Day 37: Monday, May 18, 2020o
60624. According to the Chicago Tribune Sunday, May 17, that zip code has been hardest hit by two viruses: COVID-19 and death by violence. The feature article contained the stark, lifeless statistics, but it highlighted the story of one woman, a woman who had lost three sons, two to gun violence, one to stabbing, and one fifteen-year-old grandson to gun violence, shot dead recently in her front yard. Because I have three sons and a fifteen-year-old grandson, I could not help making the comparison and being grateful that all three sons and grandson are alive and well. I cannot imagine the grief that the loss of one son would bring, but to lose all of your sons and a grandson would be grief unimaginable in its depth and weight.
How could a woman be so unfortunate? Unfortunately, the answer is quite simple: zip code. No, not the number itself, but the area it represents. On the west side of Chicago, it is a deep pocket of African American poverty—systemic, racially motivated poverty that spans generations of families, so that it is not unusual for a family to have experienced the violent death of more than one of their relatives. When asked about the problem in this neighborhood, this zip code that is well-known for its violent deaths and now is also known as the hottest spot in Chicago for the COVID-19 virus, this woman was blunt and to the point: the poverty is so extreme that the violence is inevitable. Now, the virus is also inevitable because of all the medical conditions that attack poor people at an inordinate rate compared to the general population.
Although our society has known for decades that poverty spawns violence and disease, so, too, have we known, but refused to acknowledge, that poverty itself is spawned by the institutional racism that has flourished since the founding of the country. One might think that by the twenty-first century, the country could solve the problem. But, the dilemma to solve the problem of racism and the accompanying poverty is that solving the problem would cost money—money that is in the hands of wealthy corporate America. I can’t say that I have an answer to the problem; I don’t have a plan; I don’t know what it would take for our country to come to its knees in repentance for the centuries of inequities in this country where we proudly claim that “all men are creating equal.”
Today I was reading the chapter in Leviticus that gives God’s decree for the children of Israel to observe a jubilee every fifty years. The rules are quite exact: all Israelites are allowed to go back to the land of their patrimony, regardless of their wealth or poverty; all debts become null and void at that time; all servanthood is erased among the nation’s people. It’s a re-set button. It’s a fresh start. It’s a way to avoid institutionalized inequities and poverty.
Here’s one time that I wish our government were based on some Old Testament principles. How different our society would be if we realized that all people are, indeed, created equal—and remain equal. If inequality occurs, it is wiped out every fifty years. Such a standard might not wipe out poverty in one generation, but it would see the end of poverty within less than three generations. No, I don’t have an answer; I don’t have a plan; I don’t know what it would take. But, perhaps, just perhaps, the pandemic may make us look more closely at our inequalities in this country of “equal” people and, perhaps, just perhaps, we will set about solving our problems of racism and the accompanying poverty.
Work Cited
Sweeney, Annie, Joe Mahr and Jeremy Gorner. “COVID-19 adds to crisis.” Chicago Tribune. Section 1.1, 16. May 17, 2020.
A Myriad of Things 