Over this holiday weekend, there will be quite the impressive meeting of the souls over in Rome. Papa Francesco is going to entertain Reverend William Barber, the civil rights leader from North Carolina and official preacherman of this here shebeen, and they’re going to talk over Barber’s newest mission: a Poor People’s campaign modeled after the one that Dr. King embarked on in the months before his murder, 50 years ago next year. From The Charlotte News-Observer:
This year, Barber will be miles away from North Carolina on the holiday weekend, talking about his Poor People’s Campaign at a Vatican conference that includes a scheduled meeting with Pope Francis. “It’s a deep honor and humbling,” Barber said in a telephone interview on Monday. “The pope has been on the forefront of declaring that poverty in our current world is a scandal and its eradication should be a top priority. He has called on government and moral leaders to adjust our policies to address the issues of systemic poverty.”
Barber said his invitation to the Vatican came earlier this fall, along with other worker and labor rights advocates from around the world. The pope, Barber said, should be credited for “saying to the world what true evangelism should be saying.”“If any theology is going to line up with the theology of Jesus Christ, it must begin declaring good news to the poor who have been made poor by systems of economic exploitation,” Barber added. While at the Vatican, Barber will spend several days at a conference that opens with Ghanian Cardinal Peter Turkson discussing labor and the workers’ movement. The meeting with the pope is scheduled to happen at the end of the conference. “For me, it’s not so much meeting the pope as meeting a pope who has been so consistent on meeting the challenges of and pastoring to the poor,” Barber said. “He’s been clear that the church theologically has to deal with poverty, that you have to deal with the moral issues of living wages, inadequate housing and more.”
Poverty—not the erosion of the middle class, not the “economic anxiety” now famed in song and story by bards like Salena Zito and J.T. Vance—but grinding, endless poverty has fallen off the national agenda, at least as compared to where it was 50 years ago, when Dr. King launched his Poor People’s Campaign, and when Bobby Kennedy was telling an audience of well-off medical students in Indiana what he’d seen in the tumbledowns of Appalachia and the shacks of the Mississippi Delta. The only presidential candidate of the past several cycles that has attempted to make an issue of poverty qua poverty was John Edwards, and his national ambitions certainly came to a bad end.
Because of this, we affect surprise when the inevitable consequences of poverty erupt into the news cycle: poisoned water in Flint, or urban police departments dealing with desperate people as though they are occupying armies subduing unruly native tribes. These things flood the news and then they recede, until the next time. But poverty, grinding and endless poverty—that remains, here and all over the world, which is the whole point of why Papa Francesco and Reverend Barber are going to get together and talk about all those gospel verses about camels and needle’s eyes that get drowned out by television evangelists screaming about what Leviticus said about sexytime.
Grinding, endless poverty has fallen off the national agenda.
Before establishing themselves at the Plimoth Plantation, and thereby setting in motion the genocidal boosting of an entire continent from the human beings who already were here, the Pilgrims went first to Holland, where they found life very hard. The language barrier locked them out of the local economy and locked them into poverty. They also found the mercantile, sophisticated Dutch society full of immoral influences. So, seeking to make their own fortunes with their own kind, and seeking to flee the Satanic influences of those libertine Dutchmen, the Pilgrims turned up on the southern coast of Massachusetts, which, in the Mayflower Compact, they referred to as “the northern parts of Virginia.” Elsewhere in the Compact, they committed themselves to:
“… covenant and combine our selves together into a civil body politic, for our better ordering and preservation and furtherance of the ends aforesaid; and by virtue hereof to enact, constitute, and frame such just and equal laws, ordinances, acts, constitutions and offices, from time to time, as shall be thought most meet and convenient for the general good of the Colony.”
This was one of the few things they borrowed from the sinful, fallen Netherlands. The Pilgrims were stiff-necked, fairly awful people who took to land-grabbing and ethnic cleansing as enthusiastically as did all the people who followed them here. (And John Winthrop and the gang who later founded Boston were even worse, hanging Quakers and Catholics—including Mary Dyer, who hit the Puritan trifecta by being hung for being an Irishwoman, a Catholic, and a witch—in their shining city on the hill.) But what legacy they left in white people’s politics was one formed by the poverty they’d experienced among the Dutch. They were individualists, but they formed a government for the purpose of acting through it to take care of each other. Poverty—the great enemy of the “general good”—never was far from their minds.
(Annually, upon Thanksgiving, right-wing blogs will feature someone writing about how the Pilgrims landed here and established a system based on rudimentary socialism, which failed, sending the colony spiraling into famine, and then moved on to a “free market” model that allowed them to survive. This historical canard—which likely had its origins in a 1968 newspaper column, and Cleon Skousen, Glenn Beck’s favorite lunatic, promulgated it as well—may never die, but Kate Zernike of The New York Times did the best job of debunking it in 2010. The short version: The Pilgrims established the original system to increase their profits and abandoned it because internal bitching, not unlike that heard on modern-day talk radio, began to affect the colony’s political stability. There was no famine. Also, they got better at growing corn on the land they’d stolen.)
Poverty is at the root of the holiday season on which we are now embarked.
Poverty is at the root of the holiday season on which we are now embarked, in what also happens to be one of the uneasiest years the country has seen in over a century. Poverty is an element in the true Thanksgiving story, and it certainly is a critical element in all Christmas narratives. That goes for both the ones in the gospel, and also the secular kin that have grown along the path first blazed by Charles Dickens, who fairly can be said to have invented the modern secular Christmas narrative, although I tend not to blame him for every new Hallmark holiday movie anymore.
That is why the meeting between Papa Francesco and the Reverend Barber is a light to follow as the first holiday season of the era of the president* unwinds. I give thanks for it, and for the people in my life, and for y’all. There is light, and all, for the moment, at least, should let it be.
This content was originally published here.