Moses, is that you crapping on a cop car?
Via Courrier-Journal:
. . .The church should celebrate the Occupy movement, the group that picked up the social justice mantle dropped by the majority of today’s church, and offer our stories of divine justice.
Like the story of Pharaoh, symbol of the monopoly of wealth held by the few, and what happens when leadership fears of scarcity turn Israelites into slaves.
Pharaoh monopolized the food as a way to assuage his fears of not having enough. The people needed food too, of course, so he gave them food in exchange for work.
When their work didn’t produce a living wage, they bartered away land to Pharaoh. Then their cattle. Then their freedom. Way led to way. When the strong exert financial and political power over the weak, eventually the system becomes sick. Slavery is human sickness.
Somehow the living wage jobs of the past mysteriously disappeared, replaced by machines or by the transfer of jobs to other nations with cheaper work forces.
It’s not so mysterious, really. Like Pharaoh, the Corporate Deciders made decisions in the name of efficiency that also maximized profits and secured their future. Can you blame them? That’s their job — to make a profit.
The jobs disappeared but the money didn’t disappear. It’s in the storehouses of today’s Pharaohs.
The response to slavery in the biblical story was divine intervention. “Let my people go,” said Moses. Unfortunately, since Moses is memorialized in so many stained glass windows it’s hard to apply his radical reordering of social structure to today.
The demands of today’s Occupy movement may seem less divine, at least from our close-up point of view.
But I wonder if, from a distance, say from heaven, the demands for justice don’t look a lot like those old, old stories.