Here we are about to enact into a law a tax “reform” bill that will shift even more wealth and resources to the already wealthy while we have 41 million people, more than a tenth of our population, officially living in poverty.
I find myself writing these words as a result of reading a piece in The Guardian titled A journey through a land of extreme poverty: welcome to America.
The paper accompanied an Australian academic, Philip Alston, as he visited our country in his role as “UN special rapporteur on extreme poverty and human rights.”
The piece begins as he visits Los Angeles, where one can look at the wealth represented in the downtown heart of the city, and then turning one sees Skid Row. After those introductory paragraphs, we read
So begins a two-week journey into the dark side of the American Dream. The spotlight of the UN monitor, an independent arbiter of human rights standards across the globe, has fallen on this occasion on the US, culminating on Friday with the release of his initial report in Washington.
His fact-finding mission into the richest nation the world has ever known has led him to investigate the tragedy at its core: the 41 million people who officially live in poverty.
Of those, nine million have zero cash income – they do not receive a cent in sustenance.
Alston’s epic journey has taken him from coast to coast, deprivation to deprivation. Starting in LA and San Francisco, sweeping through the Deep South, traveling on to the colonial stain of Puerto Rico then back to the stricken coal country of West Virginia, he has explored the collateral damage of America’s reliance on private enterprise to the exclusion of public help.
Alston has just released a report on his journey, and thus this piece in The Guardian.
Reading the article, two sets of texts flashed into my mind, both of which I have quoted more than once on this blog.
The first are words from Hubert Humphrey:
It was once said that the moral test of government is how that government treats those who are in the dawn of life, the children; those who are in the twilight of life, the elderly; and those who are in the shadows of life, the sick, the needy and the handicapped.
The other are the words of Jesus in Matthew 25, where he says that whatsoever you do unto these the least of my brethren you do also unto me.
Alston is quoted as saying
“Washington is very keen for me to point out the poverty and human rights failings in other countries. This time I’m in the US.”
Poverty and human rights failings.
Thing back as well to FDR, during the Great Depression, offering his 2nd Bill of Rights in his 1944 State of the Union address. Let me quote what is relevant, bolding what I think is directly relevant to my reaction to what I have just read:
We have come to a clear realization of the fact that true individual freedom cannot exist without economic security and independence. "Necessitous men are not free men." People who are hungry and out of a job are the stuff of which dictatorships are made.
In our day these economic truths have become accepted as self-evident. We have accepted, so to speak, a second Bill of Rights under which a new basis of security and prosperity can be established for all regardless of station, race, or creed.
Among these are:
The right to a useful and remunerative job in the industries or shops or farms or mines of the Nation;
The right to earn enough to provide adequate food and clothing and recreation;
The right of every farmer to raise and sell his products at a return which will give him and his family a decent living;
The right of every businessman, large and small, to trade in an atmosphere of freedom from unfair competition and domination by monopolies at home or abroad;
The right of every family to a decent home;
The right to adequate medical care and the opportunity to achieve and enjoy good health;
The right to adequate protection from the economic fears of old age, sickness, accident, and unemployment;
The right to a good education.
All of these rights spell security. And after this war is won we must be prepared to move forward, in the implementation of these rights, to new goals of human happiness and well-being.
America's own rightful place in the world depends in large part upon how fully these and similar rights have been carried into practice for our citizens. For unless there is security here at home there cannot be lasting peace in the world.
We have never fully acted on this vision.
Lyndon Johnson tried with the Great Society, adding programs like Medicare and Medicaid to Social Security, to attempt to provide a safety net.
And yet we have many homeless people.
Some are in fact veterans of military service.
All are our fellow human beings.
And yet, we have a “tax reform” bill that wants to undercut the advances we have made in providing health care, that is deliberately set up to create huge deficits so that the likes of Paul Ryan can finally act on their wet dream to undo the gains of both the New Deal and the Great Society, using the deficits they are creating to undercut a social safety net that even today is inadequate to the needs of too many of our people.
Let me return to the article. Let me quote from part of the portion on Los Angeles:
LA authorities have promised to provide more access to toilets, a critical issue given the deadly outbreak of Hepatitis A that began in San Diego and is spreading on the west coast claiming 21 lives mainly through lack of sanitation in homeless encampments. At night local parks and amenities are closed specifically to keep homeless people out.
Skid Row has had the use of nine toilets at night for 1,800 street-faring people. That’s a ratio well below that mandated by the UN in its camps for Syrian refugees.
“It’s inhuman actually, and eventually in the end you will acquire animalistic psychology,” Chambers said.
He has been living on the streets for almost a year, having violated his parole terms for drug possession and in turn being turfed out of his low-cost apartment. There’s no help for him now, he said, no question of “making it”.
“The safety net? It has too many holes in it for me.”
At least there is SOME access to toilets, unlike where the homeless are in many cities.
We tend to think of the problems of poverty from an urban perspective, but there are many poor people in rural areas, a phenomenon I have experienced in my years of volunteering at free medical and dental clinics in the Appalachian area of southwestern Virginia.
After exploring both Los Angeles and San Francisco, the article turns to Lowndes County Alabama, where the section begins with these words:
Trump’s undermining of human rights, combined with the Republican threat to pare back welfare programs next year in order to pay for some of the tax cuts for the rich they are rushing through Congress, will hurt African Americans disproportionately.
