“Society is like a stew. If you don’t keep it stirred up you get a lot of scum on the top.” –Edward Abbey; a philosophy, environmental, and popular-literature writer from the 1950s though the 1980s.

This week, Spark! is introducing a new weekly blog, the Quote of the Week.  Each week, we will feature a commentary on someone’s witty saying, reflecting on how that saying fits into modern politics, history, or society.

Our first Quote of the Week, by Edward Abbey, is full of relevance in that it reflects some political attitudes by both the Left and the Right in American politics.  Both sides tend to view each other as “scum” (and themselves, of course, as the cream of the crop, to mix metaphors as well as the stew).  In a social context, Abbey’s advocacy of “stirring” implies using the institutions of our society (education, immigration and assimilation, welfare programs to build the City on a Hill, etc.) to keep opening up opportunities for the disadvantaged and disenfranchised.  From this social message we can also derive a liberal political imperative, to keep fueling support programs, to strengthen equal opportunity and affirmative action, and to fight for individual rights.  And in our party system and government, we can also derive an imperative to break apart the large banks and to dismantle Citizens United, to keep lobbyists away from our political leaders, and to separate as much as possible the strains of inherited wealth (especially that of power-seekers like Donald Trump) and the pathways to actual political and legislative power.  While Trump himself seems to be stirring up the stew (by attacking establishment candidates like Hillary Clinton and Jeb Bush), keeping people like Trump away from the far more toxic potentials of political power was at least part of what Abbey may have had in mind.

• Quote of the Week