The co-chairs of the Poor People’s Campaign delivered this post-election message during an online event Thursday: Now that voters have turned out in record numbers to cast their ballot, the real work of advocating and caring for the 140 million Americans who are poor and low income must begin in earnest, no matter who sits in the Oval Office or walks the halls of Congress and the nation’s 50 statehouses.
Just over a week ago, the Presbyterian Committee on the Self-Development of People was supposed to be in Rochester, New York celebrating its 50th Anniversary.
How would the political landscape change if the needs and demands of poor and low-income voters were better represented in the electoral process?
That’s what a report issued this week by The Poor People’s Campaign: A National Call for Moral Revival, attempts to answer.
The Poor People’s Campaign: A National Call for Moral Revival attracted more than 2.3 million people to watch its three-hour-plus Assembly and Moral March on Washington June 20 online and on cable TV.
Fourteen months ago, the Rev. Dr. Liz Theoharis was on a bus winding through Western Kentucky on the Poor People’s Campaign’s Real National Emergency bus tour and envisioning a major march of tens of thousands of people in June 2020.
For the Presbyterian Mission Agency, 2019 will go down as the year the Matthew 25 invitation was extended and embraced by dozens of mid councils and thousands of congregations.
Dr. Jelani Cobb, a staff writer at the New Yorker, historian and the Ira A. Lipton Professor of Journalism at Columbia University, concluded a lecture before an audience at the University of Louisville Wednesday with a personal story that may say as much about race relations in the U.S. as the hour-long lecture that preceded his story.
The Rev. Dr. Liz Theoharis was delivering an impromptu sermon at the end of a long, hot day riding around Western Kentucky on a bumpy bus when she turned to the story of a leper who approached Jesus.“The leper said, ‘If you choose, you can heal me,’” Theoharis said. “’If you choose, you can heal me.’“Now that leper had gone a lot of places up to that point. He went to the HMOs of his day, and they turned him away. He went to the hospitals nearby, they had closed down. But Jesus traveled around the land opening up free healthcare clinics, never charged a co-pay. The leper said to Jesus, ‘If you choose, you can heal me.’“The question before us this afternoon is, ‘Do we choose?’”
The Rev. Jimmie Hawkins, director of the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.)’s Office of Public Witness in Washington D.C., says “we have third-world conditions in parts of the United States of America,” reflecting on his travels to cities some might find surprising.
