We Matter Too

What ever happened to poor people? Even on the left, Cornel West and Tavis Smiley’s Poverty Tour was an exception. Mostly, the talk is of the “middle class” — its stagnant wages, foreclosed houses, maxed-out credit cards and adult kids still living in their childhood bedrooms. The New York Times’s Bob Herbert, the last columnist who covered poverty consistently and with passion, is gone.

Among progressive organizations, Rebuild the Dream, a new group co-founded with much fanfare by Van Jones and MoveOn, is typical. It bills its mission as “rebuilding the middle class” — i.e., the “people willing to work hard and play by the rules.” (What are those rules? I always wonder. And do middle-class people really work all that hard compared with a home health aide or a waitress, who cannot get ahead no matter how hard she works and how many rules she plays by?)
~ from The Poor: Still Here, Still Poor by Katha Pollitt ~

What Pollitt has zeroed in on is an issue that has irked me to no end for quite some time. Mainstream politicians -- regardless of party affiliation -- always seem to frame their comments in relation to the middle class. The same is true of liberal economists like Robert Reich and Paul Krugman. While the legions of the poor continue to grow, no one talks about us!!

We are the ones who routinely need the most help. We're the ones who have been beaten down by the system the worst. Many of us will go to an early grave poor and impoverished.

But what do our national leaders talk about? The middle class. We need to save it. We need to get it moving again. We need to protect it so it can flourish. I can't remember any political leader of the last decade or so say anything about helping the working poor to flourish!

The only time we are given even the slightest thought is in the negative. We are welfare cheats, criminals, substance abusers, and loafers. We're the ones -- not the rich who refuse to pay their taxes -- who are dragging down the economy. And so, we're the ones who must be punished via the various austerity measures. To get back at us, the privileged class aims to take away our minuscule health benefits, retirement payments and college grants/loans.

In essence, though we represent the majority, we don't count. We are nobodies. Our needs, hopes and dreams don't matter.