Inequality Keeps Getting Worse, and God is Watching

A Few Comments on Inequality and Its Consequences

by Pastor Paul J. Bern

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If you want to solve a problem, start from the top down. We have been stuck in what are now antiquated concepts of representative democracy for 230 years. These days, we can go to Washington, DC via computer – the need to send other parties has become obsolete. Same goes for shareholder ownership of businesses as opposed to worker-owned or co-operative enterprises. Many people seem to believe that progress is getting other people to do more things for them, when quite the reverse is true. And I think that we’ve reached the point now where we’re stuck with a whole lot of unworkable concepts, so that when Michael Moore speaks about the number of people who make all this money and other people who don’t, it sounds as if we’re struggling for equality with them. Who wants to be equal to these guys? I think we have to be thinking much more profoundly, such as being on a higher plane of existence.

And I think that, talking about recovery, talking about democracy, we too easily get sucked into old notions of what we want. So we’re expecting protest. I don’t mind protests, and I encourage them at times. But what happened in 2001 in Porto Alegre, Brazil, or in Fergusom, Mo. In 2012 – when people gathered to say another world is necessary, another world is possible, and another world is happening, I think that that’s what’s happening. I was there in October 2011 for the commencement of “Occupy DC” in Freedom Plaza in Washington, DC, and I felt honored and humbled to have been privileged to be a part of that historical event. It inspired me to write my second self-published book, “Occupy America: We Shall Overcome” that winter and spring. It is imperative that we take matters into our own hands. Don't trust your government, they have already been lying to all of us for decades. Take the initiative! Take a look over your shoulder and you will notice that there is no one standing behind you to do anything or to take care of any business for you. It's all on you, and it's all on all of us.

People are beginning to say the only way to survive the early 21^st century is to batten down the hatches. So they are building underground bunkers and stocking them with non-perishable foods, water, firearms and ammunition. In so doing they have voluntarily devolved as human beings. Don't forget what Christ said about that, “He who lives by the sword will die by the sword”. Otherwise all our time will be wasted by a mad scramble of those who compete with others instead of co-operating with them. All our efforts must instead be devoted to taking care of one another by recreating our relationships to one another. Let me point out a few examples.

In the first place, the US is still the only developed country in the world that has no comprehensive national health insurance (forget Obama-care, it's actually a new tax in disguise) and no family leave for workers. That's right, nobody but us. The very people who call these two basic human rights “socialism” are the ones who are profiting off the existing system the most. Thomas Jefferson once said, “The first and foremost duty of any government is to see to the needs of its people.” I think that sums it up perfectly.

The second example are wages, which are downright pathetic. Having been an IT professional for over 20 years, I clearly remember how wages began falling around 2000-2001 around the time of the dot-com crash. By the time I had left the business in 2012, the bottom had fallen out as far as wages were concerned. Jobs that paid $20-25.00 an hour were going for $12.00, and older workers like myself found ourselves shut out of the tech job market for good. Today as I write this, the minimum wage remains at a paltry $7.25 cents per hour here in Atlanta where I live. And what are these pitifully poor people supposed to do with $7.25 an hour? Buy lollipops? The minimum wage works out to a take-home pay of about $845.00 per month after taxes and Social Security, not counting state taxes. Go try to live on that for a month or even a week!

Many thousands of American families are being forced into into the streets due to circumstances beyond their control. In short, we are exactly where the government wants us: powerless! Take away every available resource we have and we're helpless. The solution is a realistic minimum wage that will also serve to jump-start America's economy again. Based on the cost of living for a family of four, which would include housing, utilities, internet access, transportation, clothing and medical care, that would work out to about $14.00 an hour for bare essentials. This should be something people are out protesting in the streets about. We want a living wage, now!!

As you can see, our problems can be fixed without having to re-invent the wheel. You don't have to be an economic genius – if indeed there is really such a thing – to figure out some basic, common sense solutions to get America's middle class back to work. Otherwise I fear that too many more formerly middle class Americans like so many of us will fall into the cracks in the sidewalk and disappear.

The forcible separation of families at the US border being done in the name of the law

A Few Words About Separating Children From Their Parents

and What the Real Bible Has to Say About It

by Pastor Paul J. Bern

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 By now most everyone has heard about the outrageous remarks made by White House Propaganda Minister (um, I meant Press Secretary) Sarah Huckabee Sanders. You know, when she said that since the Bible says we have to be law-abiding citizens, it's perfectly fine to forcibly separate children from their parents at America's southern border. Before I get too deep into this, let me give a partial quote from the original article.

White House cites Bible to defend child separation border policy
Sarah Sanders slammed for saying US-Mexico border policy was justified because it's 'biblical to enforce the law'.

(Al Jazeera News) “White House Press Secretary Sarah Sanders has seemingly invoked the Bible to justify the Trump administration's policy of separating children from migrants caught crossing the US-Mexico border, drawing anger and ridicule from many online. At a press briefing on Thursday evening, Sanders responded to a question put forward by CNN journalist Jim Acosta on US Attorney General Jeff Sessions' use of Christian scripture to justify detaining children separately from their parents. Acosta asked Sanders to point out where in the Bible the policy found its moral justification. "Where in the Bible does it say it is moral to take children away from their mothers?" he asked. Sanders responded: "I am not aware of the attorney general's comments or what he would be referencing ... I can say it is very biblical to enforce the law, that is repeated a number of times throughout the Bible." When pressed to point out a specific verse justifying the policy by Acosta, Sanders lashed out at the journalist. "I know it's hard for you to understand even short sentences I guess," she said, before going on to blame "loopholes" created by the Democrats for the policy. The comments from Sanders and the similar sentiment expressed by Sessions have earned the ire of many on social media.”

“Some cited biblical passages that emphasized the need to do justice by the poor and oppressed, while others pointed out the contradiction in justifying a policy, only to blame (the Democrats) for its existence..... "So, Sarah Huckabee Sanders is blaming Democrats for the Trump regime's ripping children away from their families and throwing them in prison camps whilst her and Jeff Sessions are citing the Bible to explain why it's all okay. They are about as Christian as Kim Jong Un is," wrote twitter user Ricky Davila.”

“The issue of child separation on the US-Mexico border has drawn widespread protests since it came to light last month..... In May, Attorney General Jeff Sessions reiterated the threat to prosecute those who made the crossing. "If you're smuggling a child, then we're going to prosecute you, and that child will be separated from you, probably, as required by law." The "zero tolerance" approach has drawn criticism from those on both sides of the political spectrum, including from the UN human rights office, which said the practice "amounts to arbitrary and unlawful interference in family life, and is a serious violation of the rights of a child". The number of interior removals - or deportations of those already in the US - grew by 37 percent during Trump's first year in office when compared with the same period in 2016, according to government data. Sessions has also recently come under fire for issuing a ruling that may make it nearly impossible for domestic abuse and gang violence survivors to seek asylum in the US.”

