"The Poor Are an Event,... a Holiday"

Tuesday night, as I headed home from a small, coffee shop meeting on how we can reach out to our community, I heard this painfully disturbing piece on NPR's News and Notes with Ed Gordon. It was disturbing because I think it described well the current situation in the Western world. It was painful, because I had to struggle with the reality the statements would have still been true if they were said of the Amercian church. I am not sure which dialogue participants said the following, but here is my own transcript of the dialogue. You can listen livestream by clicking here.

As you read consider and respond to any or all of the following:

• What are your thoughts on this dialogue?
  
• What would you contribute to their ongoing discussion?
  
• How do their statements and critiques challenge our existence as the church? (Please note, in the context of the dialogue they are definitely preaching to themselves as well.)
  
• How would the gospel respond to them and embody itself in the world?

Here is the transcript...

‘The attititude is, “there are no votes in poverty; there are no campaign donations in poverty; and there are no ratings in poverty, unless you are watching the Jerry Springer show.” And that is the way we look at it. Poverty is a very difficult issue for us to tackle with because we have to confront race, we have to confront class, and we have to confront our own issues. In the media we only take a drive-by view of poverty.

Keep in mind, the week Katrina hit the federal report came out laying out the state of poverty in the United States. That story got virtually no attention whatsoever. So, I found it interesting that that story came out the same week the hurricane hit. It was as if it was by a divine work for it to happen that way.

That is simply the reality of it. We don’t like to confront it because we don’t really want to go talk to those people who are poor. And then when you say poor, you have to put the proper face on poor, because we think it is just somebody who is destitute, who is illiterate, who is African American. That is how we look at it. But there is the working poor. The people who work every single day and who don’t have the money for daycare or whatever and they are struggling to get by, and we don’t want to confront it because it is kind of painful for us to do so.”

Another participant:

“I remember writing a column about when I asked several of my friends how many poor people they knew personally. Most folks that responded to me said that they knew OF poor people, but they didn’t really know poor people outside of their family or maybe in they were in their church. But it was really just the rare occasion,… the intersection was not really there.

The other thing is that poor people are basically an event in this country, they are holidays. You know you see poor people around Thanksgiving, around Christmas. If something goes wrong, then we see poor people. Ordinarily, in the daytime, you can see poor people on the Jerry Springer Show. But we really don’t know how to deal with this issue. We don’t know where the nexus is between personal responsibility and the role of the government. It is hard work…

After Katrina subsides, poor people will go back where they came from. We don’t know how to deal with this issue.”