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Presentation by Mark McCormick, Wichita Eagle Columnist, at Peace Connections Annual Review, February 9, 2006
Let me say first how honored that you would think enough of me
to invite me out to speak to your organization. And I mean that
sincerely.
In this increasingly pro-war, anti-poor society we share, I often feel
very alone. Alone, and wondering where are the peace lovers? Where are
the people outraged by all of the violence? Where are the people who
ache the way I do when they see suffering?
And you know what? You found me and brought me here.
So for that, I say thank you, thank you, thank you.
And you all seem so sincere.
That's not the most abundant quality anymore.
I'll give you one of my favorite examples that I share with people.
Once my cousin Don was in the front yard with his mother when the
neighbor lady came walking over. As the two ladies talked, Don wedged
himself between them and stared at the lady from next door.
Finally, his mother asked him, "Boy, why are you staring at Mrs. Johnson like that?"
And he said, "Mama, I thought you said Mrs. Johnson had two faces? I only see one."
So thank you again for accepting me so warmly.
I wanted to talk tonight about why we're so poor.
Why in a nation where people get up at 3 in the morning to buy $500
video games the day after Christmas that children go to sleep hungry,
homeless women take up with abusive men because they have no where else
to go and homeless men freeze to death in vans.
I'll tell you right now that I don't have all of the answers. Maybe not
even some of them. I will say that part of the reason we're so poor has
to do with our hearts growing increasingly callous.
Each generation it seems, feels a little colder. A little harder. A little meaner.
You know, when I was in high school, all I wanted to do was play
football, make the varsity wrestling team and write for the school
paper. I had a little job at Baskin Robbins. I had an ol raggedy Ford
Maverick. I hung out at the arcade.
By contrast, since becoming an adult, I've interviewed children who
lived in neighborhoods so scarred with violence that they'd been
diagnosed with post traumatic stress disorder, and that's something
soldiers get in combat.
Just a few months ago, I wrote a column about a woman for pressured her
son into a drive-by shooting and even drove the car for him and
screamed at him to be a man and shoot the gun while she drove.
In the 20 years since I graduated you can just see the social deterioration.
And so many of us care but don't know what to do.
We've even made the mistake of looking to politicians for all of our answers.
But politicians Democrats and Republicans
treat us the way we treat our enthusiastic dog at home. You know,
pretending to throw the ball and watching to dog bound around, ears
up.æ.æ.
"Here, boy! Here boy! Want health care? Want health care? There you go! Go get it! Go get it!"
"Aw come here boy, there’s no health care, there’s no health care! Good voter! Good Voter!"
"Here, boy! Here, boy! Want employment! Want employment! There you go! Go get it, Go get it!
"Aw come here boy, there’s no jobs! Good voter, good voter!"
But if you’ve ever seen poverty up close you know its not a joke.
My parents grew up during the Depression and I still see through them the horrors of destitution.
My father tells a story about once taking some food some rabbits
he’d killed to a starving family that lived outside his town.
He said as soon as he stepped into the house the children, crying
couldn’t wait for the meat to be cooked. They grabbed the rabbits
and began bitting into the flesh, blood squirting and running down
their faces.
My mother tells the story of how, in that very same town, if someone
came around to your back door to ask for food, you fed them. No
questions asked. She remembers one man coming to the house. She looked
at him. Ragged. Reeking. Watching her Grandmother prepare him a meal
and a place to sleep.
She wondered why her Grandmother had gone through all of the trouble.
The fact that fewer and fewer of us would bother is one of the primary
reasons we’re so poor. We’re so jaded sometimes we have no
respect for poor people. We extend them almost no dignity.
Walking with my father in downtown Los Angeles as a child, I can remember my first encounter with homeless people.
I remember several men in dirty, oily clothes, soaked through with the
misery of liquor they’d been drinking. They slept as we navigated
around them, trying not to rustle the newspapers they used as blankets.
I remember being afraid and my father telling me:
Some were paupers, some were kings, some were masters of their arts
But in all their shame, they were all the same, those men with the broken hearts.
It was a message from an old country and western standard he’d
grown up on that never left him and that he passed on to me.
Later in life, early in high school, I believe, I ran across a series of articles that changed the way I'd view the world.
A journalist name Loretta Schwartz-Noble wrote these
incredible articles about poor people, one of them living in the shadow
of the Capital Dome in Washington D.C. One of her stories was about a
woman named Martha Rocha.
Martha lived in what could barely be called the
frame of a garage. She slept on moldy couch cushions. She was 65 years
old and her weight since being on the street had crashed from 165 to
about 110.
Less than a mile from a place where our government was spending hundreds of dollars for toilet seats.
I really think that those articles are still alive
in me today, sparking my sense of outrage about issues of poverty and
fairness.They convinced me that in some small way, maybe I could help
illuminate important issues for the people like me, who would help if
they only knew what was going on.
