•August 15, 2018•

By Jim Nowlan
NP Guest Columnist

I have been reading a 2017 report, “Cycle of Risk: The Intersection of Poverty, Violence and Trauma” by a century-old social services organization in Chicago called the Heartland Alliance.
Since the stated objective of the organization is to end poverty, maybe it follows that the 43-page report seems to hammer away on the theme that poverty is the fount of all social pathologies.
I beg to differ. Doing so will put these scribblings in the middle of an intense, on-going, half-century old debate about the roles of culture and poverty in shaping our society. The Left tends to agree with the Heartland Alliance, while the Right tends to see dysfunctional culture at the family and community level as the root of poverty, not the poverty itself.
As I read the report, two families from my post World War II childhood in rural central Illinois came immediately to mind. Please indulge me.
Bertha Hughes of LaFayette, Illinois (pop. 300) lost her young husband to a fatal heart attack in 1945, when her four children ranged in age from 13 down to 6. She was left with nothing but the family’s $500 home, which had no plumbing.     Login or Subscribe to read the rest of this story.