Dan Calabrese

Quick, go find the nearest poor person and tell him you’re going to do him a favor. You’re going to urge some politician to talk about him.

That’ll keep the lights on and put food on the table.

At least that seems to be the case in the world inhabited by The Detroit Free Press editorial board, which lamented with great sadness this past Friday that no one in the political world is talking about the poor. It’s a very instructive editorial. It tells you a lot about the media’s growing inability to distinguish political words from actual solutions to problems.

Consider this passage, with emphasis added:

“It has become politically unfashionable to lament what’s happening to the poor in this country. Many in the GOP have embraced the cruel mantra that the poor got that way on purpose and are just too lazy to do any better.

Not one of the party’s presidential hopefuls even mentioned the poor during this week’s Tea Party debate. And in a shocking revelation of the party’s growing callousness, several audience members called “Yeah!” when moderator Wolf Blitzer asked if a sick patient with no health insurance should be left to die.

Democrats have been cowed by the right’s rhetoric and have stopped discussing poverty openly. During President Barack Obama’s speech to a joint session of Congress last week, he mentioned the poor exactly zero times and induced yawns across both aisles when he invoked themes of the nation’s responsibility to help those who are needy.”

Talk, people! Mention. Discuss. Lament. Invoke themes, even. That’s how you get things done.

The larger theme of the editorial is that everyone is spending lots of time talking about what to do for “those who have and want to get more,” and what a shame it is that the same attention is not given to the poor. Now, our friends at the Freep are really not that obtuse, and they even acknowledge that you don’t create economic opportunity at the bottom of the ladder.

But they still seem to instinctively cling to the notion that success at the top somehow happens at the expense of those at the bottom.

Now, they do have a small point, which is that a rising tide does not necessarily lift all boats. I know Reagan said that! But it isn’t true. It doesn’t matter how good the economy is if you have no concept of how to access opportunity, if you have poor personal habits and if you have no frame of reference for what it means to achieve personal success. As I’ve written in this space before, far too many people in poverty suffer from a multi-generational perspective that leaves them ill-prepared to take advantage of even the best economic environment.

But having made this legitimate observation, the Free Press then proceeds to demonstrate why the attention of politicians has failed to make a dent in this problem throughout the nearly 50-year “War on Poverty.” What solutions does the Free Press want? Education. Training. Job placement assistance. Social safety nets. Right, because none of thathas been tried before.

Politicians (or newspaper editorial boards for that matter) talking about poverty doesn’t do a whit to solve the problem because none of them have the slightest idea what to do. They think you can address, on a collective level, a problem that sadly exists on millions of individual levels all across the country.

That is too bad because poverty in the United States is truly a tragedy, and the political and media intelligentsia in this country have now wasted two full generations deluding themselves into believing that they and their grand plans could somehow produce the answer.

Free Press editors are scandalized that anyone suggests the individuals affected by poverty are “lazy,” and lazy is not the word I would use either. But those who think government is the solution to everything need to get over themselves and realize that poverty only changes when an individual in poverty decides to change.

And while it may make Free Press editors feelbetter to hear politicians talk about poverty, it won’t accomplish a damn thing besides that.

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