Tonight, Jews around the world (including me) will begin celebrating Passover. During Passover, we retell the story of the exodus from Egypt – the journey from slavery to freedom. It’s a story that resonates across the ages and is not a story for Jews alone.
The tradition is to tell the story as if it happened to you, adding your own experiences and reflections. The story reminds us that, for all our modernity, slavery, oppression, injustice, fear and want are still with us today – in our communities, in our country and in our seemingly ever-smaller world.
In the spirit of the redemption that is a part of this season for Christians and Jews, I offer my version of the 10 plagues visited on Egyptians in the book of Exodus – updated for today’s Washington.
Let us not harden our hearts, as Pharaoh did, to the suffering of our neighbors. Instead, let us pledge to act to make our community a better place for all, whether through philanthropy, political action or other ways that feel meaningful to us.
Community-based organizations, like The Women’s Foundation and its Grantee Partners, need help to sustain their efforts to make our region live up to its promise for all of its residents.
Washington’s 10 Plagues
1. Lack of voting representation in Congress. D.C. citizens are disenfranchised; even worse, Senators and Representatives from other states impose policies they want on us, regardless of our views.
2. High HIV/AIDS rate. At least three percent of District residents have HIV or AIDS, a total that far surpasses the one percent threshold that constitutes a "generalized and severe" epidemic, according to a 2009 report by the DC Department of Health.
3. Over-reliance on incarceration and its devastating effects on communities of color. Washington has the highest black-to-white ratio of incarceration (19.0 per 100,000 population) of any state. The collateral consequences of this level of incarceration – including on employment, education, housing and health – are significant.
4. Extremely high housing and commuting costs. Households in the Washington metropolitan area spend an average of about $23,000 per year on housing and $13,000 on transportation. Combined, these costs represent nearly 47percent of median household income.
5. The legacy of continued racial segregation. D.C. has one of the highest rates of residential segregation among cities in the U.S.
6. Lack of enforcement of laws that promote hiring of D.C. residents for taxpayer-funded economic development projects – and the continued lack of education and training opportunities for D.C. residents that contribute to developers not complying with the law and public officials looking the other way.
7. Food insecurity. About 32,000 households (almost 12 percent of all households) in the District were food insecure in 2005-2007, up from 9 percent in 2001-2003. What’s more, D.C. has relatively few full-service grocery stores in poor neighborhoods: about one in five food stamp households have no supermarket within a half-mile radius of their home.
8. High infant mortality. D.C. continues to have one of the highest infant mortality rates of large U.S. cities.
9. High child poverty. Nearly one-third (29.3%) of children in the District live below 100 percent of the Federal Poverty Line.
10. Lack of health insurance. A total of 11 percent of D.C. residents did not have health insurance (either private or public) in 2007. The majority of those individuals (more than 60 percent) were in families with at least one full-time worker.
So I ask you: How do you want to live and how will you give?
Best wishes for a sweet and meaningful Passover and Easter to those who are observing them.
Gwen Rubinstein is a Program Officer at The Women’s Foundation.
