This morning while I was on the treadmill at the gym, the flat screen dangling from the ceiling in front of me was featuring a news story portending the imminent failure of the Joint Select Committee on Deficit Reduction; also known as the “Super Committee” or the “Gang of 12.” Twelve senators sit upon this august body of seasoned politicians. Its remit was to do what other politicians could not do: find agreement across party lines and trim between 1.2 – 1.5 trillion dollars over the next 10 years from our staggering national deficit. Well, fail the Super Committee did and downward the stock market did tumble. Did we expect any other different? According to a Sunday, November 20, 2011 article in the Cincinnati Enquirer entitled, “All Of Us Will Feel Supercommittee’s Pain,” “If $1.2 trillion sounds like a lot, it is: It could build 81,000 new elementary schools or put more than a million cops on the street for a decade.”
When I was in ministry in Boston, a close pastoral colleague of mine once said these anointed or wise words of wisdom: “Leadership is always the problem; leadership is always the solution.” Having been in the business world for many years prior to becoming a pastor of a very successful congregation that he founded, my colleague friend knew this statement not just as a catch-phrase or truism, but as an encapsulation of what he had witnessed in the business world time and time again as a tried and true principle. Today’s failure of the Super Committee to find agreement was a very clear manifestation of “leadership is always the problem.” So what is the problem with our politicians that govern us? Well, it depends on who one listens to, I suppose. If you are Tea Party inclined, it is that our government has become too overly centralized, too focused on raising taxes, and lost its connection to an overarching set of guiding moral principles. If you are Occupy Wall St. inclined, politicians in Washington have become too cozy with big business and corporate investment houses, provide tax breaks to the ultra wealthy, and lost its connection to the 99% of those of us who are not millionaires or billionaires. Apparently, 2011 politics based on the assumption of an altruistic calling to serve our nation’s greater good is truly an illusion. Whatever, your party affiliation or political branding, it is clear that Americans are now very, very tired with being governed by an indisputably ineffective and chronic political system, be it at the national or state level, that cannot seem to heal itself. Seemingly, like bad addicts, today’s politicians are in denial that they need recovery. As I see it, our elected politicians remind me more of Pharaoh in the Old Testament book of Exodus (probably Thutmose III or Amenhotep II) : having given up on the Golden Dream (pick which pin burst your balloon: today’s failed Super Committee or yesterday’s mortgage foreclosure crisis, or the bailouts of corporate houses ill-gotten gain; such as Lehman Brothers or Goldman Sachs) many Americans feel the intense servitude of unemployment and underemployment, poverty (now at a 50-year high), and the economic pressure that 40-50 million Americans with no health care insurance exert upon hospitals all around the nation. And so today’s new Pharaohs evidence the same repeating generational trait as the old Pharaohs did, i.e. they remain aloof and untouched by the cries of the people in their land.
Although I am not a politician by trade nor particularly well-versed in politics, I am, at least, aware enough to see that the small cracks occurring in our ability to govern ourselves well have now turned into large fissures with the added pressure of a still soured economy threatening to drive the wedge even further between the haves and the have-nots. In the Old Testament book of Exodus (read the first fourteen chapters), it becomes very clear, very quickly what Pharaoh’s problem was. It’s not that he wasn’t schooled, a great master planner, a powerful commander in chief, or even an intelligent listener to his many advisors—Pharaoh was all this and much, much more! Pharaoh’s problem, as is the problem of all those who rule, is the refusal to give up or even share power. Pharaoh’s problem with Moses’ request—on God’s behalf—to let the People of Israel—slaves in Egypt—go was not that he particularly cared for the Hebrew people at all . . . or that he necessarily found the Hebrews indispensible to his empire building, but rather that to let them go would have resulted in an erosion of his god-like power. And it was at this point that his leadership was the problem.
So what should our modern day Pharaohs do that sit upon Capitol Hill? : They should again rediscover the second half of my colleague’s maxim that “leadership is always the solution.” What is destroying faith in American government is not that our politicians aren’t hard-working or lack intelligence; it’s that that they lack flexibility to make the necessary concessions for the benefit of Americans as a whole. I suppose what may be stoking the anger of most Americans (whatever party one subscribes to) is that the majority of politicians have lost sight of the larger purposes of our nation and the needs of its people. And this is exactly what Egypt’s Pharaoh did: his utter inflexibility and defiant attitude toward Moses greatly harmed his nation (through the 10 plagues) and resulted in the destruction of his formidable military machine—a telling end to his rule as Pharaoh.
The desire of most Americans, I would suspect, is not so much that we want our politicians to all walk in lock-step with each other . . . or to hold hands adoringly across a romantic table set for two. We do live in a pluralistic society that is quite accustomed to tolerating a great many differences within our land. Rather the hands-down longing across party lines that most Americans feel, is for our elected officials to again find the power that is contained in negotiation and flexibility. As I look at the world’s stage at present, this is the fight, be it in Egypt, Syria, Tunisia, Yemen, or the United States: people are demanding two things: participation in the processes that govern them and for those that lead to have the common sense ability to know that give and take is always greater than entrenchment and partisanship.
Many centuries ago, in the barren wilds of the Sinai desert peninsula, a new government was born: that of the Hebrew people. Together they drew their disparate cords together to form a brand new nation—with brand new leadership—all springing from a Pharaoh who could not and would not agree to find a solution.
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