The Unitarian Universalist Congregation of Salem, Oregon

UUCS Sermons
Sermon by the Reverend Connie Yost

Good morning.  It is good to be here with you today.

Today we celebrate the legacy of Martin Luther King, Jr.  It has been almost 40 years since Dr. King was shot dead on the balcony of his room at the Lorraine Motel in Memphis , Tennessee .  For several months before his death, he had been speaking and leading a march in support of striking African-American sanitation workers for the city of Memphis .  The workers had a long history of grievances against the city, but the strike was begun as a response to a recent incident in which 22 black sanitation workers were sent home without pay during bad weather, while all the white workers remained on the job. When the City of Memphis refused to negotiate with the 1,300 striking workers, King and other civil rights leaders were asked to visit Memphis in support. 

The day before he died, King spoke to the crowd about using their economic clout to boycott unfair businesses, telling them:  “God sent us by here to say to you that you're not treating His children right. And we've come by here to ask you to make the first item on your agenda fair treatment where God's children are concerned.  Now if you are not prepared to do that, we do have an agenda that we must follow. And our agenda calls for withdrawing economic support from you."

God sent us by here to say to you that you’re not treating His children right.

Have things gotten better in the forty years since these words were spoken?  For some of us, yes.  For poor people, and increasingly the middle class, I would say no.  The statistics are chilling.

What is poverty?  I think we are used to thinking of it in terms of a certain annual income, defined by the federal government, below which you are in poverty.  But poverty encompasses much more than an income.  Poverty is also debt, it is working fulltime but not being able to afford decent housing, it is poor education, lack of education, poor wage jobs, lack of jobs, it is homelessness and single parents, it is lack of transportation, it is lack of health insurance, it is losing a job, it is losing a spouse, it is domestic violence, it is having a major illness or disability, it is generational and deeply psychological.  David Shipler writes that it is an absence of choices, “a sense of powerlessness, often a learned helplessness in which choices seem absent.”[1]

What causes poverty?[2]  There are two stories that are generally accepted.  In the first story, people are poor because of their individual characteristics.  The poor lack education, or skills, or motivation, or stable families.  This “culture of poverty” makes it difficult for them to obtain and hold good jobs.  In the second story, poverty is the result of systemic factors such as the proliferation of low-wage, low-skilled jobs, lack of access to higher education, residential segregation, and discrimination.

But current thinking on poverty shows that both of these views are partially right, and partially wrong.  Poverty and economic distress result from a complex interaction between the structure of society and the economy, on the one hand, and characteristics of the people who live and work in them, on the other hand.

David Shipler writes that “Poverty is a constellation of difficulties that magnify one another: not just low wages, but also low education, not just dead-end jobs, but also limited abilities, not just insufficient savings, but also unwise spending, not just poor housing, but also poor parenting, not just the lack of heath insurance, but also the lack of healthy households…The troubles run strongly along both macro and micro levels, as systemic problems in the structure of political and economic power, and as individual problems in personal and family life.”[3]

In the last 40 years, we have seen a shift in antipoverty programs that increasingly has diminished the role of the federal government, turning over welfare programs to the states and emphasizing return to the labor market.  But this has not always been an escape from poverty.  Today, most of the poor in the United States live in working families, and one in four people who work full-time, year-round, still earn less than the amount of money needed to keep a family of four above the poverty threshold.  In 2007, that was $20,650. 

25% of fulltime wage earners in this country earn less than $21,000 a year. 

In the Salem-Keizer School District , half of the students qualify for free or reduced cost meals.  Sixteen thousand students in Oregon are homeless.  16,000!  An increase of 73% in the last four years.  Marion-Polk Food Share statistics show that 47% of all emergency food assistance goes to families with someone working, and the number of people seeking emergency food is rising rapidly. 

Family incomes have risen over the last 40 years, due to two-wage earner households.  But the typical man working fulltime today actually earns about $800 less than his father earned in the early 1970s.[4]  And these two paycheck families haven’t increased their savings.  In 2004 the national savings rate dropped below zero, and credit card debt skyrocketed.  Elizabeth Warren[5] explains where the money went, and it isn’t about over consumption.  She studied federal archive data and found that compared with the early 1970’s, we spend 32% less on clothing, 18% less on food, and 52% less on appliances.  But we are spending 76% more on mortgages, 74% more on health care, 100% more on child care, 25% more on taxes, and 52% more on cars.  For single parent, one paycheck families, the situation is grim.  A typical one-parent household cannot cover even the basic expenses that would put that family squarely in the middle of American economic life.  By 2004, more children were living through their parents’ bankruptcy than through divorce.  90% of these bankrupt families cited some combination of job loss, medical problems and family breakup.

What has changed most dramatically since the days of the War on Poverty and Martin Luther King, Jr., is that people are falling out of the middle class at an alarming rate.  Jacob Haker has studied family income data gathered over the last 40 years and writes that he was “positively thunderstruck by what I found: instability of family incomes had skyrocketed…educated workers are riding the economic roller coaster once reserved for the working poor…[I found that] by the 1990’s people in their 40’s had more than a 36 percent chance of ending up in poverty.”[6]   And the reason is that the traditional safety nets of Social Security, Medicare, private health insurance, and pension plans are increasingly eroded and threatened.  The focus has remained on the aged, but the message for young adults and families is increasingly:  you are on your own.  Haker proposes Universal Insurance that would insure workers against very large drops in their income due to unemployment, disability, illness, death of breadwinner, or catastrophic medical costs.

