All I Want For Christmas Is...

I'd thought about addressing the question of a political wish for Christmas in the "12 Days of Christmas" format, but that one seemed too easy. Since Josh asked for "a political wish" for the holidays, I'm going to limit myself to one political wish, albeit an expansive one.

My holiday wish is for political leadership that understands inequality and that has the progressive spine and foresight to act to address inequality in Texas and the United States. Earlier this week, I read a Burnt Orange Report diary by Todd Hill that led me to a pictorial essay titled "The Bottom Line" at the Dallas Morning News' website. The brief numbers given in the pictorial's text content are sobering:

In Texas, a child is born into poverty every seven minutes. A child is abused or neglected every 10 minutes.

In Texas, 25% of children are born into poverty.

Texas is last in the nation in the number of people without medical insurance (we have more uninsured people than any other state in the U.S.).

Texas is home to 17 of the 100 poorest counties in the U.S., more than any other state.

Texas ranks first in the nation in teen pregnancies.

This shocking quote (shocking because I'm surprised the conservative DMN ran it) greets the reader in the overview:

Numbers such as these are a measure of how we define our state as a place where benign neglect is part of business as usual.

I don't have the heart this morning to muster the arsenal of descriptive statistics and correlations that quantify the impact that inequality has on our country, but suffice to say that it is staggering. Trying to wrap your mind around the breadth of inequality in this country is almost too big of a task, even on the best of days.

Democratic Presidential candidate John Edwards talks about the threats and challenges of inequality more often than any other Presidential candidate I can remember in my political lifetime (1992 to now). His framing of the myriad of problems of inequality as "The Two Americas" is the most elegant way of discussing inequality that I've heard from a national figure. Edwards does more than just talk about inequality; he has a robust set of policy proposals to try and stem the rising tide of inequality in the United States.

My hope this Christmas is that we either see John Edwards as our party's Presidential nominee or that whomever wins the nomination will pick up the torch that the former Senator from North Carolina has lit and shine some much-needed light into the darker corners of our nation.