Interesting perspective from a moderate thinker. I love Page and William Raspberry, BTW.
http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/c...l=chi-news-col
Poverty IQ: Po' vs. broke
How do you cure loss of hope and a poverty of optimism?
Clarence Page
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September 28, 2005
WASHINGTON -- I'm delighted to hear people jawboning about poverty again, even if it took a couple of hurricanes to get us to do it. But sometimes I wonder how many people know what poverty is.
Basically, poverty is a profound lack of money.
Or, as my father used to put it, "po'," which apparently meant that you were too poor to afford the "O" or the "R."
"Are we po'?" I asked the old man.
"Naw," said the principal breadwinner of our household. "We're not po'. We're just broke."
What was the difference?
"Po' folks don't know when they're gonna eat again," he said. "I have a job. When I get paid, I won't be broke no mo'."
For this we were so thankful that, when the Sunday school plate was passed for a "missionary offering," my parents always reminded me to drop in something "to help the po'."
I must have been in college before I discovered that, according to sociologists, our family was "the po'"! And yet, we were rich in spirit.
I might not have had hole-free socks to wear to school every day, but I went to school so that, as Mom said, "someday you can buy yo' own socks."
I had loving, hard-working and dependable parents at home, which meant I was blessed. We had an optimism about our future that kept us from feeling poor.
Optimism or a lack of it separates the "po'," the long-term poor, from those who are "just broke."
President Lyndon B. Johnson declared "unconditional war on poverty in America" in the 1960s. Two decades later President Ronald Reagan ridiculed Johnson's challenge with, "Poverty won."
Fortunately, Reagan was wrong. We've won many victories, thanks to some anti-poverty reforms from both political parties, but poverty doesn't quit.
The poor declined sharply as a percentage of the population from 22.4 percent in 1959 to a low of 11.1 percent in 1973, according to the National Poverty Center at the University of Michigan. After a few years of minor fluctuations, the poverty rate rose steadily in the 1980s to 15.1 percent in 1993. Poverty then declined to 11.3 percent by 2000. Since then it has risen to 12.7 percent in 2004, according to the most recent figures available.
Overall, we've made a lot of progress against poverty since the 1960s, thanks to a combination of government and private-sector reforms. The reforms include new job and education opportunities for blacks and other minorities, increased help for the elderly and the Earned Income Tax Credit, a break supported by the right and the left that effectively gave an income raise to low-wage earners.
Yet, after Hurricane Katrina made America's usually invisible poor visible again, I've heard people repeat Reagan's glib pronouncement, as if Americans fighting poverty had not scored any victories at all. We need to give ourselves more credit than that.
The poverty challenges that we face now are not quite the same as those we have faced in the past. What program, public or private, can prevent those who are merely "broke" from sliding into the predicament of becoming long-term poor folks?
Folks on the left want government to spend more time and money on our urban poor. Folks on the right want the poor to produce fewer out-of-wedlock babies. As Rich Lowry, editor of the conservative National Review, has suggested, these do not have to be opposing values. In a new anti-poverty war, such values could be the makings of a grand left-right coalition of the willing.
We have needs.
- We need to set realistic goals for further progress in liberating the poor from dependency and find realistic ways to achieve those goals.
- We need to avoid stereotyping all of the poor as looters, snipers, drug addicts and out-of-wedlock welfare cheats.
- We need to give special attention to the way our young males of all races are failing academically and economically at a faster rate than young females.
- We need to encourage teachers, preachers, social workers, neighborhood associations and others who have worked directly and effectively with teenagers and their families.
We who have succeeded in life need to be divinely dissatisfied with tax breaks and other government policies that widen our rich-poor divide to a canyon that resembles a Third World country.
And we African-Americans, I might add, need to transfer some of our alarm about the racial divide, which has narrowed in recent years, over to the class divide, which has widened between the haves and have-nots within our own communities.
Then maybe the poor won't have to be so po' no mo'.
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Clarence Page is a member of the Tribune's editorial board. E-mail:
cptime@aol.com
Copyright © 2005, Chicago Tribune
if it was just me, or is this out of the ordinary?
UPDATE: RITA HAS BEEN WEAKENED TO A CATEGORY 3
Clarence Page on what Katrina and Rita may have exposed
Hybrid Mode
