“Do not oppress the widow or the
fatherless, the foreigner or the poor.” Zechariah 7:10
Greatly missing from the debates,
the ads, the speeches this election season is any mention of the poor. Everyone is for helping the middle class, but
hardly any mention is made of the poor in our country, let alone the poor
around the world. Why is that?
What is it about the poor that
makes us so afraid to even mention them?
It wasn’t always so. FDR talked
about the poor, so did Johnson and Nixon.
It is certainly a part of political discussion in my wife’s home
country, Chile, and many, many countries around the world. And nary a whimper here. The closest we get to any discussion of
poverty is when there are votes to either maintain or cut food stamp funding.
I think the poor are a living,
breathing testimony counter to our ideologies.
At the core of our civil religion in America is that anyone can succeed
if they work hard, be responsible and thrifty, and play by the rules. (Very rarely do we critique the “rules”.) A lot of people do just that, and yet many
child care workers, janitors and other service providers are still poor. Their
presence, and that of the poor in general is a slap in the face of
individualism and “free” markets, because of our belief that the market system
is the engine to provide growth for everyone. If our market system doesn’t work for the
great majority of the poor, what should we conclude? It must be the poor’s fault, somehow. (I have to say, in fairness, that most of
the programs that progressive policies have instituted haven’t so much reduced
poverty, but allowed people to survive it.
Most often, they have increased resources
for poor families, without building economic power.)
I have a Face Book friend whose blog
includes this entry titled: “Would Jesus Start a Food Bank?”
http://robinwoodchurch.wordpress.com/2010/12/17/would-jesus-start-a-food-bank/
Do you notice anything about these
proposals? I don’t mean if you like them
or not, or think they will work or not. But that almost all of the solutions have to
do with fixing or helping the poor or poor communities (there is one
infrastructure one, but it is to improve public transportation for poor
communities). I’m not opposed to some of
the proposals.
But look at what is missing—there is
nothing saying that the rich, the haves must change. There is no mention that the fate of those who
have and those who don’t have are completely interconnected in an economic
system that rewards some and deprives others.
There is no mention of oppression, and none of justice. There is a mention that churches should be
more charitable, but charity in itself still is a way for the wealthy to
control how they give and to whom. It
doesn’t change the power relationship.
Probably most of us, believers or
not, would be OK with the first quote from a prophet that is at the beginning
of this post. Probably most of us would say that we don’t oppress to poor, the
widow, the fatherless or the foreigner (we’ll look at that last one sometime
soon). But how about these prophecies:
They
trample on the heads of the poor as on the dust of the ground and deny
justice to the oppressed. Amos
2:7
Scoundrels
use wicked methods, they make up
evil schemes to destroy the poor with lies, even when the plea of the needy is just. Isaiah 32:7
The poor are not blamed for their
poverty in these quotes, but rather the rich who oppress the poor, and corrupt
justice.
If that is the case today, then
what is our response today? That’s the
big question.
I’ll
leave with a beautiful quote by Mahatma Gandhi:
“In prayer it is better
to have a heart without words than words without a heart.”
Be justice.
Be beauty.
Patrick
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