Paving the Way to Poverty
AM Psalm 38 • PM Psalm 119:25-48
Amos 8:1-14 • Rev. 1:17-2:7 • Matt. 23:1-12
I learned about Ireland's Famine Roads from an Irish plant pathologist in a packed auditorium at a university in Boston—"well, not in Boston, but nearby. No, not Tufts."* As the oomycete Phytophthora infestans destroyed tubers, the British government caused the true Irish Potato Famine of 1845-1852. In accordance with the Poor Law, the Irish had to work for their emergency aid. But constructive work was nearly as scarce as healthy potato plants, and starving people were directed to build roads to nowhere, thus staving off the horrors of government dependency with fruitless labor and mass starvation.
Though climate change may make me eat my words soon enough, at present we produce enough food for everyone on the planet. Hunger today is a distribution problem, often rooted in the same vicious cycle that drove the rebellion and mass-exodus of the Irish: wring money from the poor, require continued poverty for welfare, blame the poor for their poverty, repeat ad infinitum.
With this historical and modern context, today’s reading from Amos may leave a different taste in your mouth:
Hear this, you that trample on the needy, and bring to ruin the poor of the land, saying, "When will the new moon be over so that we may sell grain; and the sabbath, so that we may offer wheat for sale? We will make the ephah small and the shekel great, and practice deceit with false balances, buying the poor for silver and the needy for a pair of sandals, and selling the sweepings of the wheat." The LORD has sworn by the pride of Jacob: Surely I will never forget any of their deeds.
* This is a quote from Season 4, Episode 11 of 30 Rock, and if you don’t get the joke, the university in question is Harvard.
Written by Kathryn Haydon
Kathryn holds a doctorate in Plant Science from the University of Arkansas and currently lives in St. Louis where she works as a food and plant scientist. She reads oodles of science fiction and fantasy and shares a happy, book-filled home with her husband Nathan and their cats Ollie and Adair. Her current fiction obsession is the Books of Babel quadrilogy by Josiah Bancroft.