Today's Quotation

One of the clips I saw of yesterday's Health Care Summit included an exchange between President Obama and a Senator from Wyoming, in which the latter was going on about how great the system was. Obama asked if he would feel the same way if he only earned $40,000 a year, and the senator looked like it had never occurred to him that someone might have to get by on so low a sum. That reminded me of Michael Harrington's sociological classic on poverty, The Other America, from which the following is taken:

"That the poor are invisible is one of the most
important things about them. They are not
simply neglected and forgotten as in the old
rhetoric of reform; what is much worse,
they are not seen."