Community Building Article
by Deborah Hart Redman
January 19, 2017
Stone Soup: a Classic Community Building Parable
When I was a kid, growing up on the shores of Lake Erie, south of Buffalo, one of my favorite stories was Stone Soup. I think I first heard it in Sunday School, at Wayside Presbyterian Church. As we huddled around the paste jar, making the Virgin Mary and adoring shepherds out of clothes pins and cotton wool, we listened to a silver-haired lady tell us how a couple of starving pilgrims (or soldiers, or monks or tramps) tricked and cajoled people into adding salt and pepper, and a few vegetables, and then some fishes and meats and their most valuable spices to a collective soup. Beginning with three stones (or nails, or an axe, as variously told) the nourishing ingredients were brought forward from the villagers’ hoarded supplies, as the soup grew tastier and larger until it could easily feed everyone. A joyful feast followed.
Stone Soup remains a classic parable of community building. It shows how we all do better, how we all become happier and richer, when we contribute, collaborate, cooperate, share and celebrate with each other, especially with those beyond our families. With strangers, in fact. It is the bone broth, if you will, of FDR’s New Deal, of LBJ’s Great Society, MLK’s civil rights movement – everything that the progressive wing of the Democratic party has contributed to America’s true greatness.
But a new dish is now brewing in the gilded offices of Trump Tower, one based on a foul extractive recipe forged from four decades of miserly, miserable behavior by the Republicans (and neoliberal Democrats, too) at local, state and national levels. One by one, this crowd has been “adding by subtracting” – taking the yummy ingredients out of the soup and declaring each subtraction a victory for the common good.
By systematically de-souping the stones, we have been told, we force everyone to be self-sufficient. And so, we succumb, over the years, to mind-numbing Orwellian-named programs to reduce aid to families, to mothers, to children, to the environment, to public schools. We witness arcane formulas and decades of neglect that cripple Social Security and Medicare and Medicaid. We don’t help the disabled, the elderly, the poor. We make life more difficult for students and their teachers; for unions, and thus for workers. We withdraw from aiding the world’s refugees even as we help create them, we ignore the distended bellies of famine-struck children.
Little by little, we enact policies designed to remove the meat and fishes, and then the carrots and celery, and finally, now, even the salt and pepper. These same policies funnel all those nourishing ingredients up to the richest families in the town. We declare war on earth itself, the large kettle that holds us all, because the folks on the hill, or living in the great urban towers, want to hoard some more treasure for another generation.
Our last generation?
[We wonder.]
We have been told, and nearly half of us believe, that sharing is just a fancy liberal word for theft, especially if it is enacted through our elected government or implemented through government policy. Tax-supported meals on wheels creates weakness, and Paul Ryan and Scott Walker and Mitch McConnell and Sam Brownback and Fox News and right-wing radio tell us that we should be returning meals to the heels that made us poor to begin with. Ayn Rand and her neoliberal market idolatry, Reagan’s voodoo economics, trickle-down theory – all discredited in theory and practice (look at the state of the soup in Kansas, if you need proof!) – continue to provide the shibboleths shielding this massive Republican campaign to buttress a cruel, destructive, dysfunctional and needless inequality. We are now about to expand and lock this inequality into permanent position, by abolishing the estate tax. The hoarded vegetables will stay hoarded, locked away from 99% of us.
We’re all in the soup now.
It’s now 20 odd hours before the inauguration of a “president” with dwindling legitimacy, and no moral authority. This Man in Trump Tower, this baby-man who habitually lies, who is brimming over with the smallest of motives and lowest of impulses, is positioned to pee in what’s left of our soup, spoiling it for everyone. The Trump cabinet is crammed with a toxic stew of overlords that embody the new crony-capitalist kleptocratic kakocracy – rule by the worst thieves ever.
To wit: an EPA head who defends extractive industries and sues every attempt to clean up the environment; an oil monarch Secretary of State who is more concerned about drilling rights than human rights, and more familiar with corporate interests than America’s interests; an unqualified Education secretary who uses ill-gotten pyramid scheme billions to undermine public schools and establish fundamentalist right-wing Christian for-profit schools; a Health and Human Services head who personally games the system to make money off insider information and his own legislative actions; a soft-spoken Confederate Attorney General who will return us to private prisons and harsh sentencing and who will ignore the Republicans’ war on Black (and Blue) voters; a Labor secretary who hates workers, workplace health and safety regulations, unions and the minimum wage; a HUD nominee who by his own admission knows nothing about running an agency and, in a Freudian slip, avowed that he would not “intentionally … help any American.”
The economic and national security advisers, save for one or two, are all equally alarming, threatening to demolish the whole soup kitchen, and maybe raze our village as an afterthought. Or by mistake.
This cabinet of billionaires and hacks is poised, slotted spoons in hand, to remove every single juicy bit they can find from our collective pot, and deposit them in their own bowls. No shame over the brazen efficiency of it all.
To speed up this great dismantling, Congress has taken extreme and unusual steps to substitute its “wisdom” for the technical expertise of career civil servants in the agencies tasked to protect us from corporate crimes, thus opening up the entire federal regulatory apparatus to an unprecedented level of greed, ignorance, corruption and outright theft.
Circling back around to Dear Leader, this awful Hell’s Kitchen is overseen by an unpopular self-serving autocrat, a proudly ignorant bully, our first true American fascist, who has convinced his loyal followers that he’s working for them.
Watch now as he ladles out a big bowl of nothing but rocks, and boasts via Twitter that it’s mmmmm…mmmmm…GOOD!
Now THAT takes stones.