Anniversaries can be inspiring. They often give us reason to celebrate, look back or even look forward with new insight and wisdom. As the country looks back at the War on Poverty, we still are not of one mind.
President Ronald Reagan was the first to coin the phase, “We had a war with poverty, and poverty won.” It’s been repeated through the years, recently by a number of conservative politicians.
From some perspectives, this is true. We’ve spent trillions of dollars, yet poverty still exists. But gains have been made. We have succeeded in preventing the poverty rate from climbing far higher. We have hugely improved living conditions for low-income Americans. Infant mortality has dropped, college completion rates have soared, millions of women have entered the work force, and malnutrition has all but disappeared.
I have personally been a part of this war for 40 of those 50 years. But it never really felt like a war to me. There was never a feeling our county or local communities would use any means possible to win this war. I served four years in the armed forces, some of them in Vietnam. That war felt different. There was tenacity — a sense of duty that soldiers still experience when they go to war. We fought for our country.
Some wars have brought Americans closer together. Others have caused internal conflict. The War on Poverty has felt more conflicted. Instead of putting all our energy into fighting poverty, we’ve spent it arguing over facts, struggling with dysfunctional systems and fighting cynicism.
But I still hold hope. Fighting poverty has been a journey, rewarding for those who gave themselves to service, insightful for those who cared to learn about the systemic issues, transformational for those who were willing to overcome prejudices.
Often overlooked in our reflections is the creation of a “movement” in the private sector. There are tens of thousands of private, community-based organizations that didn’t exist 50 years ago. Public-private partnerships point the way to the future. There are millions of volunteers who feel a moral responsibility to help their neighbors in need and a great sense of satisfaction when they do. But they cannot solve this problem alone.
They stand as a foundation stone, a North Star for how we must fight this war together.
It will require that we take the long view, a willingness to invest in our collective future knowing there are few immediate rewards. I would suggest that we know what to do. What is still missing is the political will to act on what we know is true: In the richest country in the world, there is enough.
As the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. said so well: “We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality.” This country will never reach its potential unless we all get there together. It’s a moral imperative. It defines who we are as Americans and what we stand for.
Bill Bolling is founder and executive director of the Atlanta Community Food Bank.
