This wheel alignment at Reggie’s Tire, Winnipeg, looked like it might take all day. Through the little window from the waiting area into the garage, I could tell things were not going well. All three mechanics took turns eyeing the car on the hoist, walking around it, squinting at the wheels as though it were something extra-terrestrial. Finally one of them stuck his head through the door and looked my way.
“Got anything in the trunk?,” he asked. “We can’t get ’er to sit down right.”
We popped the trunk and took a look. Sure enough, four boxes of used books stared out at us from deep in the recesses, like cross-border stowaways, culled and set aside the week before, for the Used Book Store. Not exactly “weighty”, these volumes — yet they were enough to overload the rear end of a Buick so much that an alignment was impossible.
We hauled the four culprits out and laid them on the hoist. From that point on the job went tickety-boo. Within a half hour the Buick had four fully aligned wheels with balanced, refurbished and rotated tires, one brand new. We cruised down Pembina Highway with the world’s smoothest ride — straight to the Used Book Store.
If only aligning our world were that easy! Can you imagine — that kind of balance and alignment on a global scale? Instead, in these early stages of the 21st Century, the earth is a lot like my venerable Buick: “we just can’t get ’er to sit down right.” And the damage inflicted by our misalignment is so bad, a lot of our global citizens must feel like my shredded left front tire: worn completely out on one side, patches of metallic thread sticking out in clumps like with a bad haircut. On the driver’s side at the front, the world’s richest 1% of people receive as much income as the poorest 57%! Meanwhile at the back, Sub-Saharan women live with a 1 in 13 chance of dying in pregnancy and childbirth! Front left, their sisters in the OECD countries face the much more promising odds of 1 in 4,085. Up front again, the income of the richest 25 million Americans is equal to that of 2 billion people in the poor countries.
Mercy, this “Planet Buick” is so badly out of line it should not be on the road! Reggie’s mechanics would be very unhappy if we drove it in! It would not pass a basic safety inspection! And here’s my thought from beneath the hoist: maybe the problem with planet earth is precisely the same as Reggie’s problem with the Buick! “Our trunk is too full!” It’s like one F. E. Trainer says, in a book called Abandon Affluence: “A North American standard of living is only a possibility for a few so long as the majority of the people in the world do not attain it. The main reasons for Third World poverty derive from the determination of the developed countries to pursue ever-rising living standards.”
World Evangelical leader, Waldron Scott put it this way in Bring Forth Justice: “Instead of focusing on ‘upward mobility’ we ought to begin to focus on ‘emptying’ ourselves – an act theologians call kenosis.… Superabundance in one part of the world is a concomitant of abject poverty in other parts.”
In her more recent book, No Room for Grace, Canadian Barbara Rumscheidt sees globalization as a big part of the problem: “In both North and South, the ‘global economy’ functions to actualize a kind of living death… For Christians in the North, … worship of the free market and the death of the poor can be experienced as a sense of complicity and captivity.”
Writing over a decade ago, John Piper said, “A $70,000 salary does not have to be accompanied by a $70,000 dollar lifestyle. God is calling us to be conduits of his grace, not cul-de-sacs” (Let the Nations be Glad, 2010).
Dorothee Solle, in Political Theology, puts it this way: “It is not enough to criticise … import duty imposed on manufactured goods from developing countries, so along as we [do not see] how we are entangled….” Entanglement! Now there’s a helpful word. Most of us have simply inherited a world we did not create – and been kind of co-opted by it. It probably wasn’t your bad driving that put this global vehicle so badly out of whack.
But how did our wobbly world become so unroadworthy? We could probably go back five hundred years and talk about the origins of the slave trade, and how that uprooted some forty-million Africans over three centuries in history’s greatest, and highly barbaric, forced migration. As historian Basil Davidson put it, “Africa and Europe were jointly involved [in the slave trade]. Yet Europe dominated the connection, vastly enlarged the slave trade, and continually turned it to European advantage and to African loss.” Then there were the potholes and curbs related to the industrial revolution. After that, imbalance just got worse. Those developments turned into the misalignment that just keeps getting worse, year after year, perpetuating the wear and tear of poverty and injustice today.
Susan George and Jon Bennet highlight some of the preferential trade structures that perpetuate our alignment problem in their book, The Hunger Machine: “While malnutrition remains endemic in the South, food stocks big enough to feed all of Africa five times over pile up in European and North American silos.” In his 2005 best-seller, Race Against Time, the late Canadian Stephen Lewis put it more graphically: “Every cow in the European Union is subsidized to the tune of two dollars a day, while between four hundred and five hundred million Africans live on less than a dollar a day.”
Theologian John Stott, in his book Crucial Issues, sounds like an alignment specialist when he holds out the “biblical principle of equality”: “We Christians should seek to become more committed internationalists… to develop a global perspective, and to recognize everybody’s unavoidable interdependence….God has provided enough for everybody’s need… Any great disparity between affluence and want is unacceptable to him.” This is what Paul Lehmann calls Ethics in a Christian Context: “There is a conscience-relation between my neighbour and myself. No human action is ethical in itself but all human action is instrumental to what God in Christ is doing in the world to make and keep life human.”
All of these voices might be reduced to a simple resolve: to lighten up our trunk, so that the world can be a more balanced place. If only there were a master mechanic around who could help us do that! Rather than an infant mortality rate of two-hundred per thousand live births, Zambia’s would climb to something closer to Canada’s nine per thousand live births. Rather than seventy percent of Malawians living on less than two dollars-per-day, these nine million people might have a modest income that would grant them life’s bare necessities: clean water, basic medical care, education, food and shelter. Rather than an average life-expectancy of below forty, the Sub-Saharan nations might climb closer to Belgium’s life-expectancy of eighty. Needed: one Master Mechanic… alignment specialist preferred!
Of course this will be no small job. The misalignment of the planet is now so historically grotesque that it calls for near superhuman expertise. In fact, there are those, like Dr. Richard Swenson, who say that the prospects for realignment are practically non-existent: “Progress is irreversible: profusion is a one-way street, flowing only in the increasing direction…. Could we throw the entire thing into reverse and simply back it all up? The answer is ‘No.’” (Hurtling Towards Oblivion, 51).
On the other hand, the United Nations occasionally sounds more optimistic: “Donor countries allocate a mere $55 billion-per-year to development cooperation – only 0.25 of their total GNP of $22 trillion. Accelerating progress in human development and eradicating the worst forms of human poverty are within our reach…. We know what to do.” According to the UN, it is not so much a matter of emptying the trunk as pulling out some of the excess weight. Even if we do not get a fully aligned and balanced world right now, we could at least relieve the damage somewhat.
Yet of one thing there is not the slightest doubt: lightening up my overloaded trunk in the interests of making the world a more balanced place is simply the right, and the Christian thing to do. We have no choice. The state of the world demands it.
JCK-at-large SITE 
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