Sunday, October 15, 2006

An Aphorism on American Poverty

You cannot simultaneously have an obesity problem and a proverty problem.

1 comment:

Troy Camplin said...

Well, while what you say is certainly true, we have to at least acknowledge that poverty in America is only porvery relative to other Americans -- there is an unchecked assumption that when we talk about poverty in, say, Ethiopia, and poverty in the U.S., that we are talking about the same thing. They are so much not the same thing, they should have completely different labels. My aphorism is attacking precisely that assumption. People in poverty the world over are rail-thin -- only in the U.S. are poor people eating so much that they are obese. And one does not have to join a gym to go for a walk, or to just plain get up off one's ass, turn off the T.V., and do something. Romanticising the poor, as too many are wont to do, does anything but help them. But more, we as a country have to stop pretending that AMerican poverty is even remotely comparable to poverty in almost every other country in the world. What I am questioning with this aphorism is precisely that assumption -- and with it I challenge us to come up with a different term. What do you suppose would happen to the debate if we started talking about "the relatively poor in America" rather than "American poverty"? How would that reframe the economic debate? The welfare debate? The very issues you rightly raise?