Hands Off Haywood Remarks

I was asked to speak at Haywood County’s Hands Off rally. Below are my comments I’d like to share.

There used to be a time when having empathy, caring for our neighbors, and supporting farmers was understood to be at the core of what it meant to be American. There was a time when it was not radical to say that we should feed our neighbors who go without food. That we should support our neighbors who struggle to keep food on the table. And to support and grow our farming community because without them we have no food. 

When did it become political to say we should support the impoverished, feed the hungry, feel empathy for our neighbors? 

In early March, the USDA canceled $1 billion dollars in local food purchasing that would go to schools and food banks. Not to mention the $4 billion that had been planned for future iterations of this program. These canceled programs allowed groups like ours to buy food from local farmers and make it available to hungry children and hungry families. 

That means somewhere in the neighborhood of $350,000-$500,000 of local food purchasing that would ensure that no child goes hungry, that all people have access to fresh, healthy food, and that our local farms are supported and justly compensated, is no longer coming to our communities. Local investment to solve local problems. Gone. 

Let’s back up a little though, and ask ourselves what a number like $1 billion means. $1 Billion could buy about 7 meals for each hungry person in America. For the entire year. That’s all. Not even the bare minimum needed to survive.  There were a few crumbs falling from the table of American opulence and they wiped them into the trash can.  

The attack on the poorest among us, those who struggle with basic necessities is unconscionable. Recent pre-Helene stats tell us that over 18,000 individuals in this county struggle to put food on the table. 1 out of every 4 kids lives in a food insecure household. And our country has just told them, and I quote, “These programs no longer effectuate the goals of the [USDA]” Supporting farmers and feeding the hungry are no longer the goals of the USDA. 

The single fact that poverty exists in the wealthiest country this world has even seen is the most damning charge against us for which there is no acquittal. 

Recent history is ripe with observations such as that. Gustavo Gutierrez once said, “Poverty is not a fate; it is a condition. It is not a misfortune; it is an injustice.” 

Or as Nelson Mandela said, “Poverty is not an accident. Like slavery and apartheid, it is man-made and can be removed by the actions of human beings.”

The existence of poverty in America is a choice, it is an injustice, and attacks on funding for programs aimed to help local farms feed local communities is unconscionable at best. 

Did you know that, if we used the same calculation I used earlier to determine that $1 billion equals 7 meals per hungry person per year, it would take a measly 10% of the US Defense budget to feed every food insecure person in America 3 meals a day, 365 days a year, using locally purchased foods? 

Hunger and poverty in our midst is a choice, but it isn’t the choice of those experiencing poverty and hunger. It is a choice made by those in power, those who control the resources, those who live in opulence. 

I want to close now with a quote from Dietrich Bonhoeffer, the insightful and deeply thoughtful theologian executed by Hitler in Nazi Germany. At a message given at a confirmation service in 1938, during the rise of German Nazism, when the vast majority of “Christian” leaders were supporting fascism, he said. “Your ‘yes’ to God requires your ‘no’ to all injustice, to all evil, to all lies, to all oppression and violation of the weak and poor…” 

If we are going to say yes, to God, or to America, or to basic human decency, we must say a resounding NO to all injustice, all evil, all lies, all oppression, all violation of the weak and the poor.