Why Should Another Child Go Hungry?

The moral stakes of the budget debate

Coretta Scott King addresses the “Solidarity Day” rally of the Poor People’s Campaign, June 19, 1968. (Getty Images)

“Starving a child is violence,” Coretta Scott King told a gathering of the Poor People’s Campaign on the National Mall in 1968, just weeks after her husband had been assassinated in Memphis, Tennessee.

Ms. King knew violence. She had felt its brutal capacity to steal what is most precious from us in this life.

But she also understood she was not its only victim. Starving a child can snatch away the gift of life as completely as an assassin’s bullet, yet the violence of children going hungry rarely makes headlines. One in five children is “food insecure” in this, the richest nation in the history of the world. Their families don’t have enough money to make sure they don’t go to bed hungry. But hunger is a slow and grinding violence. It’s hard to show it.

Still, Americans have a long-standing, bi-partisan commitment to investing in food for children. This is not a controversial political issue. Americans don’t believe children should go to bed hungry. We have long seen it as a shared responsibility to make sure our children eat, and we have made commitments through school-based meal programs and the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP). Based on our own government data, we have not invested enough to end child hunger in America. We can and must do more. Still, most people don’t think we should do less and let children go hungry.

This is one reason why the resolution Congress has passed to guide the current budget process on Capitol Hill is so extreme. It calls for the Agriculture Committee in the House to cut $230 billion from SNAP over the next decade. They are scheduled to vote this week on proposals for how to do this. Every option on the table would mean millions more US children go hungry.

Which begs a simple question: why?

Why does another child need to go hungry in America?

This is the question every member of the House Agriculture committee should have to answer before they vote.

The budget resolution the House is working under proposes many cuts, but it also includes some significant increases. The moral issue at stake is which spending priority justifies the violence of starving a child?

Should another child go hungry so a corporation in America can pay a lower tax rate?

Should another child go hungry so we can “reduce the debt”?

Should another child go hungry so rogue homeland security forces can have more funding to disappear people from our communities to offshore gulags?

Should another child go hungry here so our Defense Department can have more money to support wars that are starving children elsewhere?

These are the moral questions that we launched Moral Mondays at the US Capitol to raise before the nation. These are the fundamental moral questions that led us to pray in the Capitol rotunda. We invite you to join us in asking members of Congress to pray with us and families who will be harmed by the proposed cuts to SNAP.

Whether they agree to meet or not, we invite you to join on the east side of the Capitol, in front of the US Supreme Court, for another Moral Monday on June 2 to lift the voices of all who are crying out against the immorality of this budget.

Last summer we published a book about the exceptional poverty that passes as “normal” in the United States. America’s poverty crisis, which includes child hunger, doesn’t persist because we lack the resources to end it or because we don’t know how. America’s poverty continues because we haven't built a political coalition to end it.

We wrote White Poverty to highlight how America’s association of poverty with Blackness perpetuates myths that blind us to the most significant vulnerability in our common life: a creeping inequality that has created a widening gap between two Americas—not red and blue, but rich and poor.

An economy that doesn’t work for most Americans has made us vulnerable to lies that blame some of us for others’ problems. People who want to pillage our national resources have invested in spreading those divisive lies and using them to gain political power. The budget before Congress right now is the prize they hoped to win with all of their investment.

But we know that most Americans don’t want it. Most people don’t believe another child should go hungry so the richest people in this country can have more.

A moral fusion coalition, led by people who’ve already been hurt by greed, has the power to unite us around a vision of a government that works for all of us.

Moral fusion coalitions have pushed American toward a more perfect union at times of crisis in our past.

Moral fusion movements have been coming together in communities across America to oppose the extremism of this moment.

Now is the time for us to mobilize a national moral fusion movement to stop one big, ugly bill that proposes to harm all of us at once.

Now is the time to build the moral movement that can reconstruct an America that works for all of us.

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