Morning in Post-Katrina America (by Bennet Kelley at HuffPost)

[marmar]

Bennet Kelley
Morning in Post-Katrina America


Poverty. It is the centerpiece of John Edwards' presidential campaign, the cover story for Sunday's New York Times Magazine and on the front pages of newspapers nationwide after Monday's announcement by U2 lead singer Bono and two former Senate Majority Leaders of the $30 billion ONE Campaign to make poverty a central issue in a presidential campaign for the first time since Robert Kennedy's assassination in 1968. With 49 million Americans now living at or just above the poverty line -- more than the population of California and New York combined - this debate is long overdue.

As author John Berger noted, today's poverty "is unlike that of any other. It is not, as poverty was before, the result of natural scarcity, but of a set of priorities". It was a priority to Robert Kennedy, who spoke of the slow but deadly violence of poverty that break's "a man's spirit by denying him the chance to stand . . . as a man among men." Twelve years later, however Ronald Reagan swept into office campaigning against imagined Cadillac driving welfare queens and won reelection on the sunny optimism of "morning in America." Reagan shifted priorities to the individual and cutting taxes, since government was "the enemy" and poverty was merely "a career for lots of well paid people."

For the next generation, poverty largely disappeared from our political discourse and even popular culture as 1970s junk dealer Fred Sanford was replaced by the likes of Bill Cosby's Dr. Cliff Huxtable. The slow violence of poverty, however, has quietly continued as poverty has increased 17 percent under President Bush. The poor have simply become part of our disposable society, a point illustrated by the recent discovery of Los Angeles area hospitals dumping poor patients on Skid Row (often while still in their hospital gowns).

To make poverty a priority, Senator Edwards and Bono must overcome the fact that for many Americans poverty is invisible and simply an abstraction. One common abstract is that poverty is somewhere overseas or, if it exists at home, it is about "them" "over there" who for some reason, which may be of their own doing, fail to grasp the golden ring of American opportunity. It is different when poverty has a face or a name. .....(more)

The complete piece is at: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/bennet-kelley/morning-in-postkatrina-a_b_52474.html