Black people are 13% of the US population, but 23% of those officially in poverty and 39% of the homeless.
The racial element of America’s poverty crisis is seen nowhere more clearly than in the Deep South, where the open wounds of slavery continue to bleed. The UN special rapporteur chose as his next stop the “Black Belt,” the term that originally referred to the rich dark soil that exists in a band across Alabama but over time came to describe its majority African American population.
The “Black Belt” is largely rural.
Poverty falls more disproportionally upon people of color — African Americans in inner cities and in rural areas of the former Confederate states, Native Americans on reservations, especially but not exclusively on the Great Plains, and Latinos especially along the border with Mexico.
For too many Americans these people are “other” and not worthy of our attention, our assistance.
Consider these paragraphs as well:
There are numerous ways you could parse the present parlous state of Alabama’s black community. Perhaps the starkest is the fact that in the Black Belt so many families still have no access to sanitation. Thousands of people continue to live among open sewers of the sort normally associated with the developing world.
The crisis was revealed by the Guardian earlier this year to have led to an ongoing endemic of hookworm, an intestinal parasite that is transmitted through human waste. It is found in Africa and South Asia, but had been assumed eradicated in the US years ago.
Yet here the worm still is, sucking the blood of poor people, in the home state of Trump’s US attorney general Jeff Sessions.
A disease of the developing world thriving in the world’s richest country.
Alston also visits Puerto Rico, and as you would expect, finds much wrong, with issues created by the recent Hurricane not being addressed. He also visits Charleston WV, in a state that went heavily for Trump, and about which we read
It is not surprising that white families in West Virginia should have responded positively to Trump’s charm offensive, given that he offered them the world – “We’re going to put the miners back to work!” After all, numerically a majority of all those living in poverty nationwide – 27 million people – are white.
In West Virginia in particular, white families have a lot to feel sore about. Mechanization and the decline of coal mining have decimated the state, leading to high unemployment and stagnant wages. The transfer of jobs from the mines and steel mills to Walmart has led to male workers earning on average $3.50 an hour less today than they did in 1979.
And yet, the current tax legislation does little to help these people. The slashing of social safety net programs will hurt huge numbers of people.
I have never been truly poor. There were times in my life when I had no income, where I did not have enough money to buy much food, and where I was not sure I could make my next rent payment. But I had social capital, I had family and friends with resources to whom if I needed I could turn. There were times when I unloaded trucks or did other physical labor to get some cash. I was not facing desperation. I had not gone years with a poor diet, without seeing doctors or dentists.
I have seen poverty and what it can do. I have taught in poor communities in Prince George’s County MD and in Washington DC. I have homeless students. I have students with unaddressed vision, hearing, dental, and psychological problems.
I grew up in a family that, because we were Jewish and had at least in extended families experienced prejudice and discrimination, we were taught as children that all persons were entitled to respect, and that no one should ever be left to fend entirely for themselves.
As a Quaker, my most strongly held belief is the notion of George Fox that each person I encounter has “that of God” in them I should address/answer that. During my years as an Orthodox Christian, under the spiritual direction of the Abbot of a monastery on Mount Athos in Greece, I was taught to understand that the truest icon (image) of Christ was not any revered painting, but the individual human being in front of me. This was reinforced by a Biblical text, 1 John 4:20:
Whoever claims to love God yet hates a brother or sister is a liar. For whoever does not love their brother and sister, whom they have seen, cannot love God, whom they have not seen.
It is not that I focus on the concept of a deity in some distant heaven. I am far more concerned with the immanence of God rather than the transcendence.
As I read about West Virginia in the article that provoked this post, the following line jumped out at me:
If sewerage is the abiding image of the burden of the Black Belt, then a mouthful of rotting teeth is West Virginia’s.
The areas of Virginia where I have volunteered border the poor areas of Kentucky and West Virginia. I have seen the same phenomenon.
If you did not already know it, you will learn that Medicaid does not cover regular dental. One failing of America is that even many people who have medical insurance of any kind do not have coverage for dental, for vision, for hearing, for psychological services. Yet all of these are necessary to be able to have a fully healthy life. I see the lack of these not only when I volunteer, but far too often among students who come into my classroom.
the distilled torment of the American people
That is what the author of the article says that Philip Alson carried with him as he traveled to Washington to present his report, a report on the very wealthy United States that as we know is seeing increasing disparities in income and in wealth.
I need to share the four last brief paragraphs of this profoundly moving piece. It is a result of a sleepless night Alston experienced, thinking back to those he encountered on Skid Row in Los Angeles.
He wondered about how a person in his position – “I’m old, male, white, rich and I live very well” – would react to one of those homeless people. “He would look at him and see someone who is dirty, who doesn’t wash, who he doesn’t want to be around.”
Then Alston had an epiphany.
“I realized that’s how government sees them. But what I see is the failure of society. I see a society that let that happen, that is not doing what it should. And it’s very sad.”
The UN special rapporteur’s tour was done.
the failure of society
American society
Because that’s how government sees them — increasingly so in the Government of Donald Trump and a Republican Congress.
Surely we know better than this.
Surely those who call themselves follower of Jesus of Nazareth should be able to read his words and know this is not acceptable as it is now, and should not be allowed to get worse, as the policies of the current Congress seem intended to make things.
Which is why I ask what I did in my title:
What the hell is wrong with some people in this country?