The Poor and the Pentagon
“They sell the righteous for silver,
and the needy for a pair of sandals.” Amos 2:6
I am coming to a realization similar to one that Dr. Martin Luther King had in the last years of his life: ending poverty in America is one of the foremost civil rights issues of our time. Why hasn’t this “dream” of ending poverty been realized? What has gotten in our way of realizing it?
Exactly a year before his assassination in Tennessee where he was supporting striking sanitation workers and preparing for a Poor People’s Campaign, King denounced the perverse priorities of the American government as it funneled millions into operations of death in Southeast Asia while the poor in America suffered in slums.
“A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death,” Dr. King said at Riverside Church, across the street from Union’s campus.
Could it be that one of the walls in the dam that holds back the waters of justice is the military industrial complex?
The Hebrew prophet Habakkuk decries Babylon, “Their might is their own god!” (1:11) In his commentary on this chapter, Charles Ellicott writes, “Weapons of war may have been literally worshipped by the Babylonians. Similarly, the Sarmatians offered yearly sacrifices to a sword, as the emblem of their god of war. The Romans also sacrificed to their eagles. But probably the language is metaphorical, and we need not seek a closer illustration than that of Dr. Pusey, ‘So the Times said at the beginning of the late war, ‘The French almost worshipped the mitrailleuse as a goddess.’ ‘They idolised, it would say, their invention, as if it could do what God alone could do.”
MSNBC’s Brian Williams quoted Leonard Cohen, “I am guided by the beauty of our weapons,” while watching Pentagon footage of Trump’s 2017 missile strikes on Syria.
From the dramatic tale of Aaron’s Golden Calf in Exodus to Jesus in the Sermon on the Mount calling enmity between God and Mammon, the Bible repeatedly calls into question the values of society.
The presidents Bush, Obama, Trump, and Biden may have more in common than many might realize. One of the most obvious of these commonalities is weapons sales. Trump, who may have been the most rhetorically “anti-war” of the four, was famously pictured celebrating a weapons deal with Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman in 2018. In the photo, Trump holds a large chart with pictures of the various war planes that were sold, and all-capital letters reading, “12.5 BILLION IN FINALIZED SALES TO SAUDI ARABIA.” Additionally, while President Biden claims to have ended “offensive” support for the Saudi war against the impoverished and besieged people of Yemen, he promised to continue U.S. aid to the Saudi’s “defensive” war with Yemen, the poorest country in the Middle East.
Expensive foreign military exploits are not the only place where priorities are out of line.
No sham impeachment trial can resolve the tragic irony of this president being elected in the name of “Make America Great Again” and rebuilding our crumbling infrastructure. Now our crumbling infrastructure causes deaths due to power outages and negligent corporations. Now our for-profit healthcare system lets the poor and the black and brown slip through the cracks. The people of Flint and Jackson have to fight for the human right of clean drinking water.
“Alas for you who build a town by bloodshed,
and found a city on iniquity!
Woe to him who builds his house by unrighteousness,
and his upper rooms by injustice;
who makes his neighbors work for nothing,
and does not give them their wages.”
Habakkuk 2:12-13
For months, congress failed to follow up the first COVID-19 relief bill, leaving Americans with little to no safety net during one of the greatest economic and public health crises of our time. On March 13, Poor People’s Campaign co-chair Rev. Dr. Liz Theoharis responded to the passage of the latest COVID-19 relief bill, the American Rescue Plan.
“Not only must these policies be made permanent, they must be greatly expanded,” said Theoharis in an interview with The Heretic. “We need debt relief to climb out of this past year and usher in a period of true and widespread economic revival. We must change how we measure poverty, so that our policies moving forward are based on an accurate assessment of the true conditions facing the nation. This is our mandate, today and everyday.”
The 14-point policy agenda of the Poor People’s campaign, a broad policy agenda to raise the standard of living for poor people (which includes the $15/hour minimum wage recently voted down with help from eight Senate Democrats and information on COVID-19 relief) can be found at the campaign’s website.
In her March essay for Sojourners, titled “Food Lines in The ‘Land of Plenty,’” Theoharis writes, “We are to organize society around the least of these, who are most of us.” Perhaps that could be a start toward realizing King’s dream.
Zachary White is a first year at Union Theological Seminary from Portland, Oregon. Their interests include the politics of empire and labor and its implications for biblical studies.