I've recently been listening to and even watching some of the speeches of Martin Luther King Jr. One of them, given at Stanford University less than a year before his assassination, struck me.
It's called "The Other America," and it focuses on the issue of poverty. One America, Dr. King says, is "overflowing with the milk of prosperity and the honey of opportunity." The other America, he says, "constantly transforms the buoyancy of hope into the fatigue of despair." In this other America, too many are "perishing on a lonely island of poverty in the midst of a vast ocean of material prosperity."
As the head of an organization whose stated vision is "a country free of poverty where no older person feels vulnerable," the message really hit home. I was struck by how insightful Dr. King was throughout the speech and particularly when he noted that economic equality would be even more difficult to achieve than the hard-won civil rights victories at lunch counters and on buses and in the voting booth.
I was also struck, sadly, by how little things have changed, how much work we still have to do in 2016 and beyond. That economic divide between the rich and the poor has only grown worse, with more people, including more older Americans, being hurt by the sapping effects of poverty.
We should not sanitize this message. People are poor. Too many older people are poor. It's an injustice in our nation that cries out to be corrected.
On the good side, we are beginning to hear more political voices, on both sides of the aisle, speak about the scourge of poverty and how it is dividing our nation. Recognizing the problem at least gets us started on the road to a solution. But we have so far to go.
Some speak of relaunching President Johnson's War on Poverty. To me, though, poverty is not an enemy, not an external threat. It is a defect in our system. It is an illness that demands both treatment and cure. Simply put, poverty is a health issue.
I like this language because it reflects what I believe is the need for a two-pronged approach to ending poverty, and senior poverty in particular. We must continue to treat the symptoms of poverty, which is a top priority at AARP Foundation. But we all must also work toward a cure of the root causes of poverty.
We have our own initiatives to develop long-term, lasting solutions. But curing poverty requires a national communal effort, and a change in mindset that Dr. King was pointing us toward nearly 50 years ago.
For now, I encourage you to do two things: As a form of tribute this year, listen to Dr.King again, including his later speeches when he focused more on poverty. And begin to think differently about poverty, as an illness whose symptoms we can treat, an illness that we can ultimately cure.