It is hard to believe that the President of the United States declared War on Poverty - as Lyndon Baines Johnson did in his Great Society program. Today loud voices call for government to retreat to allow the fruits of self-interest to flower, to solve the problems of financing health care by free-market solutions - as did John Boehner yesterday in leading the unanimous vote of House Republicans to repeal the affordable care act.
During his tenure from 1966 to 1968 as director of the War on Poverty programs Shriver founded a myriad of social outreach programs including Volunteers in Service to America (VISTA), the Community Action Program, Job Corps and Head Start.
In 1967 - the year I graduated from college and headed off to the Peace Corps a spirit of service was in the air - and Sargent Shriver was its cheer leader and institutional leader. Instead of marveling at the brilliance of Yale law students training for mergers and acquisitions, he saw law students as idealists:
This summer, more than 800 law students will volunteer their time to bring justice to the poor. They will be using the law as a social invention, not as a social prevention. Nothing like this was happening 20 or 30 years ago. I was in law school--here at Yale — and I know. In those days, no one was tougher or more grasping than the average law student. He was a young man on the rise, eager to go up the ladder two rungs at a time. But today, something has changed — 800 of these students are going into the slums for the summer or will be travelling the circuit in rural areas. These young law students are renegades from Easy Street. They don’t care about how much money they make, but how much justice they can bring.
He asked is idealism a fad? And answered the question `No'. Today we see that youth are still ready to answer Yes, We Can. Fordham Law students have proven that year in and year out at the Public Interest Resource Center, winner of the 2008 ABA pro bono award. The disappointment that many feel today is that our leaders - from the President down - have asked too little of us, not too much. Of course we know why. The November election showed that the electorate was not ready to embrace subsidies for health insurance for those of moderate income. And the poor have fallen off the electoral map. Sad.
For an excellent biographical summary of Shriver's life, see this piece from the Yale Daily News.
For my reflections on Shriver and the spirit of those times, go HERE.
