The religion of efficiency!

We were once employed by a major United States corporation called Allstate. During most of the time that we were employed there, the company’s corporate officials were in an almost constant battle with some of its insurance agents over the idea that they might be members and believers in the Church of Scientology. To be more specific, they thought that Allstate was practicing Scientology’s supposedly held belief in numbers and comparative averages as a way to manage a company. One simply took averages and interpolated profits and losses from those averages and dismissed employees if they did not fit those means.

When confronted with this idea in a board meeting, the president of Allstate simply said that he was a Presbyterian.

It is interesting to note that so many of the heads of American corporations feel the need to be identified with a religious affiliation. And, we are sure that many of them actually do go to church on Sunday. Since most of them are driven around in secure and chauffeured expensive automobiles and probably like to hang out with their own kind in their daily lives, we wonder just what kind of churches that they might attend. Would they attend a church that, as one across the street from one of our favorite Marion, Illinois restaurants, states on its sign: Everyone welcome, This means you! Or would they attend some large edifice that was more or less secure and away from those who are less fortunate in life. This same church that we just mentioned has a service for the poor and less fortunate every Sunday at 12:30 pm. As with our volunteerism with the Marion Ministerial Alliance, we go to this church service practically every Sunday after we get back from the services at our more traditional Methodist church held a few miles away.

It is interesting how people like to hang out with those of their own socio-economic class. So many do not feel comfortable around those that they do not have any thing in common with nor understand. It has been said that the more that one is worth, the less that one needs to be close to the Lord. That does not mean that one needs to seek out a life of poverty in particular, but it does remind us of the parable of the wealthy young man in the Christian Bible who asked Jesus Christ what he needed to do to follow him. Jesus told him that he must give away all that he had and take up his cross and follow him. The wealthy young man turned sadly away and could not do the things that Jesus had asked him to do because he was so attached to his wealth. It was not a matter that he was wealthy, it was a matter of his love for his wealth that drove a wedge between him and God.

This idea that so many of the ultra wealthy of this nation profess a belief in God stands in stark contrast to what is happening in this nation today. Like the rich young man, they would like to believe and have the benefits of belief but they are so often not willing to do what it truly takes to secure those benefits. In point of fact, more and more wealth is becoming concentrated in fewer and fewer hands as each day, week and month passes by. It has been noted that the Walton family, scions of Wal-Mart, have a collective net worth greater than the bottom forty percent of this nations population combined. The week that Jesus was crucified, he noted at a meal with friends, that the poor would always be with us. However, we wonder what he would think at the numbers of them that exist today. And, we also wonder what Jesus would think of those who work daily to see that what programs are there for the poor are eviscerated or even down right eliminated as they express their profession that these less fortunate should simply go out and find themselves a job some place. As we saw Friday in the monthly jobs report, only 88,000 jobs were added and a half a million people stopped looking for work!

Over the last few decades, the very rich and powerful have worshiped at the alter of efficiency. They have found more and more ways to do and create more and more wealth with fewer and fewer employees. And, they have used technology to accomplish those goals. When one goes through a modern automobile manufacturing plant, one finds as many or more robots in use there than there are human employees. Those robots have replaced good paying jobs that helped to create the once thriving middle class that made this nation the greatest place on this earth to live and work and play. And, in addition to that, the collective weight of all of this adherence to efficiency has driven the labor union movement in the nation almost to the brink of extinction. Only around eleven percent of American workers are now unionized. Gone with these union jobs are the pensions that guaranteed that a worker could have a decent and dignified retirement. The decent pensions have been replaced by 401K plans whose average value as of last year were either 14,000 dollars or 75,000 dollars depending on who one wants to believe! Try to retire on either amount!

The one good thing that has come out of all of this has been the great advances in medicine which have led to longer and longer lives for those who can afford its benefits. But the wealthy in this nation would like to see those benefits reserved for them and theirs alone. So many of them oppose Medicare and Medicaid and fight tooth and nail against the idea that they should provide medical benefits for their employees in so many cases. The idea of Obamacare simply frightens and incenses them to no end. The future that we face as a nation might be one of disposable workers who have short post work life expectancies because they are denied good medical care as they watch the ultra wealthy achieve longer and longer life expectancies due to their access to that good care.

