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The big news in Lynden over the past few weeks concerns the construction of a casino to the northeast of town. The Nooksack tribe has proposed that a casino be built on tribal lands to bring in more revenue for the tribe in addition to the existing revenue brought in by their casino near Deming, Washington, approximately fifteen miles to the southeast of Lynden. In the state of Washington, casinos may be only built on reservation land; hence, only by Native Americans. Fortunately for the Nooksacks (and all Native Americans), anything they build on reservation land is exempt from the normal permit process, because such reservations essentially function like autonomous nations, thanks to a few centuries’ worth of treaties. In other words, local governments and the general public can do little to stop the proposed casino. (If you’d like to familiarize yourself with the issue, regular updates can be found here on the Bellingham Herald website and every Wednesday here in the Lynden Tribune. See also the website of the North County Community Alliance, the group opposed to the casino.)

This is an interesting issue for lots of reasons, including the debate about whether gambling is okay. But it is perhaps more interesting for what it reveals about Lynden as members of the community debate with each other and with tribal officials on the streets, in the coffee shops, and in the paper. In particular, the proposed casino exposes all the mechanics of a small town dealing with things beyond its control.

Most of the opponents to the casino point to the surrounding infrastructure, especially roads. The casino is intended to draw, well, gamblers, and, well, Lynden surely doesn’t have many of those. They’re going to come from somewhere else, and to do that, they’ll be using roads, including the rural roads that are designed for farm equipment and the occasional car for the few residents who live that far out of town. Even though the land on which the casino will be built is not subject to the regular permit process by the county, the county is still responsible for improving and maintaining the roads. The county, then, will be forced to pick up the tab for improving the roads, replacing crushed gravel with pavement, and the bill will be passed along to taxpayers.

Other opponents argue that the casino is an example of poor planning. It’s a giant parking lot, a big building, and lots of people in an area that isn’t ready for it. From the press release on the website of the North County Community Alliance:

“From the start, we see this as something that is going in opposite direction as far as farm land preservation is concerned in the north county,” says Leslie Honcoop, a raspberry farmer who lives directly across the road from the project. “It seems like all the years of Whatcom County land use planning, means nothing for us up here,” says Honcoop.

I’m a little befuddled by this. Lynden has a very long history of poor urban planning. It’s a small town that has not yet been forced to deal with the problems of sprawl, because an endless plain of farmland surrounds the community. Responsible planning has never before been needed because enough excess land exists to compensate for any possible urban development mistakes. And we’ve made a few.

So our campaign for the preservation of farmland certainly exists in word, but not in deed. Why? As much as we say we love farmers, we all know that undeveloped farmland is not contributing to the expansion of the local economy in the same way that occupants of new housing developments and golf courses might (never mind that many will have to commute to larger cities for their paychecks). Perhaps in a former time, agriculture drove our county’s economy, but today, given our history of urban development, that land, we think, is better suited for those who bring in bigger paychecks that trickle down into the rest of Lynden’s economy.

And there is no shortage of land to develop. Land is in demand. Developers have been eager as ever to subdivide their land as real estate prices have skyrocketed in recent years. The inflation in real estate was caused by a recently lifted moratorium that banned new home building, but did not remove the demand for new homes. But why the need for such a ban in the first place? Four years ago, it was determined that Lynden was drawing more water than permitted by the state. To compensate, city leaders decided to slow down growth and banned new home development. Given the basics of supply and demand, property values skyrocketed in Lynden until the ban was lifted last year and real estate prices had risen sufficiently enough for a fortune to be made for landowners willing to subdivide their lots.

As rural landowners divided and sold, there was no shortage of buyers, either. In the past two years, the city has annexed swaths of farmland with no opposition by Lyndenites – the same Lyndenites who now oppose the casino on grounds of poor planning and the unnecessary development of farmland. Meanwhile landowners have made millions by turning hundreds of acres at the edge of the city – former farmland – into small lots. Nobody in Lynden is averse to developing farmland.

