The Same Weary Drama

This week, employees of an Applebee’s Restaurant in Lawrence, Kansas—the home of the Jayhawks—leaked an email from their regional manager who detailed how rising gas prices are good news for the company. An excerpt: 

Most of our employee base and potential employee base live paycheck to paycheck. Any increase in gas prices cuts into their disposable income. As inflation continues to climb and gas prices continue to go up, that means more hours employees will need to work to maintain their current level of living.

As horrifying as it reads, the regional manager is the rule, not the exception. His email simply exposes the spirituality of an economy that promotes profit instead of love. Jesus proclaimed that everything that is hidden will become known. He prodded his followers to pay attention, to scrutinize this kind of system:

To those who have, more will be given and from those who do not have, even what they seem to have will be taken away. 

Our desperation economy is designed by and for elites who root for rising prices, who conspire to keep half the population living paycheck to paycheck. Love summons the rest of us to imagine and implement something entirely different—to pursue genuine change, as Audre Lorde wrote, instead of settling for a shift of characters in the same weary drama.