This from an article on Bill Moyers’ website expresses for me the anger and the disgust I feel toward the clueless, selfish, out of touch arrogance that is the attitude of the frontrunner candidates.

So no, Mitt Romney, when we say that Americans are waking up to the reality that inequality matters, we’re not guilty of “envy” or “class warfare,” as you claimed to Matt Lauer on NBC’s Today. Nor are we talking about everybody earning the same amount of money – that’s the straw man apologists for inequality raise whenever anyone tries to get serious.

http://billmoyers.com/2012/01/17/america-wakes-up-to-the-reality-inequality-matters-2/

I have to laugh when Newt tries the “elite” criticisms,  trying to pretend he’s not a quintessential “washington Elite”.  As they said on Up with Chris Hayes this morning,  he’s been in DC since Carter was president.  And he’s consistently shown himslef to be one of the most self-absorbed politicians of our era.  He STILL uses “political” rallies to SELL HIS BOOKS and Videos.  He’s like a SPAM BOT.

As I wrote yesterday,  people are waking up to the idea that “another world is possible”.  If anything,  this openness to the future and the recognition that another world is REQUIRED is to also be open to the alternative vision of the Kingdom Of God.  For too long the church has been seen as a defender  of the status quo.  To this,  churches should be offering up a counter stance.  The economic system has reached a tipping point at which “The People” are aroused and tired of what they are seeing (and,  to a large extent,  beginning to experience in their family finances,  if they haven’t been doing so for a couple of years already).  When Egypt spread to a larger “Arab Spring”,  people began to ask how long it might be before the same unrest boiled over  in the U.S.   When Scott Walker led the way for numerous GOP state governors to begin a coordinated campaign of going after union rights,  we began to see the coming of an American version of Arab Spring.  When Occupy Wall Street hit the streets,  we are being presented with the answer to the quesiton of how long.  Not long.

This openness to a new world is in many ways an oppenness to a new gospel for American churches.  Sure,  it’s the SAME gospel,  but a very different one from the Americanized, nationalistic ,  “Exceptionalism” hyping version we have been getting from American churches.   The challenge we must make is to this Americanized, watered down,  co-opted gospel.  It’s not even the gospel anymore when it is co=opted.  It is simply another support structure for the status quo.  And the Kingdom of God is the opposite of the status quo.  When the GOP candidates and pundits complain about OWS and the Dems inciting “class warfare”,  they are righ , in a sense.  It’s a matter of whether the larger portions of the oppressed class wake up to the fact that they are being “kept in their place” by the powers that be,  even as they “remain kept in their place” by their own efforts to discredit protest and the very idea  of questioning the direction of the American economy.  They are victims of the unlimited resources the economic elite have to shape political support and couch their intentions  in terms of an “American Dream” (that is quickly becoming pure fantasy).