Upcoming Sunday Worship Services
“Like a Mighty Stream”
One of the pleasures that I have experienced over many years with the Senior Youth and many adults of this church has been participating in the 20 mile Walk for Hunger. I missed walking with the kids during the years of Divinity School and my internship.
I can still remember the sights and sounds of the first time best of all. It was a warm and lovely day (we’ve had some awful ones!). The sheer number of people was breathtaking. There were people in wheelchairs, groups wearing t-shirts representing their businesses, schools, unions and youth groups. In-line skaters zipping by; old people were walking faster than I was, babies in back-packs, people of all races and creeds –
A radio disc jockey’s voice was blaring out of loudspeakers as he described the sights and sounds from out of a window where he was broadcasting - and he seemed just as taken as I was. “Who says the city doesn’t have a soul!” he exclaimed. “It is visible today, here in the streets of Boston!”
The Walk for Hunger provides funding for 400 emergency food programs in Massachusetts. According to the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA), 425,000 people in Massachusetts currently lack access to adequate food. The demand for emergency food has increased significantly in recent years.
Each year around this time we dedicate a service to social justice in tribute to the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King. Part of the reason is that Boston at this time of year conducts a census of its homeless. And finally, January is Poverty in America Awareness Month.
Back in 1962 Michael Harrington said: “The other America, the America of poverty, is hidden in a way that it never was before. Its millions are socially invisible to the rest of us...”
Boston has long been a city, more enlightened than many on the issue of poverty. Boston openly wrestles with the problem of poverty and strives to help its homeless. This past summer, Mayor Thomas Menino announced that $10 million would be allotted to programs to end homelessness in Boston. The announcement, however, came at the same time the federal government began to cut funding for Section 8 programs. “We could be facing a bleak picture,” said Jim Greene, Acting Director of the Emergency Shelter Commission. “We just have to keep fighting for the federal government to recommit itself to fighting homelessness.” (Whatsup)
The network of Boston agencies working against homelessness are under-funded and pushed to their limits. In the past few years, Boston has seen a net loss of over 130 beds in shelters and a 40 percent cut to the city’s funding for detox programs. “In the past two years we have lost half of our substance abuse treatment beds that took 30 years to build up,” said Greene. Three weeks ago when over two hundred seventy volunteers conducted the annual census they found 299 homeless sleeping outside, up from 230 last year. The total number of people in shelters and on the streets combined was 5,819 people.
As one of the Boston groups working to combat this trend, the Pine Street Inn provides the homeless with shelter, refuge and the tools needed to reconnect its guests with work, affordable housing and a community. “But it is extremely difficult to accommodate the dozens more people waiting outside their door each night”, said Shepley Metcalf, one of the Pine Street Inn directors. “The number here is up by over 100 people from last year,” Metcalf said. “We are always over capacity. But all the shelters are like this — it’s a strained system.”
After years of being over capacity, the shelter system is starting to back up into the streets,” said Greene. And as high as the census is, Mayor Menino does not deem it accurate. He said 77 percent of school-age children in Boston currently receive free meals to help combat the hunger problem plaguing the city. More than half of the families that sought shelter were turned away by the state due to lack of funding. “Where are they?” he asked in frustration. “We have to bring down these barriers to shelter.”
Mayor Menino in his press release on the census laid the problem squarely at the feet of the federal government for not providing more housing assistance for homeless and low-income individuals and families.
According to the Catholic Campaign for Human Development nearly 36 million Americans live below the government-defined poverty level today. The US government puts the poverty threshold at $18, 080 for a family of four. The Campaign suggests that the measures used by the federal government drastically underestimates the real scale of poverty in America.
I did some research. Daycare for a four-year old in greater Boston averages $8,000 per year and for an infant $13,000 per year. Now, imagine two single parents working full-time in Mass minimum wage jobs with two children – at $6.75 per hour (which is higher than the $5.25 national minimum wage) together they would make $28,080 before taxes –they would be unlikely to have health care or other benefits – this family would be nowhere near the federal poverty line – yet, can you imagine living on that in Boston?
