Just having a major presidential contender base his campaign on poverty, social equity and the ills caused by rising disparity is such a good thing for this country.
My perspective as a family physician with a masters in public health is a little different from most. I see the nation's course over the last thirty or so years not as one of progress but as one of decline from the advances achieved by FDR in the wake of the Depression.
The New Deal did not just create Social Security and pave the way for the New Deal II, the Great Society when the LBJ administration gave us the Voting Rights Act and Medicare. It also saw something revolutionary happen in the US. The federal government spent cold hard cash paying photographers to travel around the country photographing the human faces of poverty so that we could no longer turn our faces away. John Steinbeck wrote "The Grapes of Wrath". Faulkner wrote about Yoknapatawpha.
Before the New Deal, poverty was God's punishment meted out to the sinner and the lazy. During the New Deal, poverty became everyone's burden. If your neighbor suffered, you also suffered. If you lightened your neighbors load, your load lightened. The operative word was "compassion".
In the 1980s, certain groups in the US made a deliberate attempt to reverse a trend that been taking place since the 1930s. We saw the Federalists Society declare that they would undo everything that FDR did. We saw a return to the 1920s ethic of "me, me, me" with drug abuse, conspicuous consumption, increasing racial tensions. Income disparity really took off at the start of the 1980s.
http://multinationalmonitor.org/mm2003/03may/may03interviewsbernstein.htmlWorse than the actual income disparity was the way of thinking that not only tolerates such disparity but actually celebrates it--"I have so much more money than that guy, I must be something special!"-- became the norm. Instead of "All in the Family" we got crap like "Dynasty" and "Dallas"
All of this makes for a very sick country. Literally sick. When you are at the bottom, you suffer from depression, suicide, homicide, domestic violence, drug and alcohol abuse, lack of health care, poor nutrition (high fat diet) and a host of other real medical problems that stem from apathy and the real knowledge that you are considered expendable by your society. This makes it even more difficult to battle the barriers that the elite throw up to keep you from getting an education, meaningful work, freedom of religion, a fair vote.
If you are not at the bottom, you are consumed by fear that you will lose your current position on the ladder and fall. How else do you explain the sick puppies like Dick Cheney and W., who have so many silver spoons in their mouths they look like carnival freak show acts and yet they keep trying for more and more?
Anyway, for John Edwards to run a campaign which directs the nation's attention to its very real poverty problem is one of the bravest and most worthwhile things that any candidate has done in a long time. It does not even matter if he wins. I am just glad that some one is putting this right in the middle of the table where the stuffed turkey would usually be and forcing Hillary and Obama and McCain and Romney and Rudi and all the rest to look it right square in the face and deal with it. Because you know that 99 out of 100 politicians would find some way to avoid talking about the subject if they could.
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