Poor People and Billionaires

When I was a kid the word millionaire brought to mind something that was not - nor would ever be - part of my life.  That word described someone who had more money than I could ever imagine and lived a life of luxury only afforded to few.  With that said, I also grew up in a time when the distance between millionaires and those who were not - while big - was not insane.  In other words, people were millionaires but then there was the middle class, the blue collar working class and then in the far distance - poor people.  That has changed.

Forget millionaires because today our country, and society in general, is minting what are now called billionaires.  The funny thing is, many of these billionaires are under the age of 40.  The other funny thing is that the gap between billionaires, millionaires, and the rest of us has gotten pretty big.  We have also seen the emergence of another social class: the working poor.  These are people who at one time made up the blue collar, working class sector.  Those blue collar jobs have since been shipped overseas to India and/or China, and these people are now forced to work at McDonald's, Walmart, or Burger King for minimum wage and no health benefits.

We live in a country where people are given the opportunity to become billionaires.  In some cases, individual Americans will make more money than an entire third world country's entire GDP, but yet, there are people in America who say our economy is "slow".  These same people also prefer to call our working poor "takers".

When I was a kid there was also a mentality of giving back.  People saw their good fortune as a blessing and felt the need not only to give back to those less fortunate, but also to a country that provided and gave them opportunity.  President John F. Kennedy summed up this mindset when he stated in 1961: "...ask not what your country can do for you - ask what you can do for your country."

I know what we can do for our country: go into our inner-cities and fight poverty.  Tackle it with the innovation and vigor that made America great.  Imagine inner-cities that are not places of blight and struggle, but rather, are places of innovation, creation, and ideas.  Imagine if all of the children emerging from our inner-cities did so with their full potential.  Imagine what we could do!  The cure for cancer or the next great source of alternative energy could be sitting in a child's mind in a Newark housing project - we need to get that out.

Within that same inaugural address in 1961, president Kennedy also stated these rarely quoted words: "Let every nation know, whether it wishes us well or ill, that we shall pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend, oppose any foe, in order to assume the survival and the success of liberty."  Kennedy was reminding us that we need to give back - always.  Not walk away.