An op-ed piece in the September 9th edition of the NY Times asserts that the standard measures of poverty in the U.S. are misleading and that significant headway has been made on improving the lot of poor people in this country. If you're anything like me, presented with selected facts from both ideological sides of the aisle on just about any issue, you can rarely get past a far from definitive "maybe". It's only when cold, hard facts hit the realm of personal emotion and intuition that we can get to a point of view. Maybe it takes a multifaceted "jolt" to view the world from a new lens. Instead of just thinking with our heads, we let our hearts get into the act.
While the aftermath of some prominent natural disasters have recently focused our attention with red-hot intensity on the seemingly wide disparities between individuals, if we're really being honest with ourselves, we realize that these disparities exist all around us. Rich and poor, minority and majority, blue collar and professional, mobile and immobile, young and old, ... most of the time, it unfortunately takes a catastrophic event to focus our attention long enough from the rush of daily living to form a thoughtful personal opinion about what is "right" and "wrong" (if anything), and what to do about it.
Much of the dialogue most recently has been between the "rich" and "poor" (although the dialogue seems to have forgotten about that vast turf called the "middle") and the implications of being in one camp or the other. Are we truly better off as a country? Have we moved the needle on poverty at all or have gigantic, government-driven efforts over the last 30-plus years been wasted? If vast government intervention is proving ineffective could a more "market-based" system, drawing on the central tenants of capitalism, prove more effective? How could the integration of social sector organizations and businesses change the game? It'll take our heads and our hearts to figure out any of these questions.
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