First of all, I assume you saw where this article came from – Al Jazeera! The reason I picked this article was to show you all you can't trust the American news media to tell you the real story. And the real story is that we now live in a country where many people – but not all, since people like myself practice unconditional love and compassion – think it's perfectly OK to forcibly separate children from their parents because they are allegedly “illegal aliens”. Let me remind Sarah Sanders, president Trump and Attorney General Jeff Sessions that there is no such thing as an illegal human being (“The earth is the Lord's, and everything in it”, Psalm 108: 1 and, “The whole earth is full of His glory”, Isaiah 6: 3). People have been coming to America illegally for 400 years, so this is nothing new. Some came on slave ships, but that was legal. So how come it's illegal to cross our borders when they are not slaves?

Moreover, America's northern border with Canada is at least as porous as its southern border, if not even more so. Nobody says a word about this. Do you know why? It's because Canadians are mostly white. Latino/Latina people are mostly brown. It's all about race, Jeff Sessions and Sarah Sanders and all those before you, the multitudes of bigots who insist that it's 'my way or the highway'. Nonwhite people please stay away from us Anglo's, they say when no one is around. Blacks and Hispanics are not welcome in many Caucasian neighborhoods, and would be told (not asked, mind you) to leave most conservative white churches. The state of American spirituality is pathetic indeed!

So what was the Bible passage Jeff Sessions and Sarah Sanders were quoting from? It was Romans chapter 13, the first 5 verses, and I quote: ““Everyone must submit himself to the governing authorities, for there is no authority except that which God has established. The authorities that exist have been established by God. Consequently, he who rebels against the authority is rebelling against what God has instituted, and those who do so will bring judgment on themselves. For rulers hold no terror for those who do right, but for those who do wrong. Do you want to be free from fear of the one in authority? Then do what is right and he will commend you. For he is God's servant to do you good. But if you do wrong, be afraid, for he does not bear the sword for nothing. He is God's servant, an agent of wrath to bring punishment on the wrongdoer. Therefore, it is necessary to submit to the authorities, not only because of possible punishment but also because of conscience. This is also why you pay taxes, for the authorities are God's servants, who give their full time to governing. Give everyone what you owe him: If you owe taxes, then pay taxes; if revenue, then revenue; if respect, then respect; if honor, then honor.”

There is another infamous person from history who quoted from that passage of scripture often to control the masses – Adolf Hitler. The problem with using this passage of Scripture in this context is that it says nothing about separating children from their parents. It sure as hell says nothing about locking children in cages away from their parents just after locking up their parents while the children watch helplessly. These poor kids will be traumatized for life by what's being done to them, and still more people will hate our country because of all these things. This is no way to run a country; separating parents from their children in the name of 'law and order'. Separating children from their parents is also unconstitutional because it's an 8^th Amendment violation!

What are some additional examples of what the Bible says about the treatment of children? “Train a child in the way they should go, and when he gets older he will not forget about it”, (Proverbs22: 6) is one example. How can these incarcerated children learn when their parents are not there to teach them? Another example is Proverbs 29 verse 15, “A child left to himself disgraces his mother.” Jesus mentioned children on numerous occasions. One of his most memorable is from Matthew's gospel chapter 19, verse 14: “Let the little children come unto me, and do not hinder them. For I tell you truthfully, the kingdom of Heaven is made of such as these.” So you see, people, God made all the little children just like you and me. And God made these various children from various cultures, backgrounds, races and ethnicity's with different skin colors to teach us all about the richness of diversity, as well as teaching us to have some tolerance for those whose physical appearance and mannerisms are different than our own. Never forget that the same Almighty God has made us all!

Free book excerpt #18 from blogger, Web pastor and author Rev. Paul J. Bern

“The Middle and Working Class Manifesto” by Rev. Paul J. Bern.

Watch the video at http://youtu.be/VZguRDJmCqc

I Dare To Dream

(excerpt from “The Middle and Working Class Manifesto 3rd Edition” by Pastor Paul J. Bern)

The march of economic inequality, from which springs the source of racism, poverty, crime, violence, and lack of access to healthcare and higher education, has become the new civil rights issue of the 21^st century. (I like to call it Rev. Dr. MLK, Jr. 2.0.) King's dream of unconditional equality throughout the country can finish becoming a reality when the economic barriers that we all face on a daily basis finally come down for good, like an economic Berlin Wall circa 1989. Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. spoke to the masses during the 1963 civil rights march on Washington and said, “I have a dream...”. By writing and publishing these words it is my intent to help take up where King's Dream left off, and to do anything I can to help finish the job that he started. And so let me slightly change that to, “I dare to dream”.

I dare to dream of a world in which the gap between rich and poor is gone forever. We all deserve to live in a world where wealth has been redistributed in a peaceful and orderly manner and not by the barrel of a gun. I dare to dream of a country where wealth has been redistributed in 4 ways. First, every worker earns a living wage so poverty can be eliminated. Second, free higher education and vocational retraining must be available to every worker for life, including daycare available to all, that would be based on the worker's or student's ability to pay on a sliding scale, because everyone has the right to better themselves at will. Third, I envision an America where quality health care is available to every worker at nominal cost for life. Single-payer healthcare based on the current Medicare model must not be reserved only for those who can afford it, but it must be a fundamental human right for all ages. I dare to dream of an America where there will be no such thing as someone without health insurance, where every citizen will have lifetime healthcare and prescription drug coverage without qualification, and where there will be the fewest sick days for American workers and their children of any country in the developed world. Fourth, “we the people” demand the abolition of the federal tax code, including elimination of the despised federal withholding tax, which would give every American worker or business owner an immediate 18% pay raise.

I dare to dream of a new America with a robust and viable economy. That is why I have been insisting on a $14.00 per hour minimum wage since 2010. I dare to dream of a new America where education will be subsidized from the cradle to the grave so that the US develops the most formidable work force the world has ever seen. I dare to dream of an America where all workers have the right to organize, to a flexible work week and to paid family or maternity leave. Most other developed countries already do this. The US is the only exception and that has got to change. The only remaining question in my mind is whether we can accomplish this peacefully or otherwise, and it looks more and more to me like it will be the latter.

I dare to dream of an America where affordable housing is the law of the land, where home ownership becomes a right and not a privilege so we can wipe out homelessness, and where the price of a house is limited to the sum total of ten years income of any given individual or household purchasers. I insist on a country where home ownership isn't part of an exclusive club with the highest “credit scores”. It is, and must become, a basic human right. Even the cave men lived in caves of their own!

I dare to dream of a country with new public works programs that put an end to unemployment forever so the USA can have full employment all the time. America's infrastructure needs to be rebuilt, and its inner cities are in dire need of an overhaul. What a better way to accomplish this!

I dare to dream of a new America with an all-new public school and university system that has an Internet-based curriculum that can be updated at will, and that is second to none in the developed world, with a new and more intensive school year, and that has viable replacements for standardized testing, and where class size is limited by law. I dare to dream of a country where teachers make what their Congressional representatives make, and vice verse.

I dare to dream of a new nation where unconditional equality is the law of the land for every citizen without exception, and this will include economic equality. I dare to dream of a new America where there is no more income tax, no capital gains tax, no alternative minimum tax, no estate tax, no self-employment tax, and where families and businesses can have a tax free income unless they are very wealthy. In its place would be a national sales tax, such as a Consumption Tax, where everyone pays proportionately the same tax rate on only what they consume, plus an “excess wealth tax” for persons with annual incomes exceeding $3 million, and for businesses with annual proceeds exceeding $300 million, so America's budget can be balanced and fair.

