The Greed Channel

Yesterday afternoon my neighbor met Travalon and me at a park not far from where we live, and she supplied the kites. Travalon flew the kite that was pictured on this blog, I flew one that looked like a black leech with a very long tail, and our neighbor tried to fly a box kite, but she didn't have much luck. I got the leech pretty far up in the air, and it swooped and spun, but then it sputtered and fell to earth after about ten minutes. Travalon had pretty good luck with his kite too. It was a lot of fun, but then we had to leave for my adoration hour, so we gave our neighbor her kites back and left.

Later in the evening we watched a news station that we generally don't watch. I won't name it, but its name in numerology is seriously the Mark of the Beast - 666. The story we saw was about how Pennsylvania is paying people on unemployment a living wage, and the host (whose name rhymes with vanity, even if the sin he really indulges in is greed) was saying how awful that was because then people were getting paid more to not work than to work. The governor said employers could always choose to pay people more, but this host did not even address that point. I mean, if he so worships the Invisible Hand of the Market, shouldn't he pay some honor to the way capitalism works, which is that you might have to pay more to workers to get them? It seems to me that this station really exists to convince the masses that making millionaires and billionaires pay their fair share, either in wages or in taxes (or both?), is some sort of crime against humanity. Partly they do that by creating a false dichotomy, pitting greed against other immorality, as if a person couldn't be against both abortion and extortion. (I'm sure any of my readers who have agitated for social justice and heard "But abortion!" know what I'm talking about.) As if withholding the just wages from the worker isn't also a crime that cries to Heaven for vengeance! I wonder if this false dichotomy also existed in the time of Jesus, because while abortion and homosexuality and things like that all happened in his day, he didn't say a word about them... but he certainly railed against abuse and neglect of the poor. It's odd that this station appeals to so many people who claim to be Christian, because it certainly advocates a very non-Christlike world view. ("Think of the poor businessman who has to actually pay a living wage to get workers to work for him! Now he'll only have twenty billion dollars instead of thirty billion!") Certainly the people running this station are not at all concerned with the actual workers who do risky work for low pay. Maybe this is the "Christian" station, but I follow Christ, not Christians. Greed is a deadly sin in my Bible.

Famous Hat