To the editor:

What a difference a few decades make. Less than 50 years ago, LBJ began the War on Poverty. Now we have a war on the poor. Everywhere you look, you see signs of people turning on those less fortunate than themselves. Where there once was compassion, now there is hate. Why?

Going back through history, even to biblical times, there have been poor people. In the Old Testament book of Amos, it was a sin to impose heavy rent or taxes on the poor. The New Testament is filled with many examples of Jesus’s concern for the poor; he even exhorts the rich to sell their possessions and give money to the poor.

From the Roman Empire to the American Empire, governments have made provisions for the welfare of those who were unable to provide for themselves. Our Constitution states in the preamble that promoting the general welfare is as important as “providing for the common defense.” Yet, here we are some 225 years later, with whole groups of people who have decided the poor don’t deserve assistance. Senator Brown went further and stated recently that he didn’t think they even deserve to vote.

What has happened over the past few decades is a poisoning of the well of charity and loss of the concept of equal opportunity for all Americans. Every time America moved forward with providing tools to raise the standard of living for those not born with silver spoons in their mouths, the rich cried foul.

The wealthy people in this country have done a smashing job of blaming the poor for every economic ill, yet according to information published recently on Think by Numbers, social welfare accounts for $59 billion of the current federal discretionary budget while corporate welfare is a whopping $92 billion. The poor did not collapse the economy.

There are millions of Americans who can’t earn enough money to meet the costs of everyday life. They are elderly, disabled, sickly, underemployed, unemployed and children. What blinds us to their needs are the people that everyone knows who are too lazy to work or cheat the government out of some money. Maybe it’s the guy who collects disability, but seems perfectly healthy to us, or the welfare queen with five kids and two grandkids eating Twinkies while you work 40 to 50 hours a week. They are right there in front of you and it makes you mad!

But you don’t personally know the CEOs of corporations that bilked Medicare of billions of dollars, rendering that program inefficient. You don’t see the investment bankers who gambled on high-risk investments, pocketed the gains, then ran to the government for taxpayer money to bail them out when they had losses. We didn’t witness the management of AIG (bailed out under the Bush administration) take a $500,000 vacation in California with the taxpayer bail out money, because they don’t live where most of us can watch them living large on our money.

The GOP and other wealthy folks have us all so focused on the gnat in front of us, we fail to notice the rabid vampire behind us about to suck us dry.

Susan Chichetto
Bath