I dare to dream of a better USA where personal privacy is the law of the land, where identity theft is a thing of the past, and where it will be illegal for employers to obtain the credit files or credit scores of any job applicant.

I dare to dream of a more compassionate America where children have the right to a challenging and progressive learning environment, and where kids will be legally guaranteed freedom from hunger, sickness and violence, and where all God's children will have the right to safe adoption, foster care and day care.

I dare to dream of an all-new voting system, including the abolition of the elitist Electoral College, that is Internet-based, paperless, and that can be accessed from any location using any computer or wireless device, instead of wasting our time and fuel and losing work time going to polling stations, and instead of using unreliable and unsecured voting machines.

I dare to dream of an America of integrity where all of the dirty corporate money and all the filthy lucre is abolished from our political process. I dare to dream of an America where the Wall Street shysters who crashed the US economy are brought to justice, and where the keys to all of the fraudulently foreclosed homes are returned to their rightful owners.

I dare to dream of the end to America's sinister war on drugs, where all convicted nonviolent drug offenders can qualify for alternative sentences for their offenses so they may obtain early release, and where all the currently illegal drugs are legalized, regulated and taxed by appropriate legislation.

Finally, I dare to dream of a world in which all this is easily financially achievable because all the money that is being wasted currently on the wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, Yemen, and to a lesser extent in Pakistan, Libya and elsewhere will be redirected towards all these dreams that I have just mentioned. The money is already there, its just being budgeted in all the wrong places. Let me tell you why.

If the US military took all the money it spends occupying Afghanistan for just one day and put it into an interest-bearing account, there would be enough money available to send every American school kid from the first grade up to senior year in high school through 4 years of college fully paid for, including tuition, dorms, books, food, access to the Internet and to public transportation. Here's another example: If the US government took all that money set aside from one days worth of military expenditures in Afghanistan alone, there would be enough money to build a 2,500 square feet house, fully furnished and stocked with groceries, with all the utilities already turned on, for every homeless person in the US including all the homeless kids. That's how easily we can end homelessness in the richest country in the world.

Just as surely as there was an Arab Spring beginning in 2011 that is still ongoing in Egypt, Algeria, Tunisia and Somalia, to name a few, so I am telling you that there will be an American Spring in her near future. In fact, I'm surprised it hasn't already begun. Beginning in 2011 with the start-up of the “Occupy” and “99%” Movements, of which I am proud to be a part, this uprising of the American people against the top 1% will explode like an atomic mushroom cloud over the American political and economic elite, obliterating them all in a bloodless coup without anyone having fired a single shot – so that the remaining 99% of us can peacefully take back what has been stolen from us over the last 100 years. We can only accomplish this by uniting together as one and acting as one body to break free from the shackles of oppression that have us all enslaved. Who is with me today?

Get yours direct from the author ($9.95) at www.pcmatl.org/books-and-donations

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Watch the video at http://youtu.be/VZguRDJmCqc Thanks so much. Shalom!

The MLK Holiday and the State of Racism in America

The Hijacking of a Dream:

Reclaiming Rev. Dr. King’s Legacy

by pastor and published author Paul J. Bern

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As we celebrate another Martin Luther King holiday, America needs to perform a re-assessment of what this memorial holiday truly means to all of us. On August 28, 2011, the dedication of the Martin Luther King, Jr. National Memorial took place on the National Mall in Washington DC. Having the dedication of this memorial on the 48th anniversary of the March on Washington, was clearly a symbolic gesture — paying homage to one of the many defining moments in the great civil rights leader’s life. However, the corporate contributors of this event, along with many of the politicians that were in attendance, were and are symbolic themselves. They are symbols of everything Dr. King was, and would be, opposed to if he were alive today. These charlatans and hucksters know very well of this fact, which is exactly why they, together with the mainstream media and an ever-shrinking segment of prejudiced Americans of all colors and races, continue to desperately try to reshape the image of Dr. King. If these people have their way, Dr. King and his legacy will stand for nothing more than a superficial image. They fervently wish to recreate him into someone they can feel more comfortable with. This is why most children can only recite one quote in relationship to Dr. King —“I have a dream.” Our kids and many of their parents don't even know the whole message.

Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. stood for much more than what mainstream America has methodically reduced him to. In fact, if he were alive today, many of the corporate war mongering politicians, including President Trump, would be vilifying Dr. King as if he were some crazed angry black man. This is why we will never hear the likes of Barack Obama quote Dr. King when he referred to the US government as “the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today”. Dr. King said those powerful and honest words on April 4, 1967 at Riverside Church in New York City, exactly a year before he was assassinated. Nearly five decades later, the US government is still the greatest purveyor of violence on earth. You can bet that the following quote will not be read at all in King's memory:

“As I have walked among the desperate, rejected, and angry young men, I have told them that Molotov cocktails and rifles would not solve their problems. I have tried to offer them my deepest compassion while maintaining my conviction that social change comes most meaningfully through nonviolent action. But they ask — and rightly so — what about Vietnam? They ask if our own nation wasn’t using massive doses of violence to solve its problems, to bring about the changes it wanted. Their questions hit home, and I knew that I could never again raise my voice against the violence of the oppressed in the ghettos without having first spoken clearly to the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today — my own government. For the sake of those boys, for the sake of this government, for the sake of the hundreds of thousands trembling under our violence, I cannot be silent.”

After reading Dr. King’s “Beyond Vietnam — A Time to Break Silence” speech, anyone still thinking that he would be in approval of what this current administration is doing in places like Pakistan, Egypt, Syria, Libya and Afghanistan, need to rethink their conclusions. Dr. King was much more than simply a man who was anti-war; he was a man who stood for peace and social justice. He was truly a man of principles and convictions, which is why he was unafraid of speaking truth to so-called power. Remaining silent, as so many gutless politicians and celebrities do today, was not an option within Dr. King’s conscience. And because of this, he was routinely targeted by the US government, by way of the Federal Bureau of Investigation and devils minions such as FBI founder J. Edgar Hoover.

The American empire’s military-industrial complex is a vastly profitable behemoth that must be fed a steady diet of wars in order to maintain its existence. Those who threaten the existence of this killing machine become expendable. Dr. King’s outspokenness against not only the Vietnam War, but also the military industrial complex, secured his status as a target. Dr. King’s “crime” was that he dared to challenge the conscience of a nation entangled within the web of an imperialist war throughout Southeast Asia. Among other things he said, “A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death.” Which one of the political frauds, or entertainers, in attendance at the dedication to Dr. King’s memorial took such a courageous stance in solidarity with Martin Luther King, Jr.? None, that's how many. Zero.

Over a trillion dollars have been expended on these foreign wars since 2001 —- while people in the US are all losing their homes to foreclosures, school systems are being de-funded, and 40,000 Americans die each year due to a lack health insurance. That's more people than all who died in auto accidents last year. If Dr. King’s statement is true then America’s spirit must be on life support — needing an end to its profligate defense spending as part of a multi-tiered remedy for rehabilitation. Dr. King knew very well about the US government’s record of going into countries, whose governments refused to be obsequious to their addiction to other nation’s resources, and then destabilizing them by waging war, by assassination of leaders, or both. These are, in fact, the kind of immoral acts of war that Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. would be completely opposed to, along with the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq before that. His life should give us ample reason to come to this conclusion, and only this conclusion. However, how many children in America know this? Dr. King’s image has been reshaped by some amoral adults as well as by other adults who have been purposely mis-educated.