Martin Luther King, Jr. preached that there are no menial jobs, just menial wages.  Beth Shulman reminds us that many of the good manufacturing and technical jobs of the past (and by the way, 3 million of those jobs were lost in the United States between 2000 and 2004 alone), were not inherently good jobs.  They became that way due to unionization and social legislation.  She proposes that the same thing happen to today’s low-wage service jobs.  She points out that the best thing about this tactic is that these jobs cannot be shipped overseas.  These are the jobs that King talked about, the jobs that support us all where we live.

It has become very clear to me in my studies and work with poverty issues and people in poverty, that though the needs are very great, there are also many things that can be done.  And I would suggest that a place to start is in understanding some of the very real psychological dynamics that go on for people in poverty.  

In the book Nickel and Dimed Barbara Ehrenreich, a journalist, lived for several months working in low-wage jobs.  With no kids to support, she struggled to make ends meet on waitress jobs and working at Walmart.  She found that one job was not enough, but that she couldn’t do two physically demanding jobs. The closest she came to making ends meet was when she worked seven days a week.  Her biggest struggle was paying the rent – in each of the three states she lived in, she couldn’t make enough to pay for a very modest apartment along with everything else.  She writes that what she learned -- what is hard for the “nonpoor to see is poverty as acute distress:  The lunch that consists of Doritos or hot dog rolls, leading to faintness before the end of the shirt.  The “home” that is also a car or a van.  The illness or injury that must be “worked through” with gritted teeth, because there’s no sick pay or health insurance and the loss of one day’s pay will mean no groceries for the next.  These experiences are not part of a sustainable lifestyle, even a lifestyle of chronic deprivation and relentless low-level punishment.  They are, by almost any standard of subsistence, emergency situations.  And that is how we should see the poverty of so many millions of low-wage Americans – as a state of emergency.”[7]

When I lived in San Diego , I worked at the Interfaith drop in center for homeless.  Most of the people who came in were men who slept in Balboa Park .  Many had mental heath and substance abuse issues.  Some were clearly embarrassed to be homeless, and I could feel them fighting for dignity as they accepted a new pair of pants or a personal care kit.  I’ll never forget the young man who came in week after week, struggling to find work and get off the street.  He’d never been homeless before, and he told me how stressful it was sleeping in the park, always alert in case someone might steal his stuff or try to pick on him.  He said, “I’m not crazy like some of these guys, but living like this sure makes you go crazy.”

At a recent City Club meeting, the Superintendent of Salem-Keizer Schools started her talk with a cartoon projected on the screen.  The cartoon showed a young child entering a school carrying suitcases labeled hunger, homelessness, no health insurance, parent unemployed.  How can anyone be expected to learn with this kind of baggage?  A recent comprehensive study on poor single mothers found that overwhelmingly the young women saw motherhood as the one thing they could do that made them feel like their life counted for something.[8]

And even the previously privileged, newly poor suffer from the psychological damage of poor choices, divorce, and loss of income.  In How Starbucks Saved My Life, Michael Gates Gill writes movingly of how the job and relationships he made with his co-workers and customers at Starbucks helped him through the acute stress of being fired and not finding work, divorce and being broke.[9]

I have spent the last couple of months learning about the needs in our community, which are great.  I have also learned of many effective programs that are meeting these needs.  But more needs to be done. 

There are conversations going on in the interfaith community about keeping affordable housing on the table as part of the Salem downtown redevelopment plan.  There is discussion about using unused church space for transitional housing for young mothers and their children.  There is talk of a job training and mentoring program that could train workers for jobs in church member’s and other businesses.  There is a major meeting planned in February which will get service providers from government, nonprofit and faith communities together to see how we can work together to fill gaps in the service delivery system.  The newly formed Interfaith Advocacy Network has identified two issues that will need your support for the 2008 legislative session – 1) a $2.75 million allocation to keep 7,000 rent subsidized apartments throughout Oregon and to support the Federal and state mandated planning process for all Oregon counties to develop a 10 year plan to end homelessness; and 2) new legislation for health care reform.

The Rev. Jim Wallis writes that Martin Luther King Jr. never endorsed a candidate, but instead made them endorse his agenda.  Dr. King said that “The church must be reminded that it is not the master or the servant of the state, but rather the conscience of the state.”

Our UU values and principles call us to be that conscience.  It is not about being liberal or conservative, red or blue, Democrat or Republican.  It’s about being the voice of conscience that keeps our public leaders and policies accountable to the bottom line of equity –  equity that goes far beyond the words we say right into deeds that guarantee equal access to quality nutrition, employment, housing, and education.

We are called to be faithful, not successful.  We can not refuse to go out on the basis that we might not win the war on poverty.  We have to keep strong even in the face of seeming failure.  We might never know what our friendship meant to someone.  We might never know if the programs we champion are the best they could be.  We may have to witness even our best efforts failing to save someone.  But we have to keep trying.

Equity will take something from us.  We have to be willing to pay more in taxes.  We have to be willing to lobby for equitable public policies and hold our public servants accountable to those policies.  As Martin Luther King, Jr. pronounced over 40 years ago, this will be no cheap victory.  It will not be cheap in terms of the money we invest in our communities.  But more importantly, it will not be cheap in terms of our willingness to engage in our communities, to invest time in building friendships across cultural, ethnic and class lines.  I know from personal experience that when we embrace the poor as our friends and neighbors, all our lives are enriched, and new energy is found to do what we know we can do, and is the right thing to do.

 Let us be the people who go out and say:

God sent us by here to say to you that you’re not treating His children right.

And this is what we mean to do about it.

Amen, and Blessed Be.