War on Poverty
In our nation’s capital
We are drowning in think tanks
Our chief armament
In the war on poverty
And for all of their business
They have made up their mine
Poverty is not the problem
Poverty is the solution
Yet the war ever undertaking
Congress versus progress
Commander-in-chief of CEOs
Backed by supreme courts and county jailers
Triune bosses super intending won
Until six feet under
With nary a heart
The only pauper resting spot
From their holey canons
Granting fiats where one can scarcely ford
Pronouncing victory
In their own dialectical weigh
Emptying their echo chambers
Buy and buy
Only saying
Let them eat ordnances
This poem is in honor of the 50th anniversary of the “War on poverty” declared by President Lyndon Johnson in 1964. Of course, there is war and poverty aplenty still. Sometime in the 1980s, during the inglorious Reagan regime, I heard a phrase which has stuck with me ever since: Poverty is not the problem; poverty is the solution. Fortunately, this phrase was uttered as a biting critique of the implicit assumptions of a capitalistic plutocracy. The war on poverty is about the same age as me. The material wealth in the United States of America has more than tripled during this time. Further, for at least centuries, there have been enough material resources to meet the basic needs of every human being on this planet. Answering the question of why there is widespread poverty worldwide and within the fabulously wealthy U.S. is perhaps the most important inquiry humans on this planet can address. The only real scarcity on this planet is within the human heart. Talk is cheap, and rhetoric is not very nutritious. Surely, Man does not live by bread alone. As surely, Man does not live by focaccia alone. Mother Theresa perhaps said it best: “It is a poverty to decide that a child must die so that you may live as you wish.”
