“Poverty is like an iceberg, and it is moving against your walls. Although submerged, cold and impersonal, it can crash into our lives. When a professor is attacked on a city street, when a gang holds up a subway car, when a bystander is killed in a riot, when little girls are bombed in a church, we suddenly feel one cutting edge of poverty.”
Our Quote of the Week reminds us that poverty has an impact on all of us, even if we are not experiencing it ourselves: it will surface in the form of crime or violence, and will do damage that we sometimes do not see coming.
This week, we return to Sargent Shriver’s 1964 New York University Commencement. As a reminder, Shriver frames the speech in a way that is timely for those of us in the United States today:
“This is an election year, and it seems appropriate therefore to talk politics. But politics in its full sense goes far beyond primaries or even general elections. The root of the word politics is polis — the Greek word for the City, or City State. A politician in ancient times was supposed to serve the City. And ‘serving the City’ in that ancient sense is the same as serving the nation and even mankind today. That is the kind of politics we need now — the politics of service.”
Shriver then proceeds to talk about how the audience can embrace the spirit of service, citing examples from history, from the Peace Corps, and in relation to ending poverty in the local community. (At the time, Sargent Shriver was the Director of a thriving Peace Corps and was leading the efforts to create the legislation and the programs of the War on Poverty, which would be administered by the new Office of Economic Opportunity.) In this context, he brings up the overwhelming nature of poverty, which, even when invisible to those not experiencing it, it will “crash into our lives” through crime or violence.
During the 2024 presidential campaign, we have heard a lot of talk about rampant crime and a lack of safety in the United States. Such chatter contradicts the more nuanced reality, which indicates that crime, and violent crime in particular, has been decreasing. And it completely ignores the causes of crime, which, according to the FBI, include:
- Economic conditions, including median income, poverty level, and job availability.
- Policies of other components of the criminal justice system (i.e., prosecutorial, judicial, correctional, and probational).
If we are to reduce the threats and the trauma caused by crime and violence in our communities, we must acknowledge that poverty and inhumane policies are among their causes, and we must proactively pursue anti-poverty policies that can result in a more prosperous and safe society for all of us.
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