DALE PERKINS: Reverend Harold Munn ‘asks why we tolerate the existence of a permanent state of poverty’

FAITH GROUPS SHOW GOVERNMENT THE WAY

When leaders of faith communities play important prophetic roles in the community, we should all be thankful.

Reverend Harold Munn did that July 10 with his article “Food ‘emergency’ at 16 years and counting.”

He described how political and community neglect has resulted in low-income or almost-no-income people being forced to grovel for basic food supplies in order to survive in today’s Victoria.

He asks why we tolerate the existence of a permanent state of poverty.

And most telling, he wonders about a permanent social and economic system in which faith communities are expected to provide Band-Aids and charitable industries to make the intolerable bearable.

Most of us are thankful that churches, synagogues, temples and assemblies have sufficient compassion to motivate their members to volunteer and provide essential services, since the state refuses to.

At one time in our recent past, we had higher expectations of the state.

 What has happened in the interim?

Perhaps voices like Munn can bring us back to a degree of civility, when we again have the will to make demands of politicians and community leaders to abandon their fixation on market-driven policies and return us to the common purpose to look after one another.

As former U. S. President Jimmy Carter has written, “We know that a peaceful world cannot long exist when one-third of the population is rich and two-thirds are hungry.”

Dale Perkins

Victoria

 

[CCC reprint: Victoria Times Colonist, Friday, July 16, 2009, page A11]