The Space to be Human

Weedpatch Migrant Camp - Photo by Bobak Ha'Eri Wikimedia

I never read The Grapes of Wrath in high school or college. Recently, I decided to dive into this quintessentially American classic. John Steinbeck's "Grapes of Wrath" was published in 1939 and yet as I read it, I found the story profoundly relevant.

(Spoilers Ahead)

The Grapes of Wrath is the story of a family displaced by natural disaster and the relentless math of capitalism. We encounter the Joad family after they have been reduced to tenant farmers on what had once been their own land. They had mortgaged their land to cover losses from past years' crop failures. The drought continued, the crops failed again, and the Joads, along with their neighbors, were in default:

"A man can hold the land if he can just eat and pay taxes. Yes, he can do that until his crops fail one day and he has to borrow money from the bank. But you see, a bank can't do that... They breathe profits, they eat the interest on money. If they don't get it, they die..".

Now the days of reckoning were at hand.  The land owners ("owner men") have come to evict them off the land. The mathematics of finance, banking, and money-lending created an unseen force that drove them away:

"All of them [owner men] were caught in something larger than themselves. Some of them hated the mathematics that drove them, and some were afraid, and some worshiped the mathematics because it provide a refuge from thought and from feeling."

The Joads loaded everything they owned into a truck and began living as nomads. Then, as now, people resorted to living in their vehicles and encampments. In today's parlance, they were homeless. Steinbeck takes us on their journey to California as they burn through cash and fall into increasingly desperate straights. They wander around the state believing that a good-paying job is just around the corner, but there are no good-paying jobs. All the while their economic reality became bleaker. The locals treat them as pariahs. Law officers force them to move from their encampments. They hurry to arrive at orchards and fields only to find out that they can't, as an entire family, pick enough to feed themselves for a day.

You cannot read this book and fail to see today's economic refugees, sleeping in cars, in parks or under bridges, driving ride-shares as second (and possibly third) gigs, trying to survive on stagnant wages as gentrification raises rents and drives people to living on the streets.

The unseen force was mathematics, the equations of finance and capitalism. Mathematics played an important role, and now technology amplifies the power of mathematics a thousand-fold. Scheduling software has wrung out all the "wasted time" out of human labor. Service and retail jobs are scheduled on-demand. Employees are required to drop everything, come to work, or risk losing their job. Second jobs or educational pursuits are put on hold because, on a moments' notice, you can be called in and you dare not refuse.

Employees who are lucky enough to find full or near full-time employment are subject to "strict performance" (KPI) metrics. The relentless math of waste reduction squeezes out the last seconds of idle time in a workers life. In factories and warehouses employees are tracked. In an effort to prevent employee illness from dehydration, urine color charts are conveniently posted in restrooms.  Delivery vehicles are tracked as well as delivery drivers. I've seen delivery persons sprint from their trucks to front doors and back. In the end, desperate employees relieve themselves in bottles or in hidden corners to avoid being penalized for not making quota.

Service clerks are graded by their survey results. Many clerks look at me desperately. "Will you please fill out this survey?" they ask. Now that I am more aware of the possible effects on their employment, I take the time to fill them out. Ride-share apps require you to "grade your driver" on safety, cleanliness, and conversation. I once had a Lyft driver preface his answer to my question about the city with: "I won't answer unless you promise to give me a good grade on my conversation".

I was lucky enough to have a "white collar" office job. Towards the end I noticed the annual reviews were getting harsher. If you fell into the bottom third of rankings, you were out, no matter how long you had been at the company. I watched colleagues fired because they had the lowest ranking.

In all this, what is being squeezed out? The time and space to be human.

We need time and space to live beyond service to employers. "Full Employment" simply means we can obtain the 16 hours of work per day to subsist. Do that for six or seven days, and the other requirements of life (sleeping, eating) are cut to a barest minimum. That bit of left-over time at the end of the day leaves little room for relationships, family life, or parenting.

The relentless math of extraction at every level concentrates the wealth from productivity gains into the hands of a small group of capital owners:

The scenario set in Steinbeck's novel is being repeated today. We have again come to a point of precarity teetering on desperation. Today, the total of what many people can earn in a day is not enough to shelter and feed themselves and their families. At a time of record low unemployment, people are defaulting on car loans, falling behind in their student loan payments, and losing their domiciles at an increasing rate. What will happen in the inevitable downturn comes?

What is needed is a morality to balance out the mathematics. A morality that says we will not tolerate that people being homeless, children starving, or the sick dying for lack of funds as an acceptable price of American capitalism. As a society, as an electorate, we need to call in the debt of those who have prospered so much at the expense of everyone else. A debt is owed to society, to all of us who maintain society: the rule of law, the roads and highways, the power grid, communications, who care for our sick and injured. We owe a debt to those who fought for our nations’ survival and those who protect us every day. How is it that those who have risen in power and wealth in this country seem to think they owe nothing to anyone?

Progressive taxation was the norm during the post-WWII golden age that actually had a middle class. The Interstate highway system, Medicare, and Medicaid made life better for most Americans. A successful public space program put men on the moon. Now our roads and water systems are crumbling, healthcare for the aged and poor is under attack, and space exploration is the playground of a few wealthy billionaires. What we are doing now is not sustainable. Every day more people find themselves in precarity, on the edge of an abyss. Just enough crumbs are falling off the edge of the tables of capitalism for people to survive, but just barely. What will happen when the economy contracts? There will be:

"... in the eyes of the people there is the failure; and in the eyes of the hungry there is a growing wrath. In the souls of the people the grapes of wrath are filling and growing heavy, growing heavy for the vintage."

