The Poverty of a Rich Society
John F. Gardener
...Without making distinctions between those who have money and those who do not, we can say of most Americans at the present time that they suffer from a hunger of the soul, which they try to satisfy by eating too much, smoking and drinking too much, buying too much, looking at too much TV, and rushing around more and faster than necessary. Their unfulfilled hunger drives them to self-destroying life-habits and the growing gap between what they need from life and what they succeed in getting opens them to anguish and despair that they try to suppress by sedatives, stimulants, and mind-changing drugs in enormous amounts, at enormous cost...
...We know that millions of Americans in rural as well as urban areas are ill-fed, ill-housed, and ill-clothed. We could be so incautious as to suppose that these areas are the centre of poverty in our society. Yet how many gleaming, cheerful, well-centred faces one sees among men and women whose livelihood is meagre; and how many clouded, petulant, craving faces among those who seem to have everything! Which of the two is poorer? And if Want cries out so painfully, so balefully, from the squalor of the ghettos, how much of this sense of want is the simple need for more adequate food, housing and clothes; and how much results from inner deprivations and distortions that can hardly be distinguished from those of the pampered rich?...
Copyright © 1976 The Myrin Institute Inc.
Excerpted from The Poverty of a Rich Society. Proceedings No.31, by John F.Gardener.