The need to move these people around prompted the city council to approve a city-wide roads improvement project proposed by mayor Jack Louws. Since then, Lynden has paved Main Street, Front Street, Grover Street, 19th Street, and portions of several other roads. We love roads, and we’ve willing to pay the price to build and maintain them. The roads that surround the future casino are outside of the city limits, and hence, outside the jurisdiction of the same folks who approved the roads improvement project. Still, this massive project is eagerly funded by the same economic base that refused to acknowledge taxpayers’ ability to pay for road improvements around the casino.

Our beloved farmers have also been quick to point out that casino construction will deliver a serious blow to the pristine natural surroundings, especially the farms, forests, and water. Because the casino will be built in a rural area, the Nooksack tribe will be forced to provide on-site waste treatment facilities and draw water from the underlying aquifer. Casino opponents raise legitimate environment concerns. Lots of people, a large building, and a large parking lot are not great for the environment. But it is also true that farmers have never before had high environmental standards, at least none of which I’m aware. In Lynden, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) is not held in high esteem, because the EPA is responsible for, among other things, maintaining water quality in the streams that happen to surround the farms, which includes monitoring and preserving healthy run-off areas. These run-off areas are subject to constant battering by an array of pesticides, all of which are great for agriculture profits but not so great if, well, you happen to be the EPA. Add to this the problem of disposing the waste that farm animals inevitably leave behind, and things get complicated. The EPA then fines farmers for breaking the rules and nasty headlines start appearing in the local newspapers. One need only enter a local coffee shop and start eavesdropping to find that the EPA is not held in high esteem by Lyndenites. Those with even modest environment affinities are not usually favored in Lynden. And so when opposition to the casino is founded on environmental grounds, I’m a little confused by the hypocrisy. Farmers and environmentalists have never made stranger bedfellows.

So what’s the deeper issue here? If it’s clear that there’s a tax base for infrastructure improvements and it’s clear that urban development and the environment are not at the heart of the argument, why does the fierce opposition to the casino by a majority of Lynden residents remain?

Racism, but not of the sort we’re used to. Residents of Lynden do not march down Main street or Front street dressed Ku Klux Klan garb, nor do we segregate our hotels and restaurants, forcing blacks and white to eat and sleep (respectively) on the opposite of whatever establishment we happen to be talking about. True, that kind of overt and blatant racism does not exist in Lynden, and we can thank the civil rights movement for taking care of that. But racism did not disappear after the civil rights movement; it moved underground. Lynden was no exception. The kind of racism that exists in Lynden is a systemic racism that runs deep, often beyond our ability to perceive and fix. It’s the racism that we’re not at all aware of, and it’s dangerous.

In many cities, such as Chicago or Detroit (and, to some extent, Seattle and Vancouver), this kind of racism is dealt with by systemically putting the ethnic minorities into the middle of the city while everyone else moves away into the suburbs or select upscale urban neighborhoods. But in Lynden we don’t even like to do that. The two groups of minorities – the Hispanics and the Native Americans – are systemically permitted to live not at the core of the city, but only outside the city. We do not speak fondly of the Lummi and the Nooksack. We only see them when we buy fireworks once a year and drive by raspberry fields on our way there, but we leave quickly and deliberately.

Nor would we dare venture into the areas where the Hispanic minorities reside, the migrant camps. We don’t blink when unfair labor practices continue year after year, when the Hispanics are forced to work in unsafe conditions, handle dangerous chemicals, and then return home to the dilapidated housing graciously provided by the owners of the berry farms. And every person in Lynden knows that if the Hispanics’ jobs were subject to the same regulation as ours, the berry farms would close and our local economy would collapse. We need them more than we would like to admit, and more than anything, we need them to be silent.

And we don’t just want them to be silent, but we want them far enough away so that if they spoke, we wouldn’t hear them. They remain at the periphery of our community on reservations and in migrant camps. We raise eyebrows and questions when they enter our stores and walk on our streets. And heaven forbid they enter our churches. We minister to Hispanics and Native Americans them by confining them to parachurch ministries and Spanish bible studies – groups that meet in our buildings and use our facilities but are never allowed into our leadership circles, our church councils, or our pulpits.

