How to change nation

In the ’70s while working in D.C., I picked up a paperback copy of The

Communist Manifesto out of curiosity. Reading it was OK, but there was a separate back page which intrigued me: one sentence or so, and then five or six numbered words. The sentence was something like “how to change a nation,” and the words were: 1. Education, 2. Transportation, (3 and 4 I’ve forgotten); the last was Religion. Hmmm, interesting, I thought. It’ll never work in America.

Religion and education are too set in their ways. Religion is the spirit of our acknowledging one God which unites us, and education is too fixed in its ways to change. Oh, but then the Bible, the history of a people of God, Jews and Christians, which had changed the world, was taken out of public schools, from upper to lower. Well, I wondered why they put religion last, but then it dawned on me that maybe they were hitting all aims together. Marx was long dead, so I didn’t know who “they” were. Transportation didn’t make much sense to me.

I remembered coming home from a year abroad in 1969 to a country which seemed entirely different. Maybe it was because I had spent that year in Colombia, where life was simple, the air clean, the trees flourishing, lots of happy music, and the people cordial in all three cities where I taught. Life began again for me, and these thoughts were incorporated into my own busyness.

America has changed. We now face so many divisions that trip us up! And now an invisible and mysterious virus encompasses the world, killing thousands and threatening economies, and we squawk and focus on the disease and need for money. Well, this is God’s world, not ours. It is certainly within the scope of hope that the change will be for the better. But the scariest thing I read in the Old Testament was, “I am God, and I will do as I please.” It seems to me that there is but one major division for each person to consider.

JUDITH H. BAUM

North Little Rock