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By Cameron Turner
My kids and I were singing along with a CD of “Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer” when I got to thinking: what if Rudolph’s nose hadn’t been bright enough to guide Santa’s sleigh through that foggy Christmas Eve? What if it had simply been an unusual nose rather than an exceptional nose? Rudolph would probably have been doomed to a life of rejection and ridicule.
Rudolph was mocked and excluded simply because he looked different. Not only did the other reindeer “laugh and call him names” but they “never let poor Rudolph join in any reindeer games.” All that changed, of course, after Santa asked Rudolph to take the point position on that murky night. “Then how the reindeer loved him” as the song says.
The injustice here is that, because of bigotry and discrimination, Rudolph was forced to earn a place in the society into which he had been born. Rudolph had to perform an extraordinary act of heroism -- literally saving Christmas -- in order to be accepted by his peers. He was cool after the foggy night because he did something that benefited the system. He bailed out The Man.
Victims of exclusion and oppression are often told to prove themselves worthy of inclusion. Blacks and other so-called “minorities” know all about that.
The civil rights heroes of yesteryear often faced criticism from whites who claimed that black Americans weren’t culturally or intellectually ready for integration. This theme comes out in The Great Debaters, the extraordinary new movie about students from a small black college in Texas who soar to the national debate championships. During a verbal battle over school integration, a white student concedes that discrimination is wrong but argues that the South isn’t ready for black and white students to go to class together. Jurnee Smollett’s character beats that argument down by stating passionately, “The time for justice is always now!”
Reminds me of Martin Luther King, Jr’s famous “All, Here and Now” speech in which King declares, “We are not willing to wait 50 years for what is ours on the basis of the Constitution of the United States and the authority of God himself!”
So it was with Rudolph. Like us, he was entitled to full citizenship and the North Pole society had no moral right to exclude or deny him. As our Constitution eloquently asserts, freedom and equality are rights endowed to each of us by the Creator. They are not privileges doled out by biased power elites.
HOMELESS IN BETHLEHEM AND NEW ORLEANS
“And she brought forth her firstborn son, and wrapped him in swaddling clothes, and laid him in a manger; because there was no room for them in the inn.” -- Luke 7:2
We revisit those beautiful words from the Gospel of Luke every year at Christmastime. They remind us that God’s empathy for the poor was so great that he permitted his son to enter this world homeless, literally born in a barn. Jesus’ humble birth underscores God’s expectation that we love one another as ourselves.
This Christmas, however, Luke’s comforting words take on heartbreaking irony in the Katrina-ravaged city of New Orleans. There, local and federal governments are poised to actually increase homelessness. Last Thursday the New Orleans City Council voted unanimously to let the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) tear down 4,500 public housing units (aka “the projects”) to make way for new mixed-income buildings. There are supposed to be 3,200 units in these new buildings but only 900 will be designated for low-income residents. The New Orleans City Council approved a measure asking HUD to build the same number of low income homes as it plans to demolish. But HUD isn’t obligated to grant that request. Don’t hold your breath.
As the bulldozers demolish those 4,500 homes (many of which were not seriously damaged by Katrina) the residents will likely join the 12,000 homeless New Orleanians who already sleep in parks and under bridges every night. About 1/3 of these individuals work full time jobs but they can’t afford a roof and walls because rents have doubled since Katrina. Unfortunately, the HUD demolitions aren’t even the worst part of what’s about to happen in New Orleans. FEMA reportedly plans to close all of its trailer parks over the next six months. 50,000 Katrina survivors currently live in FEMA trailers.
Homelessness will expand much faster than new, permanent housing will be built and the poor, mostly black New Orleanians, will ultimately be forced to leave the city. That’s probably what some people have wanted all along.
For this to all go down at Christmas just adds insult to injury. After all, the man who was born in that barn 2,000 years ago admonished us that we will be judged by the way we treat “the least of these.”
