"The worst mistake we could make in this time of rallies and marches would be to demand too little!"

June 20, 2020, 1:28pm.  I've just finished participating in the Mass Assembly of the Poor People's Campaign.  I was lucky that I had a great "bus ride" with friends and family.  We laughed and joked, and explained the snacks and books we'd brought for the ride.  We needed this virtual bus to replace the long-awaited bus we were planning to take to Washington.  At 10am, we "arrived" and went to the Assembly, keeping in touch by text, which is the way to "share" an event these days.

The goal of the Assembly was to change the narrative by changing the narrators, and thereby to help us actually see the depth and breadth of the pain of the 140 million poor and low-wealth people in our country. So many people spoke, about so many issues, in short chapters. Women are suffering, let's hear from women. Mass incarceration is choking us, let's hear from the formerly incarcerated. Native communities are suffering, let's hear from them.

Let's hear from them.

I know all of these stories, and am constantly, in my own teaching and writing, trying to get across this point. But nothing I could say could equal the power of this time hearing from people speaking about their struggles. As an American, I am horrified. As a physician, I am crying -- 700 people a day die from poverty, that was before Covid-19, and you could see the weathering in the speakers' bodies and their faces and their voices.

Reverend William Barber II cautioned us that the worst mistake we could make in this time of rallies and marches would be to demand too little. The Assembly was designed to hammer home the lesson that, "The political and economic systems in the U.S. are plagued by the interlocking injustices of systemic racism, poverty, militarism and a war economy, ecological devastation and a distorted moral narrative of religious nationalism."

No single demand could undo this -- it is truly an ecology of inequality. Therefore the Poor People's Campaign has pushed for a complex of demands carried by a moral fusion coalition. It is the combination of the two -- complex demands and the moral fusion coalition -- that are the right way forward in these times.

Reverend Barber asked us to each take an inventory of our time on this earth. Not to be morbid, he said, but we've seen how fast and unexpectedly life could end. "If," he asked, "you knew you had 48 hours to live, what would you fight for with your last breath?"

For me, the answer is simple. My life has been about wrapping my mind around the epidemics affecting poor and minority communities, trying to understand the way out of this mess. With my last breath, I'd say, "Join the Poor People's Campaign." If you didn't get to see the Assembly this morning, watch at 6pm tonight or when they post the recording. It lights the way. As they said over and over, "Somebody's hurting our people.  It's gone on far too long, and we won't be silent anymore."

Coronavirus: Every attack on the poor must embolden our agitation!

Back at the beginning of shelter-in-place, I said there were five tasks we had to do to stay same and come out alive.  One was that we must fight for justice.  The outpouring of people into the streets demanding justice makes sense in a time when our fractured, abusive system is laid bare by the deadly progression of coronavirus through the land.

For four years, the 400 Years of Inequality Project has held up the work of Reverend Dr. William Barber II as charting the path away from inequality towards a nation truly for all.  When the Poor People's Campaign announced the Assembly in Washington on June 20th, we pointed our work in that direction.

The time has come.  There are two events we're doing to lead up to the Assembly at 10am this Saturday.

Tonight, we're holding a workshop on the People's Platform for Equity that we wrote based on our 4 years of examining the problem of inequality, including all the observances we got to attend of the 400th Anniversary of Jamestown.  You can join us at tonight (June 17th) at 7pm for an explanation of the People's Platform and how we got there.

Saturday, we've organized a "virtual" bus that will get you to the Assembly on time!  Join us at 9:30am to share signs and chants, as we "go" to Washington to hear the voices of the poor and dispossessed.  Here's a short video from the Poor People's Campaign that will give you a taste of what's to come!

And of course there's the June 20th Assembly of Poor People's Campaign.  Part protest and part programmatic organizing, this Assembly will us get on the same page about the demands we need to place on our governments, local, state and federal, to stop the abuse of the poor, which translates to the abuse of us all.  It will be a crucial moment in this charged era.

Join us!

