Unitarian Universalist Meeting of South Berkshire

January 15, 2006

“The King and Hunger”

Rev. Kathy Duhon

I’d like to begin today with the words of an evangelical Baptist minister, Tony Campolo. He often begins his speeches this way: “I have three things I’d like to say today. First, while you were sleeping last night, 30,000 kids died of starvation or diseases related to malnutrition. Second, most of you don’t give a shit. What’s worse is that you’re more upset with the fact that I said shit than the fact that 30,000 kids died last night.” Pretty harsh, huh? Actually, he’s a very caring and very funny preacher, who works hard to get rid of poverty – he believes that is what Jesus wants people to do.

A week ago it was Elvis Presley’s birthday, a day to consider working against children’s hunger, as we heard in the reading. He is not the King whose birth we usually celebrate in January, but they were close in age. “The King” was born in 1935, six years after Martin Luther King, Jr., and his life also ended prematurely, a few years after Martin’s, at age 42. Both Kings seriously helped shape the 20^th century.

I thought it was interesting that the King, Elvis, was hungry as a child, something I hadn’t known before. I hate to admit that when I first read that piece about Elvis, I had a knee-jerk reaction – ‘no wonder he was a break-through artist – suffering is such fertile ground for creativity’. It reminded me of the discussions we had in Sweden, where I had studied during one college semester. Both the Swedish students and we Americans wondered together if their system of total care for the needs of their people meant that their art and educational achievements would be lacking. None of the demands of “publish or perish” were put upon their academics; none of the stories of being “hungry” for a break in the arts could be told about their artists. In Sweden, they hire artists regularly to beautify their country, all the way down to the subway walls, and there is no hunger, nor crime, to speak of, at least back then, but I digress.

I was not pleased with my thoughts – in a contest between making sure that people have their basic needs met, and the creation of great art or scientific discovery, we would all choose the former. And of course, there is no real choice – art and science go on without the need for their creators and researchers to suffer first. And anyway, there is always suffering, as long as there is love, as long as we are capable of physical and emotional pain. So art and education and science are in no danger of being stymied by social policies that feed, clothe, house, and care for people’s medical needs. A hogwash idea, that deprivation is important for creativity, but it was still kicking around in my brain. What other excuses are we carrying for why we don’t eliminate hunger?

Today is the actual anniversary of Martin Luther King, Jr.’s birth, which we honor every year. He would only be seventy-seven. Just think of how much he would have done if he had been alive since 1968. What would be his legacy?

When we consider all that he accomplished in his brief 39 years, we often refer to his remarkably effective work for civil rights, remembering those eloquent and compelling speeches and sermons, and the non-violent protests he led so well. We sometimes remember that he advocated for a withdrawal from Vietnam, which was very controversial at the time. Do we remember that he was incredibly concerned about the issues of poverty, and was involved in various activities that advocated for the rights of the poor to food, healthcare, shelter, and a living wage? I believe that if he had lived, the ‘War on Poverty’ would have gone even further than it did under President Johnson, and that we might have actually eliminated hunger in this country by now.

Or, do you think it has been eliminated? That scrawny, hungry mountain child image, which even included Elvis, is from the past, surely. Those 30,000 kids all died in other countries, right? Maybe there is some hunger in our big cities, where the homeless live, but in the rest of America? Actually, I just read a statistic that hunger has grown in this country 43% in the last five years, and that nearly one child in five in the U.S. is not always getting adequate nutrition because of the poverty in which his or her family lives. We fight a ‘War on Drugs’ and a ‘War on Crime’ and a ‘War on Terrorism’, but we have given up fighting the ‘War on Poverty’, and so we are losing it.

We in this congregation support and volunteer at the People’s Pantry and the Breaking Bread Kitchen, two local places dedicated to ending hunger in our community, and yet we know that the people who come through those doors are rarely actually hungry. We also know that the number of clients at the food pantry and supper program has consistently risen since their beginnings a few years ago. Breaking Bread Kitchen is considering adding a second weekly night of serving a free supper, and, last year, the People’s Pantry fed 692 different families!

The people who use our food programs in South Berkshire are challenged financially, and also find a social feast of support, warmth, and acceptance. Without these programs, they would have a much harder time getting adequate healthy nutrition for themselves and their families – without the free organic produce and local milk products, for example, they’d probably be consuming more cheap food from places like McDonald’s. While it’s true that most of them would not be literally starving without these programs, they would be less well off, including having less of their other needs met, of that I am certain.

What I believe is part of the story is that often the free food helps them to be able to afford fixing their car so it will be safer, buying medications and going to the doctor’s, heating their homes and paying the rent. Poverty is an inter-related set of problems, and Martin Luther King, Jr. understood that.

