Reality Television: Poverty Grows – POLITICAL BUTTON

Reality Television: Poverty Grows – POLITICAL BUTTON

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While many seem obsessed with reality television, it seems that many more important realities are being overlooked.  I’m amazed by Western civilization’s capacity to distract.  I would hope that the chasm between reality television and reality would be something that most people could discern; though my optimism may be showing through.  While this is disturbing enough, I find myself increasingly surreal state when we propose one thing and live truly do the opposite, and then had the audacity to call these opposite the same.  Now I’m a fan of paradoxes as much, probably even more, than the next guy, but holding fast to literal contradictions seem to be an unnecessary grasping of the absurd.  Let me offer an example.  The above design references the reality that poverty grows.  This can be taken as one half of the proverbial the rich get richer and the poor get poorer.  However, poverty is not something that we can discuss in polite company in America.  For instance, Pres. Obama in his State of the Union address this year was the first president since Harry Truman to not even use the word poverty in his State of the Union address.  Now, this might not be so unusual if we were in a period of expansive economic growth and poverty was receiving, but, alas, we are in the worst economic recession since the Great Depression, and poverty is growing.  But, let’s back up to our most recent period of apparent untrammeled economic growth.  Democrats like to call them the Clinton years.  I can’t help but notice that the same Clinton cronies that Obama hired to get us out of the most recent economic crisis are exactly the same people who led us into the crisis.  But back to Clinton.  One of the so-called crowning achievements of the William Jefferson Clinton presidency was his so-called welfare reform, which I prefer to call welfare deform.  Here is where holding fast to a literal contradiction comes into play.  President Clinton used the language of reducing poverty as the ultimate goal of his proposed welfare reform.  In other words, the ultimate success of this policy was supposed to be measured by how much it lifted people out of poverty.  However, virtually every analysis of the policy from left to right, governmental and nongovernmental, concluded that Clinton’s welfare reform legislation would result in more poor people, more poverty.  And sure enough, more people were pushed into poverty.  Unfortunately, a new measure, perhaps actually the original measure, was how many people were on welfare rolls.  This actually went down.  Surprise, surprise!  When poor people received less help, they became more poor.  Oh yeah, that idea that generous Americans and the church folk would feed, house, transport, tutor, and provide jobs for poor Americans without government involvement turned out to be a pipe dream. Wow, and I didn’t have to mention the Bush administration, one or two, Papa or Junior.