WHEN JUSTICE KISSES PEACE

FREEDOM FROM WANT

We hear a lot of talk about giving Freedom to people half a world away.
For that we are sacrificing our finest.
Yet, you can't turn on Sunday morning TV and see the Feed the Children guy and not know that there is suffering everywhere. But you knew that. John Edwards calls it the "two countries" where the middle class is losing ground in a newly stratified "have, have not" society or according to Bush, a society of his base of "have mores" and everyone else. John Kerry railed against decimation of communities by "outsourcing" jobs to India and elsewhere closing factories that supported entire communities. Everyone knows people are hungry everywhere-except maybe Simon Cowell who was shocked to find a Food Bank kitchen in Los Angeles. Any given early morning in Washington, DC I can walk past Western Avenue Presbyterian Church a block from the Watergate where Condolezza lives and see homeless men lining up around the block for breakfast.
The American Idol personalities last night travelled to Africa to "give back" to people who don't have antiretroviral drugs or food much less TVs. But you know you don't have to go to Africa to find it-while it is stark there. If you look hard enough you can see it everywhere-its ugly-its shameful- its POVERTY. There might be some of it in your family even that has annoyed you and to which you turned a blind eye-that relative who is a bottomless pit of need. There might be some of it in your street at that crackling painted house, and for sure there is some of it in that neighborhood where you seldom drive without locking the doors and the windows up in the city.

"A National Scandal" is what Peter Edelman calls Poverty in America. He has been fighting the "War on Poverty" since working for Robert F. Kennedy as an idealistic young Harvard lawyer who could have easily instead probably gone to Wall Street. He is heading a task force on fighting Poverty with the Center for American Progress.
See, http://www.americanprogress.org/issues/2007/04/poverty_numbers.html

Katrina got to him. How on earth in this country could we lose entire parishes of people who were trapped and just drowned right before our eyes on TVs--IN THIS COUNTRY! No cars to get out, no bank accounts, no means to go anywhere but squatting in a sports stadium if they were rescued. You couldn't watch that and not be just sick at your stomach. People floating face down in the streets of New Orleans. Unspeakable.

Moral Lectures don't pursuade people to care about each other. Bad Boy, you made so much money you should give more of it away doesn't pursuade people to care more about those less fortunate. But economic arguments might. Poverty costs more than its worth. It costs in lost productivity costs for sick workers and for the non-integration of under-educated people who could be in the workforce, it costs in emergency room health bills, it costs in the emotional toll on people who love the people they know in poverty and it costs in terms of our international competitiveness in a thousand ways. Economists have ways to quantify this but it is obvious that Poverty costs us all. That is what the "ONE" campaign also understands.
Go to www.ONE.org and read about what they are doing to fight global poverty.

Ted Kenendy believes we can and must do better in Educating everyone to meet the competitive challenges of the global marketplace now. And don't tell him that anyone from a poor neighborhood cannot learn as well as the next kid from a rich suburb. Our public education system needs major overhauling at a national level to meet the obvious challenges, he argued.

Jesus spent his ministry doing three things basically; teaching, healing (healing people through teaching forgiveness, healing spirits and minds by driving out demons, and physically curing disease) and feeding people. He continues to do it and he continues to tell us to do it in his name. Matthew 25 is the clearest blueprint for what he has instructed and how he holds us accountable. We know that in so much as you do this to "the least of these" my brethren you do it to me. There will be sheep and goats, and you know the story. OK, so fear of firey hell doesn't motivate people much either these days. Charlie Rangel has another Angle. National Security. If we don't take care of people in poverty, they easily fall into crime, if we don't create employment in communties we create pathologies instead that eventually come back to bite us.
And the richest of us aren't saying "Bite Me." They are often really nice people who are happy to give if asked nicely in the right way by the right people-so long as they can write it off.

We have a chance now to make a real serious difference. In fact, Peter Edelman's goal is ambitious but realistic. We are the "Can Do" Nation and we Can Do this. We can cut Poverty in half in the next ten years. Certainly we can cut childhood poverty in half, and a huge percentage of people in poverty are kids. Think about it hard. A huge number of people in poverty in this country are kids. Kids. His task force has planned a 12 point legislative agenda toward this goal of cutting poverty in half in ten years and completely eradicating it in this country in a generation.
see, http://www.americanprogress.org/issues/2007/04/podesta_poverty_testimony.html
We can do this painlessly if we commit ourselves to it. 12 points, like the 12 apostles of progressive reform, or the 12 steps to sober reality checking the country's conscience.

What does Poverty mean? It means people really don't have peace of mind that they can meet their bills, it means keeping a roof over the head sheltering from the elements, it means food on the table regularly, it means a place to go to work or not instead of hanging on the street, it means that the struggle is with existence itself.

And here is what else it means-it factors hugely into calculations concerning whether women think that they can afford to bring another child into the world. Poverty is the single most influential factor on the Abortion crisis. You cannot look at Abortion in this country and ignore the issue of Poverty. To solve the Poverty problem goes a long long way toward solving the Abortion crisis. Ask any single female. 51% of all women in this country are now living without husbands single. We cannot plan public policy on the old Father Knows Best model because husbands and fathers are missing from the picture of over half the women in America now. Women are struggling. Women with children are struggling much more. Three million people a year abort their offspring in this country. Every two years we have a holocaust sized abortion pile of dismembered fetal arms, legs and heads created largely by the Bondage to Want in a country that isn't paying attention to the effects of Poverty on women.

We all want Peace, Peace in Iraq, peace of mind, peace from the tortured violence of self-destructive, emotionally devastating, fetacide abortions.

When we achieve the Justice that can happen through this 12 point legislative agenda proposed by the Task Force on Poverty, that is when Justice meets Peace and kisses it.