Real-life ‘Hunger Games’
23rd April 2012 · 0 Comments
By Edmund W. Lewis
The Louisiana Weekly Editor
The Republican Party made two very interesting moves last week. The first involved striking down President Barack Obama’s plan to end tax cuts for the rich. The second involved laying the groundwork to slash funding for the nation’s food stamp program to reduce the deficit.
Both moves sent a very strong message to Americans and the rest of the world about who the Party of Lincoln is and whose interests it represents. Basically, the GOP told the nation and the world that the federal budget should be balanced on the backs of the poorest and neediest among us and not the wealthiest one percent of the nation’s residents.
That plan suggests that the idea behind the bestselling book Hunger Games and blockbuster film by the same name is anything but far-fetched. In Hunger Games, the children of the underprivileged masses are forced to fight to the death in order to receive food from the ruling class. Two children from each of the nation’s fictitious 12 districts are chosen by lottery in the film to engage in a “survival of the fittest” fight to the death as the entire nation watches the ordeal unfold on television and the wealthy and powerful place bets on who will emerge as the victor in each year’s Hunger Games.
What is amazing about the version of real-life Hunger Games being played in the United States is that many of those who are adamant and placing the heaviest tax burden on those who can least afford it while slashing the funds allotted for the nation’s food stamp program insist upon calling themselves Christians and/or members of a political party that espouses “family values.”
May God have mercy on them.
So much for progress…
Anyone who thought that the Southern Baptist Convention was ready to put aside its racist legacy and focus on the content of the character of believers of various skin shades better think again after last week’s rant by Southern Baptist leader Dr. Richard Land during which he accused President Barack Obama and other Black leaders of using the murder of Trayvon Martin for political gain.
Using words he allegedly plagiarized from a Washington Times piece, Dr. Land accused President Obama, the Rev. Jesse Jackson Sr. and the Rev. Al Sharpton of using the Trayvon Martin case “to try to gin up the Black vote for an African-American president who is in deep, deep, deep trouble for re-election.” Land added that he was confident that a vast majority of Southern Baptists agreed with him.
So much for diversity, colorblindness and the separation of church and state.
Dr. Land’s remarks are all the more troubling given the fact that he has served as the Southern Baptist Convention’s Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission for the past 23 years and is the SBC’s ethnicist.
When he found himself in hot water, Dr. Land ultimately released an apology to the Southern Baptist Convention that reads as follows:
“I am writing to express my deep regret for any hurt or misunderstanding my comments about the Trayvon Martin case have generated. It grieves me to hear that any comments of mine have to any degree set back the cause of racial reconciliation in Southern Baptist or American life.”
Mind you, this is the same Southern Baptist Convention that wholeheartedly embraced and supported the sale, trade and enslavement of Africans but said recently that it has now seen the error of its ways and is ready to move forward with efforts to attract a more diverse membership and possibly elect its first Black president.
Wouldn’t it have been nice if Dr. Richard Land and other men and women of God who are tragically often on the wrong side of right with regard to race-related issues would have stepped forward after learning of the Trayvon Martin case to acknowledge that a human life was wrongfully taken in Sanford, Florida on Feb. 26 and that the person responsible for that killing should be held accountable. That would have spoken volumes about the Southern Baptist Convention’s progress and commitment to moving beyond its sins of the past if its membership and leadership had stepped out on faith to take a stand for justice in this racially divisive case.
So much for that.
This article originally published in the April 23, 2012 print edition of The Louisiana Weekly newspaper.
