Democracy or Plutocracy (rule by the rich)???

Two score and ten years ago, a rich, white, male president, John F. Kennedy, was assassinated.  Seven score and ten years ago, a poor, white, male president, Abraham Lincoln, gave his Gettysburg address.  Neither president understood the nature and necessity of justice for the nation.  In 1776, a rich, white, male elite drafted the Declaration of Independence; in 1787, a rich, white, male elite drafted the United States Constitution.

These documents are rightly remembered and treasured.  But I place the Pledge of Allegiance about the Declaration and the Constitution.  Why?  The Declaration and Constitution do refer to the concepts of freedom and equality, but they omit the equally important and absolutely necessary concept of justice.  The Pledge ends with this fundamental requirement of a democracy---"with liberty and justice for all."

Without justice for all its citizens, freedom and equality ring hollow.  For example:

     * Without justice, slavery can be abolished and legal freedom gained; but they were quickly followed by a new birth of oppression---legal segregation.

     * Without justice, legal segregation can be abolished and legal freedom regained; but these victories were quickly followed by an exploding racial wealth gap and the mass incarceration of young Black and Hispanic males.

     * Without justice, the beautiful and eloquent phrase "a government of the people, by the people, and for the people," becomes, in tragic reality, "a government created by a rich, white, male elite for a rich, white, male elite."

Justice demands that we look underneath the oppressive systems of slavery, segregation, wealth gap and mass incarceration to find the underlying causes/values and uproot them---something neither Lincoln nor Kennedy did.  As a nation, we must confess and repent from our national sins of American exceptionalism, white supremacy, WASPness (White, Anglo-Saxon, Protestant), and the American trinity of hyperindividualism, hypermaterialism and hyperethnocentrism---something the nation has never done.

Without a public statement of confession and repentance, we repeat the same national sins, slightly revised, over and over again.  The Declaration and the Constitution did not lead us from repentance to justice.  Neither does the Pledge, but at least the Pledge, for the first time in American history, publicly tied freedom and justice together.

We need to add another sentence or two to our Pledge:  "We pledge, under God, in a spirit of repentance and restitution, to free all our oppressed peoples.  We will pursue, under God, Jubilee justice for all our citizens."



ps  I will love my God with all my heart; likewise, I choose to love my neighbor as myself, especially my poor, oppressed, ethnic neighbor.  I pledge to pursue Jubilee justice for all my neighbors.  I do not want to make the same mistake the Pharisees who professed faith in God but who neglected justice and the love of God (Luke 11).  God, help me to keep spirituality and justice close