Moral Monday in Georgia

I had the good fortune of being in Atlanta for the first Moral Monday in Georgia. More about that in a moment but first some background.

 Moral Mondays started in North Carolina In response to an aggressive right wing  state legislature and governor the people of Moral Monday started protests at the state legislature building. These weekly protests gradually grew until they were regularly attended by 2500 protesters. In 2013 over 900 people have been arrested in civil disobedience cases in North Carolina. Moral Mondays came out of coalition organizing work going back at least 8 years.  Moral Mondays are to a large extent lead by Reverend Doctor  William Barber who is also the North Carolina head for the NAACP. In North Carolina these protests have focused on countering several pieces of  legislation that were railroaded through by the Republican controlled North Carolina state government. The legislation included attacks on voting rights, cuts to unemployment benefits, opting out of the Medicaid expansion associated with the affordable care act, an increased tax to lower income workers, restrictions to abortion access, and  cuts to public education.  This right wing legislative blitzkrieg reminds me a bit of what Michigan went through once Rick Snyder and the Republican Party took charge of our state.  To the Moral Monday coalition the North Carolina Legislature was engaged in an immoral war on the poor. 

In Georgia apparently planning efforts have been underway for a while to build a similar political response to a conservative state government, and on January 13^th 2014 the protest was launched.  It was a rainy day, not the most encouraging of outdoor demonstrations, but by my count I think about 500 of us were present, many huddling under umbrellas, but all generally in good spirits.  The focus of the protest was the governors opting out of the Medicaid expansion.  This expansion would bring coverage to approximately 600,000 citizens in Georgia, with my quick back of the envelope calculations this is about 6 % of the population of the state.  Initially the Medicaid expansion will be covered by the federal government, later the states will be required to take up 5%  of the costs, then later still 10% of the costs.  Even if you’re a fiscal tight wad providing healthcare benefits for some 6% of your states poorest people is a fiscal win.  A healthy population is a more productive population; productive populations bring in more tax review and cost the government less. Reverend Barber traveled to Atlanta this week to join us on the Georgia state house grounds. While my general patients for clergy is not so high I found his talk encouraging. Specifically he contrasted the so called construction of “morality” by the right to the morality of his faith.  Jesus was clear about one thing, helping the poor, and Reverend Barber pointed out that there is no inconsistency in using the government to provide the help. A next Moral Monday Georgia style is scheduled for the end of January.

I was lucky to be in Georgia on the 13^th, I was there for my mother’s 80^th birthday. We celebrated on the Saturday before and she actually turned 80.  Moral Monday felt like part of the celebration , as an activist family participating in a protest that is a launch of an effort for economic justice in Georgia was certainly celebratory, rain and all.

As I reflected on this demonstration I thought about the 2011 protests in Wisconsin, and the Occupy Movement.  I remembered the many demonstrations against the keystone pipeline in 2012, I thought about the efforts to prevent anti-abortion legislation from passing in Texas this past year, I also thought about the growing fast food workers strikes and demands for living wages. It has been argued that many of these efforts haven’t really brought about significant change; Occupy fizzled out, the Republican legislatures continue to pass their anti-worker, anti-poor, anti-women, anti-gay legislation, and no change to minimum wage seems immanent. Moral Mondays? How long will they last you might ask. But its important to see each of these protest movements as part of, and the first tiny steps in an uprising.  More and more people are getting that things are amiss, and people are starting to do something about it.  I have two hopes, one is that these protests and direct actions continue and grow, and the other is that as the protest movements grow activists from different sectors learn to listen and communicate with each other. I hope that the anarchist from Zuccotti park, can understand the Minister from North Carolina, that southern anti-poverty activists, can see the struggle against global warming as a struggle for a sustainable and fair economy, that women’s rights to choose are linked to rights for a living wage, rights for access to health care. All this and more. Somewhere in here is also a struggle for democracy, against the rule of the 1%. As I participated in the demonstration this past Monday I had the feeling that there was space for a broad coalition and I felt encouraged. Good luck Georgia going forward.