Poverty is Sickening
Peter Morales
Senior Minister, Jefferson Unitarian Church
March 19, 2006

Do you give money to panhandlers? It’s a tough call, isn’t it. I know good people who almost always give something. I know good, generous, people who never give money to panhandlers.

Oh, sometimes the decision is easy. Healthy, obviously privileged teenagers panhandling on the streets of Santa Cruz, California, are not worth a thought. For them it’s a game, a way to raise a little spending money. I think anyone who gives them money is a sucker.

But sometimes the decision is painfully hard. What about a poor child in a third world country? It breaks your heart just to look at them. Yet there are so many. How can we give to one and not the other? And what must it be like for them? What does it do to their souls to beg day after day?

And what should we do as a church? We have people come by all the time. Should we simply refer them to social service agencies? Should we give them some grocery certificates? How do we tell the real desperate need from someone gaming the system for beer and cigarette money?

Few, if any, of us in here have had to beg on the streets. Many of us, though, have had to reach out for help in tough times.

A couple of weeks ago I told the story of our son’s illness. He was diagnosed with cancer while I was teaching in Spain thirty years ago. (And for those who were not here, he recovered and is fine.)

Several weeks after his diagnosis, we decided to return to the states. We learned that survival rates were higher here at the major medical centers where surgeons had more experience removing cancerous kidneys from children. I quit my job. We flew back to California and he was admitted to the University of California hospital in San Francisco.

A couple of days later I learned that the health insurance that we got from the Fulbright Commission had a maximum benefit of a few thousand dollars. I was out of a job and now we had no insurance. The hospital suggested that we apply for welfare so that we could qualify for Medicaid. We didn’t want to do that, but we realized we had no choice.

It took a few months to find a job. What happened emotionally in those few months was a bitter lesson. The humiliation of being on public assistance wore me down. There was a mountain of forms to fill out and hundreds of questions to answer. We had to wait forever at the welfare office. I had to register at the employment office and answer the same questions again. I had to check in at the employment office in a rural northern California county every couple of weeks to make sure no one had posted a local academic job opening for a doctoral candidate in American Studies. It was ridiculous.

Looking back, what amazes me is how quickly I came to feel useless, how a system that was intended to help those in temporary need had the unintended effect of making me feel like a useless burden on society. I remember getting vilified in a grocery store when I paid for food with Food Stamps. I felt like I had been reduced to a case number. The messages I kept getting were that I was a ward of the state, someone who could not provide for himself or his family.

What must this system feel like to a single mom who dropped out of high school when she got pregnant? What must this feel like to someone who really has no marketable skills? Here I was, someone with a graduate degree. I had to keep reminding myself that I was a Fulbright scholar, that I had actually published a research paper in a refereed academic journal. I had gone to college on an academic scholarship and to grad school on a fellowship. And I felt useless: unneeded, unwanted, dependent, rejected.

I, of course, was a great exception among those on welfare. I was educated and employable. I was one step away from a good paying job with a good benefit package that included health insurance. Sure enough, I got that job. But what happens to those who cannot easily escape?

The effects are sickening. Being poor in America is like taking poison. Public health studies show that where people are on the social ladder has important physical effects. Rates of a number of diseases appear to be linked to where we fit in the social structure. This does not seem to have any physical cause; it isn’t a matter of diet or access to health care. How much inequality there is appears to be a critical factor, not simply the absolute living standard. In other words, two people in different societies may have the same physical circumstances, but the one who is lower on the social ladder has a higher risk for all kinds of diseases. Exactly why this is the case is not clear. One Harvard economist, Juliet Schor, has suggested that perhaps the situation is not so very complicated. She says that, being social creatures, we experience less stress and are happier in an environment where there is equality and social cohesion. Our circumstances may be very modest, but if we live where everyone is poor it is much less harmful than those same circumstances if we are at the bottom of the social ladder.

Think about our society in the last generation. By all measures inequality has grown tremendously. Imagine what that is doing the tens of millions who see themselves increasingly farther down on the social ladder. Poverty and inequality are a poisonous combination.

Our church has chosen “Poverty: Doing Our Part” as the social responsibility focus for this year. Last week we heard Johanna Chao Rittenburg, from the Unitarian Universalist Service Committee, speak to us about efforts for economic justice. In particular, she spoke with passion and commitment about efforts to raise the minimum wage.

I want to take a very different approach this morning. I do not disagree with Johanna. Indeed, on the particular public policy issue of the minimum wage, I have long believed that it is too low and should be raised. I have great respect for the work of the UUSC.
This morning I am less concerned with particular public policy initiatives. I want us to look at poverty from the opposite perspective. I want us to reflect on the human costs of poverty and inequality. And I want us to ask some hard questions about our core religious values—values like human dignity and compassion. How do we want to live in this world? How do we want to interact with our fellow human beings? We have chosen “poverty: doing our part,” but what is our part? How can our religious faith guide us?

This morning’s readings were examples of how three of the great world religious traditions speak to the centrality of caring and compassion. We heard brief readings from Islam, Buddhism and Taoism.

