogant or ignorant as to think we aren't all beneficiaries, at some relatively meaningful level, in the injustice. I like what my pastor has said about Paul and Jesus and others in the Roman Empire, about how they were subversive in their approach to injustice - they didn't incite violent rebellion; instead, they won over their enemies with love. I'm not there yet, but hopefully moving in that direction.

 

 

Please Impose Your Religious Views on Me

I’m a corporation whose business is to convince you to buy as much expensive coffee as frequently as possible. My religion is profit.

The confederate flag hanging in my truck’s rear window makes a statement about my rugged independence and it inspires pride or discomfort in those who see it as they are challenged to consider where they stand in the face of my public display of pride. My religion is independence.

Racial diversity is a core value to me. I go to meetings and ask challenging questions of others in hopes of helping them to more highly value what I value. My religion is racial diversity.

My three kids are each in four different activities after school and I spend my life running around getting them to their different activities. In telling you this I’m challenging you to introspection about whether you are a good mom or not. My religion is busy mom-ism.

I’ve started a non-profit to help fund a women’s sewing cooperative in Africa and I’m trying to convince you to also value this endeavor and show your commitment by donating money to my non-profit. My religion is help-the-poor-ism.

The magazine I work for usually has pictures of young, thin beautiful white women on the cover and tries to manipulate its readers’ insecurities so they will buy things that help them feel better about themselves. My religion is vanity.

I follow a man named Jesus who I believe is the Son of God. I believe Jesus knows me completely and loves me unconditionally. I try to honor the poor, serve my wife, defend the defenseless, run a business with integrity, and be a good dad because that’s who I am but also in hopes it might encourage you to seek this same all-knowing and unconditional love. My religion is Christianity.

Religion is a system of beliefs or values. We all have them. Religion involves worship which simply means giving significant time and attention to something we value. We all do it. And we are all always trying to "impose" our views on others if impose means trying to convince others we're right and by implication they're not. We do it consciously or subconsciously, overtly or inadvertently but we are all always doing it. It's at best hypocritical and irrational and at worst discriminatory and malicious to criticize me for trying to "impose" my religious views on you while by so doing you are simultaneously trying to "impose" your religious views on me.

We all aspire to live holistically whether we realize it or not. To be fulfilled, to be fully human, we need to be who we are regardless of the context and regardless of the consequences. So please go ahead and continue to be your authentic self and integrate your values into all of what you do in your personal, work, social, business and political lives. Advocate strongly for what you value and I’ll do the same. And if your values are attractive to me, I’ll likely start to take some of them on as my own and hopefully vice-versa. If not, then I’ll reject them, but I’ll endeavor to dialogue and to not be offended because I may value some things differently from how you value them.

Liberal Arts Education for Pre-K through College

My children's school district superintendent recently published a piece titled, "The future of our educational system is being shaped today." He posits that the district's mission is to help students be "effective critical thinkers, problem-solvers, researchers, communicators, and responsible citizens, is right on track," and I agree with him. However, he prefaces the topic with recounting a trip to China where he met students who said, "American students don't work very hard. We're going to take your jobs." The implication was that an important part of the motivation for this mission is for our children to be able to compete for jobs against their peers living in China.

I recently had the privilege of listening to Andy Crouch speak at Gordon College. Andy is Executive Editor at Christianity Today and popular speaker and author on sociology and Christianity in America. One of his themes was that a Liberal Arts education is about developing whole human beings who are able to bear the burden of responsibility that comes with being a free (liberal) person. He goes a step further in saying that this valuing of the whole person implied in the Liberal Arts tradition stems from a recognition that all people are image-bearers of God. At its foundations, it is this perspective that motivates the Liberal Arts tradition. Without it, as reflected in college demographics today, the Liberal Arts tradition will fade away.

Our school district is one of the best in the country and has gone above and beyond what we would have hoped for in caring for and training our children. We are very thankful to be part of this district and we believe its mission is aligned in many ways with this Liberal Arts focus on developing the whole person. I worry, however, that the mission is in danger of becoming skewed if its underlying motivation is to create graduates who will be able to effectively compete for jobs with the Chinese. I hope instead our district's mission will continue to build on its roots in the Liberal Arts tradition, simply honoring the reality that all students are "fearfully and wonderfully" made.

The Dulles Brothers - a System of Global Governance

Influential in American Foreign Policy and the global political economy for over four decades, the Dulles Brothers, Allen and Foster, reached the pinnacles of their power in the 1950s as Director of the CIA and Secretary of State respectively.

They arguably played a critical role in not just fighting the Cold War, but starting and escalating the Cold War in a way that likely would not have happened without them. They very directly deposed foreign leaders from Guatemala to Iran and were instrumental in leading the US into the Vietnam War. A fundamental principal of their approach to US foreign policy was a belief that the world is and should be run by a cadre of international elites.

