Livia Gershon | Longreads | May 2018 | 10 minutes (2,395 words)
On Monday, May 14, I was among some ninety people gathered at the capitol building in Concord, New Hampshire. We sang old Civil Rights songs and held signs with slogans like "Starving a Child is Violence," and "Systemic Racism is Immoral." People told harrowing stories about growing up anxious over acquiring basic necessities and brushes with disaster when a child got sick and needed a parent at home. David Jadlocki, a pastor, gave a fire-and-brimstone sermon. "We will never be free, we will never be whole, we will never be happy, as long as our fullness is bought at the expense of another's existence," he said. "As long as there are children living in our nation who wake up each morning and go to bed each night gripped by the pains of hunger and the shame of poverty, we are not free."
The crowd comprised mostly the kinds of people you would expect to find at 2 p.m. on a weekday—retirees, students, workers who could duck out early—and the civil disobedience was less dogs-and-firehoses than a polite exchange with Officer Friendly; when a group blocked a street, we were gently escorted for a brief stay in jail. None of this may have appeared particularly extreme. But the message on display was something radical, a national revival of Martin Luther King Jr.'s 1968 Poor People's Campaign, taking place over 40 days, in 39 states plus Washington, D.C., with the slogan "a new and unsettling force." The movement aims to challenge the way most Americans view the economy, by overthrowing the treasured, toxic American ideal of personal responsibility. There's no personal shame in being poor, the campaign's leaders argue, what's shameful is maintaining a society in which poverty exists.
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