How To Heal A Society That’s Sick

Outside Senator Lindsay Graham’s Greenville, South Carolina office on Monday of this week, Lisa Walters shared a recent conversation with her daughter, Nicole. A local small business owner, Walters wore an American flag shirt underneath her white cardigan on a cool Fall morning. She explained that Nicole, like her, is self-employed and purchases her health insurance through South Carolina’s ACA marketplace.

The conversation Lisa had with Nichole was one she said she never wanted to have.

“I may not be able to afford health insurance this year,” Nicole told her mom, “but I do feel like my health is at a point where I should be OK.”

“I’m not OK with that,” Walters said, shaking her head. “I’m her mom!”

There are a lot of moms like Lisa. Whatever their politics, they want to know that their kids are going to be OK. And whoever they voted for in the last election, they never want those who represent them in Washington, DC to take away their kids’ health insurance so they could give tax breaks to billionaires.

Clergy and concerned citizens joined people like Lisa at Senate offices across the South and the Rustbelt for Moral Mondays again this week.

We were outside Senator Ted Budd’s Raleigh, North Carolina office on Monday with Sloan Meek, a friend who has already received notice that North Carolina’s Medicaid program cut payments to his providers by 3-10% this month because of funding reductions that are coming from the federal government.

Sloan explained why he refuses to be silent while the programs that sustain his life are unnecessarily destroyed, making millions of Americans disappear.

MAGA’s Mike Johnson and John Thune want Americans to believe that the dramatic cuts to healthcare that they forced through Congress and are refusing to re-negotiate in order to reopen the government are meant to “shore up” Medicaid and Medicare.

They have refused to believe the data that says millions will lose their healthcare and tens of thousands will die.

They have tried to scapegoat immigrants and say that the savings in their budget would come from kicking undocumented people off of programs for which they’ve never been eligible, even though many undocumented workers pay the taxes that help fund those programs.

They have denied the data and they have used lies to distract, but 24 million Americans are getting letters this month that will explain to them that their health insurance premiums are about the double. People who lose something they’re used to having aren’t easy to distract or deny.

Which is why leaders like Lisa and Sloan are so important to the future of American public life right now. They have the moral authority to speak about what is broken and to lead an opposition to the authoritarian movement that has exploited the inequities of our common life that politicians have allowed to deepen for far too long.

Moral Mondays are about local clergy and moral leaders inviting their communities to see that the people we need to lead us out of the mess we are in are folks who’ve known rejection and injustice but still believe that a better future is possible for all of us.

In Lexington, Kentucky, Erica Davenport feeds her community because she knows what it means to be hungry. She has the moral authority to challenge Senators who cut SNAP and other nutrition assistance programs while, at the same time, they tripled funding for ICE. That’s why her voice was at the center of Kentucky’s Moral Monday this week.

Coordinated Moral Monday actions like these took place on October 20th across Alabama, Kentucky, Mississippi, North Carolina, Ohio, Pennsylvania, South Carolina, Virginia, and West Virginia. Gatherings that include both people of faith and people not of faith, these pray-in/stay-ins make clear that what we all face together is a moral crisis.

Our problem isn’t simply that some people need healthcare. Our problem is that our society is sick.

We are being led by people who do not tell the truth, who have forsaken their own oath of office, who are turning the tools of our government against us.

How do we heal a society that’s sick? We cannot wait for someone else to come and save us, and we sure can’t trust the people who’ve created this disaster to fix it. We need a movement to call forth new leaders, and that movement is being led by the people who already feel the pain.

If 24 million people are about to see their health insurance premiums double, they are the base we must organize to elect a new Congress in 2026. the Bible says that “the stone that the builders rejected has become the chief cornerstone.” Just as the best music comes out of communities that have known the greatest suffering, the people who are experiencing rejection right now are the leaders we need to heal what ails our common life.

Moral Mondays are about builing a platform for these leaders and declaring that now is the time to follow them to freedom.

No one understands the potential power of this kind of mobilization better than the politicians who are desperately trying to cling to power. They wouldn’t be fighting us this hard if they didn’t understand our power.

Despite their assertion that they have a mandate, MAGA Mike Johnson and his caucus in the House are working with the slimmest of margins, and they know their policies are incredibly unpopular. So does Donald Trump. This is why he has insisted - and North Carolina’s General Assembly has now jumped to legislate - that Congressional maps for 2026 be redrawn to give Republicans one more seat.

Senator Budd locked his door and put out a “No Trespassing” sign rather than pray with North Carolinians who are losing their healthcare. Republicans in the North Carolina General Assembly have decided that if the voters don’t want the agenda they are pushing, they will redraw the lines to get new voters.

They are doing all of this because they are afraid. Moral Mondays were born in North Carolina in 2013 when a moral fusion movements of people came together to challenge the authoritarian take-over of our state. That assault began with a voter suppression measure, and young people from college campuses led us by putting tape over their mouths in the committee meeting to protest the attempt to silence their voices.

We put tens of thousands of people in the streets, we filed lawsuits in the courts, and we mobilized an historic voter turnout to unseat the governor who thought that he could rule as a king. What we did then, we must do again - not only in North Carolina, but across the states that they will try to gerrymander in the coming months.

Sophisticated data makes it possible for politicians in power to identify and slice voters they think they don’t need from one district to overcome the margin of victory in another. But all of that data is based on a depressed electorate that rarely turns out more than 45% of the eligible voters in a midterm election. In 2018, when Democrats won a landslide victory in the House, turnout was only 50%.

If legislatures are willing to bow to Trump’s demand that they gerrymander districts to favor Republicans, then every Americans has a moral obligation to turnout like we’ve never seen before to reclaim the tools of our government. If 70 or 80% of voters were to show up in a midterm to make clear that they are not satisfied with their leadership, those “extra” votes that some politicians were willing to give up to help their party win another seat could cost them seats that they thought were safe.

This is what people who study elections call a “dummymander.”

How do we persuade millions of people who haven’t turned out in recent years to vote in 2026? Lisa and Sloan and Erica are showing us the way. We put a face on the pain that policy violence has caused and make it clear that these are moral issues. We build movements that demand leadership to serve the people. And we build power for an agenda that doesn’t just serve elite interests, but lifts from the bottom so everyone can rise.

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Listen now · 23:02

Ahead of this week’s Moral Monday actions, Jonathan joined Rev’s Rupert Hall and Tonya Pass on Pacifica radio’s national broadcast, “We Decide: America At the Crossroads.” You can listen to their conversation by clicking on the “play” button above.