In regards to people of color, especially poor people, Dr. King had a knack for placing their living conditions within the context of institutional racism and its impact on their communities. In 1968, not long before his assassination, Dr. King said, “It is incontestable and deplorable that Negroes have committed crimes; but they are derivative crimes. They are born of the greater crimes of the white society.” The great civil rights leader said those words within a speech he gave to his staff at a SCLC meeting in Frogmore, South Carolina as he was preparing them for the Poor People’s Campaign. His commitment to black people – and poor people in general – was the polar opposite of the last several presidents, who seemed at times to excel at marginalizing those demographics while catering to their corporate and military bosses.

In the same “Beyond Vietnam” speech, Dr. King gave a prescient warning when he said, “When machines and computers, profit motives and property rights are considered more important than people, the giant triplets of racism, extreme materialism, and militarism are incapable of being conquered.” Today in 2018 much of the world is suffering from the impact of America’s insatiable hunger for global domination. The USA’s runaway military industrial complex continues to take lives away from innocent civilians in places like Venezuela, Afghanistan, Syria, Yemen, Somalia and Libya, to name just a few. The American military industrial complex creates carnage abroad while preventing Americans from having things like a world-class single-payer health care system. In 2018 institutional racism remains a disease that destroys the lives of people of color in America by way of ruthless police brutality, enforced economic inequality and intentionally unequal school systems — to name a few. Also in 2018, runaway capitalism is imposing economic terrorism on countless people and their rapidly disintegrating communities. Dr. King’s words are surely more relevant now than ever before.

The dedication of the Martin Luther King, Jr. Memorial was assured to be a most superficial event replete with superficial politicians and luminaries when it was held back in 2013. The organizers of this event and their corporate cronies were promoting and selling everything from expensive hotel rooms, sponsorship opportunities, to high priced exhibitor space. In essence, they were “honoring” Dr. King by not embracing his legacy of social justice, but by financially capitalizing on his name. There were no speeches of ending America’s imperialist wars, like Dr. King did. Anyone with such a message trying to get on that stage would have been swiftly removed by security. There were no speeches about destroying institutional racism in America. Instead, the lie of America being a post racist country was and still is bandied all around. Don’t expect any talk about waging a war on poverty — after all, some of the sponsors of this event are in fact large multinational corporations (such as Wal-Mart, Monsanto and numerous others) that benefit from destroying local businesses while dissuading their workers from unionizing.

Dr. King once said, “Our lives begin to end the day we become silent about things that matter.” He also famously said, “Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.” Ending institutional racism in America, eradicating poverty and homelessness, tearing down the US prison-industrial complex by ending the drug wars, and stopping the US military’s destructive and endless wars – these are the things that really matter. They matter so much that life and death hinge upon each injustice. It is obvious that we cannot expect Democrats or Republicans to vociferously break their collective silence about the cauldron of social injustices that have been brewing in America for quite some time — that job must be ours, starting with the clergy like myself, since Congress and the President refuse to do any such thing. We must raise our collective voices and speak out against them and stand up for justice. As the 2018 King Holiday comes and goes, this is the greatest way we can honor the legacy of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.!

The pathetic state of racism and inequality in America

Why God Hates Inequality

by Pastor Paul J. Bern

To view this on my web site, click here :-)

In a continuation of my ongoing efforts to bring authentic Christianity into the 21^st century, which includes a personal relationship with Jesus Christ combined with an opposition to injustice and inequality, I wish to bring to your attention a newspaper headline posted a couple of months ago on TheRoot.com by Monique Judge, an on-line acquaintance of mine. The headline reads, “#Flint: An Update and a Reminder That It Has Been 1,196 Days Since the Mich. City Had Clean Drinking Water”. Some selected highlights are as follows:

“....Many government officials have been charged with crimes in the subsequent fallout, but the city is still without a permanent solution that provides an ongoing source of clean water for the people who live there. When the parties were unable to come to an agreement in June, the Michigan Department of Environmental Quality filed a lawsuit against the city after the City Council refused to approve a long-term water contract with the Great Lakes Water Authority, out of Detroit. The suit alleges that the city is endangering public health....“There are some helpful things happening in the meantime. Mayor Karen Weaver’s office told the Daily Progress that since March 2016, about 2,700 homes have had old water lines replaced through the FAST Start Initiative, a program with a goal of replacing nearly 20,000 lead-tainted water lines in the city by the year 2020....According to the Minnesota Star Tribune, Michigan State University, which received a four-year, $14.4 million grant from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, announced Tuesday that it will be using the first installment of that grant to establish a registry of Flint residents who have been exposed to lead since the crisis began in 2014. It will use the $3.2 million to connect people to programs that can help minimize the health problems associated with lead exposure, which include effects on brain development in children. The Environmental Protection Agency announced Tuesday that it will forgive $20.7 million in water debt that the city of Flint incurred through the Drinking Water State Revolving Fund....Flint has come a long way, but there is still much more work that needs to be done. With help and support like this from federal, state as well as local entities, Flint will indeed bounce back. Too bad that help hasn’t come in the form of potable water dripping from the faucets.”

Formerly middle class people, plus a whole lot of poor folks including people of color, are having their most basic rights taken away by a runaway government and their out-of-control police departments. Access to running water is a fundamental human right. Period. End of story. To forcibly remove – by turning off or forcibly cutting off – anyone's access to running water is a crime as far as I am concerned. The Bible says in the Book of Proverbs chapter 29, verse 7, “The righteous care about justice for the poor, but the wicked have no such concern”. That's God's take on poverty in a nutshell. “The poor you will always have”, Jesus said not long before His crucifixion, “but you will not always have me”. The poor are humankind's responsibility, starting with the churches and its volunteers. Shelter falls into the same category as water – it too is a basic human right. Even the earliest humans from 100,000+ years ago slept in caves, long before the invention of written language, and before the discovery of fire and the wheel. Moreover, I wrote in my 2011 book, “The Middle and Working Class Manifesto”, which is still available in paperback from this website (or as an e-book on Kindle from here), that people everywhere have “The right to affordable housing and the fundamental right to shelter regardless of economic status. We have a responsibility as a civilized society to end homelessness.” 

 

Here in the city of Atlanta where I live, there are lots of boarded up and abandoned houses (there's plenty out in the suburbs, too, but most of those aren't on the bus line). There are also a lot of homeless people, mainly because Georgia is one of those states whose minimum wage is still stuck at a paltry $7.25 an hour. Any way you slice and dice it, a single person who makes minimum wage and works 40 hours per week can't afford to rent a one-bedroom apartment anywhere in Atlanta, even though the most basic 1-bedroom rents for 'only' about $450-500.00 monthly. So there are a slowly growing number of squatters who are living in these abandoned houses, nearly all without the benefit of water or electric hook-up. Others live in their vehicles, if they're lucky enough to still have one. When the police catch them, and they do so routinely, they are taken directly to jail. OK, now let's review this. The cops catch some luckless squatter who is camped out in a house that nobody wants. Since that person is considered to be a trespasser under Georgia law, and since the majority of the squatters are also usually black, they are taken immediately to a city or county jail where it will cost the taxpayers upwards of $60.00 a day to detain them.

