DMZ 05/06
Sitting or standing, black or white, rich or poor, blue collar or white collar, able or disabled, young or old, the work in the DMZ community garden goes on. As Barack Obama said tonight in North Carolina, the politics of division, guilt by association, personalizing the issue is going by the wayside. There are now too many of us who, like St. Paul, believe each of us is “equal with each other, whether you are a Jew or a Greek, a slave or a free person, a man or a woman.” {Galatians 3:28}. As with the DMZ community garden, the politics of life, when the truth is spoken, tells us that all persons are equal. In the garden this means the interdependence of plants, bugs, soil, sun, rain and worm; in faith this means we are all equal in God and his love is unconditional for all of us; in politics it means not playing the politics of division and playing one against another; for the world it means we are all brothers and sisters.
“Together We Are “Growing Power” is another way of saying this same old, same old. Fact of life: We need each other and egalitarianism, not individualism, is our cry of life. Many persons suffer in the world today and go hungry. We know we can produce enough food in the world so all can eat. Yet because of greed, lack of means or sharing, my brothers and sisters go hungry tonight.
I heard a story on public radio the other day of how much food Tanzania, a country with much rich growing soil, imports. The little it exports is from a few subsistence farmers who send a little to Europe for money to survive. When a leader of one of the farmers co-ops who exports food was asked why he was sending it to Europe when food was being imported to his own country, he responded that the problem was not with land for growing. There was plenty of land in Tanzania. He said the problem was with distribution and communications. Farmers who grew some extra to sell could more easily sell it to Europe than to the country’s own people. It is the same as the food shortage; there is enough food, or could be. We just lack the will and work to grow, distribute and share it.
In the DMZ garden of life we are all equal, sitting or standing.
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