Week Nine
President Obama,
I have no doubt that you know more than anyone what your election means to the nation, not just to democrats or African Americans, but rather to the nation. You campaigned along side the first “serious� female candidate for president and in a race where every party ran on the belief that our nation needed change. But in a nation where equality has been placed with upright importance, where writing inclusive legislation and destroying the barriers between success and race/gender/sexuality have been placed on a list of accomplishments, not dreams, it seems foolish that poverty and class have found their place on the backburner, when in reality, poverty is no backburner problem. Poverty is a daily problem that is found in millions of hungry stomachs and a million more non-existent dinner tables from urban Miami to rural North Dakota.
Although poverty may be more American (and certainly more common) than apple pie, too many incorrect ideas are associated with poverty. It is too commonly thought that the poor are lazy, that with a little effort poverty could be shed like old skin. But poverty is a multi-faceted cycle that cares little about “effort�. In What We Can Do for the Working Poor, Katherine Newman uses “Wage Subsidies and Tax Breaks,� “Unions,� “Child Care and Health Care� and many more as subtitles to discuss specific areas that need to be improved/changed in order to make any kind of difference in poverty.
Creating a single policy or strategy to help the poor will not end poverty, but it help. The truth is that poverty is affected by too many factors to be “cured� by one policy. Newman notes that, “[The working poor] have not claimed a very large piece of the policy stage…[Scholars] have done little� (287). Poverty is not caused by laziness or the unwillingness to become a “productive� citizens, but it is next to impossible to escape in system in which one thing is connected to another. (For example, no wage or low wage = cheap food or no food = poor health but no wage or low wage = no or little health insurance) Future policies need to keep this in mind, that in trying to fix a system with limbs that branch into everything, care needs to be taken but change needs to happen.