Poverty Kills
Every day in our country, people die from causes that should have been prevented. They don’t have access to the right medicine, or the right treatment, or the right housing, and so we lose those lives. According to the American Medical Association, poverty is the fourth leading cause of death in the United States; behind only heart disease, cancer, and smoking.
This stark figure was the rallying cry for last Saturday’s Poor People’s Campaign Rally in Olympia. The modern Poor People’s Campaign, a revival of the Dr. King-era anti-poverty movement, has been active in WA state for the better part of a decade. As a congregation, we’ve prayed for their work, we’ve attended virtual rallies, and we’ve sent folks to some of the organizing meetings. I think this is the first time we’ve brought a sizeable group to one of their mass events, and it was an honor to be a part of it! We were about a quarter of the Bellingham contingent that got up early, rode a long bus ride, and stood in the cold and rain to cheer on the faith leaders and people with lived experience of poverty who rallied outside the Capitol Building.
There were some anti-climactic moments: we couldn’t immediately storm into the building and talk with our legislators; they weren’t available, and the sessions were done for the day. Traffic on I-5 kept us from the March portion of the action, which would have been a lot of fun and an inspiration.
But in my experience of the day, I can’t help but think that there’s something sacred about gathering with our fellow sacred troublemakers, about listening to the witness of those whose hearts are breaking. We heard witnesses about how poverty intersects with environmental justice, about how poverty intersects with gun violence. We heard impassioned pleas for action, for care, for anger.
And someone sang Ella’s Song. Whenever someone invokes Ella Baker, in song or otherwise, I think something special happens. “We who believe in freedom cannot rest, until it comes.”
We sang it together, and there on the steps in the cold and the rain, we believed it, for a moment. So that when we have to bear witness to what we believe at other times, when we have to dig into the cold slog of movement-building, the undramatic heroism of one more phone call or one more email, the way our anger has to fuel us to both survival and transformation- when we don’t believe it ourselves, we can remember the crowd. And the steps. And the rain.
And believe it a little longer.
