Why Lament?

The folks at Sojourners were interested in the Christian Call to Lament and Reconciliation, and so I was able to write something up that they posted on their blog yesterday:

>>>God's Politics: The Gulf Spill Brings Christians to Lament

I got a little long-winded, I'm afraid, but I'm always glad for the opportunity to reach more than the 8-10 people who read this blog...

Memory Lane

White House Press Briefing
May 7, 2001 (LINK)

Q: Does the President believe that, given the amount of energy Americans consume per capita, how much it exceeds any other citizen in any other country in the world, does the President believe we need to correct our lifestyles to address the energy problem?

MR. FLEISCHER: That's a big no. The President believes that it's an American way of life, and that it should be the goal of policy makers to protect the American way of life. The American way of life is a blessed one. And we have a bounty of resources in this country. What we need to do is make certain that we're able to get those resources in an efficient way, in a way that also emphasizes protecting the environment and conservation, into the hands of consumers so they can make the choices that they want to make as they live their lives day to day.

Q: So Americans should go on consuming as much more energy than any other citizens in any other countries of the world, as long as they want?

MR. FLEISCHER: Terry, the President believes that the American people are very wise and that, given the right incentives, they will know how and they will make their own right determinations about how much they can conserve ...

A Christian Call for Lament and Reconciliation

During last week's summer institute at the Duke Divinity School Center for Reconciliation, I met some wonderful folks who've worked together to compose a document in response to the ongoing oil disaster in the Gulf. I hope you'll read it, and consider adding your name. Most importantly, I hope you'll think through how your own congregation might be able to make an acknowledgment of the oil spill in its own worship and life.

The BP Oil Spill: A Christian Call for Lament and Reconciliation

Petition // Facebook

As followers of Christ, creator and redeemer of all creation, we mourn the Deepwater Horizon catastrophe and the BP oil spill now polluting the Gulf of Mexico. We mourn the human and animal lives lost, the economies and ecosystems destroyed, and the gifts of God, created from and for his love, squandered and poisoned. Most of all we mourn our complicity and active participation in an economy based on toxic energy that has made such death inevitable.

Click here to continue reading.

On blame

After Katrina, Working Assets designed a billboard which placed a photo of the submerged city alongside a quotation from famed small-government crusader Grover Norquist, stating his desire to reduce the federal government "down to the size where we can drown it in the bathtub."

I always wonder how fair it is when we take a major, unforeseen disaster as evidence of a flawed ideology.

Today the AP ran a story entitled "Conservatives seek government solutions after oil spill." In it, they recall Louisiana governor Bobby Jindal's 2009 promise to refuse federal stimulus money, in contrast with his eagerness to work with the federal government (and its resources) to deal with the oil spill. It's interesting to ask small-government conservatives from the region how they rationalize it, but ultimately not very satisfying: I gather that most would say that disaster recovery is precisely one of the few proper roles for the federal government. I can't tell if the reporter was fishing for hypocrisy, but I don't think there is much to be found here.

A much more lighthearted effort in this same vein is the Facebook group entitled "Plugging the Gulf oil leak with the works of Ayn Rand". Lord knows she wrote enough pages.

I know my opinion usually falls on the left, and I spend a lot of my time trying to be as charitable as possible toward the right. My aim is not to let anyone off the hook, or to conclude that the Gulf disaster is ideologically neutral. But if you think you're in a position to score ideological points off of this disaster, the relevant question is not whether you own a copy of Atlas Shrugged; it's whether you own an automobile.

When disaster strikes

I've been thinking this morning about how our society/nation/culture reacts to major disasters. When we look at the Deepwater Horizon spill, the Upper Big Branch mine collapse in early April, or even the financial collapse, Congress and the media seem to take up the public's interest by identifying those at fault and figuring out how to prevent the same thing from happening again. The answer, in each case, seems to be regulation: introduce more of it, or make sure that the regulatory structures aren't being tainted by corruption.

If you're interested in the question of blame, I highly recommend this piece from the Times-Picayune. The author thinks that what the American people need, alongside a proper outrage, is an appreciation of the technological challenges involved in both the drilling and the repair operations. He begins, "Pity the President of the United States who has to admit to the American people the limits of American know-how." Though I'm not going to make any excuses, I honestly felt similar pity for Bush during Katrina: when a cataclysmic event strikes, how much can we really expect of the federal government?

As for the question of regulation, I touched on the topic in a paper I wrote about the financial services industry for my Agrarian Theology class this semester. The problem with recovery through regulation is that these disasters keep happening because we are basing our livelihood on inherently risky enterprises:

The consensus solution to the contraction of credit markets has been to introduce governmental regulation of derivatives markets and to loan tremendous sums of money to banks (money which, of course, the federal government has borrowed from foreign creditors). It is unclear whether we have gained any cultural or moral wisdom. “A human economy cannot prescribe the terms of its own success,” Wendell Berry writes. “If we see the human economy as the only economy, we will see its errors as political failures, and we will continue to talk about ‘recovery.’” Indeed, the entire purpose of the federal government’s drastic intervention—what is meant by the term ‘recovery’—seems to be the stabilization of financial institutions so that we can resume borrowing and lending in a way that generates artificial wealth without being bounded by the limits that constrain real wealth. Constraint, of course, is a virtue well understood by farmers and entirely foreign to bankers.

More on offshore drilling

The NYT article about how the Coast Guard plans to burn up the oil spill is running underneath a banner advertisement ... for offshore drilling and underwater pipelines.

If, for some reason, you so desire, you can hear more from "the people of america's oil and natural gas industry" at this website.