Monday, September 7, 2020

Maine Voices: Pandemic best making issues worse for those ...

the primary issue I realized when I went to work in President Lyndon Johnson's conflict on Poverty 55 years ago changed into this: something is unhealthy for the neatly off is all the time much worse for the negative. We see this day by day now, here in Maine as in different places, in the course of the COVID-19 pandemic and the consequent economic woes.

One wonders no matter if the seemingly intractable poverty condition might not be improved now if the war on Poverty hadn't been destroyed just a few years after I joined it by using the minions of President Richard M. Nixon.

in regards to the creator

Norman Abelson was special assistant to the deputy director and a member of Director Sargent Shriver's senior staff in the battle on Poverty. He become also a founder and longtime board chair of a homeless look after and an activist in a feeding application.

changed into it a perfect answer to the horrors of poverty? Of route not. were there system defects and missteps? definitely. however have been fantastic moves taken via caring individuals who in fact wanted to wipe out this basic societal evil? And did things start to enrich for the poor? completely.

There was Head birth, the Job Corps, Upward sure, VISTA (Volunteers in provider To the usa), group action and a lot of other classes to provide poor american citizens housing, training, job working towards and to train them their civil rights and how to responsibly supply voice to their wants and grievances.

What has been the effect of cruelly shutting down these opportunities? Of killing hope? starvation, homelessness, little ones by the tens of millions going hungry each day. Billionaires and political desperadoes carrying on with accountable the bad for their poverty (be aware Reagan's "welfare queens" and Clinton's promise to "exchange welfare as we understand it"?).

collecting fortunes and the ensuing greed seem to reign in america. companies worth billions underpay or lay off laborers. Communities provide tax breaks and funding to firms to build huge warehouses employing low wage individuals, while dithering about low-priced housing and equal opportunity for the negative and reduce core classes. spiritual leaders ignore biblical injunctions against the evil of poverty, whereas raking in tens of millions to build large edifices committed to themselves.

in the meantime, parents can not discover jobs to feed their hungry families. Upward mobility, once america's proud boast, is essentially long past, except for the already well-to-do. Tax breaks abound for the ultra-rich amid speak of weakening Social security, fitness care and different classes for the needy.

The negative and underclasses, especially among the minorities, suffer and die in ungodly numbers from the coronavirus, compared to the extra smartly off. Neighborhoods of the homeless and terrible are hotbeds of an infection and demise. These forgotten american citizens, including some right here in Maine, are prisoners, unable to break out their despair, trapped by the ruthlessness of a society that generally doesn't provide a rattling about them.

Does evil in a single of its worst forms exist right here in the "cradle of liberty"? Ask any bad grownup.

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