Let's all agree on this: We are in the midst of a poverty crisis of biblical proportions, created over the last fifty years when it could have been avoided. Better judgement, more moral judgment in America would have changed things, lifted up the poor in some stirring Kennedy-esque motif. But once motifs get assassinated, its time to roll up your sleeves to help the poor. Whether it's your brother or your mother or your neighbor or your cousin or a stranger, member of your clan or congregation, or not.
I beg for justice and mercy in the poverty capital of America, where my father did before me, before he died of a liquor-soaked, broken heart. I have street credibility.
I stand next to thousands of people a year, who publicly declare that they are poor, and, therefore, require effective assistance of counsel as guaranteed by the Sixth Amendmint to the Constitution appointed at government's expense. I am an assistant public defender in the Crooked River swamps.
But, I also have a message. Lots of them, in fact. One primary message holds sway over me the most. It's not one of my own invention. It has lasted thousands of years. But it has, also, been largely obscured. It is this: you judge a society by how it treats the least among its citizens. Period. And our society is in epic failure on this point.
But all is not doom and gloom, my friends. Because I have solutions. Plenty of them. Here, in my own little internet pseudo-autonomy zone I call The Bloomsday Manifesto.
[Cue the bongos, and flautist.]
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