We were in a couple of local restaurants recently where minimum wage employees were having trouble imputing data into the cash register to complete a transaction for a meal that we had just eaten. This is illustrative of the fact that more and more on the bottom of the ladder are having more and more problems trying to adjust and cope with the constantly changing technology that is thrown at them each and every day in the business world due to that pursuit of efficiency. As each year and decade passes by there are more and more of our citizenry who can no longer cope with these changes and who are forced out of the mainstream labor force as a result of that inability to comprehend or compete. We remember the president of Sears Roebuck and Company bragging that he could punch into his computer and see what was going on at any store at any time that he wanted to do so. Just how many jobs were eliminated because of an inability, by intelligence, to simply do the things on the other end of that information pipeline to make that happen for him? We have also seen that the Kroger grocery store company has installed automated check out lanes where the customer does not need to interact with a human from the time that they walk into the store until the time that they leave the building! One of the interesting things about the Kroger situation is that the company has seen less loyalty to its brand because of this decision. In our local Kroger store, the check out employees have told me that they are graded on how friendly and kind that they are to customers who pass through their lanes. If they do not meet the grade, they can be terminated! How friendly can an employee be who is having problems coping to start with and then is faced with this sort of pressure?

What underlies all of this technology is the simple philosophy that more and more profit needs to be generated at whatever cost that might be in lost employment and the crisis that are generated from that. Efficiency is the guideword and the guidepost for this increased profit and the wellbeing of the average person/employee is lost in all of this.

The church, both physically and philosophically, that these people at the top of the economic food chain worship at is far different than the one that those most in need choose to attend. So many of those at the bottom simply want to have a decent life and could not begin to conceive of what goes on at the other end of the economic scale. We were at the ministerial alliance recently and one of the patrons there saw some new walking shoes that we had on and asked us where we had gotten them. When we replied that we had purchased them at the local mall, he was amazed because he had never been inside of one of them, nor had he ever been able to afford to buy a new set of shoes in his life. He was in his sixties!

As you read parts of the above paragraph, we simply want you to think of whether there is a God and, if so, where that God has his emphasis set. He sent us a man who was born not of an earthy father and was called illegitimate among other things. He ran with the masses and with the poor and disregarded of this world. And, we want you to think of all of those fine churches in which the poor would never feel comfortable attending or setting foot in their doors, and of the words of the twenty fifth chapter of Matthew, verses thirty one through forty six. http://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Matthew+25%3A31%2D46&version=NIV

There is a difference between religion and faith. One can go to church for an entire lifetime and never understand what true faith is all about. So many churches today are really nothing more than social clubs where people of like minded thoughts and socio economic status gather to enjoy one another’s company while they check something else off of their to do check list for the week. And, outside on the sidewalks in front of these church/edifices on a cold Sunday morning walk those who are full of the faith in the knowledge that there is a better world and a better time ahead for them. In the Christian Bible, it speaks of the time, in his last days, when Jesus was sitting in the temple in Jerusalem and watching people put their tithes in the offertory. He saw a poor woman place two mites in the plate and he stated that she had given more than anyone else even though they gave more because she gave all that she had to give. We live, increasingly, in a world of givers and takers but there are other worlds and other times to come.

As we end this piece, we do not want you to think that we are in a tirade about the rich. But there are problems out there. Warren Buffett, the Nebraska billionaire, has been on a crusade to get his fellow billionaires to donate some of their wealth to worthy causes by the end of their lives. He has had mixed success and has no guarantee that those billionaires who have signed on to his campaign will actually carry out their pledges when the time comes. And, we are reminded of the rich an d wealthy Pharisee named Nicodemus in Biblical times. He is the one who approached Jesus at night with questions about his faith. He is also one of two who took Jesus’ body down from the cross and bore him to his grave. So the stories go, Nicodemus became very faithful to the early Christian church and gave all of his money away in its service and died a very happy and content man. There is more than money in this world!

Have a nice Sunday!

IOVHO,

Regards,

Joe

To say that "God exists" is the greatest understatement ever made across space and time.