Be there!

Coronavirus: Making the moral response to the pandemic

Last night, March 26th, I attended a wonderful and inspiring Facebook Live event of the Poor People's Campaign, which is going digital, given the need for all of us to shelter in place.

This morning I got an email from AMA President Patrice Harris, which said:

The AMA is pressing the President and his administration to use all levers to help you on the front lines, including an urgent appeal to use the Defense Production Act to immediately increase the domestic production of PPE, medical supplies and equipment. 

We are teaming up with the American Hospital Association and American Nursing Association to get financial assistance for physicians and to urge the public to STAY HOME.

What immediately struck me was how short her list of allies was: AMA, AHA, and ANA are important, but it is clear that we need to go into this fight for a moral response to the pandemic with much more power.  Why isn't the Poor People's Campaign listed as an ally in the fight to save the lives of our health care professional?  One consequence of the inexcusable mismanagement of this epidemic will be the deaths of doctors, nurses, x-ray technicians, respiratory therapists and others who have responded to the moral calling of their professions, but without adequate back-up from the nation.

We have to be acting in a moral manner if we are going to ask them to do so.

Reverend William Barber, who is a leader of the Poor People's Campaign developed the seminal idea of the moral fusion coalition while serving as President of the NAACP in North Carolina.  He observed that there were many small and siloed organizations fighting for justice, each with its own issue.  He asked them to come together, recognizing that they had different issues but a common enemy.  Together those small groups formed the powerful "Moral Monday Movement."  It is an important truth in American history that great victories have been won by coalitions.  The moral fusion coalition is the coalition we need at this moment to fight for us to be on the right side of history.

What are the demands of a moral response to the pandemic?

Who are the organizations that will join this moral fusion coalition?

Coronavirus: The Pandemic and The Seven Sins

A perspective on the pandemic written by Robert Sember and Mindy Thompson Fullilove, March 22, 2020. 

On October 20, 2019, Rev. Dr. William Barber II delivered a homily at Riverside Church in observance of the 400th anniversary of the first Africans arriving at Jamestown to be sold into bondage.  His sermon, entitled “Stolen Hands, Stolen Lands,” enacted a trial of the United States  (you can find a transcript of the sermon here).  He presented the following seven charges, or sins, that America had committed as it sought to justify slavery and prevent the eradication of its harms: bad biology, sick sociology, political pathology, corruptible courts, evil economics, militia madness, and heretical ontology.  His explication of the historical appearance of these actions provided a sound basis for linking the harms of slavery to the crisis of the coronavirus pandemic now sweeping the world.  As the pandemic hits America, we believe that the seven sins are titling us toward worse case scenarios. These need to be understood and fought by a moral fusion coalition.  

The novel coronavirus, COVID19, was identified December 31, 2019, as the cause of a new upper respiratory illness, characterized by cough, fever, and shortness of breath.  As cases accumulated, it became clear that the illness was highly infectious and deadly, causing respiratory distress.  The initial outbreak in Wuhan, China, was briefly hidden by the government, but as cases and deaths mounted the nation instituted population-level quarantine, eventually affecting 750 million people.  The nation sent supplies and health care workers to Wuhan and its surrounding province, which was most severely affected.  New hospitals were built in as little as two days, providing space for the care of those who could not remain at home.  Clinicians and other scientists worked around the clock to describe the virus, including sequencing its genome and immediately sharing this information with the world (including the CDC in the USA), and describing the clinical features of the disease and the outcomes for the first hundreds of patients.  These efforts helped to contain the epidemic: at the time of this writing, only a few new cases were being reported. As of March 22, 2020, China had experienced 81,093 cases and 3,270 deaths.  

As the rest of the world watched this unfold, societies took different steps in their response.  South Korea identified its first case in mid-January and immediately instituted a full array of public health measures, including widespread testing, contact tracing and population-level quarantine for hot spots, effectively containing the epidemic to one city.  Italy was slower to respond, and was quickly overwhelmed: the number of deaths there from coronavirus surpassed those in China on March 19, 2020.  

