to remember and keep faith as he taught us. That the teaching of Christ was a paradigm of ethical living. His regular job was an English teacher, Church was a small non denominational, and he was an unpaid volunteer. I was an orphan kid and I was used by that time, late middle school, early high school to simply being invisible. Not with him, he spotted signs of thinking in a young girl and encouraged and challenged it, like those rare teachers/Christians do. Sorry if that sounds loaded, but I meant it. I struggled with faith over the years, but he was that rare bird that gave me a life lesson that literally saved my life, he gifted me with a sense of dignity and decency. Somewhere along the line I learned of the term "usury." It stuck out because I didn't hear it very often in those circles. Usury is like loan sharking. Back in Biblical times usury was as bad as being an uncharitable host, the lowest of the low. If you know your Shakespeare, you know it is the root of the excuse for antisemitism. Merchant of Venice is a horror show of just that. But usury was still evil in that era. Funny thing about that is, even in those days and through out time, most men's wealth was their labor. In one of my later attempts at keeping the faith, I found a very lovely group of Mennonites I felt kinship too. Pacifist, strong family units, educated women, humility was still a thing. In one of the Bible study classes I brought up usury, and how a man's wealth was his labor, and when in the age of Reagan and Bush, had labor become so lowly and exploitation of the poor become so acceptable? Everyone looked at me like I was nuts, only one of them, a lawyer, knew what usury was. And these were people who had been well versed in the Bible since they were in diapers. My paster labeled me a "seeker," I was and am one of those who questions everything. Mostly, that gets me labeled "a pain in the ass." Long story being short, taking a person's labor without fair compensation is usury. Selling a free cigarette on the streets of this country can get a man killed, but exploiting whole classes of people, breaking down their family structures with poverty and despair, and in the richest country in the world, an eleven year old freezes to death in his bed, mass starvation of the young, yeah, we have some serious fucking issues. And it is not "commies" or "socialism."
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