The Cost of Progress

 I am writing this today on Martin Luther King Day, and therefore I am home because it is an observed government holiday for us as teachers.  A few observations have arisen that are kind of related to this, and I wanted to just focus in on some thoughts I wanted to share with you today. 

At the private Jesuit school where I teach, the frequency of prayer services/chapels is about once a month.  In general, the slated spiritual event is either a prayer service or a Mass, and due to the fact the demographic of students we have tends to be somewhat disruptive, the school administration happened upon an idea to alleviate issues - two grades each month would attend the service in the church next door, while the other two grades would meet in their Advisories (home rooms) and would do some activity, and then this would alternate the following month.  It is not an idea I am in complete agreement with in all honesty, but I do understand the logic - the leaders of our school are trying to address an issue, and this was perhaps the most feasible solution they could come up with to curb adverse behavior from some sectors of the student body that tend to be disruptive and disrespectful in church.   So far, the results have proven good, but I have other questions about the approach I won't address here.  Any rate, let's get onto the current situation.

The focus of this prayer service this month for the underclassmen was a prayer service that promotes racial justice, in lieu of Martin Luther King's legacy that is celebrated today.  The idea itself is noble, and the whole concept of being catholic is in the very word itself - Catholic means "universal" from its Greek root, and the Church is indeed for all people regardless of background.  So, in that regard, it's a noble idea.  While the underclassmen attended an 80-minute prayer service in the church, the juniors and seniors had an activity that entailed watching a video called A Place at the Table, which documents the lives of six American Black Catholics who are slated (and rightly so) to receive canonization as saints.  These six individuals in the video are all people who had a strong Catholic faith and who also served the Church in varying capacities during their lives, and one of them (Mother Mary Lange) was from Baltimore - St. Francis Academy at the other end of town is a product of the religious order she founded, and it still exists today over a hundred years after its founding.  The lives of these future saints were definitely worth exploring, as all of them do provide a stellar example of living out the faith in ways that exemplify holiness.  However, as is often the case with these types of videos, the producers of the documentary totally went off-course and were attempting to turn their cause for canonization into a political statement, and hence the problem.  I will go into that more next.

The people who were interviewed in the documentary were a variety of priests, religious, and lay leaders, and many of them were themselves Black.  No one has an issue with clergy of different ethnicities or races - the Church encourages it, and if someone feels a calling on their lives they should definitely pursue that.  However, a couple of these priests - both Black - concerned me, as it seemed that their whole rhetoric was on how "racist" everything is - the United States, the Church, etc.  It was frankly stupid, uncalled for, and had absolutely nothing to do with the lives of the holy people who were supposed to be the topic of the documentary.  My response to these two "priests" is simple - if you think the Church is so racist, then why are you here??  Get the hell out and go to some Afrocentric cult somewhere that preaches this garbage (I hear Louis Farrakhan is looking for recruits).  While there is a place for some political and historical context in the story itself, I feel that sometimes it gets so contorted that it detracts from the original topic, and at that point it ceases being education and becomes political incitement.  Thankfully, this video was being shown to six teenagers who had other interests on their mind and they didn't pay attention to the content as much, and that is for the best in this case.  Although they had a reflection assignment they needed to do, many of them thankfully focused on how the lives of the actual people (they did get to that eventually after all the political propaganda was cleared) and that was encouraging.   The video though was just one instance of this I dealt with this week, as there was an even more personal one that still has me reeling even now.

