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Unitarian Church of Sharon
4 N. Main St.
Sharon, MA 02067
781-784-3652
E-mail UCS
Real Needs
Sermon by Rev. Deborah Cayer
November 4, 2007
One year from this coming Tuesday, we’ll go to the polls as a nation to choose a new President. I haven’t even begun to make up my mind about who I might vote for, but the state of the nation and the world are very much on my mind, as I know they’re on yours. Like you, I’ve been trying to make sense out of all the information and commentary, all the messages and images that keep coming at us in print, on the web, and on tv from candidates, parties and critics alike. Amid all the rhetoric, spin, hype and hyperbole, I start to wonder who might offer real hope and real plans to meet the real needs of the people of this nation and the world.
Real needs….as presented in the story on the front page of Friday’s Boston Globe about a forty year old program in Chelsea that has had outstanding success at getting at-risk-kids into college. However, the Choice Thru Education program is currently unfunded by the US Department of Education; Choice’s grant application was denied because it was 46 minutes late—due to an error on the Department of Education’s website that refused to accept the grant application for several days before the deadline.
And now, the best efforts of the heftiest members of Massachusetts’ congregessional delegation can’t get the decision changed; both of our senators’ phone calls are going unanswered and Rep. Capuano isn’t having success either. The Boston Globe reports that this isn’t the only program for poor students whose funding has been cut. In recent years, the Department of Education has cut $450 million dollars that formerly went toward “assisting low income, first generation students overcome barriers to get into college” (Nov. 3, pp. A1, A12). Whose needs is the Department of Education watching out for?
Real needs….a report on the Channel Five evening news last week said that in order to meet the new federal guidelines of nine recommended daily servings of dark green and yellow vegetables, poor families, those making less than 20K a year for a family of four, would have to spend 70% of their food budget on produce. Even though information about nutrition keeps constantly changing, and even though a lot of folks might scoff at eating nine servings of fruits and veggies a day, in a land of plenty, why should basic minimum nutrition guidelines identified by the government be out of the reach of any citizens? Where are the programs to help meet real nutritional needs?
Real needs….such as those currently plaguing homeowners who obtained mortgages without having to prove their ability to repay, or at much higher interest rates and terms than they actually qualified for, who are now in danger of losing their homes, their lifetime investments and savings. And all the rest of us who are affected as well, because the stock market and economy have been so greatly impacted by this crisis. Government’s job is to protect its citizens. Where is the federal oversight and regulation of predatory lenders, and of the loan industry in general?
Real needs…such as the health care crisis—middle class people without medical insurance, or inadequate medical insurance, who have to declare bankruptcy because of their medical bills. Where is the plan to meet the very real health care needs of every person?
In an op-ed piece in the NY Times last month, Judith Warner offered a unique perspective on Sen. Clinton’s surprisingly favorable poll numbers, which showed her resoundingly out polling her opponents, particularly the Republicans. Warner believes this is because the senator speaks directly to middle class voters about the issues that affect them most. “I hear you,” Senator Clinton says, as she speaks to middle class people about health care, family leave policies that protect middle class jobs, and access to education. Washington pundits are confounded by Clinton’s success, Warner suggests, in part because they’re so used to ignoring the middle class that they can’t understand middle class needs or issues anymore, and thus aren’t able to fathom the reason for the senator’s success.
All of this, Warner notes, comes at a time when the middle class is rapidly shrinking. She wrote, “More and more people are being priced out of a middle class existence. Because of housing prices, because of health care costs, because of tax policy, because of the cost of child care, The Good Life – a life of relative comfort and financial security – is now, in many parts of the country, an upper-middle-class luxury.”
In October the Wall Street Journal reported on newly released figures by the IRS that shows that in 2005, the wealthiest 1% of Americans earned 21.2% of all income…which is almost 2% greater than in the heady days of the stock market in 2000. The bottom 50% of all workers earned just 12.8% of all income, a decline of .2% from 2000. And the median tax filer’s income fell a full 2% when adjusted for inflation (to about $31,000) in the same four year period.
What I think this means is that the incomes of the American middle class are melting as quickly as the polar ice caps. I think it also means that a crisis could be looming in our society because the poor and the middle class are increasingly losing their access to security, dignity and opportunity in both private and public life.
I grew up in the middle class. My parents were among the first of their families to make it out of the working class. However, my parents had a boost, because they grew up in Detroit, which was bustling and humming during and after WWII. Their parents had been offered the advantage of housing programs in the 1940’s and were able to buy their own small, neat, well designed and built houses. My grandparents lived in their homes for more than fifty years. They had access to good food, beautiful food, much of it raised just outside the city, trucked in to huge produce markets and neighborhood butcher shops. The public schools provided my parents and their siblings with a good education. And even in the Motor City there was public transportation.
One of the things I noticed when I was a child, and have always remembered, is that both my grandfathers were very interested in politics. They were both active in their respective unions, the railroad and auto workers. They understood and cared about city politics. They understood themselves as active participants in their city. They were engaged, committed citizens. Their opportunity encouraged them to strive and succeed. Though he never finished high school, one of my grandfathers started a community credit union that’s still thriving. He helped each of his eight children get a start in life. All of this was possible because the government provided access to housing and jobs—at least for European Americans.
