A few days ago our community was again enriched by a visit from Bill and Judith Moyers. They did not come to make a series of formal presentations, but to renew a longtime friendship with Joseph and Heidi Hough. Joe is the retired President of Union Theological Seminary in New York. While Bill was a guest in our retirement community (which he holds to be the site of his favorite audience) he engaged in a Q & A session with about 150 of us, and presented his latest made-for-TV documentary. It is a 55 minute series of interviews with former Rikers Island inmates, and explores the inhumanity of that New York City prison. The film will be released publicly in a few weeks. You will want to check out when it will be shown in your area.
More than 7,500 people are detained at Rikers Island on any given day. Eighty percent of them have not been found guilty or innocent of the charges they face. Rikers Island prison is a scandalous example of the increasing shame of our penal system. The United States is witnessing a crisis of mass incarceration with over 2.2 million people packed into our jails and prisons. The US currently jails a larger percentage of its citizens than does any other nation. To understand the human toll of this crisis, Rikers Island is a good place to start. See the film!
Early in his career Moyers was educated and ordained as a Baptist minister, but soon developed a working relationship with Lyndon Johnson, and became the President’s spokesman and later his press secretary. You can find a number of biographical accounts of his long and distinguished public career on the internet, but it is not the purpose of this column to repeat that story. There is a gracious human quality to Bill Moyers that goes far deeper than his professional career. He brings that persona to every article, documentary, interview and informal chat.
In an age when it is increasingly a problem to respect almost any public figure, Bill Moyers is for me the epitome of someone whose insights and veracity are worth trusting. Not only is he right on the issues, he comes at them with a powerful ethical perspective, and encourages everyone he meets to take an active role in addressing some critical issue. While he remains hopeful that the American people will successfully turn back the disastrous course this administration has taken, he is not sure we can survive as the world’s best example of a democratic republic. Moyers reports that Trump is staffing every area of government with officials whose prior commitment is to destroy the agency or department they have been selected to serve. These presidential appointments cut at the heart on the humanizing role of government probably best seen in FDR’s New Deal.
Bill and Judith are easy conversationalists. There is not a shred of arrogance in either one of them. Yet one quickly realizes that their command of the facts and their implications for the well-being of the nation and its people are uppermost now and throughout the Moyers‘ long careers.
Bill has gone out of his way to affirm these weekly commentaries of mine, and how they have sounded a positive note as well as a issuing a warning. His one suggestion was that I needed to pay more attention to the disastrous posture of the conservative religious community, and be clear about my reluctance to allow fundamentalists to define the nature and implications of the Christian faith, particularly in addressing the most important public issues. Farther along I will be returning to these matters.
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