Our cultural bias about poverty is written in the attitudes we exhibit personally. That bias defines our access to the financial markets we use to distribute and exchange wealth. That bias now predominates in the press and is served up weekly in our religion itself. It is a bias that uses our doctrine of Self Determination to define those who don't succeed as losers. Self Determination includes several myths, including the myth that children of rich parents would rise to the top based on merit even if their parents lost everything. Sometimes that is true, and at other times it is purely and simply just another myth. Self Determination gives us all the mythical equal start. Not in this society or any other society ever created has that myth had anything to do with reality. Parents' status and educational level are more indicative of their children's level of success than any other factor.

Are poor parents not good parents? They often are as willing and capable of being good parents as any Patrician in high society. Their circumstances frequently destroy their ability to deliver on their knowledge of parenting and their desire for a better life for their children. Some succeed but by far the vast majority of them fail from the weight of what external society imposes on them due to their poverty. When I was a kid I wondered why people would live where they had to be poor. I thought they were poor because there were no jobs or because they could not learn what they needed to know in order to get the ones that were available. We have 74,000,000 adult people in this country without jobs today; they are living on the income generated by the employed millions. How much greater would be the prosperity of our nation if some millions of them could be put to work? Very substantially greater, but the current economy will not make that possible any time soon.

My childhood family was poor because my father spent his last years in an asylum for the mentally ill. He had not worked for several years because he fought Honeywell Corporation over patent rights on an invention he created while working for them. Of course he lost, but that loss meant that he could not find work anywhere in the area near our home. He could not find work because he was thought to be a troublemaker by prospective employers. For a few years my parents were members of the growing middle class, then the great depression and my father's jobless status put my siblings into poverty. I was born much later than the rest of them, after the depression was easing up and just before the war. WWII was my first experience of our nation at war and it reduced poverty greatly here in the USA. It kick-started the economy and the spell of prosperity it wove around my generation lasted until three years ago, the year 2000.

My siblings were all married around the time of the Korean war, Two of my brothers-in-law were in the military during that war, my oldest brother had fought in WWII in the Navy I joined the army during Vietnam. We were poor but proud of this nation and our small part in it. Gradually all of my siblings rejoined the middle class and raised their children to work hard and support our national prosperity. I eventually became an entrepreneur and worked my way from one business to another while learning my trade. I wandered from one level of income to another during those years culminating in a modest success that allowed my children to spend their final short years of childhood in a big house in a nice neighborhood.

Now poverty is descending on more and more of those who built this nation's economy during my generation's working years. It is not because they are morally deficient or stupid. It is not because they lack a work ethic or will not do what is necessary to learn a new job. They are getting poorer because there are no jobs being created to replace the ones that our economic policies have taken outside the nation. It is a problem today more than it was in the last decade because our economy is no longer expanding. The rich may not be getting richer; but the middle classes and the poor are certainly getting poorer fast right now.

There is some truth in the axiom that a rising tide lifts all boats. But when a boat is tied to a granite dock by a short rope and the tide rises above the length of the rope the tide swamps the boat. A job-based income is a far shorter rope than an investment based income. The middle classes' modest boats are tied down too tight to float in this expansion if that is truly what we are experiencing. People who have been relatively well-off are becoming poor again in large numbers and it is mostly because there are no jobs. I was born at a relatively good time for poor kids, the government still tried to feed and house us then, and a good education was a social priority. So were jobs for all segments of the economy. I fell to earth in the best of times for poor kids in this nation, it is getting worse fast now that we have rediscovered the moral inferiority of the poor.

Oh yes it is all about crime in the end, the poor use drugs and alcohol too much, never mind the Bacchanalian revels of those who can afford them, they are done with class and style. The poor just sit around and get drunk or stoned. If there is any class warfare in this nation it is universally the poor fighting the poor. The culture of youth gangs in our cities is being encouraged by policies that shut the young out of the aboveground economy. I was given chances that are never offered to these young people. This gang youth culture defines the efforts of black and brown entrepreneurs within boundaries that keep them from competing in our aboveground economy.

The underground economy is poorer than the aboveground one but it is better than nothing. Our popular music is supporting the culture of crime in a world of manipulated tastes. A music market where lists of songs played on radio are selected by executives from corporations and promoted does not reflect anything but their definition of popular tastes. It is easy to sell music that reflects the frustration of poverty to people trying to beat poverty. It is even easier to judge those who listen to that music as near-criminals. Especially if you assume that poverty is a choice that is made by those too morally deficient to succeed. The idea that the poor are morally deficient feeds this process and allows it to continue. In fact the poor in this nation have built a miraculous underground economy with no capital and less training. If we could harness that energy and creativeness in the aboveground economy it would raise all boats without requiring tax breaks for the wealthy.

Of course today we have a President with the innate certainty that he is morally superior to these young people who are fighting to survive. He wears his superiority in obvious ways and lives his life as if he merited what life has given him. That posturing disregards a youth misspent by testimony of witnesses that knew him then. His struggle to define our nation is the struggle of the morally superior person defining what is good for the rest of us out of that sense of superiority. His economic theory is superior to ours because it rewards the meritorious wealthy.. His right to be President was superior to our right to vote and have our vote counted. His projection of superiority extends itself to the rest of the world where such posturing sells less well. The rest of the world sees him for what he appears to me to be, a vain son of privilege whose opinions are as shallow and decisions as lacking in perspective as any visited upon humanity in modern times. He is not superior to the poor but he is helping them become poorer out of that sense of superiority.

The reason we will again have class war in this nation is wrapped around that false sense of superiority. It will be a war bounded by politics. Nothing will awaken the sleeping giant of youth who have experienced hunger and cold and daily fear and the deaths of friends faster than that narrow vision of what they are. It will take a while but anything Bush II accomplishes to impose his vision on our nation will be swept away by that force of the young rising poor classes. It is because his vision is a narrow one, of poor people, those not of his class, as criminals and deficient citizens that most of what he may accomplish will need to be swept away. "Let no child be left behind" is a slogan mocked by the programs of the man who uttered it, not a policy of this government

This is a great nation of people who have prevailed against all odds and overcome poverty far more wrenching than any we see today. They slept in cabins with dirt floors and in slave compounds; they fought for their freedom and worked for their dignity more than any of the recent members of the Bush clan have done. The poor of other nations created this nation with their sweat and blood and lives' efforts. We owe our dignity as free people to those poor men and women far more than any transplanted aristocrats who helped gain this nation's freedom. We have been borne up on their backs and we still reside in a nation that the poor are building in their striving to become less poor and then wealthy. It is our dream of a nation in which people can always work to free their selves from poverty that has contributed the most to our greatness as a nation. It is not a dream bounded by a privileged class and their faith in their moral superiority. Remember that in these trying times it will help you believe in our future. God bless and keep you our mistaken President, our troops and our protestors safe now and in the future.