“From the very beginning, this country, the idea of America itself, was the promise that all would have an equal chance to share in the fruits of our society. As long as children are untrained, men without work, and families shut in gateless poverty, that promise is unkept.”
Our Quote of the Week declares that poverty prevents the United States from living up to its potential. It reminds us that as long as anyone is blocked from taking advantage of the opportunities that many of us enjoy — for education, employment, and more — we cannot fulfill the promise on which the country was founded.
Sargent Shriver gave this address at the University of Notre Dame during a defining moment in his career. He was Director of a thriving Peace Corps, and had been heading the Office of Economic Opportunity, which oversaw the programs of the War on Poverty, since its inception one year earlier. This combination of responsibilities informs the priorities he lays out in the speech.
Shriver speaks at length about what it means to be an American, reflecting:
“Maybe true Americanism, true patriotism, is being big enough to admit that we don’t know everything, that we can make mistakes, and that we can learn from others.” He points out that one of the key things we must learn is what it means to be poor — directly from those who are impacted by poverty. He gives a deep and gut-wrenching description of how poverty affects people:
“Poverty is taking your children to the hospital and spending the whole day waiting there with no one even taking your name — and then coming back the next day, and the next day, until they finally get around to you.”
“Poverty is having a landlady who is a public health nurse — who turns off the heat when she leaves for work in the morning and turns it back on at 6 when she returns. It’s being helpless to do anything about that because by the time the officials get around to looking into it, she has turned the heat back on for that day — and then it will be off the next.”
“Poverty is having the welfare investigators break in at 4 o’clock in the morning and cut off your welfare without an explanation — and then when you go down and ask, they tell you it is because they found a pair of men’s house slippers in the attic, where your brother left them when he visited last Christmas.”
“Poverty is having a child with glaucoma and watching that eye condition grow worse every day while the welfare officials send you to the private agencies and the private agencies send you back to the welfare officials, and when you ask the welfare officials to refer you to this special hospital, they say they can’t. And then when you say it is prejudice because you are a Negro, they deny it flatly. And they shout at you, ‘Name one white child who we have referred there.’ And when you name twenty-five, they sit down — and they shut up — and they finally refer you. But it is too late then, because your child has permanently lost 80 percent of his vision — and you are told that if only they had caught it a month earlier, when you first made inquiry about that film over his eyes, they could have preserved most of his vision.”
And he then emphasizes:
“That’s the voice of the poor! And being an American is learning to listen.”
Sargent Shriver ends the speech with a call to open-heartedness and service, with the goal of bringing opportunity to those for whom the promise of America has not been kept.
In a time when we are discouraged from our impulses to listen, to learn from mistakes, and to maintain the promise for all to have “an equal chance to share in the fruits of our society,” may we take Sargent Shriver’s words to heart, and may we answer his call to open-heartedness and service.
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