Commentary

As I write, I just finished uploading the most recent issue of Sojourners magazine to our Web site, Sojourners Online. Over the past three years I have posted more than a thousand articles, dating back to November 1994.

It must be acknowledged that cost and other factors will always exclude many people from this technology, but it certainly does have its benefits. Once on our site, for example, anyone in the world can search by any word and find any Sojourners article in which it occurs. After talking with my son about a Bruce Cockburn concert he recently attended, I entered Cockburn’s name in the Sojourners search engine, and instantly found all of the Sojourners articles where Cockburn is mentioned.

If I am preparing a talk on the Sermon on the Mount for my youth Sunday school class, I can find all of the places where Matthew 6 has been used. Our men’s group agreed to discuss Richard Rohr’s article, "Boys to Men" from last month’s issue. I only had one copy of the magazine, and several wanted to borrow it. Then I realized we could all copy it from Sojourners Online. (Yes, we are an enlightened men’s group and all have e-mail and Web connections).

I don’t think the Internet will ever replace books or libraries. An article on a screen can never replace a worn copy of Sojourners that I can curl up with late at night before going to bed. Making Sojourners available on the Web is my way of giving back to others for all that I received during the many years I worked and lived with Sojourners. I believe that there is enduring value in many of the issues and articles that have been published over the years, and this is one way of making them easily and cheaply available to view and use.

The debate over affirmative action can get confusing because it quickly degenerates into complicated legal battles that most people don’t understand. In the midst of the confusion, the moral issues of this debate are the most important.

Let’s start with the most basic social fact: The United States is not a level racial playing field. Equal opportunity regardless of race has yet to be achieved in our country. We have made substantial progress, but middle-class blacks, Latinos, and Asians can still tell current stories of discrimination based solely on skin color. And for millions of people of color trapped in segregated underclass neighborhoods, hope has faded away of ever escaping poverty and violence. Most Americans, and even most white people if pressed, would probably admit that we don’t yet have a society whose rewards and benefits are "colorblind."

Affirmative action has always existed in America—for white men from affluent classes, in particular. Does anyone really want to argue that all the privileges that accrue to white people of means and their children are earned? Privilege perpetuates itself, in part by maintaining the social, economic, and political structures and habits that assist and assure its perpetuation. It is not whether anyone should get affirmative action, but rather whether anyone other than white men should get it. The question is what kind and how it will be implemented.

Diversity is not an option for America, it is our reality. The issue about diversity as we prepare to enter a new century is whether we will see it as a strength to embrace or a problem to be solved.

Recently the world looked on in horror as 22 Rwandans were executed for their roles in the African nation’s 1994 massacres that killed at least 500,000. Even more disturbing to the international community was the dancing, clapping, and whooping of the nearly 10,000 onlookers who turned out for the spectacle. The United States was among the nations speaking out against the punishment.

That same week the U.N. Human Rights Commission issued a stinging report that called for the United States to suspend all executions, saying, "A significant degree of unfairness and arbitrariness in the administration of the death penalty...still prevails." The report rebukes the United States for executing people for crimes committed as juveniles and people who are mentally retarded. It also found that race and economics play a major role in determining the severity of sentences. Religious leaders and human rights activists who have long called for doing away with capital punishment hailed the report.

Last year 74 executions were carried out in the United States. Consider this:

• Recently in Virginia the execution of a Paraguayan man was carried out in spite of the protests of the World Court, Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, and appeals from around the world. At the time of his arrest the man had been denied his right to counsel from his embassy.
• In an Arizona case, a Honduran man who had been denied similar rights was executed despite appeals from the president of Honduras.
• A Texas state legislator has introduced legislation that would make children as young as 11 death-penalty eligible. In Pontiac, Michigan, a 12-year-old boy is being tried as an adult for a murder he committed at age 11.
• In Denver, a local radio station called for listeners to drive by the station and honk if they wanted to "fry" Timothy McVeigh. Twenty-four thousand Coloradans did so. A Detroit News columnist hoped he’d catch fire in the chair, writing that "nothing smells better than a well-done mass murderer."