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I want to talk . . . [about] what I think is the great moral issue
facing America today, which is [that] 37 million people wake up in poverty every day.
In a country of our wealth and
our prosperity, to have 37 million
people who live in poverty is
wrong. I believe that all of us
together have a collective responsibility
to do something about it.
And this window opened up, as a
result of this terrible hurricane
hitting the Gulf Coast. For a lot
of the country, the window
opened for the first time. I had
people saying to me, “I don’t understand
what happened. Why did
these folks stay in New Orleans?
They should have left. They were
warned.” And, of course, they didn’t
leave because they couldn’t leave.
They didn’t have a car or a bank
account or a credit card. . . . If they
had been able to leave, they didn’t
have a way to support themselves.
The other thing that a lot of
Americans saw was that poverty
does have a face in this country. It
is to a large extent—not entirely,
I want to be very clear about this,
but to a very large extent—a face of
color. African-American families in
this country today have an average
net worth of $6,000. [For] Latino
families, that number is about $8,000.
And for white families, it’s $80,000.
That gap means something in people’s
lives. We saw what it meant for the
people . . . in New Orleans. Why did
the poor get hurt the worst in
New Orleans? They always get hurt
the worst, right? They live on the
edge every day. It doesn’t take a
hurricane, by the way. The slightest
thing can knock them down. . . . [If]
you think about it, bad things
happen to all of us—your wife gets
sick, your child gets sick, you run
into some financial problem. But
here’s the difference, . . . when it
happens to me, I’m going to get
through it. When it happens to
them, they’re in the ditch, and they
may never get out.
I have to tell you, the stereotype
that exists in America—. . . that
people who live in poverty are lazy
and irresponsible and no-account—
it’s not the truth. I know it’s not
the truth. For the last year, I [have]
had a little time on my hands. I’ve
been all over the country meeting
with families who live in poverty,
including right
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here in Chicago. A
lot of you know this already, but
when you go to a community center
or a poverty center, mostly what
you see are women, and mostly what
you see are single mothers. These women don’t just work, they
work two or three jobs. They work
for minimum wage or close to
minimum wage. They don’t have any
health care benefits. They don’t have
any kind of retirement security.
They’re just trying to survive every
single day. Why do they do it? I’ve
met with so many women . . . who
were working 14, 15 hours a day. The
reason they do it is because they
want their kids to have it better
than they have it. . . . Now this is
the country that I grew up believing
in. This is the promise of America.
Excerpt. A video of Senator Edwards’s complete
address is available at harrisschool.uchicago.edu. |
