Our Christian religion honors the principle “Thou shalt not kill,” yet we embrace an economic system that dictates who will live and who will die.

Our colonial economy was based on trading the products of the land and slavery. After the 1860s Civil War, people such as Carnegie, Stanford, Rockefeller and Harriman built their fortunes. Our membership among the imperialist powers is generally dated from the Spanish American War of 1900. Imperialists monopolize the resources of foreign lands by any means fair or foul so that the profits from the manufacture and sale of finished goods accrue to the people of the industrialized world. Profits from the sale of the countries’ raw materials are to be invested in politically stable industrialized countries. Residents displaced by industrial agriculture are driven to marginal lands, to slums of large cities or to emigration. Many die in the journey, others on arrival. Our lifestyle demonstrates that we prioritize having pets over saving human lives. Already dominant in harvesting the world’s resources, our ruling elites clamor for and promise us faster growth.

Advocates for redistributing wealth and power fail. Some have no wealth to redistribute (Aristide in Haiti). Others are defeated by counter-revolutionaries (Republican Spain by the Catholic Church). Some are defeated by our military or our mercenaries in the belief that the starving are “Better dead than Red.” The killers are called heroes, the politicians who deploy them are called statesmen and the citizens whose taxes finance them are dubbed innocents. Attempting to harmonize Christian values with capitalism’s practices is impossible. We can’t absolve ourselves of dying marginalized people by asserting a “right to life” for fetuses.

While we did not invent this system, as its greatest beneficiary it is incumbent on us to tame it before it destroys our humanity along with that of those marginalized.

John E. Gibson

Owatonna