A recent news story recounted the desperate struggles of a Pakistani father to find a tent: shelter from the impending snow in the aftermath of the recent earthquake in Kashmir. “Please, he said, “One tent to save five families”. There were none to be had: thousands face the harsh winter without shelter.

In Philadelphia, many families and individuals also are searching for housing. They’re on a waiting list and being processed even more slowly than usual because city resources have been concentrated on relocated Katrina victims. Here too, shelter is hard to come by.

All of us would probably agree that the man in the first instance should be given a tent. We might have disagreements about what level of assistance should be given to the folks on the Philadelphia waiting list.

According to recent Census data, in 2004 the poverty rate in the United States rose for the fourth straight year. There are now 37 million poor people in the wealthiest nation on earth, and we have devised  multiple explanations, theoretical hypothosese, political spinnings, and abstract analyses to account for this sorry fact.

But in addition to all of the quite valid and valuable theories we employ to explain this unconscionable mess, one of the main reasons that there are so many poor people in our country is because in our heart of hearts, we think that most people who are poor deserve to be. Those Philadelphians without housing are somehow more culpable and less deserving of aid than the Katrina victims.

Much of the research and writing that has been done around issues of poverty utilizes the language and theory of blame: people are poor because of their inadequacies, their deviance, their inability to conform to dominant social norms. Our language is full of distancing terms upon which we rely to define and understand the problem of poverty. Various phrases fall in and out of fashion: “the undeserving poor”, the “culture of poverty”, “the underclass,” all terms that serve to further separate and isolate those living on the social margins.

As lawyers, we are the gatekeepers to justice, and our understanding of who it is that is most unrepresented before our courts is crucial.  Meaningful access comes through us or not at all. Here at VIP we don’t usually have a cache of ‘deserving’ poor clients or ‘hot button’, sexy legal issues. We find a reluctance among lawyers to represent just ordinary folks who need some legal help in mundane but critical areas; low income people often rely on the legal system to obtain basic necessities: housing, food, income, education.

Like everyone, we lawyers are culture-creatures: our beliefs and attitudes toward poor litigants and pro bono clients are shaped by our immersion in a culture that still blames poverty on the poor themselves. But if we are ever to approximate ‘justice’ in our legal system, a revision in our thinking is essential.

Consider this statistic: the majority of Americans will experience poverty at some point during their lifetimes (58.5%).  Poverty is not the lot of a handful of woebegotten social misfits and unfortunates: it is the fate of a majority of Americans for at least one year of their adult lives. In other words, ‘they’ are ‘us’.

In the face of such overwhelming and ubiquitous poverty, focusing on the individual characteristics of those who are poor misses the point: there are concrete, identifiable social structures that create poverty. Inequality is built into all of our major social structures: housing, employment, health care, education, law. As Mark Robert Rank states in One Nation Underprivileged: Why American Poverty Affects Us All, in the economic, political, and social game of musical chairs that is the foundation of our American system, there are guaranteed losers.

So if the poor are not primarily responsible for their own poverty, who is? If most of our social structures create or reinforce  the conditions for poverty, who is at fault? In his Pulitzer Prize winning book, The Working Poor: Invisible In America,  David Shipler wrote: “When accountability is spread so broadly and diffused, it seems to cease to exist. The opposite is true. It may look as if nobody is accountable. In fact, everybody is.

 So let’s stop playing the blame game, and assume our rightful role as guarantors of  access to the legal system for everyone. Let’s take the sage words of Albert Einstein to heart.  Einstein observed the human tendency to see ourselves as separate from each other and the rest of the universe as “a kind of optical delusion” of our consciousness. “This delusion is a kind of prison for us…Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures…..”

 For the legal profession, such a striving would do much to not only improve the public image of lawyers, but to ensure the integrity of our system of justice, which now excludes the overwhelming majority of poor people. We say “justice for all”. It’s time to act as if we mean it.