The president of our school is generally a nice man, but unfortunately as far as his position goes, he also tends to politicize things a bit much.   Last year for instance, he was spreading a conspiracy rumor that ICE vans were circling the blocks around the school threatening to snatch up any person who spoke with an accent, and frankly that was very irresponsible.  At that time, I was taking the city bus to work every day, and I traveled every street within a ten-block radius of the school and never once saw an ICE van.  To this day I still don't see them, and that leads to an observation I wanted to share which dates back to my security officer training over 30 years ago.  It is a normal reaction for people to get a little nervous when they are driving on a highway and a cop is behind them or next to them in the other lane.  They get the idea that the cop is just randomly running their license plate ID in a scanner and will nab them if they even look in the rear-view mirror.  When I took my Class-D security training in Florida back in 1995, the class was taught by two county sheriff's deputies, and part of the class was learning to direct traffic, as security on occasion does this.  Both deputies also explained something to me that was revolutionary, and it also changed the way I looked at police authority.  What they said was this - most of the time, the cops are not worried about the cars in front of them on a street unless a car does something that merits their attention.  They are not running tags or taking pictures of the back of your car, as they too need to focus on driving their vehicles.  So, for the most part, that police car that just happens to be in your rear-view mirror is not going to be worried about you unless you give him a reason.  As ICE is also a division of law enforcement on the Federal level, the same thing is true.  ICE is not looking to randomly scoop up every person who "looks Latino" in a city, and indeed, very few in Baltimore in particular have even been detained.  The only way one can grab ICE's attention is if you are doing something that catches an ICE agent's attention.  The majority of foreign nationals here - both legal and illegal - don't necessarily fall into the category of "suspicious person" for most ICE agents.  Many of them just go about their daily business and do what all of us do, and ICE legally cannot detain anyone without probable cause.  So, if your Latino friend is walking down the street, they can do so safely, and as long as they are not criminally assaulting someone or vandalizing property, they generally have nothing to worry about.  These crazy rumors about ICE have gotten out of control, especially with what happened in Minnesota when a deranged lesbian troublemaker tried to flatten an ICE agent with her car and he defended himself with lethal force.  Generally, trying to mow over a cop of any jurisdiction with your car is not going to end well for you, because it may get you shot or if you survive it will win you a very long prison sentence for attempted assault and/or vehicular manslaughter.  It is also a reason why the president of our school should have known better than to spread baseless conspiracies, as it is unbecoming of a man of his stature.  Leadership has to set an example, and spreading baseless conspiracies does not do that.  However, that is not the only incident with our school president that raised concerns, as recently a couple of other things in casual conversation came up that concerned me. 

As today is Martin Luther King Day, which is an observed Federal holiday, our school president sent out a weekly communication commemorating Dr. King, and of course that was appropriate and nothing wrong in itself with that.  And the email itself was pretty safe - nothing controversial or anything.  In this case, it was a response to the email that was concerning.  This year, I am doing a "bucket list" objective and will be going to the March for Life in Washington this coming Friday (the 23rd).  Over the years, one of the most active participants in the pro-life movement has been Dr. King's niece Alveda, and she has been a very strong voice for the sanctity of life for many decades.  I believe she has been in attendance with every March for Life since almost the beginning, and as I understand it, she is also a devout Catholic convert herself.  I mentioned this to the school president, noting that I may get the opportunity to meet her, and his response is what raised some flags.  In his response - which was cordial - he said something to the effect that Alveda King always loved to associate with what her uncle called "adversaries," as if somehow the pro-life movement was Dr. King's enemy or something.  Dr. King was killed about 4 years before Roe v. Wade even existed, and according to what Alveda has said, her uncle would have actually been very enthusiastic about protecting all human life.  Also, if the president of a Catholic school thinks that the pro-life cause is "adversarial," then he may need to re-evaluate his career choices, especially when the March for Life Mass is going to be celebrated by Archbishop Lori of Baltimore this year.  I have more to say about all this in a short bit, but I also wanted to note another time when the president of the school really deflected any Catholic identity the school had.  I had an informal meeting with him a few months back, and it went well - it was a friendly meeting, and to be honest the president is actually a cordial and personable guy.  However, when I mentioned that a Catholic school should strive to be passionately Catholic and academically excellent, he deflected that almost immediately by using the word "inclusive" instead.  Now, of course education does have a level of inclusivity, as no one should be denied opportunities.  No one argues that.  However, that was not what this definition of "inclusion" was.  Rather, it was the politically-charged DEI understanding of "inclusion," which ultimately if seen for what it really is would be more exclusionary.  The DEI nonsense has been largely discredited in the past couple of years as essentially irrational and unattainable, and why people still cling to it amazes me.  Every attempt to implement it has resulted in disaster, and in doing so it has caused more harm than good.  People fail to recognize that you cannot legislate something called "inclusivity" in the way they wish, because ultimately someone will be excluded somewhere because no one can decide on what DEI should entail.  That is because it cannot be enforced - if you try to force those agendas on people, at some point they come back to bite the ones who implement them in the butt.  Political "inclusion" is ultimately very exclusive in other words.  If people want the real concept, it starts at the grassroots and doesn't require a policy or manifesto to implement - the only rule for it is four simple words: "don't be a jerk."   Fighting a jerk by being a jerk is not going to solve anything - to be proactive, let's just respect people as fellow human beings and not highlight race, ethnicity, or anything else as a defining trait of who an individual is.  If we do that the results will be amazing.  Perhaps our president of the school needs to understand that better. 