In 1966, Martin Luther King, Jr. moved his family, and the movement, North to Chicago, and lived in the ghetto deliberately to find out what it was like. The King family hated it, but they stuck it out for a while, believing that understanding it was part of their work against poverty and deprivation, and for dignity and basic human rights. In the end, the much worse reception they received in Chicago than anywhere they had been in the South, with tremendous threats and violence, led them back down South.

King became a leader in the Poor People’s Campaign in 1968, which culminated with the March on Washington for economic transformation. He traveled around Mississippi listening to the stories of the poor – black, white, and Native American; rural and urban. He said that the civil rights and voting rights he had helped secure hadn’t cost the country one penny, and now he wanted to spend billions of dollars for the poor. He wanted job programs; he wanted to rebuild the cities; he wanted economic aid for the poorest communities; he wanted an economic bill of rights; and he wanted a living wage.

By the way, the minimum wage was actually worth a lot more in 1968 when King was trying to make it livable, than it is today. For more than eight years, the federal minimum wage has not increased – it is still at $5.15, which is only $10,700 a year. Inflation has eroded its value by over 15%. To have the purchasing power of the 1968 minimum wage, it would need to be raised to $9.05, and that ‘princely’ sum, worked full-time, would still leave you living below the official poverty line for a family of four.

This winter, one of the greatest economic threats to folks is from the increased costs of heating their homes and fueling their cars. While the applications for federal fuel assistance are already up by 10.8 % over last year, the funding is the same as last year. All the help from Joe Kennedy, Venezuela, the Good Neighbor Fund, and congregations like ours, where we give out crisis fund money for heating oil, helps, but is not enough. When the various funds run out early, then people will be triaging their basic needs – heat, but not heart medication; running the car, but not able to pay the rent – instead of these basic needs being rights that are guaranteed, as they are in many nations that aren’t as wealthy as ours.

Our social justice committee has been working on another of the huge issues of poverty in this country, which is also worsening – health care. In the U.S., 46 million people have no health insurance. Many more are under-insured. Here in the southern Berkshires, including nearby towns in Connecticut and New York, the estimate is that 10,000 people have no health insurance – that’s as many as all the residents of Great Barrington and Lee, our largest towns in the area, combined. It’s unimaginable, and it’s very real. We are blessed to have the Community Health Center and the Volunteers in Medicine, and a somewhat better state Medicaid program than most places, but it’s hardly enough. We need true universal health care that is the single payer system so that everyone receives the medical care they need. Healthcare should be a basic human right.

When it comes to discussing poverty issues, hunger issues, our conversation cannot just be about our own country. The situation is so much more dire in other places. I just read Mountains Beyond Mountains, Tracy Kidder’s book about Dr. Paul Farmer’s work in Haiti. He is working in one of the poorest places in the world, and he knows that he cannot just give out medication – he has to give people food, and figure out ways to help them meet their basic needs, for his medical care to be effective, and it has been. He understands the complex inter-related world of poverty, including that the U.N., the U.S. and other well-off nations, can make a huge difference by funding world wide, well understood, researched and administered health policies. The most hope is coming now from the most destitute areas. We need to notice the successes and help to grow them more.

Habitat for Humanity is making strides in housing people, as the largest construction company in the world. It operates on the principles that housing is a right, that people need a hand, not a hand out – a partnership which has dignity. We are proud to have worked with Habitat for Humanity in Central America, making sure that housing is a right and a reality in the poorest places in the world.

Recently, hunger is decreasing in a few places, which is a nice surprise – in parts of India and Bangladesh and Brazil. An analyst of globalization, such as who some of us heard this past week at the Dowmel lecture, Fareed Zakaria, will tell you that the world is better off with the good economic growth, raising all ships, that has to do with some nations becoming more open to global markets and planning more in the way of the dominant model of free societies and free markets. The other side of the story is told by Frances Moore Lappe and others, who credit local grassroots actions with much of the progress on reducing hunger, as they are bringing education, health care, planning, and capital investment into communities. The emergence of micro loans in many areas has been one of the greatest factors in reducing hunger. If you lend a woman enough money to buy a sewing machine, she will feed her family and probably 2 or 3 other families – employees - and pay back the money.

Lappe calls it ‘living democracy’, and it has some of the same principles as Zakaria described about the positive change of globalization – local, individualized control, yet global participation. We buy the colorful shirts that the woman has sewn; we buy fairly traded coffee and other goods; but we can also be part of the process of providing the micro loan for the sewing machine. Many groups are out there making this happen, as reported in our UU World magazine. I have copies of that article, and others that are related, available for anyone to pick up after service.

Poverty is a complicated issue, but also very simple. Martin Luther King, Jr. said, a year before he died, “A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death.” We have long grown enough food in this world to adequately feed everyone on Earth. If we decide that basic needs are human rights, that people have a right to food, as well as education; to health care as well as to the free expression of religion; to adequate clothing and shelter, as well as to the vote of a living democracy, then we will be on our way to realizing another of Martin Luther King, Jr.’s dreams – no more hunger. Long live the King.