poverty (blog action day)

today is blog action day. the topic is poverty. i was thinking about how the presidential candidates never talk about it. throughout this whole economic crisis, the media, the candidates, the analysts and the pundits speak only of wall street and main street; the fat cats and the middle class. there are only two classes in america: the super rich, and working families. i've hardly heard any coverage of how the housing foreclosures are effecting people who rent. while i consider our little family to be quite privileged (in so many ways), we don't own a home, or a small business, we aren't shareholder's, CEOs or even investors (other than some tiny 401K-type accounts). we are not poor, and yet i rarely even hear the realities of our lives represented in the media.

i've always been amazed at how most of us believe we are middle class, even if we are working class, upper class, very wealthy, or poor. americans have a sketchy understanding of class distinctions. we are made to feel that we're all middle class, or that we live in a classless society.

and, let's face it, the poor, the growing numbers of people actually living in poverty in america, are powerless. if you don't have money to contribute to a campaign, if you are too busy finding tonight's dinner to find out when the last day to register to vote is, or, if you don't have an address to register from, or, if you lost your id, and can't find transportation to the DMV to get a new one, or, your birth certificate got lost in the shuffle the last time you were evicted from your apartment--- you don't count-- you do not have a voice. if poor people mattered, post-katrina, lower 9th ward, new orleans would be a thriving community on the mend right now.

that's why it is so heartening to learn about geoffrey canada, and the harlem children's zone. If you have not already heard about it, it is a comprehensive program designed to lift a generation, in one community, out of poverty. the focus is on the children, from birth THROUGH college. i recently heard a piece about it on NPR, and then i heard a story on this american life, and i was so moved by the insight, determination, and seriousness of this man's work. when i went looking around online, i saw that he'd appeared on oprah, and that barak obama even talked about him in a speech (and yes, he did use the word poverty). there's a new book out about him, and he's getting a lot of attention.



one of the things he said in (i think) the NPR interview, is that he himself rose from poverty to the middle class, and was living in the suburbs raising kids. when he observed the kinds of things that middle class people did for and with their kids, he realized that the most important things really had very little to do with money. things like reading to your children, creating a language rich environment and encouraging your children instead of tearing them down verbally, and expecting them to fail.



he believed that he could change the lives of children in poor communities, by nurturing and educating parents, and providing families with what they need to raise healthy, smart, successful, happy children. in a way it sounds like "duh!" but at the same time, we recognize how impossible that goal really sounds.

i encourage you to check out some of the media that is out there on canada and his work, including this book:


it is a fascinating story, and it may inspire me to get off my ass and actually do something, instead of cowering in despair and hopelessness, as i have done for so much of my life.

my hero

in case you didn't get a chance to see this on PBS friday, i've copied it for you here:

May 2, 2008

BILL MOYERS:Welcome to the Journal.

I once asked a reporter back from Vietnam, "Who's telling the truth over there?" "Everyone, he said. "Everyone sees what's happening through the lens of their own experience." That's how people see Jeremiah Wright. In my conversation with him on this broadcast a week ago and in his dramatic public appearances since, he revealed himself to be far more complex than the sound bites that propelled him onto the public stage. Over 2000 of you have written me about him, and your opinions vary widely. Some sting: "Jeremiah Wright is nothing more than a race-hustling, American hating radical," one viewer wrote. A "nut case," said another. Others were far more were sympathetic to him.

Many of you have asked for some rational explanation for Wright's transition from reasonable conversation to shocking anger at the National Press Club. A psychologist might pull back some of the layers and see this complicated man more clearly, but I'm not a psychologist. Many black preachers I've known — scholarly, smart, and gentle in person — uncorked fire and brimstone in the pulpit. Of course I've known many white preachers like that, too.

But where I grew up in the south, before the civil rights movement, the pulpit was a safe place for black men to express anger for which they would have been punished anywhere else; a safe place for the fierce thunder of dignity denied, justice delayed. I think I would have been angry if my ancestors had been transported thousands of miles in the hellish hole of a slave ship, then sold at auction, humiliated, whipped, and lynched. Or if my great-great grandfather had been but three-fifths of a person in a constitution that proclaimed, "We the people." Or if my own parents had been subjected to the racial vitriol of Jim Crow, Strom Thurmond, Bull Connor, and Jesse Helms. Even so, the anger of black preachers I've known and heard about and reported on was, for them, very personal and cathartic.

That's not how Jeremiah Wright came across in those sound bites or in his defiant performances this week. What white America is hearing in his most inflammatory words is an attack on the America they cherish and that many of their sons have died for in battle ? forgetting that black Americans have fought and bled beside them, and that Wright himself has a record of honored service in the Navy. Hardly anyone took the "chickens come home to roost" remark to convey the message that intervention in the political battles of other nations is sure to bring retaliation in some form, which is not to justify the particular savagery of 9/11 but to understand that actions have consequences. My friend Bernard Weisberger, the historian, says, yes, people are understandably seething with indignation over Wright's absurd charge that the United States deliberately brought an HIV epidemic into being. But it is a fact, he says, that within living memory the U.S. Public Health Service conducted a study that deliberately deceived black men with syphilis into believing that they were being treated, while actually letting them die for the sake of a scientific test. Does this excuse Wright's anger? His exaggerations or distortions? You'll have to decide or yourself. At least it helps me to understand the why of them.

But in this multimedia age the pulpit isn't only available on Sunday mornings. There's round the clock media — the beast whose hunger is never satisfied, especially for the fast food with emotional content. So the preacher starts with rational discussion and after much prodding throws more and more gasoline on the fire that will eventually consume everything it touches. He had help — people who for their own reasons set out to conflate the man in the pulpit who wasn't running for president with the man in the pew who was.

Behold the double standard: John McCain sought out the endorsement of John Hagee, the war-mongering Catholic-bashing Texas preacher who said the people of New Orleans got what they deserved for their sins. But no one suggests McCain shares Hagee's delusions, or thinks AIDS is God's punishment for homosexuality. Pat Robertson called for the assassination of a foreign head of state and asked God to remove Supreme Court justices, yet he remains a force in the Republican religious right. After 9/11 Jerry Falwell said the attack was God's judgment on America for having been driven out of our schools and the public square, but when McCain goes after the endorsement of the preacher he once condemned as an agent of intolerance, the press gives him a pass.

Jon Stewart recently played a tape from the Nixon White House in which Billy Graham talks in the oval office about how he has friends who are Jewish, but he knows in his heart that they are undermining America. This is crazy; this is wrong -- white preachers are given leeway in politics that others aren't.

Which means it is all about race, isn't it? Wright's offensive opinions and inflammatory appearances are judged differently. He doesn't fire a shot in anger, put a noose around anyone's neck, call for insurrection, or plant a bomb in a church with children in Sunday school. What he does is to speak his mind in a language and style that unsettle some people, and says some things so outlandish and ill-advised that he finally leaves Obama no choice but to end their friendship. We are often exposed us to the corroding acid of the politics of personal destruction, but I've never seen anything like this ? this wrenching break between pastor and parishioner before our very eyes. Both men no doubt will carry the grief to their graves. All the rest of us should hang our heads in shame for letting it come to this in America, where the gluttony of the non-stop media grinder consumes us all and prevents an honest conversation on race. It is the price we are paying for failing to heed the great historian Jacob Burckhardt, who said "beware the terrible simplifiers".