Summer

“Summertime and the livin’ is easy
Fish are jumpin’ and the cotton is high.” George Gershwin ‘Porgy and Bess’

Summer is my favorite season. Lazy hot days, lots of outdoor activities. As Gershwin writes in his famous aria from ‘Porgy and Bess,’ “The livin’ is easy.”

Or is it? Gershwin’s aria is sung to an orphaned girl who has just lost both her parents. Her prospects are certainly not easy.  Nor easy, in any season, are the lives of the 38 million – 12% — of our fellow Americans who live in poverty, despite America being the world’s richest nation by GDP. 

In her “Demon Copperhead” description of rural Appalachia, Barbara Kingsolver demonstrates how pernicious can be the slide into poverty, and how ineffective the welfare safety nets. Kingsolver states that “from 15 to 35 percent of kids in some Appalachian counties are being raised by someone other than their parents, because their parents are addicted or incarcerated or dead.” Kingsolver makes a strong case for land-based vs. money-based economies.

Closer to home, California has 12% of the nation’s population, yet 30% of America’s homeless population, and 50% of its unsheltered homeless population.  Consider the current push to close the homeless camps like in Palm Springs on Tahquitz Creek at Gene Autry.   Once their temporary shelter voucher expires, where can they go? Experts describe a “doom loop” in which people end up without a home and then homeless and then chronically homeless, and it gets worse and worse.

I believe that we as people of faith need to keep trying to find solutions to the structural inequities that drive poverty and homelessness. We can’t do it alone; but in community, constantly talking with each other, inspiring, and lifting each other up, there lies a path forward. We must act, for as Gandhi writes, “Cowardice is impotence, worse than violence.”