http://www.njfordean.org/print.php?page=oped&id=32<snip>
Many of America’s poor can’t find a job. Others work two or three. Then there are children. The number who live below the poverty line continues to climb. If we decide this unacceptable, writes a leading, presidential candidate, we can do something about it.
Growing up in New York City, I was acutely aware of those around me. The city has a particular closeness that makes it impossible to shield oneself from social inequality; some of America’s richest and poorest families live literally within blocks of one another. As a child, I often rode the Lexington Avenue subway, studying the faces of the working-class adults who commuted down from Spanish Harlem and the Bronx. They sometimes had their children in tow, and it did not take a great leap of imagination to envision trading places with one of them. Even at that young age, it was obvious to me that there was very little separating us, other than a few subway stops and circumstances of birth.
Working hard and giving back to the community and to society were familial expectations, and the effects of my doing so would prove far deeper than just a sense of civic duty and a solid work ethic. As my three brothers and I grew older, our exposure to people across the economic spectrum began to shape how we saw the world. Charlie (who would later perish in Laos in 1974, near the end of the war Southeast Asia) spent time working with underprivileged children, while I chose a summer clearing fields and repairing corrals on a Florida cattle ranch. I worked alongside Cuban exiles who spoke little of no English; many could not find employment of any other kind. It was a grueling job, but the toil was tempered with the knowledge that I had a comfortable home to return to at the end of the summer. The same could not be said for most of my Cuban counterparts, a reality to which I was not oblivious.
Poverty has many faces, I was learning it seemed not to spare those worked the longest or labored the hardest, and there was certainly no guarantee of escape, regardless of dedication or force of will. A stint as undergraduate teaching junior-high school children from low-income families in New Haven only deepened my sense of the realities of social inequality. I clearly had opportunities that others never would, and although I did not feel guilty about my upbringing, it was obvious that the playing field was not a level one.
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