What Obama's Inaugural Address Got Wrong About Poverty

[xchrom]

http://www.thenation.com/blog/172357/what-obamas-inaugural-address-got-wrong-about-poverty


President Obama watches as students from Roxbury, Massachusetts, perform Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” speech, February 28, 2012. (Flickr/Pete Souza)


Liberals seeking affirmation for their faith in President Obama believed they found it in his second Inaugural Address, with his passionate invocation of Stonewall and Seneca Falls, his soaring rhetoric about government “of, by and for the people” and an American creed forged “through blood drawn by lash, and blood drawn by sword.”]

But amidst the warm words for equality and collective action, one sentence stood out:

“We are true to our creed when a little girl born into the bleakest poverty knows that she has the same chance to succeed as anybody else because she is an American, she is free, and she is equal not just in the eyes of God but also in our own.”

However much we might like to imagine otherwise, a little girl born into the bleakest poverty will never have “the same chance to succeed as anybody else.” If you take a step back, could anything be more obvious? And yet this notion is so thoroughly woven into the “American creed” that we barely notice how misleading it is.

[handmade34]

1. rec n/t

[GeorgeGist]

2. Some folks are offended ...

when one points out the absurdity of the statement

'We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, ...

[Igel]

7. I go from the opposite end.

They pondered their words carefully. So what did they understand "self-evident" to mean?

And what does "we hold these truths" actually do for the sentence?

"Self-evident" doesn't mean "obvious" or "commonly accepted," but "axiomatic". They're making the claim that these "truths" need no proof or demonstration. They also point to the philosophical dialog of their day. Locke first used the term "self-evident" less than a hundred years before and claimed that moral virtues and truths cannot be self-evident.

On the other hand, the sentence isn't absurd. It's an article of faith, that they believe these "truths" to stand without any need for proof or demonstration.

Is this an absurd thing to believe?

The opposite is to believe that children when they're born are inherently unequal, that their inequality doesn't derive from their condition or their environment but because, well, some are intrinsically inferior. I think this is true: Intelligence has a genetic component. Kids born with hydrocephaly or with deep autism or with flippers are not going to be equal in many ways to other kids--those with a brain, those with a normal neural wiring, those who can walk or grasp things with their hands. But that does violence to the text because it stops the sentence.

The rest of the context is the repetition of the same thought in other words: That they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights. In this I think every American should assent: The austistic kid, the flipper baby, the hydrocephalic infant still has the same inalienable rights. The only way that a right can be inalienable, incapable of being truly removed by a government, is if the government isn't the grantor of rights but an agency that can infringe, accommodate, or protect those rights.

I think that's a dandy thing to believe.

[demwing]

15. + 100% = "These 'truths' need no proof or demonstration"

thanks for nailing that down.

Equal does not mean equally gifted, or challenged. In the sense being used, "equal" means equal in the eyes of the Constitution.

Is that concept perfectly implemented? Far from it, but shall we then reject the concept because we fail to uphold it perfectly?

[pocoloco]

9. Oh, sure,.........

all men are created equal, it's just some are more equal than others.

[pampango]

3. It is 'so thoroughly woven into the “American creed”' that it is useful to utilize it to further

a liberal agenda, even though it is actually not true. In that way it is like a lot of the flowery rhetoric in a speech like this. If it serves to further progress in our country I will forgive the utterance of such a 'lie'.

[deutsey]

4. As someone who was born into poverty

I know what it's like to have to bust your ass just to get to the starting line where many middle class and affluent kids naturally begin their lives (of course, really wealthy kids start off way beyond the normal starting line).

It ain't easy to get to that starting line, so it's no wonder that many born into poverty remain where they are...and even you do manage to leave your poor origins behind, as GB Shaw once said, the chill of poverty never quite leaves your bones.

[OneGrassRoot]

5. Huge K&R n/t

[alcibiades_mystery]

6. I did take it as a conditional

"We are true ... WHEN..."

The fact that it has never yet happened means that we have never yet been true to that creed, and certainly are not today. This is the same structure of conditionals as Martin Luther King's repeated trope of living up to America's promises, something you wouldn't have to say had it ever been actualized.

That said, I would agree that it is an odd conditional, to the extent that it contemplates the continuing existence of "bleakest poverty," even accepts it as a given. We are more true to a creed when we have eliminated it, not made getting out of it easier. That would be the more appropriate critique.

[ProSense]

8. I find this a bizarre criticism

“We are true to our creed when a little girl born into the bleakest poverty knows that she has the same chance to succeed as anybody else because she is an American, she is free, and she is equal not just in the eyes of God but also in our own.”

However much we might like to imagine otherwise, a little girl born into the bleakest poverty will never have “the same chance to succeed as anybody else.” If you take a step back, could anything be more obvious? And yet this notion is so thoroughly woven into the “American creed” that we barely notice how misleading it is.

