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Three days into this campaign, I visited the South End in Boston. At the intersection of Massachusetts Avenue and Melnea Cass Boulevard, a public health crisis has gripped the city, a devastating mix of homelessness, addiction and poverty.
A woman came up to me as our group approached a local homeless shelter, and she was screaming. Sobbing. I'm doing everything I can, she said. But here I am on the street, with nothing. What else do you want from me? What else can I do?
This, in a state with 98% health care coverage.
A few weeks before I'd been at a hospital in Attleboro, walking through an ER so full you couldn't fit down the hallways. They were packed with mental health patients waiting to be seen, to be treated, to find a bed in a facility somewhere in the state that could care for them. An eight-year-old boy who had been there for five full days. An 83-year-old man who had been there even longer. It shouldn't be this hard to help them, an exhausted doctor told me.
Then there was the church in Worcester filled with LGBTQ refugees, struggling to find their place in a country that had promised them acceptance but delivered them exclusion. The veterans in Somerville fighting to access basic needs after giving everything to protect our freedom. The advocates and officials in Greenfield working day and night to wrap their arms around an opioid crisis that has left no community unscathed. The immigrant families at St. Luke's in Chelsea, the men and women at Our Father's Table in Fitchburg, the children at Duffy Health Center on the Cape — all of them forced to fight for the basic dignity our nation is supposed to promise all.
I want to be crystal clear with you: this is why I'm running for Senate.
Because across the Commonwealth our people are being locked out, let down and left behind.
Because injustice and oppression still grow in American soil.
And because our system – our politics AND our policies – has wholly failed to respond.
So I can't hear the stories I've heard, met the people I've met, and be content to wait. To accept the status quo. To decide that our people are getting the leadership they deserve.
Because they're not. We've left the families who need us most high and dry. Forced to fend for themselves in a country that has made it difficult to be middle-class, excruciating to be poor, and downright impossible to be poor AND. Poor and black. Poor and brown. Poor and female. Poor and gay. Poor and sick or old or addicted.
In Congress, these have been my fights. For the low-wage workers exploited in an economy that takes them for granted. For the transgender Americans denied basic human dignity because of who they are. For the folks suffering from mental illness — and the families that love them—forced to the margins of the richest health care system on Earth. For the working families fighting eviction or discrimination, thrown into a justice system that does not offer them a chance in hell.
My campaign is a movement to bring back in the people who have been cut out and amplify the voices that have been ignored. We want every hand in this Commonwealth on deck: new faces, new energy, new perspectives, new activism, new ideas and a new approach.
The more people willing to get in the fight, the better. That's what this campaign is about.
Grateful to have you on the team.
Joe
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