At the turn of 1961, President Dwight D. Eisenhower gave a farewell speech to the nation. For those of you who may not know the history, Eisenhower was the commander of all allied troops in Europe during World War II, and later became the 34th President of the U.S., serving two terms starting in 1953. In his goodby speech, he did what most Presidents did as they left office–he acknowledged the solemn responsibility of passing on the mantle of President to a successor, emphasized the importance of preserving our democracy and gave advice to both government and those governed.
My Millennial daughter wrote me a note, asking about the events occurring in Afghanistan. She didn’t understand what was happening, and hadn’t been hearing much in the news over recent years. None of us have, really. That twenty year war has taken a back seat for quite a while to such headline grabbers as the Presidential election of 2020, the global pandemic, extreme weather events, hundreds of thousands of burning acres of forests, etc.
My response to her was, “It’s complicated. Brace yourself. The tale begins long before you were born.”
You’ve probably noticed it. My latest indicator was an experience at the shipping store this morning with Cheri. While she went in to send a package to her nephew, I stayed outside with the bikes.
Enjoying the lack of commitments or deadlines in the day, I stood under a shade tree and day-dreamed. My gaze settled on a leaf on the sidewalk. Wait. That’s not a leaf. It’s a twenty dollar bill.
I picked it up, noticing that it was near a car parked at the curb. So I walked into the shipping store and raised my voice through my mask so I could be heard, “Anybody in here own the white VW parked outside?”
The five customers and two clerks snapped their heads towards me. Everybody leaned away, their shoulders hunched up a bit. I caused the whole group to flinch.
In the Judeo-Christian traditions there is a concept of “tithing”. The idea is that the collective contribution to the institution that represents the spiritual foundation of its people is a privilege and a duty. To support this idea, there are references in the Bible that describe tithing as “putting God first” in one’s life, since it is believed that God is the reason why a person earned what they earned. Since God presumably needs no income, the tithing is used by that religious organization to further spiritual work on Earth, for the people who benefit from it. A church takes the tithing to accomplish things that a single person or family could not do on their own, such as create a school, build a church, provide support for the poor, create community events that form the glue of the congregation, etc.
A similar approach to financing large endeavors was the hallmark of monarchies for hundreds of years. The royal families owned everything. They taxed the people who were allowed to live on the royal lands as a kind of rent. The taxes collected were then used to pay for the common defense, explore the New World, build nice palaces and gardens, etc. While taxes and tithing are based on different concepts of authority (King or Queen on one hand, God on the other), the underlying premise was that the amounts paid were owed, and that they allowed accomplishments that could only be achieved through collective contribution of resources.