As Foster told the International Chamber of Commerce in Berlin in 1937, "It is a well ordered domestic economy which provides the greatest assurance of peace, and the problem of international peace is but an extension of the problem of internal peace." They were founding members of the Council on Foreign Relations whose one-word Latin motto "ubique," meaning "everywhere," spoke volumes of their belief that it was only through international capitalism tied into all workings of society in all corners of the globe that international peace and stability would be achieved.

None of the above is necessarily flawed reasoning. But regardless one's worldview, a governing system left unchecked in the hands of humans will become corrupt. It is only by a set of values that transcend the governors and the governed that a system will be just. As James Madison, America's fourth president said, "You must first enable the government to control the governed; and in the next place oblige it to control itself."

In the name of effective (probably even "just" in their eyes) global governance, the Dulles brothers perpetrated fraud and supported cronyism of epic proportions. They made policy that directly benefited their business clients and their friends or made it in retribution for slights of their clients and their friends. Those on the right side became incredibly wealthy and powerful in the process. Those on the wrong side were deposed and bankrupted or on a grander scale died in unjust wars or suffered poverty through a flawed system.

Then is the right answer to work to remodel global political economic systems around universal truths? A topic for another discussion, but this I believe is the definition of a society and the reason societies have been birthed and the way they have been governed from time in memorial. Yet we still are where we are today, so there must be something more to the answer that we have yet to fully grasp..

Much of the thinking above is derived from Stephen Kinzer's "The Brothers: John Foster Dulles, Allen Dulles, and Their Secret World War"

Ironman South Africa 2012

185 participants didn’t finish the 2012 South Africa Ironman. I so easily could have been one of those people. You have 2 hours and 30 minutes to finish the swim or you are disqualified. I finished the first half in 45 minutes, then the winds and currents really picked up. At less than half way into the 2^nd lap of the swim, I realized I was already at the 1 hour 30 minute mark and that I wasn’t making much progress swimming against the current. I started pushing harder and turned the corner to be able to at least swim cross-current and made it back to finish the swim in 1 hour 50 minutes. One of the professional’s described the swim as “cruel,” saying it made her feel like she hadn't even trained.

Getting into the bike was actually pretty encouraging as I took it relatively easy and finished the 1^st third averaging over 16 mph which would have put me at 7 hours total bike time. My goal had been 6 to 6.5 and I figured I could make up time on the next laps. Starting up the hill at the beginning of the 2^nd lap, I realized I had been seriously deluded and that I would be lucky to finish the bike in the total time allotted. Pros ended up taking an hour longer than previous years on the bike because of the wind. We would literally be riding uphill into the wind, then make the turn and start a long downhill only have to pedal against the win to actually pick up speed on the downhill…not to mention the 45 kilometer per hour (kph) sideways gusts that knocked a few riders over while going downhill. My second lap was 15 minutes slower than my first and my third was 15 minutes slower than my second. A couple flat tires and a little slower ride and I wouldn’t have made the bike disqualification cut-off time either.

I laughed after talking to my friends in Kigali who had completed an Ironman when they told me that the best part of the race was after the bike when you realized that all you had left to do was a marathon. But having finished the bike and started the run, realizing that I could still be considered a finisher even if I ran/walked 16 minute miles, I appreciated what they said.

It doesn’t sound very spiritual, but the true driving motivation throughout the different legs of the race was that I wanted to just get that particular leg finished. On the swim, I felt OK physically throughout, but I had drank so much salt water and was so sick of being tossed around by the waves for almost 2 hours that I just wanted out of the ocean. On the bike, similar to the swim, my legs and lungs actually felt OK, but my morale had been beaten down by the wind and rain and I was so saddle sore that I never wanted to look at my bike again. Finally on the run, with the rain and the dark and a slightly pulled Achilles and swollen knee, I just wanted to be done pounding the pavement which motivated me to push for 12 minute miles instead of the 16 that I could have finished with. I had about three miles to go before I was done and my only thought was that I wanted this thing to be over with so I picked up the speed from there through to the finish line. And miraculously for those three miles, my Achilles and my knee didn't bother me at all.

There’s no doubt that the Ironman is mostly a mental game. I knew that if I started walking on the run, I would end up walking most of the run so I didn’t even start. But I did drag super slowly on the first lap (of three) going uphill. It was there that I literally felt like people must have been praying for me because I just flipped the switch and decided not to mope about how I felt and instead get back on a good pace so I picked it up and held that same pace for the rest of the run.

