Good One

Nate Heklman posted this link to Facebook and Stephie commented on it which brought the link up on my facebook page.

Statement of Lynne and Bill Hybels
Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on Immigration, Border Security and Refugees

For the Thursday, October 8, 2009 Hearing on Faith-Based Community Perspectives on Comprehensive Immigration Reform

Everybody should read it. One method the elite use to prevail over us is to divide and conquer. Besides a sense working class solidarity, Christian sensibilities also advise us not to fall victim to biases that divide us.

When blacks or latinos demonstrate, or even when they resort to mob action, will you vote for greater social justice or more armored cars for the police? If you chose armored cars you have fallen victim to the exploiters' manipulations.

I confess that I am prone to think blacks are "different from us" when in the same evening news I see clips of grotesque black on black violence first in Zimbabwe then in some US ghetto. I always have to recall the news clips of first day at school in Chicago, the hope and happiness expressed in those little black faces. What happens to that hope and happiness over the next seven or eight years? What despair and dehumanization occurs? If you don't take a moment to feel concern for them it probably wont occur to you to worry about your childrens' grandchildren being consigned to the same conditions.

I feel the same repugnance for the juvenile thugs attaching no value to human life or virtue that most readers do, but remember, they weren't born that way, something happened, something went wrong. And in the prevailing economic system things are going to go wrong for a lot more people. Those little black kindergardners are the canaries in our coal mines.


PS As a token of my appreciation for Christians who identify with Christ more strongly than with Glen Beck, I'm restoring the link to Sojourners which Kim initially installed here, but I must have deleted at some unecumenical moment.
.