Friday, May 14, 2010

Equality of the Dollar

Take a dollar bill from your purse/wallet. Examine it closely. Ask someone close by to do the same. Other than a different serial number on each, I am guessing that each bill looks exactly the same (wear & tear notwithstanding!). And I assume that your $1 bill looks exactly like mine.

When we each deposit our $1 bill into our respective bank account, the only thing that is recorded on our computer file is “1.00.” That’s it. Your digital “1.00” looks just like my “1.00.” There is no other tag attached to our 1.00s, no indication of our age, gender, race, religion, profession, marital status, etc. Just a generic lookalike “1.00.”

When we write our checks to pay our taxes – federal, state, county, local – our “1.00 without a suffix” goes into another bank account filled with lots of other 1.00s. Those 1.00s come from many people with a myriad number of backgrounds, demographics, personal opinions, spiritual/religious beliefs and affiliations; people who live their lives in countless different ways. All of those individual people are nondescript and neutral to the tax treasury – just a whole lot of identical 1.00s mushed together. In fact, our public treasuries are one of the great equalizers of our wide-ranging diversity. The commonality of our 1.00s makes us all equal, shared co-owners of the public funds, wrapped together across our individual human differences.

When it comes time to dispense all of those collective 1.00s, we are all shareholders in those decisions. EQUAL shareholders, because such decisions are not based upon how many 1.00s you contributed versus I versus others. Unlike a corporation, a greater pay-in does not buy you greater shares of public stock and thereby give you greater voting control. My one vote is the same as your one vote for the Congressperson or city council member who will likewise each have one vote on how to spend the money.

While the majority of one-votes accumulated will decide how the money will be spent, such decisions need to still reflect and honor the individual sameness of all of those 1.00s that contributed to the pot. The time-honored American tradition is that, while the majority rules so that we can move forward, the rights of the minority must still be respected. So public expenditures must be as “category-neutral” on human criteria as possible. Funds provided from diverse sources should not be spent so as to favor homogeneity or favored groups. We are obligated to preserve the same neutrality going out as the 1.0s were neutral coming in.

Yet when large sums of public funds are dangled in front of adoring eyes, these principles of neutrality and the avoidance of favoritism seem to get quickly lost. A failure to proactively support one interest group’s cause over other groups is often seen as an attack on that first group, a limiting of its causes, instead of recognizing that a preferential treatment today can easily be tomorrow’s discriminatory treatment. Yet with public institutions supported by public dollars paid by taxpayers with different views and values, it is only by remaining neutral that we can ensure that all expressions can be made possible, all citizens/taxpayers can be included, and no one is legally preempted out of participation.

Instead we choose to argue about whether the Ten Commandments should be displayed in secular courthouses. These Jewish teachings may be 10 good principles for moral living, but only a few of them have been made into actual laws. (Maybe I should honor my father and mother, and proclaim only one particular god, but thankfully these admonitions have not been made into American statutory law.) Likewise, when an organization puts a cross on a hilltop in a publicly funded national park and then disingenuously claims it to be a non-religious monument to WW1 dead, it speaks in contrast to the many beautiful and moving memorials to our war dead that required no obvious symbol of only one religion in order to be meaningful – witness the Viet Nam or WW2 war memorials in Washington. When we eliminate the saying of prayers in public schools, we are thereby protecting our children and all religions from abuse by any one preferred religion – because who’s prayer would we use that would be applicable to all of the diverse children in the classroom? Which child would have to leave the room? When my county commissioners open a public meeting with a prayer that concludes “In Jesus’ name we pray,” are non-Christians thereby implicitly excluded from the subsequent political discussion? When students in a California law school seek to form a club open only to Christians pledging a non-homosexual lifestyle, AND seek to have the club funded from a pool of student fees paid equally by ALL students, do these would-be lawyers not see the inherent conflict of their request?

Some religious and lay leaders now claim that America is “A Christian Nation” and was founded as such. Just as I guess Iraq and Iran were founded as an Islamic Nation or Israel as a Jewish Nation. But nothing could be further from the truth about America’s founding or purpose. Our country was founded by men and women who predominately (but not exclusively) attended some form of a multitude of Christian churches, but whose personal religious views encompassed many different viewpoints and expressions. Given the experiences of their forefathers/foremothers in colonizing America to escape persecution and the abuse of state-supported churches, religious tolerance and religious freedom were in fact their over-riding concerns and what was collectively written into their Constitution for us. Promote none; allow for all. And over the course of our 200+ years, we have gotten better at extending such equality and neutrality in the public arena to differences of race, gender, economic wealth, and marital/sexual status.

If we want homogeneity of thought and a single point of view, that is where we have the power to utilize our privately-funded churches, schools, topic-specific clubs, and corporations. But when you take my 1.00 of taxes and merge it with your identical and no-more-powerful 1.00, please do not turn around and try to have it spent in a way that insults or minimalizes me. Let us instead respect and look out for each other in our common endeavors, and go our separate ways only in our private endeavors. Picking none, we are open to allowing for each of us.

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