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Lost and Found

I am  an engineer who is a bit of a techno-geek. If there is one thing I hate is being lost. I like to know where I am and where I am going. So when I started using smart-phones, the map app was my favorite.  Not only could I see where I was, I could see the traffic ahead! This provided the opportunity to see problems in advance and detour around them. Knowledge is certainly power! However the information has to be correct.

Over time I began to notice that my map location was not following my true location. I also noticed that the exercise app was getting the paths and distances wrong. This was totally unacceptable.

I searched the internet to see if anyone else has had this problem. Indeed they did! It turns out that a GPS could have an accumulation of errors that might need to be cleared out. However, to do that required a GPS test app. So off to the app store I went.

I installed the GPS test app so I could clear out the errors. After  opening the app, I discovered a previously unseen world. It was fascinating. A live map showed the location of approximately 20 satellites orbiting overhead. At first the symbols were gray. One by one, the symbols changed to yellow, orange, and then green as the GPS locked on to them. When enough satellites locked, the GPS established a fix. I cleared the GPS and the location locks came much faster.

I have observed that life can be like that. Sometimes we get lost. Errors accumulate. Noise, stress, fatigue, grief, and difficulties of our journey all take their toll.  We lose our bearings. We can no longer see the "satellites" that guide us. I like to think of these "satellites" as clues to our location and direction in life. So what are these "satellites"?  Conventions. Manners. Ethics. History. Tribe. Religion. Our "spirit" or inner voice. Our conscience. Our upbringing. Our families. Consciously or subconsciously, we rely on these reference points for guidance.

Sometimes we don't know that we are lost. We have been running on auto-pilot for so long, we don't realize we have lost our way. However there may be hints. A short temper. Irritability. Depression. The need to "escape". The need for substances.

Not only do we need to know where we are, we need to know where we are going. What is the destination? Status? Wealth? Fame? Leisure?  Family life? Social life?

Once we have our destination in mind, we have to set priorities. What will it take to get there?  Is it worth the cost? Life tends to be a zero-sum endeavor. What things will we have to give up to get the things we desire? We cannot have it all.

Just like the GPS, we might have to do a reset, clear out the corrupt data, and re-establish the lock. We might need to simply rest. Take care of ourselves. We might need a spiritual retreat. We might need to work on our important relationships. We might avail ourselves of the wise counsel of friends and community. The point is that our internal guidance system has a limit. It needs to be cared for.

In the end I was able to reset my GPS and get pretty decent location locks. Then I dropped the phone and cracked the glass. No reset helps that, so I upgraded. Wow! The new phone locked instantly even if it caught a sliver of sky! In my office building however, was metal coated glass that completely block thermal and electromagnetic radiation. Inside this building, there is no GPS. There are times when you have to step outside to see to where you are.

A Gospel of Which I am not Ashamed

Periodically, I am challenged to "like", "honk" or otherwise acknowledge that I "am not ashamed of the Gospel" (St. Paul's quote). As I thought about it, I realized I might just be ashamed of the Gospel. So what exactly is the "Good News" I should not be ashamed of? Was it the Evangelical "Roman Road"? Getting people to "accept Jesus"? Or were these classical definitions in fact not the good news at all? Perhaps these definitions represented religious ideology.  Was faith was reduced to a past sacrament or agreeing to a list of assertions? The definition of the "Gospel" was critically important to answering this question. Whether or not it was "good news" depends upon how it would be received by its' hearers.

Is it good news only to those with wealth, status, or those of a certain ethnicity? Is it more about being right rather than compassionate?  Is it about hate rather than love? Is it concerned about being "left behind", but not about those being left behind by inequality and injustice? Is is about the Kingdom of God in the here and now and not just in heaven?

In Evangelli Gaudium, Pope Francis described a Gospel which is indeed "good news." It is a message that can be claimed by all Christians. Moreover, it is accessible to everyone. It expresses the full scope of the Gospel to meet all human needs, emotional, physical,  and spiritual. It is the Gospel that I have been looking for and longing to hear expressed so clearly.

Evangelli Gaudium is a scathing criticism of the current economic order where the preeminence of finance, profit, and trade are assumed. Destructive side effects are accepted without question. It is a system of economic Darwinism that knows only the survival of the fittest and destruction of the weak as the cost of doing business. A human person is only a consumer or producer, an object to be discarded when they are of no further value. It is a system that American believers bought in too easily; it was a system that I had accepted too readily.

The Gospel, the "Good News" that Jesus' disciples were instructed to share was the nearness of the Kingdom! The proclamation to the people was that the "Kingdom of God is Near". It was embodied. First by Jesus himself. Then by his disciples. The message was not a definition of the Kingdom; it was the presence of the Kingdom! Embodied first in Jesus, then by His disciples, and ultimately those of us who have chosen to be His followers.

A Gospel of which I am not ashamed, thereby one I can be "proud" of, is one that is embodied. It is made near by my presence as I follow Christ. It must be radically inclusive, radically accepting, and radically gracious. Since I cannot be perfect, it must be radically honest, quick to accept the blame for failure, and even quicker to apologize and ask for forgiveness. Since others cannot be perfect, it must readily accept that imperfection, whether accompanied by an apology or not. It must forgive because people do not realize what they are doing. It must manifest love, joy, peace, patience, and kindness. It must be radically generous. That is the Gospel of which I am not ashamed.