The fuller truth is that Detroit was a segregated city. For twenty plus years, because of public policies that made jobs and credit and housing available to whites only, the decent city housing and jobs were for whites only. The unions that made my families’ lives so prosperous had notoriously brutal racial discrimination practices. And what happened in Detroit was the same thing that happened in other great American cities. By the late 1960’s the pressures of racial inequality coalesced into rage and erupted in violence. The once beautiful, vital city that hummed day and night to the rhythm of cars on the wide boulevards became, for a time, a place of desolation and ruin.
If you have eyes to see and ears to hear, America in the middle of the first decade of the new millennium has a very disturbing profile. The wealthiest Americans play and compete on a field created just for them by government policies that limit access to education for middle class and poor children, just as government policies limited opportunity for minorities before the great civil rights battles of the 60’s and 70’s. The best credit and housing opportunities are still offered to upper middle and upper class people, while the working middle class and the poor are offered unregulated, unfair deals. In senate hearings, people who work for mortgage companies have testified that they don’t even understand the terms of their own loans, nor could they explain the terms of loans to lower income clients.
The wealthiest Americans have functional family leave benefits while middle class workers do not; middle class workers can be and are regularly fired for taking time off to deal with a family crisis; they also don’t have a lot of affordable options for day care or good options for nursing home care for their parents.
The current administration’s policies are getting meaner as well as narrower. In a new book, former senior White House aide, Michael Gerson talks about his disillusionment with the current administration’s priorities. He says that at White House meetings a proposal to help the poor or the young or the sick would be presented, but the VP’s office or the budget team would continually say that it was too expensive or that it was the wrong priority.
Gerson says he was worn down by this thinking and his party’s indifference to people in need. In his book he says, “Traditional conservatism has a piece missing - a piece that is shaped like a conscience.” And in an op-ed piece in last week’s Washington Post, he says that while government should tread lightly in people’s lives, at the same time “the justice of society is measured by its treatment of the helpless and poor. And this creates a positive obligation to order society in a way that protects and benefits the powerless and suffering.”
In the place of ladders and bridges proven to create access to a good life, a public life teeming with vitality, our country’s leaders have created policies that have resulted in the building of significant walls that deny access to a decent life to increasing numbers of people. In Anais Mitchell’s song, Hades’ logic sounds an awful lot like the logic of current Washington politicians. “We build the wall…to keep out the enemy, which is poverty, to ensure that we’ll have what others don’t have, which is the work of building the wall.”
This is the logic of a closed system feeding on itself. It’s the logic of hell and death, despair and ruin. This is not a preferred option for anyone’s future.
I talked this morning with the children about what it means to win, what it means to be a winner. When you win, how should you treat others? By taunting and taking all the best players and equipment for yourself? If you do, pretty soon the game isn’t going to be much fun. If you want the game to keep going and stay competitive and interesting, if you want to keep making profits, you have to set up some kind of system that equalizes conditions in the league. You have to create conditions that foster equality, that encourage players to exert effort, make improvements and innovations. You can play to win, but you also have to create conditions so that everyone has a chance to win.
The current Administration is actively promoting a game that is unjust to increasing numbers of people. They are promoting a game that is not worthy of a nation and a people with great ideals. This Administration is tragic, on the scale of Greek tragedy, in its inability to see the obvious consequences of its own greedy, arrogant, self interested policies that benefit the wealthiest 1% of citizens. Current officials are playing a win-lose game and all of the citizens of this nation, and perhaps other nations, will lose.
We must insist that our leaders find, and engage a national conscience once more.
We can begin by remembering what government is for—the protection of its citizens. Citizens shouldn’t have to defend themselves against policies that take away access to education, fair credit, housing and jobs. Government’s job is to level the playing field; its job is to provide ladders and bridges.
Middle class isn’t just an amount of money that you make or how much education you have. It’s all the connections that allow you to access a door into a preferred future—the future you envision for yourself. If we take seriously that every human being has inherent worth and dignity, we will insist that our government not build a playing field with impenetrable walls that keep people out. We’ll insist on more access to the field, not less.
I’m not a big fan of President Regan, whose administration, among other hurtful actions, decided that ketchup was an adequate vegetable for low income children who received subsidized school lunches. But I do remember his challenge to Gorbachev in Berlin in1989, “Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall….”
“Reach out,” the poet tells us. “keep reaching out, keep bringing in.” Our most real human need is to connect with one another as real people, real human beings with worth and dignity, despite our differences. Our real need is to be open to one another so that we find what we have in common—our shared humanity. It’s in our own interest to treat one another like beloved brothers and sisters, because in our interconnected, interdependent world, this is what is ultimately true; we are related. It’s just the way things are. If we ignore this truth, we upset the balance in the world. Because when people are disrespected, and when they’re oppressed, they react…eventually sometimes with violence. There are consequences to ignoring social realities. Societies go up in flames and everyone is affected. No amount of accrued wealth can keep you safe behind any wall of any thickness.
There is a better way, the way of interconnection. The way of respect and kindness. When we live our lives in accord with this larger reality, in harmony with this sacred ultimate reality, we are better able to see and hear one another’s very real needs.
When we understand, when we let in what it’s like to be another person, the most real option, the most moral option we have is to insist on policies and programs that adequately meet the real needs of every person, today and in the future.
I don’t know who I’m going to vote for next November. But what I’ll be looking at carefully is each candidates’ record and proposals to understand how their policies will affect all of us—whether we’re middle class, wealthy, poor, or upper middle class. The candidate who addresses real needs that are in accord with the ultimate needs not only of individuals, but society as a whole will get my vote.
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