"Poor people are hot."

You'd expect such crass commentary from Paris Hilton, who's hot factor has gone south since her sophomoric antics put her in pinstripes.

But we have the editors of "Fast Company" magazine to thank for this gem. The calendar entry on p.40 of the September edition leads with "Poor people are hot," and then explains that the Base of the Pyramid Conference in Ann Arbor will focus on alleviating poverty while also engaging in business development.

One of my first jobs out of college was working at Scholastic Inc.--more specifically "Instructor" magazine. And though I so badly wanted to be assigned a feature story, I was asked to put together pages like FC's "Next" section, where upcoming events are compiled and then given a catchy blurb. We can safely assume that some wet-behind-the-ears journalist in training researched and wrote these pieces, trying to be clever and perhaps slightly ironic.

But where was the intern's editor? Surely, someone should have been redlining that page and perhaps asking in the margin, "Too cheeky?" or, "Likely to offend millions of people?"

People living in poverty are not "hot." And working to improve the lives of people living in poverty isn't a trendy pasttime. Trivializing the "war on poverty" and those who wage it isn't just a boorish breach of political correctness; such coarseness drives one of the world's most pressing problems further from our consciousness by stripping it of the seriousness it warrants.