The United States also had its first case in January. More like Italy than South Korea, the US made minimal use of the early days of the epidemic to prepare effectively.  In particular, the US bungled early efforts at disseminating tests for the virus, making it impossible to deploy much of the rest of the epidemic control tool kit.  Cases spread, following the classic geography of hierarchical diffusion, spatial contagion and network diffusion.  President Donald Trump repeatedly claimed that the epidemic was not a problem, praised himself and his administration for their successes, and declared that, like the flu, it would disappear with warmer weather.  Thus his administration dallied while infection spread silently and exponentially, by March 15th reaching the point of inflection at which the number of cases began to shoot up and those with advanced infection to overwhelm the hospitals.  As of this writing there were 22,000 known cases in the United States, but, because of the failure to implement widespread testing, there are probably 10 times that number, or 220,000.  Models suggest that we may see 2.2 million infections in the weeks to come.  

We turn from this short history to examine the ways in which Reverend Barber’s iteration of America’s seven sins reveals how we come to be on this terrible path of excess death, economic distress and loss of faith in government. To illustrate the concepts, we have selected examples of each of the seven sins; there are many others that could be included in this list.

1. As evidence of bad biology we have a litany of denials, distractions, falsehoods, and arrogant magical thinking that led the CDC to turn down the WHO’s offer to provide test kits, only to find that its self-designed tests were faulty.  The resulting delay hampered public health workers’s efforts to develop an accurate map of where and how infections were growing locally, regionally, and nationally.  This bad biology continues in the failure of the federal government to implement, in a timely manner, the full panoply of public health containment efforts.  Then, prematurely thrust into the mitigation phase of the epidemic, we faced and continue to face equivocation regarding the production and distribution of PPE and ventilators and the building of temporary hospitals. Reports suggest that the administration is more interested in adhering to its “small government” and “free market” ideology than using the resources at its disposal.  Instead, we are offered the promise of treatments, even cures, that lack the evidence-base to support such claims.  Testing potential therapies and vaccines is essential but premature, exaggerated, and unfounded claims of efficacy is not helpful.  Equivocation fuels ambivalence and confusion.  This contributes to the “don’t worry and carry on” attitude some are practicing as they ignore calls for social distancing and gather for recreation and worship.

2. The formulation, “China Virus,” is subjecting us to yet another episode in this administration’s spectacle of othering.  By casting an entire nation or population as the cause of the epidemic, the president and his apologists have dashed weeks of efforts by local officials to combat anti-Chinese racism and the falsehoods upon which those ideas and practices rest.  This sick sociology will surely make us sicker in body, in spirit, and in community.  Thus, in addition to addressing the legitimate challenges of this moment, we also have to deal with these efforts to blame the epidemic away and set peoples against one another.  

3. As indicated above, a political pathology fuels bad biology, sick sociology, and the other structures named by Rev. Barber.  This crisis underscores the costs of the political calculus underlying attacks on the Affordable Care Act and related efforts to extend medical care to all in this country.  Conservative forces are exploiting this crisis to further diminish women's reproductive rights by designating abortions "elective" and, therefore "nonessential" surgical procedures that must be delayed.  This administration’s budget proposals have also repeatedly included sizeable cuts to the CDC (The CDC’s staff has decreased by 591 positions, or 5.4%, from December 2016 through March 2019) and NIH, and then there is the confusion and lack of knowledge in the executive branch regarding whether and how the directorate for global health security and biodefense on the National Security Council (NSC) was either eliminated or reorganized.  The Obama administration established this position in response to the Ebola crisis wake-up call.  The debates regarding what actually happened to this position underscore a basic lack of planning and preparedness.  And, we see political pathology in the emerging stories of how certain politicians used their insider knowledge to leverage their own profiteering by claiming that the crisis was not a crisis while selling off their investments ahead of the inevitable plummet in the stock market.

