Throughout the last year of the pandemic New Jersey’s elected officials have gone out of their way to praise essential workers who have kept life as we know it running by putting themselves and their families at risk from a deadly COVID infection because they don’t have the luxury of working remotely.

So far, New Jersey has lost almost 25,000 people but no one is keeping track of whether or not they were essential workers. For a few months there was talk about extending hazard pay to them but that was totally voluntary.

Throughout the pandemic, Governor Murphy has repeatedly hailed the sacrifice of essential workers and yet it was his party that was in control of the U.S. Senate and voted down a long overdue raising of the $7.25 minimum wage to $15 an hour that would have been a lifeline for so many of them.

As was to be expected in a vote that pits big money up against the interests of the nation’s 65 million poor and low wage workers, all fifty of the Republican Senators voted for their patrons, the monied interests to reject the hike to $15 by 2025.

The surprise was that they were joined by Murphy’s fellow Democrats Chris Coons, D-Del.; Tom Carper D-Del.; Jeanne Shaheen, D-N.H.; Maggie Hassan, D-N.H.; Joe Manchin, W.V.; Jon Tester D-MT.; Kyrsten Sinema D-Az.; and Angus King of Maine, an independent who caucuses with the Democrats.

The callousness of the moment was captured by the Senate floor gyrations of Arizona Democratic Kyrsten Sinema.  When her name was called to vote on the measure, which would uplift tens of millions of poor and low wealth Americans, she went down into the well of the Senate and gave a very theatrical thumbs down on uplifting tens of millions of Americans out of poverty.

In Sinema’s state alone the measure would have helped 839,000 workers, or almost one in four working Arizonan.

The Democratic betrayal of poor and low wealth workers was all the more outrageous because President Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris had so aggressively campaigned for the hike to $15, making the point over and over how it would uplift millions of households headed by women of color.

After the Senate vote there were few Democratic members of Congress who had the courage to echo the moral outrage expressed by Rev. Dr. William Barber, the co-founder of the revival of Martin Luther King Jr.’s Poor People’s Campaign. He is also the convenor of Moral Mondays, which started in 2013 to hold the North Carolina’s Republican legislature accountable for the political and economic targeting of the poor and low wealth families in that state.

In an interview I had with the Rev. Barber last week, he likened the Senate to “the House of Lords” disconnected from the daily experiences of the tens of millions of poor and low wealth Americans. “It took Black people 400 years to get to $7.25—we can’t wait another 400 years you see,” he said. “What they are doing should embolden us and intensify the agitation and if we challenged Trump for using power in the wrong way, then we have to challenge our own ‘friends’, the people we voted for. We did not vote for normalcy. We did not vote for the same.”

Rev. Barber continued. “We voted for folks because they said, ‘elect me and I am going to deal with systemic racism and I am going to pass a living wage of $15 an hour’, which is a compromise in of itself. We have to hold people to what they said.”

Here in New Jersey, it was up to Rep. Bonnie Watson Coleman, who is also the Vice Chair at Large of the growing Congressional Progressive Caucus, to speak on behalf of the tens of millions of poor and low wealth American families, many of whom were struggling long before COVID.

As President Biden’s $1.9 trillion American Recovery Plan emerged from the U.S. Senate sausage machine Coleman tweeted “This trend is outrageous: Eliminating $15/hr Reducing thresholds for payments (cutting off ~400k New Jerseyans) Cuts to weekly payments What are we doing here? I’m frankly disgusted with some of my colleagues and question whether I can support this bill.”

As Rev. Barber sees it, the abandonment of the $15 minimum wage by centrist Democrats it not just re-enforcing systemic economic racism, its political science malpractice. His observations should be particularly relevant for Democrats who would like to reclaim southern New Jersey 2^nd Congressional delegation that President Obama carried twice but then Donald Trump flipped.

According to Barber, 55 percent of poor and low wealth voters cast their ballot for the Biden/Harris ticket. “We found that poor and low wealth people make up a third of the electorate. That’s 65 million voters and 35 million voted this time–six million more than in 2016…So, that’s the only place you can expand the electorate.”

In August 2020 the Poor People’s Campaign and Columbia University researchers released a report entitled “Unleashing the Power of Poor and Low Wealth Voters” that found that in 15 states, including several in the south, getting just one to 22 percent of poor and low wealth voters who have not voted before to cast a ballot could be determinative in which party prevailed.

And while Democrats are rightly quick to push back on race-based voter suppression, they also have to be mindful that failure to inspire your base by bold action can also be a self-inflicted wound as it was in 2016 across the country in key swing districts like New Jersey’s 2^nd.  Barber warns that if Democrats fail to deliver on the $15 minimum wage as they promised, they could suffer the same fate in 2022.

Throughout the pandemic, Gov. Murphy has been promising that with a consistent commitment to observing the state’s public health requirements the state’s economy will get back to normal. And in fact, President Biden’s massive American Recovery Plan is structured in a way that assumes the government’s role is in getting people over a rough patch when the country got knocked of course.

For Rev. Barber, the country was already well off-course before COVID when it came to addressing the systemic race based economic inequality Martin Luther King Jr. had repeatedly warned about and that the $7.25 minimum wage so embodies.

Rev. Barber told me he sees the hankering for a return to our pre-COVID normal as a “sign of a kind of spiraling spiritual death” that ignores the 250,000 poor and low wealth people that were dying a year due to inadequate or non-existing health care before the virus hit. “We had seven people die from vaping and we had the White House and Congress convening hearings while 750 people dying from poverty and low wealth [pre-COVID] and you still couldn’t get a politician to talk about poverty consistently. Now that death [with COVID] has accelerated.”

Could it be that having so much of the country working for poverty wages and often without sufficient health care were our society’s preexisting conditions that helped grease the skids for this ongoing mass death event we are living with every day?

Normal was how we got here.