Getting back to the pro-life issue, many people who identify with legalizing abortion as a "right" identify as "progressives," but what they fail to understand is that abortion is a manual-labor outgrowth of a sinister pseudo-science called eugenics.  When you hear top Democrat politicians like Hillary Clinton tout Margaret Sanger, the founder of Planned Parenthood, the largest abortion corporation in the US, they almost make the woman look like a saint.  However what they fail to mention is how racist Sanger really was, and that she specifically targeted populations she called "human weeds" to implement eugenics programs, including abortion clinics.   Sanger was inspirational to people like Adolf Hitler, and she also was a sought-after speaker for Ku Klux Klan rallies.   What few "progressives" fail to understand is that the whole idea of race-based eugenics which birthed the abortion industry was the ultimate manifestation of Darwinian evolutionary theory.  Darwin, like other elites of his time, did not see things in terms of diversity of human ethnicity - instead, he proposed a polygenic origin of humanity in which he saw different races as different "species," and thus some were in this rationale "better" or "more evolved" than others.  Some of this garbage also found its way into early Fundamentalism as well, in that there were preachers who actually preached that interracial marriage was an "abomination" because it was essentially a form of bestiality to them - it was the very bad misreading of passages in Scripture such as Genesis 6:1-4, which talked about the sons of God cohabitating with the daughters of men, and despite the traditional reading of that text not being race-based, some Fundamentalists applied Darwinian biology to it and came up with perhaps one of the most racist ideas that could be spouted from a pulpit.  You see this as well in German volkisch occultist writings such as Lanz von Liebenfels' notorious work Theozoology, and it is at its core Darwinian "science" as defined by his cousin Galton's codification of eugenics.  Today, some Black supremacist groups do the same thing with White people, and you see that particularly in the writings of sects such as the Nation of Islam and various Black Hebrew Israelite groups.  It even finds its way into so-called "liberation theologies" such as the junk that was taught by late theologian James Cone.  This is why we have to be oh so careful with how we view heretical ideas such as Sola Scriptura, because this is the ultimate conclusion of such ideas. 

The reality here is that there is only one race, the human race.  We all come from the same origins, the same two parents (Adam and Eve) and a Black person is just as human in their DNA as a White person is.  As a matter of fact, a professor I had as an undergrad said many years ago that we have a misconception about the term "race," as in reality what we call "race" is actually ethnicity.  Therefore, Blacks are an ethnicity, not a separate race, and that is true of every nation on the planet.  And, at the end of the day, we are all one thing - human beings.  You cannot be more "inclusive" than that, right?  This is why interracial marriage is not a sin or an abomination - it is nature, and it is also perfectly acceptable because the term itself is irrelevant - the couple is not from separate races, but separate ethnicities, and as long as it's a man and a woman and they truly love each other, there is absolutely nothing wrong with that.  Perhaps maybe it is time we get back to a common-sense approach like that, don't you think? 

As I reflect on this, I am also at this time starting to rethink my career choices, as the self-identified "Catholic" school I currently am at seems to be having some problems reconciling its convictions.  I don't blame the principal, or even the Jesuit order that administers it, as it seems they are grappling with this question as well.  The issue is more complicated than can be explained here, but at some point in the future I will address this more in detail, as it does impact the way Catholic education should look. My main issue today though was seeing the inconsistency with how "progress" is often viewed, and some things we call "progressive" may actually be dangerous to a civilized society.  And racial identity politics of any form is one of those dangerous ideas that needs to thrown onto the garbage heap of history and burned until it is no longer recognizable.  And, it really has no place in a Catholic school or any other religious institution, and it is time to surgically remove it. 

Thank you for allowing me to share, and next week I will have a special report on my participation in the March for Life, as it is an important event.  Have a good week, and will see you next time.