I tend to tweet four topics. Faith, Technology, Politics, and Sports (usually considerably less of the latter).  Dropping the obviously less significant of the four,  sports,  and focusing on the other  three occurs to me today because I am “mad as hell” about the state of Washington today,  and the kind of talk (and walk) that continues to ignore the destructive path we’re  on in regards to the continued siphoning of the nation’s wealth into the hands of a few.

It brings me to consider more urgently the need for an earnest collaboration between faith, media,  and politics.  This continued assault on basic government safety nets, education, infrastructure, environment,  and the poor has to be stopped,  and reversed.  What we’re seeing is nothing less than another potential chapter in Naomi Klein’s excellent book ,  The Shock Doctrine.  The GOP is all over  the task of exploiting this economic trouble we’ve been facing,  to push through their delusionary ideology that raising taxes on the rich costs jobs,  and that lowering them will create jobs and infuse the economy.

It’s based  on a theory that has had decades to “prove  itself” and has not only NOT done so,  it has done the exact opposite,  gutting infrastructure along  the way,  and lowering the standard of  living for the middle class as well.  Add to this the absurdly irresponsible stance of not only NOT regulating health insurance companies,  but refusing to even TRY the public option,  which is SUCCESSFULLY done and is so obvious to most other modern democracies,  and the burdens are increased on everyone but the wealthy who have access to high cost plans which do not  deny coverage,  or can pay for the things that insurance will not.  Bottomline is that jobs were not only NOT gained over these TEN YEARS we’ve had of the “Bush tax cuts”,  but we’ve seen a net loss from the point at which the Bush Tax Cuts  went into effect.  And we have reached and are leaving behind the point at which the middle class are seeing any benefit at all from any growth of our GDP.  This is the first time in economic recorded history that this is the case.  And the GOP wants to continue the siphoning of wealth from everything BUT the tax cuts which the rich have obviously NOT shared (ie not sent out into the “trickle” that supposedly comes to the rest of  us.)

It’s time for a “People’s Budget” such as  what Jeffrey Sachs wrote about this week.  It’s actually what the majority of people want.  You wouldn’t know that from the constant barrage of GOP talking heads telling us they “are responding to the people” when they talk about the evils of “Obama-care”,  or that they are trying to “save Medicare” (code for actually slashing it).

Media MUST become conscious of what an ACTUAL majority of us want.  To subject us to a constant barrage of point-counterpoint from amazingly narrow slivers of opinion and imply that these are our choices is , itself,  amazingly blind and lazy.  I will be interested to see how the media covers (or in all likelihood IGNORES) the “People’s Budget” Jeffrey Sachs talks about in his  article Friday “The People’s Budget”

People in the church know, or should know,  that what we are about goes way beyond politics.  What the church is called to be is something far beyond what can be expected from secular government.  But what this government is in the process of doing is to acquiesce to what amounts  to a full scale takeover of decades long infrastructure with the apparent aim of gutting it and send as much as possible to the rich and to the corporations under the assumption that this will “free” up their purse strings enough that they will give the rest of us jobs.  But tax cuts to the rich and favors to corporations don’t seem to be having such effects.  EVER.  In fact,  we instead see the most massive shift in wealth to the top 1% in history,  and it looks as if this  trend is not deemed enough or  fast enough siphoning of wealth to those at the top.

The church in many cases has a politics  problem.  They seem to be just as afraid to use any “bully pulpit” to take a stand against the savaging of safety nets,  and of gutting the finances of infrastructural maintenance.  These are things on which we have come to depend as givens to help sustain and enable a healthy economy in the long run.  Long run has seemingly been thrown out as economic policy consideration.  Churches are afraid in this partisan environment to say what they darn well know is the message of the Kingdom of God :  to speak on behalf of the poor,  and to do what can to promote a justice in our political community.  But the church seems to care more about filling the pews than in carrying a real conversation about what constitutes faithfulness in America at this time.

I’d like to see the church model an alternative media.  If you consider the congregation as a “channel”,  it IS supposed to function as a “media stream”.  It’s just not necessarily a high tech channel.  But the church could do with some wider distribution of its version of the story which is America.  Or rather,  its story as a People of God in this particular place called America.

There are churches (sadly in short supply)  that would be a light that dispels the widespread notion that churches are irrelevant to real life (and again,  sadly,  this is often the case with regards to their activity amongst those for whom America is a present struggle.  We need to tell the story of those churches.

We need to let the moral, ethical, compassionate, passionate people of this country who work tirelessly for social justice know that the church believes in a shared commons with those kinds of concerns.  So often,  many of these tireless hard fighting social justice advocates are dismissive of the church because  of what they see from a painfully large portion of the people representing “church”.  And I have to admit,  they are right to be dismissive of that.  I myself am not dismissive.  I am angered.  I am embarassed.  I am offended at the damage done to the idea of a Kingdom of God by these damaging “witnesses”.  We have to work on letting a different story be known.

I added “Part 1” to my title here because I have much more to flesh out on this set of ideas.  I want to be an effective advocate and enabler and participant  in a new media offered by the church that interjects a “particular/distinctive” People’s Budget. More in a bit.

In the mean time, better start revving up those soup kitchens and homeless shelters!  Not only must we advocate with our political voices and conversations,  but also to “be there” for the dreary anticipation of the victims this will add to our nation’s struggling.