Civilizations rise and fall. A goal of the current administration is to eliminate support for most individuals, particularly those who require food and other support, to lean in to the rich, and deny rights to anyone unable to pay for them. The rationale seems to be that if a person cannot be rich, they don’t deserve assistance.

Sumer, the oldest known civilization (c. 5500 – c. 1800 BC), provided food to anyone who needed it. It was not, perhaps, by our standards today, as just and fair as it might have been. Nevertheless, feeding the hungry was the very least a civilized society could do for its people. We can say, well they’re gone now, aren’t they, those ancient Sumerians? Yes, they are long gone, yes, they fought wars and took slaves, yes. But their culture and government lasted for thousands of years and their legacy is what we call “civilization” today.

There were civilized societies even before Sumer. After them, and derived from them, came others with systems of law, including The Code of Hammurabi, which led to and was responded to by Judeo-Christian scripture and ethical/legal systems. The so-called rise of civilization is meant, most often, to reward generosity and justice, not limit those virtues to benefit only the wealthy few. Even what we now call barbaric practices, such as slavery, was regulated and finite—unlike the inherited and dehumanized system we experienced in America. (The Bible acknowledges slavery as an institution, which was not perpetual.) None of those ancient cultures advocated starvation and disease as controls on population, taking children from their parents or beating the elderly however they might misbehave, nor do they assume that personal misfortune is a sign from God that the suffering deserve judgment. The longest book in the Bible, The Book of Job, was written specifically to counter that cruel notion that our situation in life is a judgment from God. Bad things happen to good people and that fact is crucial to our understanding the human condition. Who we are and what we think is variable. Most of us value family. Most of us hope to earn our way and that sharing is a virtue and that stepping up to help those in need is only right. People also believe things that their friends and neighbors find ridiculous, but we share the conviction that we should let them have their private thoughts.

Serving only those rich and powerful enough to force their beliefs on the rest of us is not the notion upon which our nation was founded. We do not believe in God choosing our leaders. We do not accept that the rich and powerful should be in control of the rest of us. The notions of divine intervention and imposition of inherited leadership [royalty] were abandoned with the Declaration of Independence. We wrote a Constitution, a first in the world, to ensure that power was distributed to all, that our personal beliefs would not be help against us or outlawed, and those strong enough to take away our choice and beliefs would be stopped because We the People…

Warrior cults care about power. Civilizations care about people.