So, evidently there are some who think it's better to spend $60.00 a day to house otherwise harmless petty criminals than it is to let them sleep in abandoned structures at night where they are bothering no one. No one seems to care about the fact that incarcerating these people is an unnecessary burden on the taxpayers. I understand that they're trespassing on someone's property, but if that is something that must be enforced then why is the structure abandoned and in disrepair? The answer, brothers and sisters, is greed. The property owners, many of whom live out of state or overseas – and who want nothing to do with these properties because they owe back property taxes on them – will not hesitate to press charges against some poor homeless man, or a homeless single parent with small children, for sleeping on a front porch on a rainy night. They can't be there themselves, so they make donations to the local Fraternal Order of Police, or “lobby” the local Congressional representative, and the trespassing laws are rigidly enforced as a result.

The Bible has plenty to say about this. For example, in Exodus chapter 23, verses 6-9 it says, “Do not deny justice to your poor people in their lawsuits. Have nothing to do with a false charge and do not put an innocent or honest person to death, for I will not acquit the guilty. Do not accept a bribe, for a bribe blinds those who see and twists the words of the righteous. Do not oppress an alien; you yourselves know what it is like to be aliens, because you were aliens in Egypt.” In Psalm 9 verse 8 it reads: “He will judge the world in righteousness; he will govern the people with justice.” Psalm 106 verse 3 says, “Blessed are they who maintain justice, who constantly do what is right.” There are lots and lots of examples like these that make abundantly clear that God stands for justice, fairness and equality, such as Zechariah chapter 7 verses 8-10, and I quote: “And the word of the Lord came again to Zechariah; 'This is what the Lord Almighty says: 'Administer true justice; show mercy and compassion to one another. Do not oppress the widow or the fatherless, the alien or the poor. In your hearts, do not think evil of each other.'”

Does America deny justice to poor people? Given the fact that many nonviolent offenders who get caught up in the “criminal justice” system wind up languishing in jail for months or even years waiting for a court date because they can't post their bail bonds, I would say absolutely America denies justice to poor people. “Do not accept a bribe, for a bribe blinds those who see and twists the words of the righteous.” For those who didn't realize this, these are the very words of God as dictated to Moses during the ancient Israelite's 40 years in the desert. Today in our government at the state and federal levels, we have exactly the opposite. Only today, we give them the innocuous-sounding name “lobbyists”, which excuses nothing! It's all still a bunch of bribery! “Do not oppress an alien; you yourselves know what it is like to be aliens....” All Americans are descended from first-generation immigrants at some point in their past, however distant that may be. You can already see where I'm going with this, and I've brought it up before – the extremely harsh treatment of undocumented foreign nationals, the majority of whom are people of color, by the majority of American citizens. It's all race-based and everyone knows it deep down in their hearts. It's time to call a spade what it is – racial prejudice – and get it over with. There I just wrote it, or said it if you're watching this on You Tube, for all to see and hear. It's way past time for America to confront its issues with racial prejudice and get over all this nasty racist stuff. There will be no racists in heaven, all you Christians with your stinking Klan robes! You cannot love God while despising his creations! So forget about it!

“This is what the Lord Almighty says: 'Administer true justice; show mercy and compassion to one another. Do not oppress the widow or the fatherless, the alien or the poor.” As before, this is exactly what the USA, an allegedly “Christian nation”, is doing as I write this. Does the US show “mercy and compassion”? On the contrary, we have the largest percentage of people in jails and prisons-for-profit of any nation in the world. America is first in incarceration, but when it come to education America truly sucks, and people are just getting things off the ground with ways to change that. But until this occurs, it is time for the US middle and working classes to put our collective feet down and say ”no more”. Let there be no mistake, America is ripe for mass civil disobedience, even for outright revolution. Moreover, as I just proved, this is all based on the Bible, not some ideology. The conditions and circumstances in which the middle and working classes find themselves has become truly intolerable!

Personally, I am a very patient and thoughtful man. I work hard each day to be slow to speak and quick to listen because I know from experience that there is much wisdom to be derived from living my life this way. But by the same token, I am a Christian man and Web evangelist who stands against social injustice and economic inequality, and whose patience is at its end. Just as surely as Jesus preached against the political and religious establishment of His day, in like manner I will do the same in the present day in order to emulate the man I regard as my personal Lord and Savior. So, if you truly care about the deteriorating state of our nation, if you are really concerned about the issues that we are faced with collectively as a people, and if you want to make a stand against social and economic injustice – and since it's in all our best interests to do so – you owe it to yourself to stand up in the face of power and say, “That's it! You're done!!” You know why? Because if Jesus Christ were to return this very day, that's what He'd say. And the ones who are having the homeless thrown in jail for trespassing on their dilapidated properties would be the first ones Christ would send straight to hell.

Echoes of a Bygone Era in Charlottesville, Virginia

Racism and “White Nationalism” Have No Place

in 21^st Century America

by Pastor Paul J. Bern

To view this in any browser, click here! :-)

I once saw a one-hour documentary on cable TV (back in the days when I still watched TV) that was all about neo-Nazi skinheads, their swastika tattoos and flags, and how they are organized into gangs that operate outside the law. The extreme racial hatred of these people was chronicled by this cable channel in raw detail. It showed how these organizations recruit new members over the Internet, and how they support themselves by selling drugs and guns. I clearly remember how appalled I was as I watched this documentary with all the hate and violence perpetrated by these racist organizations. It made me think about the first book of John in the New Testament and what it says about those who harbor racist hate.

“Anyone who claims to be in the light but hates his brother is still in darkness. Whoever loves his brother lives in the light, and there is nothing in him to make him stumble. But whoever hates his brother is in the darkness and walks around in the darkness; he does not know where he is going because the darkness has blinded him.” (1st John 2, verses 9-11) Fast forward to the present, and we had a very public example this past week of politicized, racist behavior in connection with the riots in Charlottesville, Va. this past Friday and Saturday. So-called “white nationalists” put on this big public demonstration and parade, and all the while there were equally numerous anti-bigotry counter-protesters, resulting in an inevitable clash between the two that would up on global TV news outlets. The death toll from these incidents has just risen to 3 as I write this. Was it really worth 3 human lives just so hatred and intolerance could be better expressed? I think not!!

