Digital Analogue

John Edwards and poverty

Here's why John Edwards is cool: he's out there stumping on behalf of the poor---which would be nice enough---but more importantly, he's stressing the fact that the vast majority of people living in poverty aren't there because of disability or laziness, they're actually working full-time.

It should be enough to know they're poor, but one of the less flattering traits of humanity at large is the belief that people should only get what they "deserve", whatever that means, and that lazy people don't deserve to get anything. This in turn becomes an easy out, permitting people to dismiss poverty as some strange form of just deserts.

The problem is, this really hasn't ever been true, although the lazy poor person is pretty much a trope in political discourse. It certainly isn't true now. Poor people aren't any lazier than the rest of us---considerably less so in many cases---and in the vast majority of cases, they're only in the position they're in because life dealt them a crappy hand. Helping the poor is not, as Edwards points out, a matter of charity; it's a matter of justice.

"Character is what you are in the dark." --Dwight Moody