4. Contestations regarding the responsibilities and accountability of the state can be arbitrated by the courts.  The current administration has been very clear, however, that this is not its understanding of the function of the courts, which it is aggressively populating with ideological purists.  Corruptible courts are more likely to obey than dissent.  And so, under the guise of this crisis, while other arms of the justice department work to promote social distancing and other practices that will help curtail and eventually end this crisis, immigration and deportation hearings continue.  The crisis is already being used to heighten border restrictions and to restrict asylum claims.  Reports are also emerging that while the administration is not using its vast emergency powers to accelerate production and distribution of essential emergency equipment--devolving those responsibilities to the atomized albeit well meaning efforts of the private sector and already overburdened state governments--it is keen to use the crisis to push for controversial policy changes, including the ability to ask chief judges to detain people indefinitely without trial during emergencies.

5. The economy is heading for recession, and here we show how this is linked to evil economics.  Millions are facing unemployment and production and consumption flows are severely curtailed.  The path plotted by politicians, industry, and corporations as the way through this will reveal what is considered the country’s priority.  While a proposed corporate tax cut promises to compound income inequality, this crisis has afforded us the opportunity to elevate consideration of long-standing economic crises that have either been continually ignored or deferred: homelessness, a growing part-time and, therefore, precarious workforce, real estate speculation, student loan debt, rising rents as a result of national corporate consolidation of rental properties, food insecurity, digital divides, etc.  The culture of greed and exploitation is endemic to our society as evidenced by the hundreds of thousands of people who took it upon themselves to hoard hand sanitizer, masks, and other supplies or to market counterfeit products so that they could use fear and panic to coerce consumers to pay exorbitantly inflated prices.  Similarly with the hoarding of food by those who have the disposable income and “me first” inclinations to do so.  The images of revelers permitted to celebrate spring break on the beaches of Florida at risk of spreading infection further throughout the nation was another sign of evil economics.

We also see evil economics at play in the vastly skewed value we place on labor in our society: the service workers that are now cleaning, driving buses and trains, delivering mail and packages, and stocking shelves struggle to make ends meet at the best of times and usually only do so by working more than one job. 

6. Violence is a time honored strategy for dealing with a crisis.  Militia madness is what lies behind racist maneuvers, such as intentionally referring to the Novel Coronavirus or COVID-19 as the “China Virus.”  Violence is done when the number of people incarcerated in prisons that are often already beyond capacity is not reduced, and when individuals and families continue to be detained and deported.  We enter this crisis as a country that is deeply and violently divided. Our militia madness ensures that many are excessively armed and will be ready, as they have been in the past, to act to preserve the power and privilege of the few.  Gun manufacturers and gun merchants are thriving in this crisis as people purchase new and additional weapons and stock up on ammunition convinced that things will get so bad that only the violent will come through.  Given the history of this militia madness it is hard not to think that this fear may be a wish.

7. In Rev. Barber’s review of the history of inequality, heretical ontology, the notion that inequality is at the very heart of our nation, functions as the system’s bedrock and its blueprint.  To succumb to heretical ontology is the greatest defeat of all for it means that we both accept and collude in the production and enforcing of inequality.  This belief blinds us to other ways of being and relating to others, including the realization that we are all in this together, that as we act to protect others we are protecting ourselves.  To manifest the tenderness imminent in shared vulnerability means that we affirm that everyone is worthy, valuable, and deserving.  Inequality, such as the assumption that extraordinary measures are not required to protect homeless men and women from the risks of infection, is heretical, a betrayal of our shared life.  Medical professionals are going to find themselves in fiercely difficult situations in the coming weeks as they determine how best to use limited resources.  They will likely be accused of rationing care when, in fact, it is actually the existing rationing of inequality managed through bad biology, sick sociology, political pathology, corruptible courts, and evil economics that undergirds this all.  

