Our attitude toward the poor is a portrait of our souls. It’s not a simple portrait. It’s one that take’s contemplation. After all, poverty is complex and so are we. It’s been almost 2000 years since Jesus was supposed to have said, “Whatever you do to the least of my brothers, you do unto me,” yet Americans–many who claim to have a personal relationship him– still fail to apply this most fundamental of his precepts. I’m no longer religious. I’m not an atheist or agnostic nor am I believer in any traditional sense. I might be considered ethnically Catholic, if there’s such a thing, but I don’t worry about my eventual transcendence, but I’m serious about my soul, that part of me, of all of us, that makes us what we are at our best.
The Democratic Party hasn’t been at its best for a long time nor has our country. Not only do we give little thought to the lives of the poor, we have set up our society to cause poverty. As Gustavo Gutierrez, the founder of liberation theology said:
“the poor person does not exist as an inescapable fact of destiny. His or her existence is not politically neutral, and it is not ethically innocent. The poor are a by-product of the system in which we live and for which we are responsible. They are marginalized by our social and cultural world. They are the oppressed, exploited proletariat, robbed of the fruit of their labor and despoiled of their humanity. Hence the poverty of the poor is not a call to generous relief action, but a demand that we go and build a different social order.”
Our (in)actions create poverty. As progressives, we must work to build a different social order. It may or not be in our political interest, but as Democrats, we must embrace the poor. Because it’s right. To make a better world, we must dream a better world. We must not be led astray by what remains of the New Democrats who would ease their consciences by pretending market-based solutions will alleviate poverty. Capitalism and democracy have always been and will probably always be opposing forces. Much of the 1990s was spent fooling ourselves into thinking that there really wasn’t any conflict. Embracing the market would solve our problems. It didn’t. And it won’t. We need democratic and governmental solutions to poverty.
The middle-class can be the heart of our party, but the poor must be our soul.
The nation’s constitution calls for us to treat one another in a fashion that Christ would be proud of, but does this generation have what it takes to rise to the challenge? I hope so. I see so many people forming negative opinions of their neighbors through a mixture of their own intellectual laziness in not questioning what they are told and the efforts of people who would exploit that ignorance. However it is my belief through my own personal experiences that mankind is inherently good. I hold onto my faith that God is good and just. If He created us in His image we also must be inherently good, therefore those who are misinformed will eventually do the right thing once the facts are presented in spite of a few bad people bent on capitalizing from the momentary confusion. Trust in each other exchanged helps build a better world, actions based on that trust helps us all move closer to that Heaven on Earth we want for our children.
…I forget from whom (and this may not be quite verbatim):
“When I give to the poor they call me a saint, but when I ask why they are poor they call me a communist.”
…was the one you quote.
Founder of Liberation Theology and a big influence on Bill de Blasio and Pope Francis alike. Just as Francis recognizes that spiritual renewal comes from the bottom up with a church for the poor-our party can likewise regain its soul and it’s political footing by focusing in the least of these.
Like all generations, they have to realize the situation.
They are already less bigoted, less homophobic, and generally more tolerant than my generation was. They also stand to get screwed worse than mine.
… might be the fault of our generation.
We are removed in time from many of the great struggles (And I am using the word ‘great’ in the most neutral way possible: not some form of ‘OMG, bestest evah!’ but rather a pointer to scope, effort and mobilization. ): female suffrage; the child-labor laws and the implementation of universal public schooling; unions fighting for a forty hour week and a clearly defined weekend; the great depression; both world wars and, of course, civil rights.
Our struggles haven’t been nearly as dramatic nor quite so comprehensively about change and qualified by a certain inchoate perversion: an inability to grasp the essence of the problems because they are both bigger and flimsier than previous problems. The way I think about previous struggles is not the way I think about our present struggles and the end result, win or lose, of our present struggles will be less readily distinguishable the win from the loss.
What do I mean by that? Well… There was a point in time where child labor was not only legal, but encouraged. Then that was reversed, comprehensively. Women were not allowed to vote. Then they were. Another clear reversal. All the way back to the Civil War where, before which there were slaves and after, there were not any slaves. I could go on… once the work week was wholly at the mercy of the employer. Then it was proscribed in time by act of government. Public school was once a more or less optional luxury of the upper middle class. Then it was universal. There was segregation. Then there was not segregation… although that particular fight was particularly long and drawn out as well as particularly nasty. But signature moments can be seen, the ‘before’ and the ‘after’. Abortion is no different. It was illegal. There was a political fight. It was legal. We can point to Roe v Wade and say, “change.”
