Poverty amid plenty: the scandal of our political choices

You probably know the expression “canary in a coal mine.” It comes from the time when miners would bring caged canaries into the mines with them. Canaries are extraordinarily sensitive birds and they would show signs of sickness if there was a gas leak in the mine long before a human would notice the air poisoning, giving the miners time to get to safety. Canaries were therefore an effective – if crude and cruel – early detection system.

You may also have heard of Marshall Ganz – a great figure who came of age working for Cesar Chavez and the farm workers movement in the ‘60s. He spent decades doing community organizing and leadership work, and now teaches at Harvard University’s graduate school of public policy. He told me “poverty is the mine-less canary. In the 21^st Century, it’s a warning sign that the political and economic environment has been compromised. Something has gone wrong.”

And if you start thinking of it that way it opens up a whole bunch of questions: How is it that the richest country in the world has allowed poverty to become not just a common occurrence but – for many people – the daily norm? How is it that we’ve allowed inequality to become such a toxic presence in our political landscape? How is it that when we try and talk about these issues we run into a firewall of big spending by political interests that like the situation just the way it is?

How is it that a country so rich in resources should have so many people who don’t have access to those resources?

We don’t have 50 million people who rely on food stamps and are food insecure because we’ve had crop failure. We have more food than any other country on earth, but we have 50 million people who don’t know how they”re going to afford the next meal.

We don’t have 40 million Americans even after the Affordable Care Act who are lacking good access to health care because we have too few doctors, too few nurses, or too few hospitals. We have an abundance of medical personnel and yet we have people who cannot get needed medical treatment.

We don’t have a homeless problem because we can’t build enough houses or we don’t have enough metals and stones and all the other components that go into building a home. We have plenty of construction workers, plenty of businesses that make a large amount of money around construction, and yet we have large numbers of homeless.

If you want to understand the story of American poverty, you have to understand it as a political choice.

Poverty is not a tragedy

If you view poverty as simply a tragedy, it’s tempting to throw your hands up and think “there’s nothing we can do” in the same way as when an earthquake hits and people are buried in the rubble. “It was an act of nature or an act of God.” Or when a Tsunami hits and entire coastal villages are wiped away, you’d say “It was a horror, but there was nothing we could have done to stop it.”

But if you think of poverty not as a tragedy but as a scandal – as the result of choices made or not made, of priorities made or not made, as the result of how and who we do and don’t value – then suddenly it makes much more sense and you have the ability to say why. Once you have that then you have the ability to start looking for solutions.

Food bank line in Pueblo, CO
J. Moore/Getty Images

And here’s why we have to look for solutions: because these aren’t abstract concepts, these are real human beings. In North Philadelphia I met a woman named Vincentia who was in her 60s and had cancer. She was desperately sick and needed care, and yet she was spending her Saturday mornings from 7am onwards huddled in the cold on a folding chair, waiting in line for the food bank doors to open at 11am. I said to her “Why do you get here at seven in the morning?” And she said “Because if I don’t get there this many hours early, by the time I get in there’s no fresh meat.” Here’s a women old enough to be a retiree sitting in line waiting for a little bit of free meat because she cannot afford to go shopping.

In Stockton, California, I met Matthew, an ex-steel worker who was also a deacon in one of the local churches. When I met him he had just lost his job. They’d called him into the office and told him that he – along with hundreds of his colleagues – no longer had work. Matthew, a grown man and a leader in his community, said to me, “I went home and I curled up in the fetal position and I began to cry because I didn’t know how I was going to keep a roof over my family’s head.”

I went to Dallas, Texas, and met a woman called Mary at a union hall just outside the city. She too was in her sixties and had cancer as well as diabetes, heart problems, and many other health ailments. She worked for Wal-Mart, one of the largest companies on earth. She earned about $8 or $9 dollars an hour and was rarely given 40 hours a week. I said to her, “You’re diabetic – you’re supposed to eat well. What do you eat?” And she said “Well when I can afford it I buy an 88-cent TV dinner from Wal-Mart, and when I can’t afford it, I go to bed hungry.”

These stories aren’t from a second or third-world economy but from the United States in the 21^st Century. That is why we have a moral imperative to intervene against poverty – because these are real lives fractured. These are real people who have been ignored. These are real communities who have essentially been told that they’re expendable.