Modern technology has minimized natural disasters as threats to life leaving us plagued with problems of our own making. Someone said, “You can’t make an omelet without breaking eggs.” Politicians afraid of antagonizing their corporate sponsors, refuse to break eggs, accepting calamities like poverty, addiction and suicide as inevitable byproducts of human interaction. Remedies must be found in the churches.

Socialists believe that average people, choosing among the physical and emotional fulfillments found in nature and society, should determine mankind’s future. Human nature, changeable when unthreatened, is being molded every day by a social system that encourages competition and minimizes cooperation. Problems humans create can be solved by cooperative humans without divine intervention.

Capitalism allows an acquisitive minority to usurp government, using it to create a legal framework to defend itself. It restricts choices to material goods that industry and commerce find it most profitable to provide. It numbs us out with distorted accounts of our glorious history and noble pretensions. Capital attacks socialism knowing that a socialist government would limit its profits and power.

Communism argues that capitalism won’t surrender its power until confronted by an equal revolutionary power. Communism attacks socialism hoping to recruit some of its followers for the revolution. Socialists have seen that such power once assembled is often used to replace one dictatorship with another.

The only feasible solution is mobilization of the moral force of the electorate as has happened in South Africa and India. The institutional churches, largely ignoring the socialism of Matthew, have become a black hole, swallowing the moral energies of the people. Parishioners must get their butts out of the pews, kick the digital habit and dedicate themselves to restoring the individual to a central place in human society.

If we fail to use our freedoms to empower others, we will remain mere instruments in the hands of the economic machine that we have built.

John E. Gibson

Owatonna