The Boston Globe asked a handful of its columnists to write a few words about the ignored stories of the past year. Here's Roland Merullo's, whose work we've featured a time or two here.
To my mind, poverty in the richest country on earth was the most underreported story of 2007, as it has been for many years now.
It should have been on the front page of every newspaper once a week. Every day, we should hear radio and TV news announcers reminding us that some 35 million people live below the poverty line; that 10 million Americans - 3 million of them children - experience hunger.
We should flip through the cable channels and find preachers exhorting the people in their stadium-sized churches, "Help them! Share with them!" Political figures should be making pickup-truck tours of the dirt roads of New England, where families live behind plastic-covered windows in temperatures that drop to minus-20 degrees.
But we've come to accept it somehow, as if there is nothing we can do or say, as if it's too much of a disgrace even to read about.
Roland Merullo's latest novel is "Breakfast with Buddha."
Updates: A nice review of Breakfast with Buddha in the Dec 21, 2007, Seattle Times, and for the third week running, that same funny tome is "New & Recommended" in the Sunday Boston Globe Book Review section.