Our movement emerged from the Christian and Jewish traditions. The concern for how the strong relate to the weak, the rich to the poor, is a central theme in the Christian and Hebrew scriptures. The Hebrew prophets Amos, Isaiah and Micah emerged at a time of increased inequality between the rich and poor. Peasants were thrown off the land. Ownership of land, which in an agricultural society is the ownership of the means to life, became concentrated in fewer hands. God becomes imagined as one who hears the cries of the poor. The prophets speak against the concentration of power and wealth. The overwhelming image of poverty in the scriptures is that the poor are in their condition because of injustice and lack of power, not because they are lazy and unrighteous. Part of the Jewish expectation of the messiah is that he will deliver the poor from their oppressors.

Jesus, of course, was part of this Jewish tradition. He sought to comfort the poor. The famous beatitudes in the book of Luke has an account of Jesus taking the side of the poor and predicting woe to the rich. Jesus is comfortable among the poor and downtrodden. In another passage Jesus tells his disciples that to do something for the lowest person is the same as doing it for him. The recurring image of the Kingdom of God is an image where everyone is equal, where everyone is loved by God.

Whether we look at the Christian and Jewish traditions or we look to less familiar traditions of Islam, Buddhism, and Taoism, we find the same teachings. All these religions teach that we should treat each other with compassion, that the strong should help the weak. More importantly, they all teach that we are equal. All traditions also teach the fundamental insight that beyond being equal, we are all connected. What happens to my neighbor affects me.

Doing our part about poverty and inequality begins as religious work. Before we debate the pros and cons of public policy, we must come to terms with innermost sense of how we are called upon to relate to the world around us. If you and I are convinced, deep in our hearts, that we are rugged individuals and that each one of us must look out for his or her own interests, then you and I will end up indifferent to the suffering around us. If, deep in our hearts, we sense that we are connected to each other and to all of life, we go down a very different path.

I believe we are all connected, even when we don’t realize it. We are often blind to those connections. We are utterly dependent on others. At the most crass physical level, few of us could survive for long without others. We would starve. We would be without electricity and water to drink. At deeper levels, our very consciousness is tied to others. We think in words, but we did not make the language. Our sense of ourselves is shaped by how others see us—people in our families, in our church, in our place of work. When others are happy to see us our spirits soar. If we fell we don’t belong, our spirits wither. People who feel they don’t belong are much more likely to commit suicide or become sociopaths. We are connected. We need one another.

The spiritual cannot be separated from the relational, for we are relational creatures. We cannot speak of matters of the spirit or matters of religion without speaking of how we relate to one another.

You and I breathe the same air. Air pollution affects us all. If we poison the air, we poison ourselves.

So it is with inequality. When wealth and power are in the hands of a very few, it poisons the world of our relationships. Those of us who are not poor and are not powerless are affected by the same poison. I do not mean that those of us who are comfortable suffer as much; we clearly do not. Yet look at how inequality affects even those of us who are comfortable. Look at the gated communities all around us. Look at the segregation of our metropolitan area by class. Look at how fear of the stranger, fear of the poor immigrant, is affecting our politics. Think of all the places we are uncomfortable going to, all the people we are uncomfortable being around, all the people we avoid.

Poverty is not just about economics. Inequality poisons our relationships and poisons our spirits. This isn’t about money, and money alone won’t solve the problem. Poverty and inequality are essentially about how we relate to one another.
Poverty: doing our part? What is our part?

I believe that we have to create a society that is less poisonous. This is a huge undertaking, and one that is the work of lifetimes.

I believe that poverty is about much more than money. A society that simply transfers some money to the poor is not enough. My religious values, my sense of connection to other human beings demands that I do more. Giving money to a beggar does not accomplish anything; neither does refusing to give money. There must be better choices. We must create better choices.

A system that dehumanizes the poor even as it strives to help them is not nearly enough. Such a system maintains poisonous relationships. We can do better; we must do better.

Doing our part surely must involve involvement in creating public policy that is more compassionate. A country that is rich and that cannot immunize its children or give them a good education is a country already sick from its own poison.

I am not suggesting that absolute equality will ever come about. The only human groups where everyone is equal are primitive groups where no one has anything. I am certainly not suggesting we abandon a market economy. Communists tried that in the last century with disastrous results.
Yet, as people who would be faithful to a religious vision of human dignity, of the inherent worth of every person, must envision an alternative to the poisoned social environment we see all around us. We must bear witness that the insane discrepancies between the most wealthy and the poor are inhuman madness that affects us all.

We must bear witness that every human being must be treated with respect. Programs that rob people of dignity while giving them a handout feed the body and destroy the soul.

Doing our part about poverty means, I believe, that we insist on a new way. Our part is to dream realistic dreams of a society that cares for the sick, cares for its children, and insists that everyone has something important to contribute. Handouts are not the answer. Condescension is not the answer. Ultimately it does not matter if you or I give a dollar to a beggar. What does make a difference is if you and I create a world quite different from the one we inhabit. As we consider political alternatives, we must ask how these policies will affect the poor at all levels, not just the economic.
The truth is that we are all connected. The quality of your life, the quality of my life, is tied to the fate of poor people seeking a place in the society we all share. Poverty is sickening. It affects us as well as those who are poor.

Doing our part means finding a better way. Doing our part means creating a world where everyone matters, where everyone has a place at the table. Let us do our part together.

Amen.