<...>

Certainly, there is much that can and must urgently be done by government to restore some of the equality of opportunity that has been lost as wealth has concentrated at the top...But given the chasm that now separates rich from poor, improving conditions in schools or preserving Medicaid and other existing social programs is not going to give a hard-knocks Bronx kid the chance to compete with his Park Avenue counterpart on a level playing field. Suggesting otherwise is not only dishonest, but by making it seem like his struggles arise from his own weakness, it places yet another hurdle before him.

Am I missing something?

The statement is about a promise woven into our creed, an ideal, not about a real-life action or event. The real-life action implied in this ideal is one that is probable, not impossible.

The author goes on to say that this ideal will "never" be realized. Now, maybe that's true, but that doesn't mean we shouldn't strive to achieve it. She then goes on to mention what can be done to move toward this ideal, but concedes that poverty will never be alleviated by government programs, there will never be " a level playing field," and suggesting that it's possible is "dishonest" and amounts to a-blame-the-victim creed ("struggles arise from his own weakness&quot .

That goes against the meaning of an ideal, which is what we want, what we hope to achieve, equality. This is no different from striving for racial equality. We have a black President, but not every black child is going to have the same opportunity to succeed. Does that mean they never will?

The other point is that this statement of an ideal is woven into a longer speech that talks about the ways in which we can move toward achieving this ideal, some of which is mentioned and dismissed by the author.

Ideals are not "dishonest," they're the highest of goals.

[Fumesucker]

11. If we were true to our ideals a little girl wouldn't have to be born into the bleakest of poverty

But the fact of the matter is that it happens every day, and that's exceedingly unlikely to change in the land of the free.

[ProSense]

12. True, but the author says it will never be achieved,

which runs counter to working toward an ideal.

[Fumesucker]

17. Idealists are all well and good as long as they keep quiet when thinking inconvenient thoughts

Sort of like atheists that way, something else that ends in "ists" and makes people uncomfortable.

[magical thyme]

10. Never say "never." And "never" is a long, long time...

My understanding/interpretation of that sentence is that we will not be true to our creed until we have equal opportunity and rights. That we, as a society, get our priorities straight so that every girl born into poverty has the opportunity for a good education and career prospects.

I don't think this is an impossible goal, although it will require many tons of work.

And, of course, a lot depends on how you define "success."

[Liberal_Stalwart71]

13. This man can NEVER do anything right. Had he not mentioned poverty, ya'll still would be up in arms.

He can't win. He simply can't.

Trashing thread.

p.s. And I disagree. Just because one is born into poverty doesn't mean that there is absolutely no hope of getting out of it. It may not be certain across the board, but we shouldn't succumb to defeatism, either. I've witnessed many people in poverty transform their lives.

[grantcart]

14. No he got it exactly right.

We are true to our creed when . . . knows that she has the same chance.


Until every little girl or boy knows that, and it is true, then we have not fulfilled our creed.


Not surprisingly however there still will be some, like the writer you quote, that will go to extraordinary lengths to try and school the President on what poverty really means.


The fact that the President lived a very modest life including just above the subsidence level in Indonesia, a very modest lifestyle in Hawaii and after putting himself through college and graduate school turned away from an easy life on Wall Street or a prestigious well paid clerkship on the Supreme Court and worked with the poor in Chicago and still has some patronizing blogger trying to pick apart every word (and failing rather miserably) is of course both ironic and embarrassing for those so deeply committed to find him unsympathetic to the hard working middle class, the working poor and dispossessed.

I am sure that those that continue to despise the President will run to rec this.

I would like to say something really snarky about Betsy Reed's comfortable education and the fact that she has taken really cushy jobs and not been down on the trenches but googling her for a few minutes all I couldn't find enough to even make fun of.

[frazzled]

16. I think you misunderstand the rhetoric

The phrase you cite—“We are true to our creed when a little girl born into the bleakest poverty knows that she has the same chance to succeed as anybody else because she is an American, she is free, and she is equal not just in the eyes of God but also in our own.”—does not mean that this hypothetical little girl currently has the same chance to succeed, etc. You forgot to consider the introductory phrase: "We are true to our creed WHEN ..."

That means: In order to be true to our creed ( that is, to the words enshrined in the Declaration of Independence) we must reach the point where this little girl considers herself, and we consider her, to have the same chance to succeed as anybody else." It's a conditional proposition, not a declarative one.

It is a statement about the need to return to the foundational propositions of the Declaration of Independence in order to work on the continual (never-ending) process of perfecting the union.

[stupidicus]

18. I don't take exception to those words

Last edited Wed Jan 23, 2013, 12:12 PM - Edit history (1)

I see it as an ezpression of what should be, not what is. But I do agree that there's a vast diff between the "born/created" equal concept that has long been misused by rightwingnuts since it ignores the realities on the ground, like the severe lack of socio-econ mobility in this country, differences in mental/physical abilities, etc.

It more than anything else what serves as the foundation for the preference for the "rules of the jungle" the modern rugged individualist/"Grisly" Adams types have, and the moral justification for their greed.

“The modern conservative is engaged in one of man's oldest exercises in moral philosophy; that is, the search for a superior moral justification for selfishness.”
― John Kenneth Galbraith