Who Will Eat and Who Will Serve

When wealth is passed off as

merit, bad luck is seen as bad character. This is how ideologues justify

punishing the sick and the poor. But poverty is neither a crime nor a character

flaw. Stigmatize those who let people die, not those who struggle to live.

-Sarah Kendzior, journalist and

author (1978-)

I am a contributor to A.Word.A.Day and, along with their daily email to my inbox, they include a quote from someone worth quoting whose birthday shares the date. I like to keep track of quotes that are meaningful to me and today’s choice meets that criteria in spades.

I look people up. It’s a quirk of mine, but I like to know

something about those people, organizations and media outlets I happen to write

about.

According to Wikipedia, Sarah has

written for Al Jazeera, The Guardian, Foreign Policy, Marie Claire, The

Boston Globe and other outlets. The Irish Times asserted that

Kendzior "has become a must-follow journalist."

I hope never to be accused

of going against the opinion of the Irish Times.

But the quote fascinates me and part of the reason is no

doubt that we love to see our personal opinions confirmed in print.

We Americans are in absolute awe of

both wealth and celebrity. But Sarah makes the point that when we see those

circumstances as worthy or deserving (merit), then by comparison poverty and

bad luck become the natural condition of losers.

If you are Jeff Bezos, you’re a god,

but if you’re homeless and begging, it’s your own fault and you’re a bum. As a

society, we by-and-large agree with that. And by-and-large, we are dead wrong.

Who among us has ever actually sat down next to a homeless

person and listened to their story? Certainly not I.

Thirty million American families

are said to be one minor catastrophe from bankruptcy—an uninsured illness or

loss of a job. The slide into poverty is a slippery slope, yet hardly a crime

and, if its' seen as a character flaw, then a very major portion of our nation

shares that flaw.

Earthquakes are not the only phenomenon that are speculated

upon as they become seriously overdue. Pressures have been building for forty

years on the tectonic plate that is economic disparity.

When that long overdue plate slips,

the resulting institutional collapse that follows may expose what is truly

criminal and what is merely a character flaw. Bezos, Gates and the Walton

family are surely not criminals, nor do they lack character in the common

understanding. They played by the rules.

It’s the game that has been criminally

changed. The further criminal act was to blame the victims for the robbery,

for a robbery it was by any definition.

“Stigmatize those who let people die, not those who

struggle to live.”

We have chosen to glorify

those who let people die. We have allowed the prisons and ghettos and

homeless and unprotected to overwhelm our society because they are not us—but

too close for comfort. Rather than hold out a hand to those who have been left

behind, we edge away from them as though their poverty and anguish might be

catching.

I was born in the middle of the Great Depression and have

little memory of it, other than my father’s comment that “people in those

circumstances were more kind to one another than I have ever seen them since.”

I don’t know where our gradual loss

of kindness will take us, nor do I know what circumstances the present pandemic

will leave behind. But I know we will be changed.

Sarah Kendzior may have, in a mere

47 words, accurately explained the circumstances of the times, as well as a

prescription for the future.