Remarks of Senator Barack Obama: Changing the Odds for Urban America
July 18, 2007
It's been four decades since Bobby Kennedy crouched in a shack along the Mississippi
Delta and looked into the wide, listless eyes of a hungry child. Again and again
he tried to talk to this child, but each time his efforts were met with only a blank
stare of desperation. And when Kennedy turned to the reporters traveling with him,
with tears in his eyes he asked a single question about poverty in America:
"How can a country like this allow it?"
Forty years later, we're still asking that question. It echoes on the streets of
Compton and Detroit, and throughout the mining towns of West Virginia. It lingers
with every image we see of the 9th Ward and the rural Gulf Coast, where poverty
thrived long before Katrina came ashore.
We stand not ten miles from the seat of power in the most affluent nation on Earth.
Decisions are made on both ends of Pennsylvania Avenue that shape lives and set
the course of history. With the stroke of a pen, billions are spent on programs
and policies; on tax breaks for those who didn't need them and a war that should've
never been authorized and never been waged. Debates rage and accusations fly and
at the end of each day, the petty sniping is what lights up the evening news.
And yet here, on the other side of the river, every other child in Anacostia lives
below the poverty line. Too many do not graduate and too many more do not find work.
Some join gangs, and others fall to their gunfire.
The streets here are close to our capital, but far from the people it represents.
These Americans cannot hire lobbyists to roam the halls of Congress on their behalf,
and they cannot write thousand-dollar campaign checks to make their voices heard.
They suffer most from a politics that has been tipped in favor of those with the
most money, and influence, and power.
How can a country like this allow it?
No matter how many times it's asked or what the circumstances are, the most American
answer I can think of to that question is two words:
"We can't."
We can't allow this kind of suffering and hopelessness to exist in our country.
We can't afford to lose a generation of tomorrow's doctors and scientists and teachers
to poverty. We can make excuses for it or we can fight about it or we can ignore
poverty altogether, but as long as it's here it will always be a betrayal of the
ideals we hold as Americans. It's not who we are.
*As prepared for delivery