The Proud As The Millstone Around The Neck of the Left

"The one we are seeking," LAUREANO answered at once. "He is a young man who talks of the Revolution or revolutionaries almost every time he comments on the Bible.  After a brief pause he added:  The one that revolutionaries want to build, all the revolutionaries of the world."

He has shown the strength of his arm;
he conquers those with proud hearts.

OLD TOMAS, who can't read but who always talks with great wisdom:  "They are the rich, because they think they are above us and they look down on us.  Since they have the money .... And a poor person comes to their house and they won't even turn around to look at him.   They don't have anything more than we do, except money.   Only money and pride, that's all they have that we don't."

ANGEL says:  "I don't believe that's true.  There are humble rich people and there are proud poor people.  If we weren't proud we wouldn't be divided, and us poor are divided."

LAUREANO:  " Were divided because the rich divide us.  Or because a poor person often wants to be like a rich one.  He yearns to be rich, and then he's an exploiter in his heart. that is the poor person has the mentality of an exploiter or not."
I said that nevertheless it cannot be denied that in general the rich person is a proud man, not the poor one.

And THOMAS said:  "Yes, because the poor person doesn't have anything.   What has he got to be proud of?   That's why I said that the rich are proud, because they have the money.   But that's the only thing they have we don't have, money and pride that goes with having money."

He pulls down the mighty from their thrones and raises up the humble.
He fills the hungry with good things and leaves the rich with nothing.

One said:  "The mighty is the same as the rich.  The mighty are rich and the rich are mighty."

And another:  "The same as proud, because the mighty and the rich are proud."
TERESITA:  "Mary says that God raised up the humble.  That's what he did to Mary." 

And MARIITA:  "And what he did to Jesus who was poor and to Mary, and to all the others who followed Jesus, who were poor."

I asked what they thought Herod would have said if he had known that a woman of the people had sung that God had pulled down the mighty and raised up the humble,  filled the hungry with good things and left the rich with nothing.

NATALIA laughed and said:  "He'd say she was crazy."

ROSITA:  "That she was a communist."

LAUREANO: "The point isn't that they would say the Virgin was a communist.  She was a communist."

"And what wold they say in Nicaragua if they heard what were saying here in Solentiname?"

Several voices:  "That we're communists."

Someone asked:  "That part about filling the hungry with good things?"

A young man answered:  "The hungry are going to eat."

And another:  "The Revolution."

LAUREANO: "That is the revolution.  The rich person or the mighty and is brought down and the poor person, the one who is down, is raised up."

Still another:  "If God is against the mighty, then he has to be on the side of the poor."

ANDREA,  Oscar's wife, asked:  "That promise that the poor would have those good things, was it for then, for Mary's time, or would it happen in our time?  I ask because I don't know."

One of the young people answered:  "She spoke of the future, it seems to me, because we are just barely beginning to see the liberation she announces."  

Last night, during a blog brawl at that well known intellectual stomping round, Salon, someone brought up a quote from that well known authority on morals, Seneca, to the effect that religion was for ignorant "common people".   The translation actually used that phrase, "common people".   Considering he was the tutor of Nero, a well known intellectual and moral authority, who couldn't manage to save his own life from the product of his tuition, I'm not sure Seneca is exactly someone to talk.  He's certainly not a good example for anyone who claims to believe in democracy and the legitimate foundations of a genuine left.

The very same people are constantly trying to discredit religion through its association with working class people,  "trailer trash" "white trash" - they apparently don't see black people and other people of color in enough detail to notice the important force that religion has been and is among people of color.

One of the major drawbacks of the secular left is their pride in their assumed intellectual superiority over everyone else, another thing Salon said yesterday was that religious people are stupid and intellectually inferior to atheists.  Which the comments certainly didn't support.  And the intellectual superiority of these atheists includes their total incomprehension that the very people they so love to disdain and hold in contempt then opt to not vote for atheists.  A point you can make to them over and over again and still get a reaction of angry refusal to believe the poor are smart enough to know when people look down on them.

As I said about the scandal that the Catholic church in Latin America had left people to have to resort to the language of Marxism to understand their condition when the terminology is available in a canticle recited daily by the clergy and religious of the Catholic church, it is a scandal that the American left has left the working class and the poor to the effects of corporate Republican public relations and electronic propaganda.   The snobbery of the secular left and any that is in the religious left is the primary tool with which the corporations have ruled over us.  One of the lessons of The Gospel at Solentiname for us is that it's no secret to poor people how they are seen by the affluent, the uneducated rich and far too many of the educated.   As William Cobbett observed:

An empty coxcomb, that wastes his time in dressing, strutting, or strolling about, and picking his teeth, is certainly a most despicable creature, but scarcely less so than a mere reader of books, who is, generally, conceited, thinks himself wiser than other men, in proportion to the number of leaves that he has turned over.

The proud, relatively affluent "left" has certainly been brought down in the United States.   Unfortunately it is the oligarchs who have brought us down with them, though the division caused by the arrogance of far too many on the left,the mechanism for the oligarch's success.  Not to mention the definite lack of real commitment of way too many on that alleged left, who really are more into their lifestyle issues.  I would guess that most of them care more about disdaining the kind of people who would be seen at an Olive Garden than about the struggle for economic justice. You'd think that with the history of that kind of thing that smart people would have figured out it doesn't work for the left particularly well.