The fact that I trained at much higher altitude in Kigali, that I never had the extra buoyancy from a wetsuit or from saltwater during my training and that I was generally training in less-than-ideal conditions (lots of hills, lack of nutrients and water, lots of traffic, etc) really helped me do OK with the difficult conditions of the race.

I didn’t spend a lot of time analyzing the “why” of doing this before I did it and I don’t want to spend a lot of time doing so now. All I know is that I wanted to and had wanted to for a while and the desire to do it hadn’t gone away. Ultimately it felt like a "natural" thing for me to do, as opposed to something forced or contrived for some ulterior motive.

I think what this race reconfirmed for me is that life is about being who I am. And that it’s really not by might nor by power but by His Spirit. And that it’s when I’m being who I am that I have the chance to realize that it’s not by might nor by power.

So…genuine Glory to God and thank you to my friends and family who supported me throughout this last 9 months and particularly for all the prayers that carried me through a really long day in South Africa on the 22^nd of April 2012!

Capitalism Requires that we Love Our Neighbors

Today I listened to a podcast on faith and justice from Bill Moyers and a number of philosophers talking about the seismic shift in the global economic system. A common theme was that we were in the midst of a “transitional moment” in economic history. They claimed that the market has failed us.

I side with another philosopher, Ecclesiastes, who said, “there is nothing new under the sun.” Since the beginning of time, people have traded with one another in order to achieve higher levels of utility, or in other words, to get more of what they wanted. The blacksmith and the cobbler and the doctor all had different levels of training and different levels of compensation, but what they had in common was a desire to make themselves individually better off and they traded their particular service with the other in order to achieve this. Some traders took great risks to achieve great utility or benefit to themselves, but in so doing, they also produced great innovations and great benefits to others in society. Economic history is littered with boom and bust cycles because of our human nature to achieve more and more and more for our own personal gain. But those who take this too far are often destroyed by that motivation that had made them so successful. This is part of the cycle of life itself, the process of creative destruction, the process of learning from our mistakes, the process of survival of the fittest that makes our society and world stronger and stronger and stronger over time.

But in the midst of this, there is destruction of the weakest and poorest and oldest and least intelligent. In this process there are those who manipulate and take advantage and abuse those who, in economist speak, are less well endowed with the capacity to achieve higher levels of utility. Prior to Adam Smith ever codifying any form of definition of capitalism, the earliest of societies realized this and put in place systems by which to control and limit power of some and increase the power of those who had less. Adam Smith defined a market system in the context of having these controls in place. He and others have defined specific areas where the market system fails and requires some form of intervention in order to correct for its failures.

The following are the areas where the market is destined to fail:

- When products or services are Public Goods. When there are products or services that cannot be efficiently provided by the private market because the public benefits from the product or service and because no one can be excluded from the benefits of the public good. Examples of these products include lighthouses, national defense, bridges, air, and fish in the ocean.

- When a Monopoly/Oligopoly situation exists. When an entity becomes so powerful that it can dictate the total output volume and price of products or services for an entire market.

- When Externalities exist. When benefits and costs of certain activities are not able to be priced by the market and are not directly borne by the producer or consumer of those activities (pollution, parks, etc), leading to inaccurate pricing of those activities.

- When there is no effective system of Property Rights. Without just and accurate definition of who has the right to buy or sell certain assets, there is implicitly no market.

- When people have Imperfect Information. When buyers or sellers are not aware of all of the information relevant to the conduct of a transaction, leading to artificially high or low prices.

So not only is the global boom and bust that we have experienced recently not unique in history. It does not portray the failure of capitalism or the market system. It is the market system. The market system is built to fail. The market system is defined by the existence of these failures. There is no market system without these failures. This recent boom and bust cycle does not indicate a transition from thousands of years of human nature. It is not a “transitional moment” to some new third or fourth or fifth way. The market is the most efficient system of allocating goods and services to benefit the greatest number of people, if and only if the above market failures are properly managed.

The market system demands that some governing body intervene to correct for these market failures. And that is where the fault lies in the suffering and injustice being experienced today. The governing bodies have failed miserably to intervene and correct for these market failures.

The tragedy is that the government would rather blame someone other than itself for the current suffering and injustice. And in representative governments, the citizens are the government. If our politicians produce ineffective legislation, it is because we want them to; because effective legislation requires sacrifice on the parts of the governed in order to correct for the market failures. We might actually have to pay more for products if we want to decrease pollution. We might have to endure higher taxes if we want to recognize the societal benefit of a baseline level of medical care and education for all. We might have to pass up opportunities to take advantage of insider information related to a particular transaction.

Here’s a revolutionary thought from the late President of the United States, John F. Kennedy. “Ask not what your country can do for you, but what you can do for your country.”