The late Pete Seeger sang a song about two maggots that fell off a manure wagon. One fell into a dead cat, the other fell into a dusty crack in the road. After several days, the maggot that fell into the crack is nearly dead. He finally crawls back up to the road where he finds his brother fat and happy atop the dead cat. “What do you attribute your success in life?” he asks. His brother replies, “Brains and Personality, brother! Brains and Personality.”
I’ve lived in Ohio for over sixty years. I’ve never known hunger, never lacked for shelter or comfort of any kind. I’ve never lost a night’s sleep worrying that my children would not be educated to their potential, suffer from violence or crime, or not turn out to be the happy productive middle-aged people they have become. I attribute those things, not to brains or personality or hard work but to the fact that the last six generations of my family - back to the early 1800’s - were white Americans with college educations. Some folks in those six generations were sure they deserved their white skins and their money. Some weren’t so ungrateful. I’ve always known that I’m like the maggot that landed in the dead cat. Just lucky.
A lot of people in those six generations were doctors or teachers -- professions that deal directly with poverty. I taught for thirty-some years in a district where eighty percent of the students were children who live in poverty and neglect. The lives of minority children in a America are often as harsh and brutal as many in underdeveloped countries. Millions of minority children attend schools which fail to prepare them for a future of beyond poverty. Schools where they are daily subjected to violence, drug abuse, and crime. More than a quarter of the students in my school district were in foster homes. Many in their fourth or fifth placement before they were 18.
Jeffrey Sacks describes the four step progression from a subsistence economy, to a commercial economy, to an emerging-market economy, to a technology-based economy. During the four decades I taught in a low-income suburb outside of Dayton, I watched as Sacks’ progression steps moved backwards! Manufacturing left, retailing moved out, infrastructure and education funding declined sharply. Personal and family poverty steadily increased along with violence, crime, and child neglect.
I know my efforts had some effects. But I’m not the sort of person who is proud when they have just done a little. In the Nineteen-Forties, one of my grandfathers was the sheriff of a very small county in southern Kentucky. He was troubled that the sixteen black children in his town couldn’t read or write. Unwilling or perhaps unable to fight for their right to go to the public school with white children, he used his own money to build a schoolhouse next to his home and enlisted his grown children to teach there when they came home from college. He never bragged about it, because I think he knew he had only done a little of what needed to be done.
I think Sachs is right - technology and science have given us the tools to end poverty. But we have to accomplish and maintain all of the four steps to make real progress. A lot of folks in America don’t know that they are just lucky. Somehow we have to convince the people who fell off the wagon into the dead cat to help out instead of stand in the way.
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Jeffrey Sachs, Common Wealth and http://goo.gl/9U8PBA
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