Consider an especially disturbing gambit by today's extreme, plutocratic right. They mock America's poor by spreading the canard that our country only has a kind of pseudo-poverty that really amounts to abundance. "Look at 'em," goes this line of attack. "Many of them have refrigerators. Even cell phones. Plus, they're not emaciated, they're fat!"
Anyone who's ever been close to poverty knows how obscenely wrong (both as fact and as a tactic) such a perverse portrayal is. Up-by-the-bootstraps myth-making aside, being poor in America, as one who has been there puts it, is "soul destroying, grinding, and cruel."
In a New York Times column last month, Dr. Perri Klass, a pediatrician, wrote about the rise of childhood poverty in our nation. It's not a matter of a few cases here and there, she pointed out, but a deepening crisis that's an affront to the egalitarian opportunity that America has long stood for, as well as an explosive long-term threat to our social cohesiveness: "Children are now our poorest group," Dr. Klass writes, "with almost 25 percent of children under age five living below the federal poverty level."
As pediatricians know from the reality they confront in their exam rooms, income matters. "Poverty damages children's dispositions and blunts their brains," reports Dr. Klass, and it defines "many children's life trajectories in the harshest terms: Poor academic achievement, high dropout rates, and health problems from obesity and diabetes to... substance abuse and mental illness."
A past president of the American Academy of Pediatrics adds that, "after the first three, four, five years of life, if you have neglected that child's brain development, you can't go back."
Yet, Washington rushes to coddle billionaires while cutting budgets that invest in children. That's Austerity Street's dead end, and while it seems to define our leaders, I don't believe it's who we are. Is it?
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