The Ghost of Tom Joad.

• Author: MCDONNELL, LYNDA

What happens when an entire generation forgets what it means to be poor?

A FRIEND WHO TEACHES COLLEGE ART history complains bitingly about her students' ignorance of the Bible. How can aspiring artists understand Renaissance art--Michelangelo's "David" or Raphael's Virgin Mary--without knowing the major prophets, saints, and martyrs?

Her complaint is not about the students' lack of religious fervor, but their cultural illiteracy. Schooled in neither church nor classroom in the Judeo-Christian stories that still shape our culture, they take refuge in ignorance: Why do we have to learn this stuff? We're here to paint, they say.

I thought of my friend's complaint while watching the Democrats in Los Angeles this summer. Challenging George W. Bush's vague but ardent claim of conservative compassion, President Clinton traced his party's legacy of compassion from FDR to LBJ to Jimmy Carter, who's still pounding nails into Habitat for Humanity homes.

While Clinton's speech was a substantive response to Bush's, I suspected that Clinton's homage to Johnson and Roosevelt held as little meaning for much of Clinton's audience as my friend's allusions to St. Paul held for her art students. The reason? Much of Clinton's audience no longer has any understanding of poverty--whether working with the poor, being poor, or even sharing a bus seat with someone poor.

Nearly half the country is younger than 35, and the percentage of Americans who can remember Black Friday or the War on Poverty is on the decline. Those coming up behind them view poverty through a very different lens--if they view it at all. Not only have today's young adults come of age during an unprecedented time of peace and prosperity, their social history has largely been informed by such leaders as Ronald Reagan and Jesse Ventura, not Martin Luther King Jr. and John F. Kennedy. And, as America's class segregation has sharpened over the past 20 years, today's newest generation of affluent adults has had very little opportunity to fully appreciate their good fortune.

This shift in perspective is already having an impact on national politics; even the Democrats understand that talk of noble causes like ending hunger or combating illiteracy does little to rally the voters. During the first presidential debate, the only mention of poverty from either candidate came when Al Gore suggested that welfare reform should be extended to the fathers of poor children.

You could say that the disappearance of poverty from national politics is merely the product of a prosperity-induced callousness or the stupor of affluence, but I suspect the reason is more complicated than that. Call it national amnesia.

Life Lessons

Last year, I taught a seminar on poverty to a dozen college freshmen at the University of Minnesota. Early in the semester, when I asked what they knew of the Great Depression, a lone student raised his hand. Jobs were kind of hard to get, he'd heard. Unemployment was high.

Having been reared on family stories of lard sandwiches, failed businesses, and families doubling up because of lost jobs, I was amazed. Then I did a little subtraction: For these students, the Great Depression was nearly as remote in time as President McKinley and the Spanish-American War were to me at their age.

Their grandparents might have been children during the Depression, but they didn't talk about it. Perhaps, like my sons' grandparents, they live far away and want to spend their limited family time spoiling their grandchildren with miniature golf and ice cream, not recounting hard times. High school history these days does a poor job of filling in the gaps. Jay Leno recently demonstrated that the average schmo doesn't have a clue who those guys carved on Mt. Rushmore might be. Even Harvard grads are a bit vague about the details.

My students, all white, from small towns and suburbs in the Midwest, had concern, or at least curiosity, about poverty. They just didn't know much. Some were simply baffled. The nation's been on an economic roll since they were in fourth grade. Minnesota's unemployment rate has been less than three percent for years. In that context, a 12 percent poverty rate--nearly twice that for children--is indeed a puzzle.

The students' own encounters with poor people had been few and largely unsympathetic. One recalled an old guy who lived in a shack outside her small town...