The Haves and the Have-Nots

“America’s poorest are, as a group, about as rich as India’s richest.” The utterly divorced from global reality American definition of poverty is something my brother and I discuss frequently, as I read and research a lot and he’s traveled quite a bit. He’s seen *real* poverty, having traveled to Iraq three times and Afghanistan once. I talk to people who’ve lived it, refugees and immigrants. How we define poverty here in the US is at best insensitive, at worst insulting, to those who truly do endure poverty -- those who watch their children starve to death before their very eyes, whose children die of illnesses that could be treated with medications costing a mere handful of pocket change.