No Greater Moral Imperative

Behind my house is a dense wooded area surrounding a creek that flows into a lake near my home.  Deer often make their way up the creek bed during winter searching for food.  Gaunt and weak, they come out of the woods at night to pick at the tree bark and eat branches off shrubs in my yard.

As they crowd around me on those cold, bleak, snowy nights, they stick their noses in the feed bucket as I pour a mixture of rolled oats and corn onto the ground.  Feeding the deer is not nature's way, but nature didn't surround them with sub-divisions either.  The city accuses me of contributing to an overpopulation of deer, but I reject that.  If there is a deer problem in my area, it's because the city and county do not have a wildlife plan.  Starvation is not a plan, it's the result of no plan. 

In a similar fashion, I was shocked the other day to learn of a new public relations campaign in Kansas City encouraging community and church organizations to stop feeding the homeless.  Led by the Police Department and officials at City Hall,  the city council is threatening to pass an ordinance making feeding the homeless illegal.  As incredible as their logic seems, the city contends that feeding the homeless contributes to a homeless problem.  Does the city actually believe people are willing to give up their homes and live on the streets just to receive a free sandwich on cold February nights?

Each evening, food trucks roll out of community centers and churches, passing out blankets, shoes, coats and food to the homeless.  However, to hear community leaders talk, that should be a crime.  Quoting Leslie Caplan, president of a local neighborhood association (Kansas City Star, 2/2/13), "It's killing our wonderful neighborhoods and historic homes."  Sean O'Byrne, of the Kansas City Downtown Council, says, "Throwing a sandwich to someone in a park is getting redemption on the cheap."  Thankfully, community and church organizations are refusing to comply.  Neal Jorgenson, of the Salvation Army, explained it this way, "We are not enabling them.  We are keeping them alive tonight."

Eric Cantor (R-Va), the House Majority Leader, said in a speech last week before the American Enterprise Institute (2/5/13), "There is no greater moral imperative than to reduce the mountain of debt facing us..." It's the idea that if America can't afford to fund it's obligations, we should start by cutting social programs, instituting a sort of economic triage.  Let's save the people who have jobs, who have money, while depriving the poor of food, shelter and medical care.  That's not a moral imperative, it's the absence of one.  

Funding social programs doesn't make the United States a welfare state.  It is precisely those government programs, large in scope, that give our nation it's most effective tools to address problems in a cost effective way.  For instance, only FEMA can bring to bear the overall resources needed in an emergency.  Yet, the GOP finds it difficult to fund disaster relief at all.  In the final passage of the recent Hurricane Sandy relief bill, 179 Republicans in the House, nearly 80% of their caucus, voted against it. 

For all the faith in God that conservative Republicans profess to have, they conveniently forget that Christ had his budget problems, too.  Yet, He managed to feed a multitude with five loaves of bread and two fish.  How is that different from the Food Stamp program feeding 32 million children?  Perhaps, our budget problems would disappear if we built our society from the bottom up instead of the top down.  Feed the hungry, heal the sick and give shelter to the homeless.  There is no greater moral imperative.

Eric Cantor, who wants to exact his pound of flesh from the poor to avoid paying higher taxes, would do well to heed Portia's admonition to Shylock in Shakespeare's The Merchant of Venice, Act IV, Scene I:

"The quality of mercy is not strained.
It droppeth as the gentle rain from heaven
Upon the place beneath. It is twice blest:
It blesseth him that gives and him that takes.
Tis mightiest in the mightiest; it becomes
The throned monarch better than his crown.
His scepter shows the force of temporal power,
The attribute to awe and majesty,
Wherein doth sit the dread and fear of kings.
But mercy is above this sceptered sway;
It is enthroned in the hearts of kings;
It is an attribute of God himself;
And earthly power doth then show like God's
When mercy seasons justice."