Honoring King for efforts on behalf of working poor

In 1967, Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr. proposed his vision for America in his book Where Do We Go from Here: Chaos or Community? He challenged those in political and religious power to eliminate poverty once and for all. That gauntlet has yet to be picked up by any American leader.

Dr. King held firmly to the belief that freedom is founded on the religious principle that every life – rich and poor, white and Black, Republican and Democrat – is a reflection of God in us. He further asserted that “every act of injustice mars and defaces the image of God in men” (p. 105). Injustice included keeping people in poverty away from a living wage. Contrary to popular myth that the poor are poor because they choose not to work, Dr. King recognized that poverty is created by society. It is a man-made social class system.

In 2015 as in 1967, more whites live in poverty that blacks. Thus, poverty is not a race issue or an issue of laziness – it is a discrimination issue. Dr. King proposed a simple remedy to eliminate poverty, a remedy much talked about in his day but never implemented in the United States. That solution was the guaranteed income.

Though political and religious leaders in the United States lacked the moral courage to promote this idea, our Canadian neighbors in Ottawa and in Winnipeg, Manitoba, did not lack the moral courage. They put the guaranteed income idea to work first in Dauphin, Manitoba, a farming community, in 1974 to see if “giving checks to the working poor enough to top up their income to a living wage would kill people’s motivation to work. It didn’t,” reports Zi-Ann Lum, a Huffington Post journalist in December of 2014. Until the Canadian government changed in 1979, the experiment in lifting the working poor out of poverty provided proof ample that Dr. King’s idea actually worked on the practical level.

Now that a new Congress began this month, maybe instead of hot air, doing nothing, and giving the rich more tax breaks at the expense of working Americans, members of Congress will pick up Dr. King’s challenge and institute a guaranteed income for all America and end poverty in this, the richest nation in the world.

Talk is cheap. Having the moral courage to improve the life of the working poor is doing the right thing. We can only hope Congress chooses to do the right thing.

Dr. Duane Pitts is a retired Odessa public school teacher now living in Moses Lake.