Letter to the Editor: We need a morality that sees our neighbors as potential players in our games

We Americans love capitalism. We hate socialism because we see it as the enemy of capitalism. 

We also love good Samaritans. Right here in Quincy, we have a fine institution named after the “good Samaritan.” The name comes from a story that most of us have heard.

One reason why we love capitalism is that it is based on competition. Doing capitalism is like being in a game with a competitor, where it is fun to win. In competitive games, we deliberately set up the rules so that each side has a chance to win. If one side always wins, the game quits being fun, and the losers walk away. When players walk away too often, we change the rules because we believe competition is more important than winning.

But we Americans do not love other people. We love our own. We know our own people, and we believe that our people are better than other people. We say that other people are lazy, and they will cheat us if we give them a chance. We think they will hurt us if they can. We are afraid they will mess up our games if we let them play, and there are a lot of them. They are flooding our country. We have to stop the flood. 

The same person who told the story of the good Samaritan also told us that we should not see the speck in our neighbor’s eye when we might have a plank in our own eye. We clearly see the speck in other people’s eyes. They are lazy, and they will cheat or hurt us if we give them a chance. They will mess up our games if we let them play, and there are a lot of them. They are flooding our country. 

We say we are a Christian nation. We should behave more like the good Samaritan. We should quit seeing specks in other people’s eyes when we may have planks in our own eyes. We are a capitalist nation. We want people to play in our games, so we should make sure the rules allow all people to have a chance to win in our games.  

We need a morality that sees our neighbors — all of them — as potential players in our games, and that assumes that any neighbor can play in our games because our neighbors are just as moral as we ourselves are.

Brother Joseph Zimmerman, OFM
Holy Cross Friary
Quincy, Illinois