Ask people if they love God or not and the vast majority will say yes, excluding the atheists. (Atheists have themselves as their own gods, so they engage in what amounts to self-worship.) Yet how many of us harbor hate, intolerance and mistrust towards groups of people who are different from us for various reasons? Religion, race, nationality, age, gender, sexual orientation and especially differences in economic status are some of the most common examples. We can't love God and at the same time hate that which He has created. This can range from laughing at a racial joke all the way up to mass murder in schools, churches or movie theaters. The underlying message implied by these things is that there are some people who think that they are somehow better than everybody else. “I think I'm better than you”, is the basis for their opinions, and that's wrong! God created us all and He sees us as equals, as it is written: “Rich and poor have this in common; the Lord is the Maker of them all.” (Proverbs 22: 2)

It is high time for these condescending, racist “white nationalist” people to begin seeing themselves as peers as God has commanded us to! Otherwise, things can go terribly wrong in a hurry, as we have already seen on TV. In this next quote the apostle John, the younger half-brother of Jesus, takes this a step further. “If anyone says,'I love God', yet hates his brother, he is a liar. For anyone who does not love his brother, whom he has seen, cannot love God, whom he has not seen. And He has given us this command: whoever loves God must also love his brother.” (1st John 4, verses 20-21)

If there is one thing we can say about this passage of Scripture, it is that John tells it like it really is. He minces no words with this last quote, “whoever loves God must also love his brother”. That was not just an idea or a suggestion. This is how we are to be conducting ourselves in everyday living. If we love God, then we are to love that which he has created. “For anyone who does not love his brother, whom he has seen, cannot love God, whom he has not seen”. It's hard to get any more blunt and direct than that. So, people who are racially prejudiced and hate-filled but still go to church, do so in vain! They are committing a gross injustice against people of color by their racism, which is why racism is an injustice in God's eyes! Does the Bible have anything else to say about injustice? In fact it has volumes of commentary and Godly commands that humankind is charged with the task of following. Isaiah 30, verse 18 says, “Yet the Lord longs to be gracious to you; He rises to show you compassion. For the Lord is a God of justice. Blessed are all who wait for him!”. Zechariah chapter 7, verse 9 says, “Administer true justice; show mercy and compassion to one another.” Here is one Bible verse that I can truly say a certain Texas state trooper violated when he racially profiled Sandra Bland due to her broken tail-light and Black complexion back in 2015. That, combined with her out-of-state tag, made that officer indirectly responsible for her untimely demise. I wonder how he sleeps at night?

There are many varieties of bigotry, intolerance and prejudice. It can be racial. Do you hate black or white people? What about the Latino immigrants, who are in fact economic refugees from Mexico and Central America? It can be gender-based. Are you a guy who hates women or vice verse? There are people like that, more than one might think. Speaking of sex, do you hate gay people? We may not agree with their lifestyle, and many say they are in sin, but that doesn't give us the right to despise them. Although we believe the Bible says homosexuality is a sin as the majority of Christians do, that give us no license to hate the sinner. Just because they are different than you doesn't make them any worse or yourself any better. Sexual sin is still sexual sin, and questions about same-sex as opposed to opposite sex attraction are, to me, besides the point. The same goes for age discrimination. Ask any older worker who has been turned down for a job in favor of a younger candidate to describe that experience. I've walked a mile in those shoes myself. What about homeless people? Do you tend to not tolerate or fear the homeless? What about the mentally ill? Moreover, economic discrimination is the worst kind of prejudice because it affects the largest group of people, since 99% of America's wealth is squarely in the hands of the top 1% of the US population. What is the antidote for this social sickness? How do we overcome all the artificial barriers that constitute hate, intolerance and prejudice? How can we put forth fundamental change in these areas? For the answer to this pressing question, let's refer one last time to the apostle John.

“Dear friends, let us love one another, for love comes from God. Everyone who loves has been born of God and knows God. Whoever does not love does not know God, because God is love. This is how God showed His love among us: He sent his one and only Son into the world that we might live through Him. This is love: not that we loved God, but that He loved us and sent his Son as an atoning sacrifice for our sins. Dear friends, since God so loved us, we also ought to love one another. No one has ever seen God; but if we love one another, God lives in us and His love is made complete in us....There is no fear in love. But perfect love drives out fear, because fear has to do with punishment. The one who fears is not made perfect in love. We love because He first loved us.” (1st John 4; verses 7-12, 18-19)

Love is the perfect eraser for hate. Bigotry, intolerance and prejudice are based on fear – fear of what we don't understand – and hate, which itself is pure evil because it is derived from contempt. To overcome this, try volunteering in an inner city ministry where you live, or maybe at a food bank or in a homeless shelter, or at the church you attend. It will open your eyes to a whole different world. Hunger in America is real, near-panic over America's future is too, and they are ever-present. The middle class is disappearing because big multinational corporations have exported all the good middle class jobs for pennies on the dollar to emerging countries and economies worldwide. At this point, the only thing left that “we the people” can do about it is an outright revolt, but the violence in Charlottesville, Va. was not the way to go about it! Instead, our churches should be a very good places to start, whether it be for ministry, community outreach or even outright revolution (think “Black Robed Regiment” from the US Revolutionary war). But, if churches aren't your first choice, there are lots of other nonprofits out there such as Goodwill, the Veterans Association and so on. Better yet, start a movement of your own. By volunteering or being a missionary in the poorest parts of your city or town, that is just one way we can combat racism and poverty as an entire nation. From this kind of a ministry we can gain understanding, from understanding tolerance, from tolerance compassion, and from compassion empathy. These are the antidotes for racism, bigotry, prejudice and intolerance. This is how we as a nation can stop hate in its tracks. This is how we as a united American people can ensure there are no more Sandra Bland's (RIP kid sister, you are not forgotten) or Charlottesville, Virginia's. Hate is no longer OK, it isn't even tolerable for those with a strong sense of conscience and a deep desire for justice. You will be surprised at what a positive effect this can have on your outlook on life. It works for me! And the God of peace, a holy peace that is beyond normal human comprehension, will be with you all when you do so.

Free book excerpt from "Occupying America" by Pastor Paul J. Bern

Occupying America: book contents plus free sample

Buy now!

Table of Contents

Chapter One

A Commentary On Modern Revolutions ---------- page 3

Chapter Two

The Occupation Chronicles ------------------------ page 27

Chapter Three

A Documentary of a Broken System ------------- page 56

Chapter Four

Capitalist Implosion: The Warning Signs -------- page 94

Chapter Five

Class Warfare: The Attack of The Elites On The 99%

-------------------------------------------------------- page 128

Chapter Six

Counterattack: The Second US Civil War ------ page 168

Chapter Seven

Ways to Replace a Broken System -------------- page 211

Chapter Eight

The United States of America: Under New Management

-------------------------------------------------------- page 249

Book Excerpt

Just as in Europe, we are seeing the results of colossal social failure. The occupiers are the very sort of people, brimming with ideas, whose energies a healthy society would be marshaling to improve life for everyone. Instead, they are using it to envision ways to bring the whole system down. What we are witnessing can also be seen as a demand to finally have a conversation we were all supposed to have back in 2008. There was a moment, after the near-collapse of the world's financial architecture, when anything seemed possible.

Everything we'd been told for the last decade turned out to be a lie. Markets did not run themselves; creators of financial instruments were not infallible geniuses; and debts did not really need to be repaid – in fact, money itself was revealed to be a political instrument, trillions of dollars of which could be whisked in or out of existence overnight if governments or central banks required it. It is nothing but a legalized Ponzi scheme, and all Ponzi schemes eventually implode.

