Who's Talking About Poverty? (3/28/08)

[LiveLiberally]

Sometimes the truest words about Americans come from voices outside America -- maybe because they tell us things about ourselves we would rather not hear. When it came to the issue of poverty, John Edwards didn't shy away from that either.

A commentary on poverty in America appeared today on the website of Britain's The Guardian. The article isn't just about poverty, as if the poor were some problem separate from ordinary American experience. It argues that our unquestioned belief in the great American "middle class" is blinding us to the fact that so many of us are just -- to quote Congresswoman Barbara Lee -- one paycheck away from becoming part of the underprivileged that we (and, sadly, our remaining presidential contenders) refuse to adequately acknowledge or represent. (The article also gives Edwards credit for making poverty "no longer an abstract, to-be-avoided-in-polite-company, topic, but a core theme.")

First Few Paragraphs of "Who's Talking About Poverty":

Everybody in America is middle class. They might be struggling to pay their bills, watching as the little equity they have accumulated in their homes evaporates, wondering how they can possibly retire what with rising healthcare costs, a collapsing private pension system and the ominous clouds of inflation overhead. But when it comes to self-identifying, even as more and more commentators wring their hands over the "shrinking middle class," most people tell pollsters they are still members of that middle class.

Millionaire businessmen and plumbers might never socialise, but, at least when it comes to opinion polls, both claim a shared class identification.

Maybe that means America is a more genuinely class-mobile society than most other parts of the globe: that so many think they are middle class means they at least glimpse the possibility of being able to afford the sort of lifestyle we generally associate with the bourgeois classes of affluent modern nations (or, conversely, are loathe, because of the illusion that the country is fundamentally egalitarian, to self-declare membership in the nouveau upper-classes).

Possibly, however, it means people have been socially promoting themselves to pollsters because of a deep-rooted shame at not being able to keep up with the Joneses. If your next door neighbor has clambered up into the middle classes, well surely you should have too? Perhaps that explains, at least in part, why so many people get so far into debt in the US trying to purchase their way into comforts of class that they cannot truly afford.


Link to Rest of Commentary: http://commentisfree.guardian.co.uk/sasha_abramsky/2008/03/whos_talking_poverty.html