Another season of the Brattleboro Overflow Shelter concluded last month. According to Lucille Fortier, interim director of the Brattleboro Area Drop In Center:
• Shelter volunteers served 133 individual adults and two children. This past winter, the shelter also saw an increase in women, with 33 individual women at the shelter this winter, compared to 10 last winter.
• Those guests used the shelter 3,012 times (“bed nights”).
• Volunteers served, between dinner and breakfast, more than 9,000 meals.
• When the shelter closed for the season on April 2, 30 people were staying there. Fortier said the majority went to tents, but the Drop In Center has managed to house 10 people since the Overflow Shelter opened this past winter.
And, as anyone who spends time downtown can attest, plenty of homeless people still live on the streets of Brattleboro. The difference is that, instead being in a shelter, they are sleeping in camps along the river, in abandoned buildings, under bridges, in cars, or in any other place that reasonably shields them from the elements.
Despite all the exciting progress in Brattleboro, the reality is that there are still a significant number of people who are living in poverty, here and all over our nation.
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The elephant in the national living room can be summed up in these figures:
• The U.S. poverty line is set at about $22,300 for a family of four.
• There are 46.2 million Americans, or 15.1 percent of the population, living below the poverty line. That's an increase of 27 percent from 2006 to 2010, and those people are disproportionately people of color.
• And nearly 1 in 4 American children, 16.4 million in all, live in poverty.
Given the silence of those now in power in Montpelier and Washington, it's worth remembering a time when one book had the power to change public policy when it came to poverty.
This year marks the 50th anniversary of Michael Harrington's The Other America: Poverty in the United States.
Even in the early 1960s, a time of affluence and limitless possibilities for many Americans, grinding poverty plagued big cities and country villages. It was poverty that was nearly invisible to most of the nation.
“There are mighty historical and economic forces that keep the poor down; and there are human beings who help out in this grim business, many of them unwittingly,” Harrington wrote. “There are sociological and political reasons why poverty is not seen; and there are misconceptions and prejudices that literally blind the eyes.
“But the real explanation of why the poor are where they are is that they made the mistake of being born to the wrong parents, in the wrong section of the country, in the wrong industry, or in the wrong racial or ethnic group. Once that mistake has been made, they could have been paragons of will and morality, but most of them would never even have had a chance to get out of the other America.”
Harrington referred to a “vicious circle of poverty,” where poor living conditions led to poor health, poor attendance at school or work and, over time, condemned generation after generation to a bleak existence where the means of escape simply did not exist.
“The fate of the poor hangs upon the decision of the better-off,” he concluded. “If this anger and shame are not forthcoming, someone can write a book about the other America a generation from now and it will be the same or worse.”
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Harrington thought he would be lucky to sell a few thousand copies of his treatise. Instead, it became a bestseller and ultimately sold more than one million copies. President John F. Kennedy read Harrington's book and was so moved by it that he ordered his administration to come up with an anti-poverty program in 1963.
After Kennedy's assassination, Lyndon Johnson quickly picked up this plan, added to it, and made fighting poverty a national issue within weeks of his taking office.
Johnson's “War on Poverty” initiatives, such as Job Corps, VISTA, Head Start, and the Community Action Program, succeeded in reducing poverty by 43 percent between 1964 and 1973.
Combined with civil rights legislation, that policy opened more social, political, and economic opportunities for the disenfranchised.
Five decades ago, our society accepted Harrington's thesis that the idea of poverty in a prosperous nation such as ours is a moral outrage. Today, poverty isn't on the radar of many of our elected officials, and few seem concerned that poverty is returning to levels not seen in decades.
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The most frustrating thing is that solving the problem of persistent poverty is not that difficult to do.
Anti-poverty advocates say that just four simple initiatives on the federal level - raising the minimum wage, strengthening the Earned Income Tax Credit, expanding the Child Tax Credit, and improving child-care assistance - would reduce the poverty rate by more than 25 percent.
But the political will to do even this much is nonexistent.
This situation is simply unacceptable, but as long as the poor remain invisible to our elected officials, and as long as no political price is exacted for ignoring the needs of the least among us, politicians will get away with it.
And the beds at our homeless shelters, and the tents along the river, will continue to be filled.