When the history is finally written, though, it's likely all of this tumult – beginning with the Arab Spring – will be remembered as the opening salvo in a wave of negotiations over the dissolution of the American Empire. Thirty years of relentless prioritizing of propaganda over substance, and snuffing out anything that might look like a political basis for opposition, might make the prospects for the young protesters look bleak; and it's clear that the rich are determined to seize as large a share of the spoils as remain, tossing a whole generation of young people to the wolves in order to do so. But history is not on their side. As I see it, if the occupiers finally manage to break the 30-year stranglehold that has been placed on the human imagination, as in those first weeks after September 2008, everything will once again be on the table – and the occupiers of Wall Street and other cities around the US will have done us the greatest favor anyone possibly can.

The Wall Street protests must grow and spread across this country because they are the only realistic hope for change remaining for the 99% of Americans falling behind in this broken economy. Sad to say, but democracy in the land of the free and home of the brave simply no longer works. Big corporations and the wealthy have hijacked the political system for decades with their hefty donations to various political campaigns. Their contributions guarantee that bought-off politicians pass laws and tax breaks to their benefit. It is no secret, everyone is aware of how the system works, and it must be called for what it is: legalized bribery.

With traditional democratic political methods useless, what recourse do ordinary Americans have left? We are now witnessing the only real avenue left: ordinary citizens taking to the streets and demanding change to the rigged economic system that leaves 99% of them behind. It is only a start, but a vital one. Every day more people are awakening to the stark realization that the political and economic system in this country is stacked against them and getting worse.

During the Vietnam era, because they were directly affected, young people took to the streets to protest the war. America's young males were subject to a draft, and the prospect of being shipped off to die in a war they didn't believe in angered them a great deal. And so the war planners wised up and did away with the draft, but look at what has replaced it. America now has perpetual wars for oil, using a "volunteer" military, many of whom have enlisted due to lack of other opportunities. Seemingly unaffected by post-Vietnam wars, students and other young people have been politically inactive since the early 1970s.

But that is coming to an end. Young people are finding few if any jobs awaiting them when they get out of college (that's assuming they were fortunate enough to afford the high tuition). They graduate with no income coming in, but years of student loan debt to pay back. Those without a college or high school degree are even worse off. All of them see the sad reality, that the American Dream is only for the privileged few. If these demonstrations and protests continue to grow and expand, both here and abroad, the big banks, oil companies, billionaires and politicians will have to pay attention and give some ground. Either that, or face the prospect of violent revolution.

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Here's another book sample from Pastor Paul J. Bern, "Cannabis Legalization and the Bible: Compatible or Not?" links at bottom

 Six Ways That Cannabis Criminalization

Defies All Reason and Logic

[1. Pot smokers punished more than sex offenders] Drugs are so reviled in the US and many other parts of the world that using them is considered worse than any other crime. If you commit violent crimes – arson or rape, for instance – a judge will determine all the facts of the case and consider your criminal record, if any, in sentencing you to prison or not. But if you are caught selling or growing marijuana, there are mandatory minimum sentences involved at the federal and most state levels that take the power of sentencing out of a judge’s hands and turns it into a Chinese take-out menu – a marijuana plant from Column A, within 1000 feet of a school from Column B, that will be 10 years with no parole. Next!

Still don’t believe drug use is considered worse than violent crime? Then why does our federal government pay a bounty for drug arrests, but no other arrests? These monies are called Byrne Grants and they are awarded to local police department for the express purpose of fighting drug crime. In actuality, they incentivize police to go after low-level drug offenders for the easy stat-padding drug arrest, rather than the tougher-to-catch-and-prosecute drug kingpins or the actual violent criminals out there. Still not convinced? Then explain how the Supreme Court could find the death penalty unconstitutional to punish the raping of a child, but there still exists on the books a federal death penalty for growing 60,000 marijuana plants? Or how a serial raping arsonist in Montana gets less time than a guy who merely rented space to a medical marijuana dispensary? Or how a guy who pleads no contest to sodomizing a four-year-old in Oklahoma gets a year behind bars but a college student with a dorm room stash could get life in prison? Or why there are more arrests for marijuana possession almost every year than for all violent crimes combined?

[2. The separation of church and weed.] Even an American educated in one of our fine public schools knows our Constitution recognizes freedom of religious expression. You can be Catholic, Baptist, Mormon, or have no religion at all, and that right is so important our Founding Fathers made it part of our First Amendment. You may practice your religion any way you choose, so long as you don’t violate other laws. But even then, our courts have given believers some latitude to violate laws in the name of religion. Nowhere is this more evident than in the use of drugs as a sacramental rite. A parent allowing their seven-year-old child a gulp of wine at the Olive Garden might earn a visit from Child Protective Services, but the same gulp at the cathedral is acceptable for children when it symbolizes the Blood of Christ. Our Supreme Court ruled several years ago that the use of an illegal Schedule I drug can be allowed for adherents of a South American religion using ayahuasca tea, a powerful hallucinogen that is considered a sacrament by their believers. Our Congress even went so far as to pass a Religious Freedom Restoration Act (RFRA) to protect such use when the Supreme Court allowed the State of Oregon to deny unemployment benefits to two Native Americans who were fired over sacramental peyote use. So it seems in the case of drug laws, the compelling state interest is preventing you from using drugs. Very few people use ayahuasca tea or peyote, it doesn’t grow everywhere, the religions that find them sacred are well-established in historical tradition, and the sincere adherents are easily identifiable. So allowing a few native religious believers their powerful psychedelic sacraments isn’t going to seriously hinder any efforts to prevent you from using those drugs. But your herb stash? That’s different, because there are 26 million Americans who are toking at least once a year and pot grows like a weed. In that event, trying to stop anyone from using, buying, growing, or selling pot would become nearly impossible.

[3. A patient on one of side of the border and a criminal on the other.] It is easy enough to find examples where differing state laws make you a criminal on one side of an imaginary line but not on the other. That applies to the numerous states that have passed medical marijuana laws and their non-medical marijuana neighbors. But what people don’t realize about medical marijuana states is that most don’t recognize each other. Only Arizona, Delaware, Maine, Michigan, and Rhode Island of the currently 17 states that recognize medical marijuana will accept the cards/recommendations from other medical marijuana states. So California and New Mexico patients who cross the border into Arizona would be safe, but Arizona patients who cross into California or New Mexico could be arrested for marijuana possession. Nowhere is it more absurd than the case of the Pacific Northwest medical marijuana states, Oregon and Washington. Both states have virtually the same list of qualifying conditions for medical marijuana. Both states allow patients to cultivate more than a dozen cannabis plants. Both states allow patients to possess up to a pound and a half (680 grams) of usable medicine. But if a Portland patient crosses the Columbia River into Vancouver with 40 grams of pot, he’s a felon. If the Vancouver patient crosses into Portland with 28 grams of pot, she’s a felon. Lesser amounts get you a 24-hour mandatory minimum jail stay in Washington but only a ticket and loss of driver’s license (even if you weren’t driving) in Oregon. Can you imagine if getting your driver’s license was something you had to do for each state you wanted to drive through? Now imagine that instead of a driving license, we were talking about licensing whether or not you would be able to eat today and not suffer bone-wracking pain and spasms, and you had to renew this license at full cost every year.

