December 22, 2004

Bangor Daily News Op-Ed

By Jim Harney

The season we celebrate has a dramatic challenge behind it: yes, it’s a season of joy. But when we read the papers or check out TV a gush of “compassion fatigue” runs through our bodies. A nation divided. We have Christians at each other’s throats with conflictive takes on the world and the place of the US in it.

A touch of joy in our hearts might bring us to look the growing deficit square in the face. A deficit exists so huge that it will soon surpass the Argentine economic implosion in December 2001, the worst default in history. Maurice Obstfeld of the University of California, Berkeley, and Kenneth Rogoff of Harvard, say that our country by the year 2007 will look like Argentina just before the bottom fell out of its economy in 2001. A year ago I witnessed Argentines picking dumps to make a living: thousands out in the streets demanding change that would bring employment to the 20% of the population without jobs.

Central Banks around the world are scraping up Euros: dumping dollars. Argentina does it; even pays its debts to the IMF using the Euro. Washington doesn’t like that kind of independence for it means the Great Power to the North has less power over the Southern Cone country.

What a privilege I had to go to a place capital steers clear of – the slums – and to hang out with rag pickers in Argentina. Millions of them live in metropolitan Buenos Aires. They make less than $2 a day! In a dump, I attended a first-mass celebrated by a young priest. I saw smiles, heard language with hope and joy compressed into it and the organizing challenges that accompany it.

I saw some of the hell that seethes throughout the country and I’ll never be the same again. I witnessed a Euro-Argentine middle class enraged at losing their homes. One guy told me his $250,000 home lies empty, auctioned off, because he couldn’t pay his dollar-based mortgage. His payments increased three hundred percent when the peso was taken off its peg with the dollar and devalued in the year 2002. I’ll never forget the way he looked at me, the way he spoke, his grimaces as he tried to come up with language to talk to one who comes from the nation that put in place so much of the economic pestilence he deals with.

In Argentina people sing a song that says, “I ask God that I might not be indifferent to injustice.” They sing it, but more importantly they live it. They’re out in the streets demanding change.

Our country could be another Argentina. How do we experience joy when each of us carries $70,000 of an outlandish US deficit on our backs? And it has to be paid! Bush-Administration policies wrapped a deficit of $631 billion around the nation. We’ve got a poor and dwindling middle class just like Argentina. This US deficit gobbles up a sixth of the rest of the world’s savings! Ten percent of that goes to pay for bloodletting in Iraq. And joy is scarce in a world where Americans aren’t noted for their inclination to save: on the contrary, we’re consumers of last resort. We’re told we’re being patriotic when we consume – try to link joy to that one!

Joy might blossom when we develop capacities to look at the structural sin that shrouds our country. Argentines do it. Why can’t we? It’s not the economy but morality that counts these days: so goes the mantra. The two go hand in hand. When separated, trouble brews.

When we use our language and imaginative genius to develop a prayer, a politic and spirituality that brings us to challenge financial institutions that thrive off the poor there is reason for joy. For every dollar the US and other developed countries lend to the poor ten dollars are taken back. Not a bad deal: but in the transaction lies a mountain of untold suffering. One billionaire, Kenneth Dart, makes $170,000 every 35 days off the debt of the Argentine people.

Joy enlivens our spirit when we risk meeting with others to discern ways to change structures that pummel the poor. With the poor in mind we stand a chance to change habits that collude with dominant values and practices that push human beings into an unimaginable hell. When we cement linkages with the humiliated rather than running roughshod over them joy abounds. We’ll advocate for a world of inclusion rather than exclusion. Perhaps we’ll even come to a place where everyone will have a place at the inn.

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Jim Harney works with Posibilidad, a Bangor-based nonprofit that deals with issues of globalization. He can be reached at jimharney@posibilidad.org

Jim Harney

Posibilidad

85 Wiley Street

Bangor, ME 04401

207-942-3501