[The poor are what Dr. King once called “a new and unsettling
force” capable of transforming “our complacent national life.”]
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THE POOR AT THE CROSSROADS  
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Liz Theoharis
April 21, 2022
Tom Dispatch [[link removed]]

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_ The poor are what Dr. King once called “a new and unsettling
force” capable of transforming “our complacent national life.” _


,

 

The 54th anniversary of the assassination of Reverend Martin Luther
King, Jr., just passed. Dr. King was shot down while organizing
low-wage sanitation workers in Memphis, Tennessee. At that time, he
was building the Poor People’s Campaign
[[link removed]],
an effort to organize America’s poor into a force to be reckoned
with. In his opposition to the Vietnam War
[[link removed]] and
his promotion of a campaign to lift the load of poverty, he suggested
that racism, poverty, and militarism could only be dealt with
by uniting millions
[[link removed]] of
poor people to change the very structure of our national life.

More than half a century later, his message remains tragically
relevant in our seemingly never-ending pandemic-ridden moment
[[link removed]], still
rife with racism, economic exploitation, and militarism
[[link removed]]. Indeed,
today, 60% more
[[link removed]] Americans
are living below the official poverty line; racialized laws
to suppress
[[link removed]] their
votes have been passed in dozens of states; and the longest war
[[link removed]] in our history,
the 20-year disaster in Afghanistan, only ended late last year, while
globally conflict and bloodshed still swirl around us.

You need only check out the conditions of life for the 140 million
[[link removed]] Americans who
are poor or low income to recognize how relevant King’s message
still is. Today, the poor live at the crossroads of injustice, hurt
first and worst by the interlocking evils of climate change,
militarism, and racism, as well as other forms of violence and
inequality. With gas prices ever higher
[[link removed]], food
shortages [[link removed]] on
the rise, and a possible recession
[[link removed]] (or
worse) looming, those who continue to suffer the most will be those
most affected by whatever is to come.

A POOR PEOPLE’S PANDEMIC

A new report about the disproportionate effects of the Covid-19
pandemic on poor communities has just been issued by the Poor
People’s Campaign (which I co-chair with Reverend William Barber
[[link removed]])
and the U.N. Sustainable Development Solutions Network
[[link removed]]. The Poor People’s Pandemic Report
[[link removed]] connects data
about Covid-19 deaths at the county level with other demographic
information to demonstrate that, during the pandemic so far, poor
counties have experienced twice the number of deaths as higher-income
ones — and up to five times the number at the height of various
waves of the disease. It reveals that Covid-19 has, in fact, been a
poor people’s pandemic, one that exposes the depth of the racism,
poverty, and ecological devastation that preceded it in
poverty-stricken communities. That should be shocking news, don’t
you think? But throughout the pandemic, the story of its unequal
impact has largely not been covered by the mainstream media.

Quite the opposite. Over the last two years, there have been countless
stories about how Covid-19 was the great equalizer — how, unlike us,
pandemics and plagues don’t discriminate. All too sadly, the new
report shows clearly that, though a virus may not be able to
discriminate, our society has in fact discriminated in the most
virulent ways. Consider it an outright indictment of a society that
allowed the deaths of almost 250,000
[[link removed]] poor
and low-income people in the year 2000 alone, two decades before the
pandemic even hit our shores. It should be a wakeup call for a society
that has become far too accustomed to death, at least when it’s poor
people who are dying.

As Reverend Barber, who came up with the idea for the new
report, explained
[[link removed]],
“The finding of this report reveals neglect and sometimes
intentional decisions to not focus on the poor. There hasn’t been
any systemic or systematic assessment of the impact of Covid-19 on the
poor and low-income communities.” Indeed, to date, the government
hasn’t even collected data on the impact of the pandemic based on
income levels, leaving us to do the necessary detective work.

Importantly, the report’s findings can’t be explained by vaccine
status alone. The disproportionate death rate among poor and
low-income people is the result of a complex combination of factors,
including work and life conditions that long predated the pandemic.
For example, 22% of Native Americans, 20% of Hispanics, 11% of Blacks,
7.8% of Whites, and 7.2% of Asians didn’t have health insurance in
2019 just before the pandemic hit. Not surprisingly, perhaps,
preexisting disparities in healthcare access, wealth distribution, and
housing security yielded disastrous effects once it did so.

