It has been said on more than one occasion that this nation knows nothing of war. While this statement is a falsehood of such amazing ignorance it does not even require refuting, I would posit that, contrary to the beliefs of most of this country's "left", this nation does in fact know nothing of poverty.

It only takes watching this extremely uncritical 60 Minutes II segment to understand this. People who consider themselves poor and in need of help drive to food banks in this country. They stand in line wearing new coats, new hats, new shoes, and glasses. They return to homes with televisions, VCRs, and microwaves.

And they are all very well fed. Around the rest of the world true poverty is measured by how close you are to death by starvation, disease, or war. It is measured by the number of tiny bodies lying on a roadway, covered in flies. It is measured by the number of beggars sitting on a street corner in a filthy loincloth because they literally have nothing else to wear.

It's no wonder much of the "developing" world considers Americans soft, decadent, and arrogant. What are they expected to think when a 50 year old woman drives to a food bank in clean clothes, jewelry, and freshly styled hair? What are they expected to think when a teenage girl with a double chin weeps openly claiming she can't concentrate at school because she's "hungry"? What are they expected to think when they see a grown man with a tearstained face claiming he can't find work when they see their own brothers and sisters virtually imported by the boatload to work here as field hands, janitors, dishwashers, maids, and clerks?

Our grandparents and great grandparents were the last generation in this country to really understand what poverty meant. In a time before Social Security, welfare, and the "great society", being thrown out of work meant you were quickly on the street. Having a crop fail meant you were quickly going to starve. Many people were so traumatized by these events they never really recovered. I can still remember hearing about friends who had older relatives who didn't trust a bank, and literally stuffed their money in mattresses.

Americans today know no real poverty at all. Getting fired from jobs, evicted from homes, going on food stamps, being hounded by collection agencies, and patronized by people who claim to want to help are poverties of convenience. These people are in no danger of starving, of dying from a curable disease, of being murdered en masse because they happen to have the wrong last name. I find it sickening that we can compare an overweight white kid in a mobile home in Ohio with a naked orphan on the streets of Calcutta.

If you have loved ones around you, you are not poor. If your children are being educated for you, even taken away and raised by someone else because you can't, you are not poor. If you can find help to get you out of the situation you find yourself in through bad luck, bad decisions, or bad blood, You. Are. Not. Poor.

Because there's a difference between needing help and being poor. Needing help means you dug a hole too deep and need someone to lead you out of it. Needing help means you're too stubborn or stupid to stop having babies and leave a man that beats you. Needing help means God decided to bunt a hurricane through your back yard this spring and the insurance company doesn't want to pay. There's no shame in needing help, really nothing remarkable at all. Certainly nothing needing the breathless, chicken-little yammerings of people who claim to know better.

Needing help implies a contract between you and me, one that has a beginning, a middle, and an end, one that provides you with the tools and the responsibility of using them to fix your own situation. Being poor is just something you are, something that cannot be escaped, something that entitles you rather than enables you.

I just wish Americans would look up from their commercials long enough to understand the difference.