Today’s Scripture Reading (March 20,
2015): Revelation 6
At this year’s
version of the Academy Awards, Patricia Arquette used her moment in the
spotlight to demand gender equality within the wage wars. There is nothing new
with the idea of equal pay for equal work regardless of gender. And as much as many
of the viewers, both inside and outside of the Academy, seem to have been
offended by Arquette’s words, there is also nothing wrong with Arquette’s
demand. There should be wage equality across the gender gap.
But Arquette’s
words may reveal an even greater problem. In our culture, inequality reigns. Arquette
admits that it was not much of a discussion for her to gain equal pay with her
male counterparts on her new television show “CSI: Cyber,” but she also argues
that her situation seems to be the exception rather than the rule. And she is
right, but it is not just a gender problem. There is inequality across the
breadth of our society. And the gap between the rich and poor is steadily widening.
The middle classes, maybe only fifty years ago a stable in our society, have
become an endangered species. In our culture there are increasingly only two
classes – the rich and the poor. And not to miss Arquette’s point, there are
more women in the latter class (the poor) then there are in the former (the
rich).
But the
problem is greater than a speech at an awards show can reveal. Over the past
few months my morbid mind seems to have been drawn toward several article
outlining how our little blue planet may find its end, with suggestions as far
reaching as climate change (by far the most likely scenario for the demise of
our planet according to several authors, the collision of earth with a meteor
or asteroid (a Near Earth Object), or even alien invasion (the least likely
source of our end.) But what almost every author misses is this - we know how
the world is likely to end. There is a danger that is even greater than climate
change which at this point seems almost inevitable – our planet will end with a
death struggle between those that have and those who don’t. Inequality is a
problem that demands all of our attention because within it we will find the
seeds of our own destruction. People will die today for no other reason than
that they do not have enough to eat, while I will discard food because I don’t
like the taste of it. And now this inequality, which maybe once was a story that
was told of exotic places across an ocean, has reached our shores. We don’t
have to go to some exotic place to find starving children. They are living in
our own backyards.
The Third Horseman
of the Apocalypse would seem to illustrate this kind of inequality. Bread would
be measured out precisely, and a day’s wage would only buy enough to feed a
single person and keep him or her alive. Right now, the luxuries of life are
beyond the grasp of many, but in this day the essentials of life would be only available
to the rich. In the day of the Third Horseman, the middle classes would be
totally destroyed, all that would be left would be the rich who could afford to
live, and the rest of us begging for the scraps that are falling off tables of
those that have. And because of this, and with the overwhelming majority that
would have no other choice than to beg for the essentials of life, the table
would be set for revolution.
And yet John
seems to indicate that even here there are limits. Some have suggested that the
protection of the oil and the wine would be another indication of the divide
between the rich and the poor. But oil and wine in this day were not luxuries,
they were staples. It is much better to interpret this as an indication that
recovery would come – that the famine would only last for a while. But in that
a while, there is no doubt that our world would be changed.
Tomorrow’s Scripture Reading:
Revelation 7
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