If you were to hold up a collective mirror to us, you would see a
nation [[link removed]] in which there were
87 million uninsured or underinsured people and 39 million workers who
made less than a living wage before the pandemic struck. You would see
a government that refused to either expand health care (even during
the worst public-health crisis in generations) or raise wages for the
very workers who can’t afford the essentials of life. You’re
talking about a country in which, again before the pandemic arrived,
14 million families couldn’t afford to pay their water bills and
more than half of our children lived in food-insecure homes. Is it any
wonder that so many poor and low-income people suffered and died with
the arrival of the virus?

SACRIFICE ZONES OF THE POOR

That toll from Covid-19 is, however, only one way to understand the
recent impact of policy choices related to the poor. It was all too
symbolically on target that immediately after releasing the Poor
People’s Pandemic Report, the Poor People’s Campaign kicked off a
Moral March on West Virginia that was to go from Harper’s Ferry to
one of Democratic Senator Joe Manchin’s congressional offices in
Martinsburg. Poor moms, former coal miners, labor organizers, and
climate activists from West Virginia hiked 23 miles to call on
[[link removed]] “their”
senator to begin actually addressing the needs of his constituents —
to expand voting rights, raise the minimum wage to a living one,
extend the Child Tax Credit, protect this planet, and invest in
education, health care, and programs of social uplift.

In reality, by blocking
[[link removed]] the
passage of even a watered-down Build Back Better bill in Congress,
Manchin refused to legislate in the interest of the majority of his
constituents, especially the 710,000 poor and low-income West
Virginians
[[link removed]].
He has similarly blocked bills to restore and expand voting rights
protections through the Freedom to Vote Act
[[link removed]] and
the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act
[[link removed]].

Buy the Book
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Meanwhile, by refusing to vote to end the filibuster
[[link removed]] in
the Senate or enact a fairer taxation system
[[link removed]],
Manchin continues to ensure that policies benefiting millions of
Americans and the planet writ large will once again be left at the
side of the road. He’s repeatedly chosen to side with the greed
[[link removed]] of
the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, the largest lobbying group
[[link removed]] in
the country, and the fossil-fuel industry against the needs of the
people. And such stances have been disastrous. Figures compiled
[[link removed]] by
the Institute for Policy Studies last year showed that in West
Virginia, the $3.5 trillion version of the Build Back Better bill
would have created 17,290 new jobs, benefited 346,000 children by
extending the expanded child tax credit
[[link removed]],
and allowed an additional 88,050 West Virginians to take paid leave
each year.

To make matters worse, in the northern panhandle of West Virginia,
there’s the Rockwool Ranson Plant
[[link removed]],
an insulation manufacturing factory set up in a poor community. Our
Moral March made its way through Ranson. While there, we heard about a
mother whose children go to a school just blocks from the plant, which
is within two miles of four public schools that house 30% of the
county’s student
[///Users/Liz/Downloads/Rockwool%20Pediatric%20Health%20Concerns%20(1).pdf] population
(as well as several daycare centers). Scientists tested the blood
levels [[link removed]] of kids at North Jefferson
Elementary School before the plant opened in 2021. Just a year later,
there were already higher rates of asthma and toxins in their blood.
Indeed, the very placement of that plant goes against the
recommendations
[[link removed]] of
the Environmental Protection Agency and the World Health Organization
(WHO), both of which assert that heavy industry should not be located
near schools. (WHO has specifically stated that industrial plants
shouldn’t be located within two miles of schools.)

We heard testimony from horse breeders who claimed they could no
longer raise thoroughbreds because of the changing air quality and bee
farmers who, after generations of family farming, said they can no
longer make a living. Not surprisingly, it’s a poor community with a
high percentage of Black residents. No public hearings were even held
before the plant’s opening, which Senator Manchin attended.
Still, local resistance
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it has been strong and continues to grow.

THE VULNERABLE SUFFER THE CONSEQUENCES

Such suffering and resistance are realities not just in the hills and
hollows of West Virginia. At the very time when West Virginians were
rallying against the Rockwool Ranson Plant, for example, protests
[[link removed]] broke
out in New York City against Mayor Eric Adams’ crackdown on the
unhoused, including police sweeps of homeless encampments.

No wonder we in the Poor People’s Campaign travelled from that Moral
March on West Virginia directly to New York to hold a Moral March on
Wall Street. And just as Joe Manchin has gotten away with attacks on
the poor while styling himself a populist hero, so Eric Adams has
insisted that the sweeps he ordered are what’s best for New Yorkers,
including the unhoused. Yet the true depth of homelessness there
betrays the cruel measures Adams is pursuing.

