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“Poverty is the Worst Form of Violence”
By Eric Parkinson

“Ultimately a great nation is a compassionate nation. No individual or nation can be great if it does not have a concern for ‘the least of these.’ Deeply etched in the fiber of our religious tradition is the conviction that men are made in the image of God and that they are souls of infinite metaphysical value, the heirs of a legacy of dignity and worth. If we feel this as a profound moral fact, we cannot be content to see men hungry, to see men victimized with starvation and ill health when we have the means to help them....Love is the key to the solution of the problems of the world.” (Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., Nobel Prize Lecture, Dec. 11, 1964.)

A recent article in a local San Luis Obispo newspaper addressed the poverty present in my own community. The author discussed the last days of three homeless men who died in a field across the street from the local homeless shelter. Each man had been recently discharged from the hospital and required further treatment, but the shelter had no room for them and they had no place else they could go. So they each lay down in the field and waited to die.

Friends – other homeless people living in the field – of one of the men were kind enough to purchase him a mattress from Goodwill, which they dragged down to the field for him to lay on so that he was a bit more comfortable. They adjusted the mattress so that he could look at the wildflowers while he died. “He loved nature,” they said.

Recovered from the man’s meager possessions after he died was the following poem written out on a crumpled piece of paper:

I hopped offa freight train and what did I see? I saw a band of American refugees As I rolled out my bedroll I looked over to see An old gray-haired man gazing at me His clothes dirty, torn, and well used – It’s hard to believe the things on his feet were called shoes As I looked into his eyes and seen the sorrow and pain, He pulled out his jug and took a drink just the same Years went by, me not thinking of these things, Until the lord restored bits of my memory to me You see I was kickin’ it at a train yard thinking I was free When I looked over to see a younger man gazing at me His eyes were full of life and hope and no shame But I pulled out my jug and took a drink just the same

He had become one of the “American refugees.” His eyes had become filled with the same “sorrow and pain” that he had seen in others.

Commenting on the man’s death, a social worker said, “If he was a dog or a seal, he wouldn’t have died alone in a field. We don’t have the outpouring for these people because they’re not warm and fuzzy. It’s like having a Third World country in our own community that no one wants to look at.”

What an outrageous and offensive statement to make.

Well, “Poverty is the worst form of violence,” said Mohandas Gandhi. And although violence is offensive, we have to call it what it is. Sometimes the truth hurts.

It must be that we don’t want to look at the Third World poverty in our own communities because we certainly have the means to end it.

In 2005, Americans had so much wealth that we were able to spend $756 billion on recreation and entertainment, $455 billion eating out at restaurants, $144 billion on alcohol, $90 billion on tobacco products and $59 billion on jewelry. That’s a total of $1.5 trillion. (Personal Consumption Expenditures by Type of Expenditure in 2005, U.S. Dept. of Commerce, Bureau of Economic Analysis.)

We just don’t want to look.

All of our spending on luxuries might lead some to conclude that we are happy as a society. But growing rates of drug addiction, suicide, divorce, mental illness and prison incarcerations (the largest in the world in both proportional and absolute terms) betray a poverty of the soul that money does not seem able to end. As Martin Luther King said over 40 years ago: “In spite of [our] spectacular strides in science and technology, and still unlimited ones to come, something basic is missing. There is a sort of poverty of the spirit which stands in glaring contrast to our scientific and technological abundance. The richer we have become materially, the poorer we have become morally and spiritually. We have learned to fly the air like birds and swim the sea like fish, but we have not learned the simple art of living together as brothers.”

Open your eyes to the Third World, America. It’s not just in Sri Lanka; it’s right outside your door. Only be careful whose eyes you look into. They could one day become your own.

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