Reality, Grief, Hope: Three Urgent Prophetic Tasks

by Walter Brueggemann

This combination of military illusion, economic distortion, racist posturing, and skewed religion amounts to an effort to sustain a practice of denial. The purpose of the denial, I suggest, is to maintain old privilege and entitlement and to fend off the reality of the world. The practical consequence is that we have a society that in truth is not working for a large number of people.7 The “not working” is indicated by all kinds of social indices about health, education, jobs, and housing. The “not working” is helped along by the tacit appeal to violence as a way to order society, all the way from an exploitative prison system, to “Stand Your Ground” laws, to agribusiness that diminished the land for the sake of profit, to the unrestrained gun lobby, to acceptance of torture as a viable government procedure. The sum of these practices is unbearable to the body politic. But they are made “acceptable” through appeals to the ideology of exceptionalism that gives warrant for the distortion of social reality.