In a city that spends more than $2 billion a year on homelessness,
roughly 47,000 people
[[link removed]] — more than 14,500
of them children — sleep in its homeless shelters each night. Rather
than address the scourge of poverty and the homelessness that goes
with it, Adams has chosen to destroy
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than 200 homeless encampments, while
all-too-symbolically cutting the city’s homelessness budget by
one-fifth. Like Manchin, he’s pursuing an all-too-familiar path in
twenty-first century America: punishing the poor for their poverty
while further gentrifying the city as a playground for the rich.

This is not, however, happening without a fight from the unhoused,
local grassroots organizations, and even some politicians. The
majority of New York’s City Council, for instance, has denounced his
encampment demolitions. In a letter of opposition
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they pointed out that “these sweeps will not end homeless[ness];
they will only put people in further harm.”

Amid all of this, one comment
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Adams stopped me in my tracks. While meeting with a group of clergy,
he argued that the disciples of Christ would have supported his
homeless encampment sweeps, saying, “I can’t help but to believe
that, if Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John were here today, they would be
on the streets with me helping people get out of encampments.”

As a Christian preacher and biblical scholar, I should note that such
a statement is not simply wrong or insensitive; it’s heretical. The
Bible is clear that the rich and powerful are to blame for poverty,
abuse, and injustice, not the poor themselves. And not surprisingly,
throughout the ancient scriptures, those who hoard the wealth of the
world also twist the words of the prophets to their own advantage at
the expense of the poor and exploited.

But, as the story goes, just as Jesus was crucified and died, the
tombs of the freedom fighters who came before him were opened and they
were revived to continue the fight for justice. Hate and death, we are
reminded, never have the last word.

BUILDING MOVEMENTS NOT MONUMENTS

Three years after Martin Luther King’s assassination, Carl Wendell
Hines
[[link removed]] penned
this poem about him entitled _A Dead Man’s Dream_:

“Now that he is safely dead let us praise him
Build monuments to his glory, sing hosannas to his name.
Dead men make such convenient heroes.
They cannot rise to challenge the images we would fashion
from their lives.
And besides,
it is easier to build monuments
than to make a better world.
So now that he is safely dead
We, with eased consciences, can teach our children that he
was a great man,
Knowing that the cause for which he lived is still a cause
And the dream for which he died is still a dream
A dead man’s dream.”

Jesus Christ was killed by the Roman Empire for building a movement of
the abused and excluded, only to have his memory distorted by hateful
and sacrilegious theologies throughout the ages. King was murdered as
he fought poverty, racism, and militarism, only to later be quoted and
canonized by those who despised him. Indeed, as Hines points out, it
is far “easier to build monuments than to make a better world.”
But as those in power like Joe Manchin
[[link removed]] and Eric
Adams
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to find comfort in their (bad-faith) praise of prophets like Jesus and
King, poor and dispossessed people in places like Ranson and New York
continue to carry on the work of justice.

Yes, the organizing of the poor and dispossessed should be considered
at least one antidote to the pandemics, literal and figurative,
plaguing our society as we grieve for almost one million
[[link removed]] Americans dead of Covid-19 and more
than six million people globally. Even if many of us don’t always
either see or hear it, the leadership of those most affected by
poverty and injustice is crucial to our future. They are what King
once called “a new and unsettling force” capable of transforming
“our complacent national life.”

Copyright 2022 Liz Theoharis

_LIZ THEOHARIS, a TomDispatch regular
[[link removed]],
is a theologian, ordained minister, and anti-poverty activist.
Co-chair of the Poor People’s Campaign: A National Call for Moral
Revival [[link removed]] and director of
the Kairos Center for Religions, Rights and Social Justice
[[link removed]] at Union Theological Seminary in New
York City, she is the author of Always With Us? What Jesus Really
Said About the Poor
[[link removed]] and We
Cry Justice: Reading the Bible with the Poor People's Campaign
[[link removed]].
Follow her on Twitter at @liztheo [[link removed]]._

_Follow TOMDISPATCH on Twitter
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[[link removed]]. Check out the newest Dispatch
Books, John Feffer’s new dystopian novel, Songlands
[[link removed]] (the
final one in his Splinterlands series), Beverly Gologorsky’s
novel Every Body Has a Story
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Tom Engelhardt’s A Nation Unmade by War
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as well as Alfred McCoy’s In the Shadows of the American Century:
The Rise and Decline of U.S. Global Power
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John Dower’s The Violent American Century: War and Terror Since
World War II
[[link removed]]._

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