[4. Fine line between legal gardening and a felony.] In those 17 medical marijuana states, trying to determine which pot smokers are healthy enough to deserve a cage and which ones are sick enough to protect from arrest is bound to lead to logical absurdities. Fourteen of the states allow patients or their caregivers to tend a garden to grow their own medicine. To deter large-scale growing operations, some states have implemented limits on the number of marijuana plants a patient may grow. In a state like Washington, this is simple enough, as the state has specified fifteen as the total number of plants allowed. But in Oregon and some other medical marijuana states, a distinction has been made between “mature” and “immature” marijuana plants. Oregon’s limit is the most generous, allowing six “mature” and eighteen “immature” plants, to accommodate the fact that patients have to keep a continuous cycle of plants coming into maturity in order to maintain a steady supply of medicine. However, the law completely abandons horticultural science in defining what a “mature” marijuana plant is. In nature, a mature plant is one that is producing flowers, or in the case of cannabis, the buds that patients are putting into bongs, vaporizers, and brownies. But in the Oregon Revised Statutes, a “mature” plant is one that is greater than 12 inches in any direction or is producing buds. So your thirteen-inch pot plant vegetating in the closet is “mature”, even though it is weeks from being mature. It would be like setting the limits of sexual consent based on how tall a child is. This has led to situations where growers are diligently following the law, tending six flowering mature plants and the next three sets of six plants in three stages, only to have one set shoot up from ten inches to fourteen inches over a weekend growth spurt. Now the grower has twelve “mature” plants, even though only the six mature plants can produce any marijuana, and he’s no longer a patient, he’s a felon.

[5. Feds denying that marijuana is medicine at all costs.] The government’s intransigence on the medical utility of cannabis is the most stubborn and hypocritical federal policy ever. The feds will tell you, with a straight face, that marijuana is a Schedule I substance and as such has no recognized medical value within the United States, even as seventeen states expressly recognize its medical value. Now if you complain about the 17,000 peer-reviewed research papers sitting in the federal 'PubMed' database that demonstrate medical use of cannabis, you’re barking up the wrong tree. This is a federal government that itself has patented the medical utility of cannabis and still tells you it is not medicine. As if that weren’t hypocritical enough, the US government maintains a pot farm at the University of Mississippi. This is the one legal weed grow in America, expressly allowed under the 1961 UN Convention on Narcotic Drugs for the production of cannabis for research purposes. In 1975, a glaucoma sufferer named Robert Randall sued for the right to use marijuana, lest he go blind, and won. This decision led to the development of the compassionate, investigative new drug program that produced and delivered medical marijuana for Randall.

Shortly thereafter, more patients sued to get access to medical marijuana, expanding to a few more federal medical marijuana patients. In the late 1980s and early 1990s, AIDS activists began marshaling thousands of applications for HIV+ gay men who found marijuana to help combat the symptoms of their disease. So rather than expand the compassion to thousands who would have benefited, the Bush Administration in 1992 closed the program to new applicants and the Clinton Administration in 1999 declared it would not be reopened. However, the program was not closed to the patients who had already been approved. Today there are four remaining federal medical marijuana patients who receive a tin of eight or more ounces of pre-rolled federal medical marijuana from the federal medical marijuana farm every month. But, federally speaking, there is no such thing as medical marijuana.

[6. The Drug Enforcement Administration forbids cultivation of a non-drug.] Nothing is more absurd in the war on marijuana than the ban on industrial hemp. If you don’t know, hemp is also cannabis, but cultivated differently as to produce a seed and fiber crop that is exceptionally low in any drug value. It takes anywhere from 2% to 4% THC content (tetrahydrocannabinol, the “high” ingredient in pot) for someone to cop a buzz off weed. Some of the finer medical marijuana varieties may top 15% THC content. By law and international agreements, industrial hemp must be produced at less than 0.3% THC content. It’s safe to say that there is a greater alcohol concentration allowed in a “near-beer” than THC concentration in hemp. There’s more THC in my bloodstream as I write this than is found in a field of industrial hemp plants. But even though there is absolutely no way one can use hemp as a drug, its cultivation is banned by the Drug Enforcement Administration, because it contains any amount of THC. If this standard were applied to other drugs, you’d never have another legal poppy seed bagel, because they contain trace amounts of opium. SWAT teams would be raiding your grandma’s house for the decorative poppies in her backyard garden, as they could actually be processed into heroin. This is even more maddening when you realize how keeping hemp illegal works against the DEA’s stated goal of reducing outdoor marijuana cultivation. Though some cops seem to think hemp would allow pot growers to hide their illegal crop, cross-pollination of hemp into marijuana makes both crops worse. The marijuana becomes less “druggy” and the hemp becomes less “industrial”. The last thing a marijuana grower wants next to his prized plants is a hemp farm.

What is the most dangerous activity you can engage in? If you guessed doing illegal drugs, you would be wrong. Extreme sports like big wave surfing, base or bunjey jumping, cave diving, white-water rafting and mountain climbing all have a higher rate of risk to life and limb. Yet the question of a ban on these behaviors beloved by "adrenaline addicts" is viewed as ludicrous, even when the risk of death, say, in climbing Mount Everest once (until recently, about 1 in 3) is greater than the annual risk of dying from heroin addiction (around 1% to 4%). Or consider mundane activities like driving: Car accidents are responsible for 1% of annual deaths nationwide. Cigarettes and alcohol do at least as much, if not more, harm to each user than heroin or cocaine. Alcohol, cocaine and heroin have a 3% to 15% rate of addiction, depending on how it is measured—and tobacco's rate is much higher. Yet the risks don't align well with their legal and social status, especially when you consider that marijuana is safer than any of the legal drugs. The reasons for this inconsistency around risk are complicated. Driving has huge personal and economic benefits. Risky sports are seen as noble challenges that foster the human will toward exploration, adventure and growth. When it comes to non-medical drug use, however, discussion of benefits tends to be either dismissed as delusional or simply stifled. 

I don't mention these facts to promote drug use – not at all! That I feel compelled to immediately include such a disclaimer underlines my point: Our values shape our perception of risk and the way we make drug policy. If we recognize only the risks and ignore the benefits, we fail to understand that the real problems are addiction and harm — not the substances themselves and the people who use them. For instance, when we talk about the “epidemics” of Oxycontin, methamphetamine or heroin, we rarely acknowledge that the majority of users never become addicted. Over the course of a lifetime, only about 10% to 15% of regular users ever get hooked for an entire lifetime. That risk is not insignificant: Few people would fly on a plane that crashed every tenth flight. But focusing on use as the main factor in addiction obscures what is actually at stake. There are, decade after decade, headlines about the fall of one drug and the rise of another. Yet the overall rate of people with addictions remains fairly constant. Although population differences and other variables make the numbers hard to compare exactly, a large national survey in 1990 found a 3.6% rate of illegal drug problems (such as abuse or dependence) in people ages 15 to 54 during the previous 12 months. The most recent National Survey on Drug Use and Health, which includes people from age 12 to those in their 80s or older, found a 3.5% rate of abuse or dependence in 2014, the latest year such stats are available. While that rate may not seem much lower, the difference is probably due to the later survey’s inclusion of people over 55, who are numerous and had a 2011 addiction or drug misuse rate of a mere 0.8% or less. It is worth noting that 1990 was the peak of fears about a non-ending crack epidemic; by contrast, today, while there are concerns about growing prescription opioid addiction, the actual rates have been steady since 2006.

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