'Tis the season to ruminate on the millennium. I've generally avoided this (mostly because as a math buff, I think the millennium turns next year), but I've been cajoled into a couple of once-in-a-thousand-year columns.

When I consider the human condition, there are a few things which have remained surprisingly constant since the year 1000 C.E. (C.E. is the scholarly, nonreligious way of saying A.D.). First is the general trepidation with which the masses and the powerful approach art. Or, to put it another way, art scares people. Always has, always will. The second observation is that poverty is prevalent. Again, always has been and always will be.

I might talk about that first notion next week (and I might not), but I've been turned on to thinking about poverty, and I want to attack that. If I only knew how, of course.

So here's the deal. The first written languages were languages of commerce, scripts which accompanied traders and helped to settle disputes. The Phoenicians' cuneiform script emerged thousands of years ago, and they mainly talk about haves and have-nots. There is a beer recipe in there as well, but that's another story.

Think of the Bible. Yes, this notion of "rich in spirit" does come along, but fairly late (well into the New Testament). The Old Testament heroes are rich and powerful guys: Noah, Abraham, Joseph, Moses, Joshua, David and the like. Oh, we got a few crackpots in the mix (Jeremiah and Daniel immediately come to mind), but generally the folks discussed are rich. Or, like David, their stories of how they came to be "blessed by God" with riches and power are retold as inspirational "can do" sermons.

It is a fairly recent notion that society should actually do something about poverty. Yeah, the Greeks (Athenians, mostly) talked a good game when it came to democracy, as long as you were Greek and a man and a property owner. Hell, that notion passed as egalitarian well into the nineteenth century. After all, most of the abolitionists gave up on black folks after the Civil War helped resolve the slavery issue. It took people like Upton Sinclair (author of The Jungle, among other books) to help bring some sort of class consciousness to the average American.

And yet, after wringing our hands for a century, poverty is still prevalent in the richest nation in the world. We've tried the New Deal, a couple wars, welfare, workfare and even bribing companies to build factories. The percentage of hungry people (probably a better gauge than the more arbitrary "poverty line") simply hasn't changed much since the Great Depression.

So the question is: What to do?

I don't know.

I'm not one of those people who simply throws my hands in the air and whines, but I really don't have a clue. In the past 100 years, our nation has shifted from an agrarian economy to an industrial economy to a post-industrial/service economy. And, with few exceptions, it's the same people who are hungry.

What I see is that poverty begets poverty. Very few rich families end up poor. Oh, the rich may become merely middle-class, but that's about as much downward mobility as there is. And the upper middle-class might get rich, but it's guys like Bill Gates and Donald Trump, who had more than enough seed money to start their ascents, who hit the stratosphere. It is extremely rare for even a middle-class person to score great wealth outside of the entertainment business (sports counts as part of this realm).

Yes, there are a few the Horatio Alger stories. And they all have two things in common: Education and hard work. The only way to move up is to work your butt off and get an education. The education does not make you smarter, mind you, but it gives you more marketable skills and it validates you in the eyes of people who might pay you.

So, see, everyone is right and everyone is wrong. Capitalism does, indeed, have winners and losers. The structure of society is in large part to blame for poverty. But in our country, any person can get an education and, with hard work, move up the ladder. There are people who aren't willing to put in the extra work required to get out of the hole. Yes, people like me had it easier. But that is no excuse for giving up. The same way it is reprehensible to say that poor people are obviously dumb because some don't recognize the value of an education.

What can we, as a society, do to eliminate poverty? Nothing. But we can give more lifelines to those who want them. The easiest to comprehend is increased funding for education, and I mean massively increased funding for all sorts of education, from kindergarten to senior citizen job training. Now, will all of those receiving these gifts appreciate them? No. But we can't worry about that. We need to make quality education as available as possible to the widest variety of people. And anyone who tells you that urban schools are equal to suburban schools is lying. Vouchers, school choice and the like will only help so much, if at all. We must invest in our people, and education returns the greatest rewards.

Now, I'm also a big fan of universal health care and childcare. These are the biggest drains of cash on poor people, and if they're eliminated, then minimum wage jobs can almost pay the bills. Yes, the tax burden on all of us will be greatly increased. But I'm willing to pay it.

Could these ideas actually eradicate poverty, at least in our nation? No. But just like the economic concept known as "full employment," the point at which the unemployment rate simply cannot fall any further because of natural transitions between jobs, there is something I would call "minimal poverty," the point at which all of the people who are willing to work themselves out of poverty are working toward just that. It is appalling how far we are away from that goal.

Maybe we'll get a little closer during the next thousand years. I hope so, anyway.