What would you do, in his place? Following in the footsteps of the most popular person, much less politician, of your generation. Stepping into the realm when his brother was still there and in a position to make your life difficult. Never mind that he and his sister-in-laws lives were now, well, complicated. There is not much you can do about that, or the fact that the memory of your predecessor is not about to fade anytime soon. It may in fact grow.
A savvy man, no matter how large his own ego, would hitch his wagon to that star which may soon be deified. And Lyndon Johnson was nothing if not savvy. And egotistic. So he hitched his wagon to the memory of John F. Kennedy and loaded it up with the War on Poverty. This being the first war we declared on something other than an enemy combatant, we had to figure out how to win the war. (Such niceties have been discarded in later “Wars on…” you may have noticed.) Luckily for the President, Mollie Orshansky had come up with a way to do just that. She figured a way to tell who was poor.
It went, basically, like this: people spend a third of their income on food, so if we figure out how much it costs to feed a person and multiply it by three, we have a basic threshold for figuring out poverty. Off to the grocery store we go and take down the prices of cereal, milk, hamburger, and mallow mars. Times all that by three. Voila! Poverty level. Which works ok as long as the underlying assumptions all work. Like that the cost of a gallon of milk is the same on Massachusetts Ave as it is on Haywood Road. Or that DC rents are the same as Asheville rents.
Neither of which is necessarily true. Nor do we necessarily spend a third of our money on food these days. In absolute dollars we spend more. Cokes don’t cost a nickel anymore. But proportionally, we spend less on food than we did 50 years ago. Yes, 50. So what we wind up with is a standard for poverty that is much lower than actual poverty. It’s been true for years and years. No politician has wanted to do anything about it, however, because in the process of adjustment, someone is all of a sudden going to look like the guy who made 4 million or people poor overnight.
But of course they did not get poor overnight. They get poor by degrees. The gap between the most wealthy and the least of these is like a crack in the foundation of a house. At first you can’t see it and then you don’t want too. Next thing you know, the house is in danger of falling apart because there is a good half inch or more of daylight where the west facing wall meets the south facing wall. It’s gaps like that which let you know that your in trouble.
It’s that kind of gap that Jesus is trying to describe for his disciples in the Parable of the Talents. You know the one: a guy is going out of town so he gives one slave 5 coins, one slave 2, and one slave one. The first two invest and double theirs, but the third buries his. When the guy gets back, he rewards the first two and throws the third into the outer darkness. There he will be, as my high school principal assured us, “with wailing and gnashing of teeth.”
Who gets 100% returns on their investments anyway? The Madoffs? Payday loan people? Credit card companies? I’m not really sure, but I do know that Jesus is saying that you know that the end is nigh when the people who make this kind of money are the ones who are celebrated. They are the ones putting cracks in the foundation of our collective home. They are corrosive to our society. Perhaps, Jesus is suggesting that when 1% of our society creates such a chasm, it is time to issue a prophetic call. Perhaps that is exactly what people on corners in New York and Oakland and Hendersonville are trying to do.