Toyi-toying

Some years ago, I read a perspective by Walter Brueggemann, who wrote about the dehumanising effects on someone who is unemployed. His observations in this current economic climate ring even more true, when so many families have been decimated by the loss of work of their breadwinner. I am, by nature, a pretty conservative guy. Call me old fashioned, but I like order and structure. So I had always felt that police should take a firm, if not hard line, against those who feel that causing a large disturbance in a city centre is the way to to further their agenda - by marching and chanting and dancing or whatever. Brueggemann, using the example of an unemployed person, wrote that somehow people equate capitalism with a good moral work ethic, and accordingly supposed that if you worked hard, you would prosper. So the unemployed person now believed the loss of his job and his inability to feed his family was unmistakably his fault. We all know now - even more starkly than we did before - that this is untrue. Larger global economic forces can cause an economy to shed jobs irrespective of how hard an individual works. Brueggemann relates that feeling of numbness that anybody who has ever been unemployed can relate to -that utter frustration, humiliation, helplessness and resentment. And how this man went to these marches of the unemployed and marginalized just to be in a crowd, to break the isolation and not to feel so utterly alone in his despair - if only for a few hours.
His writing really shamed my previous attitude.
(The book was Biblical perspectives on Evangelism by W Brueggemann)