Newsweek writer Anna Quindlan, in an article entitled, “A New Kind of Poverty” writes:
“America is held in the grasp of a myth – that work provides rewards, that working people can support their families. In fact, many workers who play by the rules, who work 40 hours a week or more, still cannot make ends meet.
”Look at rescue Mission on Lafayette Street in NYC. They used to feed single men, often substance abusers, homeless. Now you go in and there are bike messengers, clerks, deli workers, dishwashers, people who work on cleaning crews. Many, if not most, of these workers have no health care, sick pay or retirement provisions. We salve our consciences by describing these people as “low-skilled,” as though they’re not important or intelligent enough to deserve more. But low-skilled workers today overall are better educated than ever before. Soup kitchens have been buying booster seats and high chairs. You never used to see young kids at soup kitchens.”
Not everyone agrees that the existence of the poor should be on our conscience. Conservative columnist Walter E. Williams writes:
“Is poverty pre-ordained? A married couple, both working fulltime at a minimum wage job that pays $5.15 per hour, would earn an annual income of $20,600. If they had no children they would not be poor; if they had two children, they wouldn’t be living in the lap of luxury, but neither would they be below the poverty threshold. Having children is not an act of God. Female-headed households are the result of short-sighted, self-destructive behavior of two people.
The Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank closely aligned with the Bush administration, just this week published a report entitled “Understanding Poverty in America” argue the following:.
“Only a small number of the 35 million persons classified as “poor” by the Census Bureau fit the description. Most of America’s “poor” live in material conditions that would be judged as comfortable or well-off just a few generations ago… Most poor children today are, in fact, supernourished and grow up to be, on average, one inch taller and 10 pounds heavier than the GIs who stormed the beaches of Normandy in World War II.”
There are two main reasons that American children are poor: Their parents don’t work much and fathers are absent from the home. Overall the US population and the poor in America live in very spacious housing. The “poor” have enough food, but not the kinds of food they would prefer…. Overall the living standards of most poor Americans are far higher than is generally appreciated. The generally high standards of poor Americans are good news. Our nation can readily reduce remaining poverty, especially among children. The main causes of child poverty are low levels of parental work and high levels of single parenthood and drug abuse. However, even these households would be judged to have high living standards in comparison to most other peoples in the world.”
But if these conservatives deride the need for soup kitchens because the poor shouldn’t need them, then there is the other side of the coin. Dr. Larry Brown of the Jewish Council for Public Affairs rails against America’s soup kitchens, but for another reason. Here he is in a speech delivered at Brandeis University last February:
“What’s so bad about feeding people through food pantries and soup kitchens? Charitable hand-outs, by definition, do not end hunger. They only feed a hungry family for the moment, and poor people have the peculiar habit of getting hungry again the next day.”
Dr Brown is a kindred spirit of Martin Luther King. Listen to these words of Dr. Brown closely:
“You must always remember that while we are taught from an early age to be charitable, our greatest responsibility is to work for justice. Charity is not justice. Giving alms is not the embodiment of justice. Justice binds, charity distances. Justice promotes strength, charity promotes dependence. Justice lifts, charity stigmatizes. No matter how well meant the effort, no matter how cozy the environment, no matter what’s in the bag of food, it is an indignity for an adult to be reduced to relying on others to feed her children. It is the essence of adulthood, of dignity and self-respect, that we feed our own families. Anything else is an indignity. Period. So charity is not the answer. The incredible efforts of the charitable sector are not a sign of collective success, but a symbol of public failure. Private charities to feed the hungry reflect the failure of American policymakers to do their job.”
Brown acknowledges that we are the most prosperous country in the world. There has been an enormous growth in American wealth in the past 20 years. “But,” he asks,” where is the money? Labor statistics show that the average middle income two parent family now works 660 hours more each year than in 1979, more than those in any other wealthy industrialized country. US productivity is still the highest in the world and yet we reap fewer benefits …in the form of vacation time, holidays or paid leave. So where does all the money go?
