To the Editor:
Eleven million U.S. children are living in poverty. They are regularly missing meals, going without sufficient winter clothing, getting ill and staying sick longer than their peers, and therefore missing school while finding it hard to concentrate in the classes they can attend. Poor children are not doomed to failure. They do have a very steep and treacherous hill to climb just to reach a standard of living most of us take for granted. Many will not make that climb through no fault of their own.
Many politicians respond by saying, “The poor will always be with us.” This partial quote from Jesus (Matthew 26:6-13) ignores what follows those remarks, “Whatsoever you do to the least of my brothers you do unto me” (Matthew 25:31-46). Rather than being encouraged to ignore the poor, we are called on to help them.
The same politicians demand that poor children pull themselves by their own bootstraps. It is these children’s individual responsibilities to overcome hunger, illness and poor schooling. If they cannot, they have no one but themselves to blame. That cruelly unreasonable ask is actually in line with the original 19th-century meaning of bootstrapping, which describes an impossible task.
Politicians who use these phrases are systematically undermining the common good. While encouraging us to ignore and demean the poor, they promote the concentration of wealth to the point where 1% of the population controls 32% of the nation’s wealth, half of us together possessing 2% of that wealth. As the middle-class shrinks, CEO pay has skyrocketed 1,460% since 1978. How did we get here? Politicians telling us that poverty is not our collective concern attack and underfund programs like Medicaid, CHIP and SNAP that can help impoverished children succeed. Simultaneously, they subsidize the rich, as seen in the $650 million in tax breaks granted by Ohio’s legislature and governor to the Intel Corp. Money corporations do not pay in taxes is money that is unavailable to meet our shared needs. Paying taxes funds the common good. These striking inequalities and the misery they cause result from ongoing attacks on the common good by corporations and the politicians who serve them. Please ask yourself when voting, which candidates promote the common good and which serve the interests of an ever-richer few. Please vote for those who stand with and for all Americans.
Sincerely,
Ed Schortman
Gambier, Ohio
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