| SOCIOLOGY
The Other America
by: Michael Harrington,
1976
ISBN:
0140213082
America in the early 1960's was two
nations, one affluent, where everything was possible, and another replete
with misery, poverty, and social stagnation, perpetuating itself in a vicious
cycle. The two Americas, were still with us one decade later after Johnson
declared 'war on poverty' and is still with us today, perhaps more so than ever,
given that Welfare has been 'reformed' to serve less and less people, and social
security is on the verges of becoming ancient history--if George Bush has his
way.
Harrington first
described 'The Other America' and published his findings in 1962, the
book shocked the nation including its young idealistic president who earnestly
promised to rescue those caught in a vicious cycle of poverty. An Assassin
stopped that from happening but JFK's ideas would later form the crux of
Johnson's 'Great Society'. The attempt did reduce misery and poverty in
America, but since Nixon was elected, poverty in America has been on an upward
spiral.
I first met Michael Harrington one
autumn day in 1979 as he delivered a lecture on the state of America at Rutgers
University. He presented his ideas with a great sense of urgency and
dynamism, and without excusing a perspective which he described as social
democracy. I would later debate the ideas that Harrington proposed, with
mainstream political science professors who labeled Harrington 'a socialist and
a dreamer.' The criticism is a 'straw man argument'; destroy the
messenger and you thereby destroy the argument, a rhetorical ploy often used in
mainstream American politics. In logic, the straw man argument is a
fallacy, in other words such an argument is nonsense. So Harrington's
words and his vision, have stayed with me these many years, resounding in
clarity. Perhaps his vision is a dream waiting to happen, akin to Martin
Luther King's dream. Upon re-reading this book recently I am forced to
recognize that this is a classic that still deserves to be read and
'intellectually digested.'
'The Other America' is a
descriptive work, that cites statistics, examples, case histories 'ad nauseum',
if anything, it established beyond doubt the existence, the misery of how many
fellow Americans lived across the United States in the early 1960's. The
book recites a pattern created by circumstances of poverty that cement a vicious
cycle hard to escape. Harrington would later argue with equal fervor, and
armed with facts and statistics, that America continued to struggle with these
same circumstances in the 1970's and 1980's.
"...being poor is not one aspect
of a person's life in this country; it is his life. Taken as a whole,
poverty is a culture...the point is not to make them wards of the state.
Rather, society must help them before they can help themselves."
(p.171)
"...there is no realistic hope
for the abolition of poverty in the United States until there is a vast social
movement, a new period of political creativity. In times of slow change
or of stalemate, it is always the poor who are expendable in the halls of
Congress... it is much easier to catalogue the enemies of the poor than it is
to recite their friends." (p.182)
"...it is obvious that these
statistics represent an enormous, an unconscionable amount of human suffering
in this land. They should be read with a sense of outrage. For until
these facts shame us, until they stir us to action, the other America will
continue to exist, a monstrous example of needless suffering in the most
advanced society in the world." (p.202)
Updated April 01, 2005
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