Bangor Daily News has an article titled, "Maine’s poor take to stage in Bangor in effort to dispel myths." Pat LaMarche moderated the two hour event at Husson University Wednesday night.
(Full story HERE)
Sponsored by WKIT and WZON, Stephen and Tabitha King’s Bangor radio stations, Faces of the Poor featured people from the community who say they were hurt by the Maine Legislature’s final budget.
“I grew up Methodist, and I remember a lot of those scriptural readings I heard in church,” Stephen King noted in a news item posted on his stations’ website. “One of them, from the book of Matthew, quotes Jesus: ‘Here is the truth: anything you did not do for the least of these, you did not do for me.’ Or, from the book of Luke, ‘Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.’
“The poor are just as much a part of our community as the rich. They deserve bread for their tables, a roof over their heads, clothes to wear, and shoes to walk in. When we do for them, we do for ourselves,” King said. “It’s called sharing the love.”That's awesome! Hold on. . . let me think about this. . . as a preacher I've got to say : THAT'S AWESOME! King is quite right, the Scriptures do command us to have a compassionate attitude toward the poor. Something the conservative right would do well to remember.
King's note is evidence that he has not forgotten his childhood and the desperate measures his mother went to in order to make sure he and his brother were okay. It is also evidence that he remembers well the Scriptures he was taught, and in particular the words of Jesus.
I'd liked to distinguish, if I may, the difference between Conservatism proper and what's commonly called the Right.
ReplyDeleteIn my opinion, what we're dealing with here is, if you will, a radical faction that has systematically distorted the tradition of a prudent Conservatism based on tradition and experience that I'm willing to say can be traced as far back as the biblical prophets, and substituted in it's place personal politics in place of Creed.
In the strictest sense this is nothing new, long before the Enlightenment and Industrial Revolution it was called Might makes Right or I before All if you want to think of it like that.
That kind of thinking has never entirely gone away down the years, it's just gotten better at making excuses for it's behavior, in that sense it's textbook neurotic abusive behavior.
All that people like John Stuart Mill and Jeremy Bentham did was give an old disease a house made of sand to hide in.
ChrisC