Most would prefer to work for a decent wage. Nor can we offer a justification for the children who are born into a poverty that they did not choose or deserve, and whose conditions prevent them from gaining the skills and ambitions that would allow them to escape. I am going to do everything I possibly can to start the national conversation. I am going to travel the length and breadth of this country, as Robert Kennedy did thirty years ago, and as Eleanor Roosevelt did during the Depression, to observe the face of poverty in the streets, villages and neighborhoods of those in distress. I want to dramatize their plight, to reveal for many of our fellow citizens the face of poverty as it exists at the end of the millennium.
Poverty has many faces.
There are the elderly, now less poor than the rest of America because of the success of Social Security and Medicare and Supplemental Security Income, as well as our private pension system. But women and minorities among the elderly are disproportionately poor. Our challenge for the elderly is to find the right way to protect Social Security and preserve Medicare. There are the disabled, protected by the historic Americans With Disabilities Act but experiencing a backlash in recent benefit cuts. But even for those who can work, there is still very high unemployment.