We just keep going with whatever shitty or exploitative behavior we are doing until the consequences force us to do otherwise.
This haunting sculpture was made by Kwame Akoto-Bamfo in memory of African ancestors who drowned as they were being transported across the Atlantic Ocean as slaves.
I read this last week regarding Juneteenth: I wish I had written down where I read it – I didn’t.
Today is Juneteenth, the national remembrance that it took two years (TWO YEARS!!) for white, land-holding enslavers in Texas to tell the people they held in slavery that Lincoln had set them free. They probably wouldn’t have told them even then, if it hadn’t been for Union Troops who marched into Texas two years after the Civil War was over. That instinct—to exploit until the last possible moment, and to only stop when accountability shows up—is ever-present, and we’re seeing evidence of it all around us. How long, Oh Lord?
I’ve been thinking about this aspect of human nature and why we are like this. We just keep going with whatever shitty or exploitative behavior we are doing until the consequences force us to do otherwise. We exploit the unseen workers overseas who are working at slave wages or worse so we can buy cheap goods. There have been no real consequences to us for it. We exploit the workers among us with less than a living wage with little to no consequences for it other than minor inconveniences like a longer wait for our food due to a shortage of workers in our local fast-food restaurant. We exploit women and minorities by paying them less for the same work, until they quit or revolt. We exploit marginalized groups by making them the targets of our unresolved fear and rage and the scapegoats for what is wrong in our society, until unrest breaks out. Women carry unequal workloads in the home, are ignored by their husbands, are exploited sexually, not just by strangers, but by men who claim to love them, until they leave or blow the whistle. We exploit our own bodies with junk food, alcohol, cigarettes or lack of exercise, until our bodies revolt with chronic illness or worse. We will continue to exploit the planet until our food and water supplies are so damaged that we can’t avoid the consequences to our very lives. Why?
Our mindset is so steeped in an economic and judiciary viewpoint, we can barely conceive of actions that are disconnected from reward and punishment. We do what we do to GET. Our very theology of God is transactional. God is a being who rewards that which is good and punishes that which is evil. So, unless we are being punished, we often have no sense of wrongdoing. We are like a rebellious teenager, who is trying to break free from her parents’ rules, and we continue our shitty behavior until punishment or consequences are received. We have not realized that God is not a parent. God is nothing but grace and love – not rules and punishment. We have not understood that when we love others as ourselves, love the planet as part of the incarnation of God, love our bodies as though they were the body of Christ, we step into the energy that is love. Instead, we have seen the whole thing as transactional. An economy in which we do good things (including love) for rewards and pay-offs and might just do shitty things until we are punished.