So it’s no wonder we react with opposition to those gambling Nooksacks. They’ve ventured off of their reservation where they’re supposed to be and now stand poised outside our backyards, in the middle of the farmland we fail to preserve, destroying the environment we’ve never cared about before, and on the roads we refuse to maintain. Typical NIMBY tactics aren’t working. These Nooksacks are no longer where we’d like them, where we’re comfortable with them. They’re coming near our community; they’re compromising the utopia that we’ve built by excluding people like them. And what if the Hispanics became as bold as the Nooksacks have become? We shudder to think what would happen if the minorities in northern Whatcom County found their voice and took ours away and treated us like we’ve treated them. Fortunately, the plank in our own eye has saved us from acknowledging the problem or dealing with the inevitable consequences.

Our hands are tied.

That’s because as horrendous as it is, racism isn’t Lynden’s biggest problem. In Lynden, we have created a climate that suffocates dissenters. Lynden is a homogeneous community, and it thrives on its homogeneity. Our homogeneity is protected on the west by the ocean, on the north by Canada, on the east by mountains, and on the south by the liberals of Bellingham. Outside voices in our community are not welcome, and when they happen to speak up, they are discredited before they are heard and engaged. We have mean names for such outsiders, such as “East Coast Liberal” and “Someone from Bellingham.” It doesn’t matter how reasoned their opinions or how well-articulated their arguments; when they speak, they are promptly refuted not on the grounds of what they say or how or why they say it, but instead on the grounds of who they are: namely, not us.

When legitimate arguments for the casino’s construction are raised, the arguments are swiftly refuted not on the grounds of the arguments themselves, but on the basis of the person who speaks. These persons are liberals, democrats, people concerned with racism, and intellectual elites who couldn’t possibly understand the practical mechanics of maintaining a small town like ours. Their opinions, we think, are only as good as the persons who espouse them.

This climate that suffocates dissent prevents the entire community from ever getting at the heart of any issue. It prevents legitimate discussion about any issue not agreed upon by the majority, it silences alternate voices, and it discredits the good intentions of individuals we don’t like. This lack of dissent is far more dangerous than a casino in our backyard, because it robs us of the tools by which we build and maintain our community.

Let it be known that I am fully aware of the problems associated with gambling, including the lives destroyed and families split because of addiction. Make no mistake: gambling addiction is a serious problem and should be treated as nothing less. And, as a caveat, I grew up in a rural area, outside the city. At the same time, I am also aware of the greater and deeper and more dangerous problems that the casino controversy reveals, including the problem of systemic racism, made even more dangerous by its universal acceptance and perpetuated by the refusal to listen to dissenting voices.

My perusal through hymnals and songbooks has yielded a few insights and prompted some questions. That’s what blogs are for, I guess.

Most of the songbooks I’ve been looking through during the past couple days could be broadly categorized into two groups. The first group, mainline hymnody, and mostly books of songs and hymns composed by a single author. The second group, African American songbooks, one the African American Heritage Hymnal and the other Lead Me, Guide Me, which is a hymnal for Black Catholics. (Yes, your inference was correct. There are African Americans who are also Roman Catholic who sing songs like “Nothing But the Blood” and an assortment of gospel and even praise and worship songs. Thanks, Vat-2.)

I’ve noticed that the African American songbooks include few, if any, songs about justice. And, for a demographic that’s been routinely treated unjustly, that seems a little bit strange. Conversely, the mainliners, instead of singing about nothing but the blood, are singing about nothing but justice, reconciliation, and peace, which strikes me as even more odd, because most of them (broad stereotyping going on here, I realize, but track with me for just a bit…) have comparatively nothing to complain about.