Brown says if we divide the aggregate US income into five quintiles and look at what each quintile gets now compared to back then—all four bottom quintiles – the bottom 80% of American workers, lost in proportion of income over these two decades. The top 20% took in all the gains. The richest 20% get as much income as the other four all together. And if we look, not at income but at wealth – the poorest 80% of population owns just 4% of stocks. The top 1% hold 47.7%.
The deck is stacked so that all the money is going to the top. Our nation is becoming economically more imbalanced every day.
Dr. Martin Luther King, although he died in 1968, was well aware of America’s growing disparity in wealth and the poverty that results from it. Here are some excerpts from his last book:
Up to recently we have proceeded from a premise that poverty is a consequence of multiple evils: lack of education… poor housing... fragile family relationships…. The logic of this approach suggested that each of these causes be attacked one by one….
Programs [to address these] …have been piecemeal and pygmy….. As a consequence, fragmentary and spasmodic reforms have failed to reach down to the profoundest needs of the poor.
…the programs of the past all have another common failing… each seeks to solve poverty by first solving something else.
I am now convinced that the simplest approach will prove to be the most effective… the guaranteed income.
Earlier in this century …economic status was considered the measure of the individual's abilities and talents. In the simplistic thinking of that day the absence of worldly goods indicated a want of industrious habits and moral fiber.
… The dignity of the individual will flourish when the decisions concerning his life and in his own hands, when he has the assurance that his income is stable and certain, and when he know that he has the means to seek self-improvement. Personal conflicts between husband, wife and children will diminish when the unjust measurement of human worth on a scale of dollars is eliminated.
This proposal is not a "civil rights" program, in the sense that that term is currently used. The program would benefit all the poor, including the two-thirds…who are white….
Our nation's adjustment to a new mode of thinking will be facilitated if we realize that for nearly forty years two groups in our society have already been enjoying a guaranteed income… The wealthy, who own securities, have always had an assured income; and their polar opposite, the relief client, has been guaranteed an income, however miniscule, through welfare benefits….
The contemporary tendency in our society is to base our distribution on scarcity, which has vanished, and to compress our abundance into the overfed mouths of the middle and upper classes until they gag with superfluity. If democracy is to have breadth of meaning, it is necessary to adjust this inequity. It is not only moral, but it is also intelligent. We are wasting and degrading human life by clinging to archaic thinking.
The curse of poverty has no justification in our age. It is socially as cruel and blind as the practice of cannibalism at the dawn of civilization, when men ate each other because they had not yet learned to take food from the soil or to consume the abundant animal life around them. The time has come for us to civilize ourselves by the total, direct and immediate abolition of poverty.
You may say that this dream of King goes too far. But don’t dismiss him too quickly. Jesus was a dreamer, too – and Buddha, and Moses.
Working for a just society is central to the Unitarian Universalist faith. In the year 2000 at General Assembly members voted a Statement of Conscience which notes in oart:
“The gap between rich and poor continues to widen. Tens of millions, particularly, women, and the elderly live in poverty, a disproportionate share of whom are ethnic and racial minorities.” “As Unitarian Universalists, our work for economic justice must cover such things as: fair wage and benefits; health care and adequate housing.”
Martin Luther King, who had a dream, challenged people to strive until “justice rolls down like waters and righteousness like a mighty stream.” Basic to that striving is having a dream, developing a vision of what justice would look like – and nurturing it.
John F. Kennedy, a kindred spirit, once said, “The problems of the world cannot possibly be solved by skeptics or cynics whose horizons are limited by the obvious realities. We need men [and women] who can dream of things that never were.”
Maybe you don’t subscribe to King’s vision – or maybe you do. But don’t look away from the harsh realities and come to accept the world as it is. One of our fundamental human religious tasks is to dream, and keep our dreams alive – to develop visions of what justice might look like.
I ask three things of you as Unitarian Universalists and as members of this congregation: Support our Senior Youth Group on May 1st when they Walk for Hunger to support Massachusetts food banks – charity is important 2) vote compassionately on issues of justice at the ballot box because charity is not justice – and finally 3) look at the harsh realities out there on the American landscape today and allow yourself to be bothered – be strong enough to care and to develop a dream of a much better tomorrow.