Inequality in Kansas and the U.S. threatens to swamp us all. We must look out for one another.
Columnist Mark McCormick stands among the crowd at the Martin Luther King Jr. celebration on Jan. 12, 2023. (Sherman Smith/Kansas Reflector)
The Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. once said that as long as poverty existed, he could never be rich, even with a billion dollars.
“As long as diseases are rampant and millions of people in this world cannot expect to live more than 28 or 30 years, I can never be totally healthy even if I just got a good checkup at Mayo Clinic,” he said. “I can never be what I ought to be until you are what you ought to be.”
King saw stunning inequality some 60 years ago and proposed structural changes to help make the country whole. These ideas — the death of inequality and the survival of a common good — could determine society’s future.
Some 27,000 Kansans lost Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program access after passage earlier this summer of President Donald Trump’s H.R. 1 bill that shifted millions in federal responsibilities to states.
This vast new wave of food insecurity could create another social pathogen.
Back in 2016, a Clemson University researcher offered “An Examination of Food Insecurity and Its Impact on Violent Crime in American Communities.” The study, by Jonathan Randel Caughron, “examines how the relationship between food insecurity and violent crime varies in relation to the level of dependent variables such as the income level and population level of the county.”
The study suggested a 1% increase in food insecurity could lead to a 12% increase in violent crime.
Mean policy — cutting access to food and education — seems to produce mean people. We are more connected than many care to admit, no matter how many walls and gated communities we build. We fixate on symptoms but avoid causes.
This nation remains proficient at tough and even cruel anti-crime measures. Consider what this portends, especially as inequality continues to rise. According to an Associated Press article from 2019, U.S. inequality had grown to its highest level in a half-century. Yes, it said, “even in Kansas.”
“The gap between the haves and have-nots in the United States grew last year to its highest level in more than 50 years of tracking income inequality, according to U.S. Census Bureau,” the article said.
It went on: “Income inequality in the United States expanded from 2017 to 2018, with several heartland states (like Kansas and Nebraska) among the leaders of the increase, even though several wealthy coastal states still had the most inequality overall.”
The report noted that not only had Kansas opted to not raise the minimum wage, but the economic recovery also led to windfalls for those owning “stocks, property, and other assets.”
The article referenced University of Kansas economist Donna Ginther, who said: “The winners tend to be at the top. Even though we are at full employment, wages really haven’t gone up much in the recovery.”
There remains a school of thought that poverty reflects bad choices and bad character. Even King reportedly exhorted Black Americans to prepare themselves for full citizenship by getting their financial houses in order.
But he also said: “The curse of poverty has no justification in our age. The time has come for us to civilize ourselves by the total, direct, and immediate abolition of poverty.”
King spoke often of the systems that support a culture of poverty.
“True compassion,” he said, “is more than flinging a coin to a beggar; it is not haphazard and superficial. It comes to see that an edifice which produces beggars needs restructuring.”
And: “One day we must ask the question, ‘Why are there 40 million poor people in America?’ And when you begin to ask that question, you are raising questions about the economic system, about a broader distribution of wealth.”
Extremists frequently quote King out of context about “content of character,” and “color of skin,” but they never acknowledge his commitment to the poor, a belief system that likely got King killed.
King objected to the war in Vietnam, arguing that military spending drained resources for “social uplift” programs.
“The bombs in Vietnam explode at home; they destroy the hopes and possibilities for a decent America,” he said.
King wasn’t alone. President Dwight Eisenhower expressed similar thoughts.
“Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and not clothed,” he said. “This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children.”
Ike sounds like King there. The question becomes just how this “Christian” nation will respond. What does this mean for wealthy Christians seemingly choosing a third or fourth house and a fourth or fifth car over food and shelter for suffering people?
H.R. 1, also called the “big, beautiful bill,” represented to many observers the greatest transfer of wealth from the poor and working class to the wealthy in the nation’s history. But people are not disposable, and we are not meant to live in isolation.
“This is the way our world is made,” King said. “No individual or nation can stand out boasting of being independent. We are interdependent.”
Mark McCormick is the former executive director of the Kansas African American Museum, a member of the Kansas African American Affairs Commission and former deputy executive director at the ACLU of Kansas. Through its opinion section, Kansas Reflector works to amplify the voices of people who are affected by public policies or excluded from public debate. Find information, including how to submit your own commentary, here.