There seems to be a relationship between the lack of songs about justice and the abundance of songs about an other-worldly heaven. The African Americans are singing almost nothing about justice and are instead singing that heaven is somewhere else, where we’ll get robes and wings and other kinds of spiritual paraphernalia. The mainliners, on the other hand, are singing about a this-worldly eschatology, i.e. the kingdom of heaven will be inaugurated in this world by such strange things as a mustard seed and a little child. We simply have to join in the ongoing restoration of Christ and learn to receive this kingdom. And the mainliners are singing about the manifestation of heaven on this world through works of justice.

Strangely enough, the ‘this-world’ theology is the one to which Black Catholics ascribe, yet their hymnody is determined by their experience: namely, life has not gone well for several centuries, so bring on eternity somewhere else, somewhere better. So the people who have every right to sing about justice sing instead about eschatology, and the people who’ve got it good are singing about justice.

This summer at the CICW I’m doing some preliminary work on a forthcoming collection of songs based on the Old Testament, which among other things, involves lots of time spent looking through hymnals and songbooks and various other publications. Many of the songs in such books include a loosely related verse from scripture found at the top of the page, usually right under the song title. I’m always intrigued (saddened, too) by the editors who include patriotic songs in their songbooks and hymnals, but even more so by the verses chosen for the top of the page of each song. Here’s a sampling from a songbook I’ve been working through this afternoon:

The Star-Spangled Banner – “Some take pride in chariots, and some in horses, but our pride is in the name of the LORD our God.” (Psalm 20:7)

America the Beautiful – “…you shall be for me a priestly kingdom and a holy nation.” (Exodus 19:6)

God Bless Our Native Land – “Happy is the nation whose God is the LORD, the people whom he has chosen as his heritage.” (Psalm 33:12)

This perpetuates the notion that America is especially chosen and made special in much the same way that Israel was once a chosen nation. And it further confuses Christian identity with national identity and risks nationalizing a Gospel that transcends race, ethnicity, nationality, gender, and a host of other dividing walls, as Paul calls them, that inhibit true community with each other and with God.

I saw The DaVinci Code this weekend. All told, not a great movie. Not a terrible movie, either, but the plot moves slowly and suffers from constant interruption whenever Robert Langdon (played by Tom Hanks) must pause from his whirlwind tour of Europe in order to explain to his companion, Sophie Neveu (played by Audrey Tautou), the historical, cultural, or religious significance of whatever is at hand: something old, something cryptic, something pseudo-churchy. These constant interruptions might make for a great novel and might even contribute to the novel’s suspense – we reach a critical juncture in the plot and are forced to pause for an explanation – unfortunately, this approach does not seem to translate well in film.

Given that the story is so-so and that the film was not great, I find myself surprised by The DaVinci Code’s popularity. It has been near the top of bestseller lists for a few years now with increasing sales after the recent paperback release, but it isn’t much of a work of literature in my under-informed opinion. It’s a page-turner, but nothing more. Overall, it lacks the necessary components of good literature (which, I admit, I can’t really identify).

Still, I wonder if, in a few centuries, The DaVinci Code will be recognized as a great work of literature simply because we are so obsessed with it. Perhaps future scholars will use The DaVinci Code to peer into our culture in much the same way that we use the works of Shakespeare to peer into sixteenth century England or the way we use Dante to peer into the thirteenth century church. Maybe Dan Brown will communicate to future historians the values of North American culture.

… just link to people who can say it better than you.

Last night the synod of my denomination removed the word “male” from the qualifications for ordination while at the same time prohibiting women from serving as delagates to synod. And they’re dropping the matter for seven years in order for the church to focus on other ministries.

I was going to post my thoughts about this, and I probably still will later this weekend after I calm down a bit, but doing so now would only be redundant and far less eloquent.

So I refer you to Mary’s blog. She’s saying what I’m thinking (minus the swearing). Take, eat, read, participate in the discussion.

I came across the following tidbit in an article in the NY Times this morning on demographic shifts in Louisiana since Katrina (interesting, by the way, on its merit):

“I can tell you that I learned nothing new about Texas,” Mr. Murdock said. “These are very limited data. The truth is, nobody knows how good this data really is.”