Now, it’s a little different. On sexual rights and mores, we went from “the love that dare not speak it’s name” to same sex marriage rather bloodlessly… For me, personally, I didn’t meet anybody who was openly gay until the early nineties so I can, more or less, posit that the bulk of the changes occurred within a pretty tight twenty to twenty-five year time frame… And while there were, to be sure, economic woes associated with the denial of same sex rights and benefits, I’m not sure I can point to a ‘before’ and ‘after’ where the nation as a whole reversed course in the same way it reversed course on slavery, or civil rights or womens suffrage. For the sweeping nature of the change, some form of dramatic touchstone seems missing here.
It is similar with the health care fight. It isn’t really about rights but about process. A much more boring fight. And even more clearly than with the issue of same sex equality, the end result… that is to say, where we will be in ten or twenty years… isn’t going to look or feel that different from where we are right now. We’re not fighting to overturn or oppose an evil so much as we’re working to extend a good to all… We’re not looking for a different world, but a better, more inclusive version of the one we have.
Which brings me to the problem of the poor. I said earlier that a certain unclear perversion marks our struggles here and now and nowhere is this more evident than in our present poverty and in our approach to poverty. There’s no simple way to put it and anything I write here is almost guaranteed to be incomplete and un-focused… so there’s that.
But what I’m trying to get at is the notion that, in America at least, poverty isn’t the forthright Dickensian squalor that was once conjured up to illustrate London’s impoverished. The problems of obesity and stress… that is to say, eating too much (and too much of the wrong things) and working too hard and worrying too much… mark the modern American underclass more than ever it has in the past and sit right alongside hunger and homelessness at the bottom of the socio-economic scale. At one time, in human history, being fat and spending their free time in worry were the exclusive province of the nobility. And there remains among us the pernicious notion that if somebody is overweight or has a cell phone or is working to put their children through a good school they’re ‘well off,’ in a rather cruel excuse not to care.
If there is such a thing as the ‘hedonic treadmill’ for the middle and upper class -the notion of constantly upping your pleasure seeking in a cycle of diminishing returns- the converse holds true for the poor: constantly working harder and harder for less and less on a treadmill of horror is a fact of life for many. And, for many, no matter how hard they work homelessness and hunger await, and very often having nothing to do with their effort…
I started this, rather long, comment with pointing out that both the tolerance and acceptance of the next generation and the fact that they are about to be screwed sideways might both be the fault of our generation. And I think it is because we failed to hold the line: we let the promise of the earlier struggles be casually, but ineluctably, eroded and, piece by infinitesimal piece, chipped away. I can’t imagine what Eugene Debs and other labor leaders would say if they could see us now. I’ve mention this before: in the last decade alone, every last major sports league, even the NFL referees, reaped well the benefits of collective bargaining while, at the same time the collective bargaining rights of nearly everybody else were slowly asphyxiated under the twin crush weights of middle class apathy and upper class enmity. MLB, the NFL, the NBA and the NHL all have had lockouts and bargaining and drawn out collective bargaining. Disputatious and disruptive, to be sure, but ultimately resolved to the satisfaction of all involved. Walmart workers? Target employees? Teachers unions? Not so much.
And obesity and stress, some of the hallmarks of our version of poverty, are medical issues. And medical issues are solved by health care. A majority of the people have and enjoy health care. We’re working to to change that at all, but to make a majority a totality. Working too much is a problem of the employer: the people who deliberately hire only part time workers and work them to near death with no benefits. That is both an issue of labor laws and health care… So the issue might not be one of innovation, but rather renovation: we need to renovate our labor laws; re-invigorate them with meaning an purpose directly and forthrightly to help the poor, those among us with the least… We might not, actually, need anything new… we might just need to renew our purpose and drive in holding up the gains we’ve already won and extending them past major sports teams and referees and right down to all and everyone.
Years before I was born the governing philosophy seemed to be, “I got mine and you can’t have any.” When I was growing up the operative notion was “i got mine, go get your own.” But we’re, I hope, moving to the day when “I got mine, let me share it with you’ is the rule rather than the exception.