Still, it seems as though we get a little more comfortable with people
such as Martha starving and sleeping in squalor with each passing
generation.
Now, we actually exploit the poor.
Look at where they live.
Check Cashing stores. Furniture rentals. High fat, low quality food. No
grocery stores. More liquor stores than gas stations in communities
where people have higher rates of cirrohisis of the liver, throat,
stomach and esophegeal cancer as well as alcohol related or induced
homicide and domestic violence.
We spin stories about Welfare Queens and looters in New Orleans to
stoke middle-class fears as justification for simply not caring. No one
ever seems to ask how much did all those contractors make by hiring
people after the government waived minimum salary requirements.
We’ve already forgotten about David Wittig, the Westar Energy
head convicted last year of literally "pilaging" the utility and all of
us who pay into it.
We use them to prosecute a war of choice. Funneling them into military service with the promise that they can "be all they can never be in the society" if they join the army.
That’s why we’re so poor.
They used to be us, but now, they are "them." Let me say that again:
They (the poor) used to be us, a part of us. But now, they (the poor)
are "them" meaning other people.
Now, its "not me." That would never happen to me. I’m a good person. I don’t deserve that.
It’s "Them."
You’d think we’d all know by now just how dangerous "Them" can be.
"Them" allowed us to Segregate. "Them" allowed the world to turn our
backs while Jewish people were put in ovens. "Them" allows us not to
care.
And as if simply not caring wasn’t enough, now it seems we have license for outright contempt for the poor.
That’s why Rush Limbaugh could claim on his radio show that the
Lord’s Diner in Wichita was serving people who weren’t
really in need, despite what its director had said.
And why a man could freeze to death in the back of a van which happened
in Wichita a year ago and cause nary a ripple in our lives.
We have to find ways not just to send ripples, but to send shockwaves through people’s consciences.
One of my professors, Samuel Adams, a man who is like a father to me, did that in his own time.
You can find Daddy Sam, as I call him, in the Congressional Record
where he’s given credit for helping to launch this nation’s
war on hunger for an investigative piece he produced while posing as a
migrant farm worker.
This is just about my favorite story about him.
He’d learned that the crushing poverty of the South had forced
people out of their homes and out wandering the region for work and for
food. Many of those people were swept up in the stream of migrant farm
work.
They worked long hours for little pay and almost no food, and Daddy Sam wanted to tell their story.
So he got a job as one of them, adopting their stooped posture and
broken speech by day and phoning in stories of their Hell to the St.
Petersburg Times Newspaper by night.
It was dangerous work.
The men running these operations suspected that people might try and
infiltrate it and kept an eye out for anyone who didn’t look as
though they belonged there. Specifically, they were looking for workers
who failed to pick enough of what they called "pinks" small vegetables
of a particular color.
And Daddy Sam is red-green color-blind.
He somehow eluded detection and filed his stories of heartbreak,
hardship and hunger. The stories, which were Pulitzer Prize finalists
shook the nation’s conscience, even bringing then President
Lyndon Johnson to the site where Daddy Sam had toiled undercover.
We're so poor because we just don't feel in the intimate way we used to feel.
Just this week, I bought an old album of Halloween stories that I had
when I was a child. I found it on E-Bay. I'd play it over and over and
over in my room and my favorite story on it was Edgar Allen Poe's
Tell-Tale Heart. The story was about a man with senses so acute that
the beating of an old man's heart drove him crazy. Drove him to attack
the old man and bury him under the floor boards of the house.
When the police arrived to investigate the reported disturbance, the man was cool at first, saying:
"I smiled and bid them welcome. And invited them to search. Since the
room had been restored to perfect order, I had nothing to fear.
"But soon, I grew pale and wished they would leave. My head ached, and
a ringing began in my ears, but still they sat and chatted.
"As the ringing in my ear grew louder, I talked in a louder voice and
now, a new noise came to my ears, the low, dull sound such as a watch
makes when wrapped in cotton.
"I rose and argued about trifles, making wild gestures but the noise grew even louder.
"Pace the floor! Will they never leave? I felt I must scream or die!"
Think a minute. What if we thought of poverty the way the killer in
Poe’s Tell-Tale Heart thought about the beating of the old man's
heart?
What if other people's suffering tormented us the way the old man’s beating heart tormented his killer’s mind?
We need to feel that way. We need to find our acute senses when it comes to poverty.
I say what Dr. King said: Truth forever on the scaffold, wrong forever
on the throne, yet that scaffold sways a future and behind the dim
unknown stands God within the shadows, keeping watch above his own.
That has to be us.
We have a future to sway, you and me, for the people only God watches over.
When no one cares, we have to care.
When no one cries, we have to cry.
When people refuse to see them, we have to see them.
Why are we so poor?
Because right now, we simply don't care enough.
Let’s start.