We outline this analysis in the spirit with which Rev. Barber presented his sermon on the seven charges against the United States on October 20, 2019.  He framed this call to account for the legacy of slavery and settler colonialism as an opportunity for “learning from the sins of the past so that we might embrace a better future.”  This current crisis is another opportunity to take up this work.  Indeed, the word “crisis” is derived from the Greek word “krisis,” used to name that "turning point in a disease" when a patient could get better or worse.  It's a critical moment.  As we work to prevent illness, care for and heal those who are ill, accompany with compassion and mourn those who do not survive, so must we attend to the social ills of inequality that shape this time of crisis.  This is a political “turning point” and a “critical moment” for justice.  

Rev. Barber foreshadows this juncture by punctuating his review of the history of racist ideologies and practices with James Baldwin’s incontrovertible challenge: “We made the world we’re living in and we have to make it over again.”  In this period of crisis, we confront a most American of paradoxes: our deeply exercised capacity for, on the one hand, discrimination, exclusion, privilege, and dehumanization--we are not, as some in power claim, “all in this together”--and, on the other, the spirit of justice, equity, emancipation, and horizontalism--indeed we are “all in this together” if our intention is our collective wellbeing.  Within this paradox lie crucial questions of spirit and being, existential questions, questions of community and society.  We have an opportunity to look at who we are and to envision who we might become.  “I am committed to working with you all to build a moral fusion coalition in the 21st century,” declared Rev. Barber as he concluded his sermon.  Then he asked: “Is there anybody else in here ready to build?”

Coronavirus: How distorted thinking will kill us and what that has to do with slavery

I was heartbroken by the front page of the Times today:

These headlines outline the crisis of bad thinking that we are in, but let me draw your attention to a few indicators.

1. The government knew that something like this pandemic could happen and that the nation was unprepared.  We did not get prepared.  
2. Health care workers have been decrying the shortage of personal protective equipment, but the nation has not revved up production.
3. Unemployment claims are surging, but President Trump asked the states to suppress the numbers.
4. People are working to find a "silver bullet" but not employing proven "magic strategies."
5. And (not shown) a story about rightwing people in Louisiana who scoffed at the coronavirus until one of their own got seriously ill from it.  

I could go on, as could anyone who's been following the news and updates from public health and medicine.  I think, however, that I've proven the point that we are managing this pandemic in a fashion that will increase its devastation to our population.  

I promised to say how this bad thinking is related to slavery, which might have puzzled you as a claim. 

For the past four years, I have worked with a consensus group of organizations on a project called, "400 Years of Inequality."  Our project issued a call in 2018 for the nation to observe 2019 as the 400th anniversary of the first Africans landing at Jamestown to be sold into bondage. Observances were carried out all across the US, in small churches and large concert halls. 

We focused on "inequality" because we saw that as an egregious and enduring harm of slavery that entrained the whole nation.  We were honored to have the Reverend Dr. William Barber II offer the homily at a solemn occasion held at Riverside Church, called "Stolen Lands, Stolen Hands."  He centered his homily on the identification of "seven sins" committed to justify slavery.  These include: bad biology and sick sociology.  He emphasized that we have not scrubbed these distorted ways of thinking from our schools and universities or from our government or our population.  

Philosopher Robert Fullilove had this to say about distorted thinking:

Logicians teach us that, if the premises of thinking are incorrect -- for example, if people postulate that some are not the equals of others -- then they will make conclusions based on these premises that are logically correct (they will have formed a "valid argument"). But here is tricky part: "valid" is not the same as "true."  That does not mean, in other words, that their conclusions will be illogical.  People can make logical arguments beginning with false premises, but sound logic does not make the conclusions we derive from untrue premises to be true.  

And that is the trap that we find ourselves in at this moment.  We are working from false premises and arriving at "valid" but wrong conclusions. It is killing us.  

One immediate step: sign the Poor People's Campaign petition for a "Moral Response to COVID19." Led by Reverend Dr. Barber, this "moral fusion" campaign invites all of us to recognize that inequality harms us all and to fight against it.