 I wanted to start with a favorite quote of mine from Mrs. Coretta Scott King from more than 50 years ago. She said that I must remind you that starving a child is violence, that neglecting school children is violence, punishing a mother and her family is violence, discrimination against a working person is violence, ghetto housing is violence, ignoring medical need is violence, contempt for the poor and apathy towards action is violence. This was just about a year after her husband, the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. called the U.S. the greatest purveyor of violence in the world. And one of the things that I find most powerful about Coretta Scott King's quote is how it pulls us out of our silos, which we often comfortably sit in and reminds us of the importance of connection, of networks, of intersectionality. And as Jackie said at the very beginning, we can't win with the peace people over there and those committed to civil rights over here and people concerned for a living wage over there and adequate housing and education and all everyone kind of divided. But so just like in the Poor People's Campaign and in UFPJ and in Code Pink and so many of the different kind of efforts and networks and groups here, this quote and Coretta Scott King's life and legacy shows us that these issues are connected and so then we must be, right? We know that the military as we just heard is the biggest polluter in the world. We know that war and the war economy is fueled by a poverty draft because poor and low income people are compelled to enlist because of a lack of living wage jobs or opportunities for higher education. We know that the wars being waged across the world are racist and imperialist wars and these intersections keep going and they keep going and they keep going and that's why we are and must break through these silos and come together across all the lines that divide us and build a movement from below. None of this is anything different than what has been said all evening. If it wasn't clear enough, if we already didn't all agree with this, if we just look at what's happening in Congress right now, we see why this is so important, right? Folks might have seen that this evening or today the Congressional Budget Office just came out with a scoring for the Build Back Better agenda and that scoring basically says that it's going to be a deficit, right? We know that that agenda has already been stripped down and that it started out many, many, many times less than what economists have been saying that the country needed to even just get back to where we were before the pandemic hit and as all of us on this call know, with 140 million people who are poor and low income, when we had the level of military spending and military engagement all over the world, the level of racism and injustice, things weren't good then. And so to not even build back a little bit towards that is absolute catastrophe. But then for weeks and for months, the nation and mostly in Congress, especially in the Senate, has been debating whether we can afford to expand health care and to lengthen the child tax credit and to increase the earned income tax credit and to provide a pathway to citizenship for immigrants or to have early childhood education and raising wages for essential workers and having a care economy. And politicians, as we all know, on both sides of the aisle have just been saying over and over again, we just can't do it. It'll cause inflation. It will add to the deficit. It'll hurt the economy, but we in the richest country in the world can't believe the lie and the lies that we don't have the resources to lift from the bottom so that everybody can rise. You know, we on this call, we in the poor people's campaign have been crying that poverty and inequality, the lack of living wage jobs, the kind of military investment that we have are what's really costing too much, costing too much and lost lives and livelihoods and actually even hurting our economy. And folks here, I'm sure know that Congress is going to soon vote on a defense bill, right? And that that defense bill at this moment stands at $778 billion. Even though the war in Afghanistan is over, the bill includes $37 billion more dollars than Trump's last military budget and $25 billion more dollars than President Biden even requested, right? And that that bill, you know, actually has this nation spending more on the military than the next 12 nations combined. And it's more money than in real inflation adjusted dollars than was in our military at the height of the Cold War or during the Vietnam or Korean War, right? And we know that this money is going to go to the Department of Defense. The only federal agency that hasn't been able to pass an independent audit in decades, right? I mean, we know all of this. And yet somehow what's the debate in our country right now is about not being able to afford health care for our people and no debate about this kind of military spending. And so this is where organizing, this is where networking, this is where mobilizing and movement building comes in. And so I go back, you know, again, to another Dr. King quote, who he talks about kind of power because that's what we need. We need power. And he said that power for poor people, right, will really mean having the ability, the togetherness, the assertiveness and the aggressiveness to make the power structure of the nation say yes when they may be desirous of saying no. And so that's where we and movements come in. So this June, June 18th, 2022, the Poor People's Campaign and all of our mobilizing partners are going to be holding a mass poor people and low-wage workers assembly, a moral march on Washington. We're seeing this as not a day but a declaration, a generationally transformative event, the largest gathering of poor and low-income people in U.S. history, right? And we're hoping that we're going to get to partner with all of you to build this assembly and this moral march, right? And so I think many folks here already know some about the Poor People's Campaign. Many of you are very active in it, in fact. But the Poor People's Campaign, you know, takes on these five interlocking injustices. We see the connection between systemic racism and poverty, ecological devastation, militarism in the war economy, and this false moral narrative of religious nationalism. Our theory of change is that we should nationalize state-based movements, that we should shine a light on what's possible, not just pointing out everything that's wrong, that we have to shift the narrative, the narrative of what is going on and what's possible, and then build the kind of power, compelling power to make it so. We're organized in almost every state across the country, and we are organized much like many of the groups on this call are organized into coordinating councils that are led by impacted people and moral leaders and clergy and activists and advocates. And just like everyone here, we're persistent, we're intrepid, we're indefatigable, right? And we know that we have to kind of create peace. We have to work for justice. We follow the idea that Dr. King laid out that the Achilles heel, that the weak point of racism and poverty and militarism is actually to unite poor people, low-income people, marginalized people across all the lines that divide us, especially race and geography, and that it's by kind of uniting people, organizing people, that we can kind of become a new and unsettling force that can disrupt this kind of national complacency on war and on military and on racism, on low wages, and on so many injustices. So I want us to get to discussion and to conversation and to questions, but I also am a pastor and a biblical scholar, and I know that not everyone and not maybe even many people on this call are people of faith, but I still feel like this moment calls for a little bit of story. And a favorite one of mine from the Bible is this woman who is persistent until she's able to win justice. And I think it's a kind of model for the work that we're all doing here, whether it's caravans and embarkments and whether it's anti-Ratheon campaigns, but in Luke 19, we have a woman, a widow, who keeps on confronting this unjust judge kind of demanding justice. And the story is clear that this judge, this powerful man, this wealthy man, someone who's caught up in war and empire, he doesn't care about any other human being and he doesn't fear God. But this woman enters and enters and enters and enters and enters and keeps on coming. And she's a person who's been abused and used by violence and poverty and empire. And she probably starts up pretty small and then she starts bringing others with her. Her first demonstration might be one or two, but then moves up to 20 and 30. And through that kind of work, she wins justice. The judge never kind of has a aha moment. We never hear that he changes his ways and he finds the error of his position. The text tells us that the judge figures out that this woman is just never going to stop. And it says that in the Greek that even though he doesn't care about people, she's going to give him a black eye. Now, I think this woman was nonviolent. So I don't actually think she was trying to beat him up. I think the story is saying that her persistence, her organizing, makes him look bad, tarnishes his reputation, makes his corporation a little less shiny. And so in the end, she wins. And she wins justice. She doesn't win a pittance. She doesn't win crumbs. She doesn't win like a little tiny concession. She wins the justice that she goes seeking for. And I think that that is the message of networking, of movement building, of organizing, and of the work that we're all doing here this evening. We have to keep at it. We have to keep coming and coming. We have to network and bring others in. And we have to pray with our feet. And when we do this, we win. And it means that we can win. Not just be right, not just try, but we can actually achieve justice. And so I'm so encouraged by the work that people are doing and so honored to be in this movement with you all. And so looking forward to moving, as we say in our work, moving forward together and not one step back. So thank you so much for having me here with you this evening.