Apologies in advance for length!
I have seen posts and comments from folks following this case discussing people who live in poverty. They have mentioned the hoarding, the overcrowding, the dirt, the deadbeats and the moving, the drugs, the lack of ambition and general indifference. We all know these leaches exist right? The welfare entitlement class, sitting on their butts, filthy kids in second-hand clothes playing in the broken glass and weeds, parents squatting out more children and smoking crack, their greasy hands held out demanding more freebees from the productive god-fearing people of this great nation.
Right?
Wrong. It’s self-congratulatory meritocracy bulls*** based on a whole bunch of false premises, a lack of objective reason, and fear. But let’s begin this with a few simple facts.
In the 50’s and 60’s and 70’s times were pretty good. If you went to work and kept your nose clean, college or not you could easily build a good life for yourself. Hell, one parent could work and support the entire family, not as some executive, but just working in one of our nation’s many factories. The largest employer in America was General Motors. The rest of the top ten consisted mostly of major manufacturers, all paying solid middle and upper middle class salaries to the men and women working on the line. They had healthcare, retirement, holidays, bonuses, you name it.
Today, America’s largest employer, employing about 1.5 million Americans, is Walmart. With an average pay of almost $9 per hour and some benefits, millions of American’s considered them a pretty decent place to work. Number two is McDonalds, not employing high-school kids looking for money to buy a car, but adults desperate for anything to support their families. Rounding out the top ten are companies like Home Depot, Lowes, Target. All pay as close to minimum wage and the fewest benefits they can. This is the new economy, the minimum wage and falling economy.
Approximately one-half the country lives in or near poverty. The vast majority of them work. One out of every four children went to bed hungry last night. Almost two million children, many of them with working parents, are homeless -- they are living in their parent’s car, the local shelter, or on a family-friend’s floor.
Officially, the unemployment rate is hovering at about 9%. This is a measure of people who do not have a job and are actively looking. The broader U6 rating, which includes some of the underemployed, is hovering at just under 20%. Essentially, one in five people want to work, or work more, but cannot find a job. They cannot find a job because there isn’t one. That’s the reality.
Those of us doing well love to pat ourselves on the back. We like to credit our choices, our skills, our merits for our success or security. We look at those doing poorly and believe that it was only their poor choices, their lack of skills, their sins. This wonderful fiction not only allows us to feel better about ourselves and how freaking awesome we are, but it frees us from any responsibility for helping others. They earned it, they deserve it. Bad things, we like to believe, happen to bad people.
In reality “bad things” happen to all people. They happen every single day. Some folks just have better tools to deal with them, and the two best tools anyone can have are money and hope. Poverty eats up both like a fire going through a crackhouse.
When you are doing okay, if something breaks you fix it or replace it with something you believe wont break. When you are poor the money to fix it is always money you needed for something else (that‘s what being poor means), so you leave it. If you have to replace it, you either do without or replace it with the cheapest thing you can find. You know it will break again, you just hope it lasts for a while, you hope when it breaks again you will somehow have the money to buy another cheap one. And around and around you go, your world slowly falling apart around you.
You keep things like a packrat. You tell yourself that it’s because you might need it or some part off of it. Sometimes it’s even true. The reality though is that the poor warehouse this junk for the same reason my depression-era grandmother filled her cupboards with useless oddities. It’s just what poor people do. It piles up, gathering dust, there’s no real way to clean around it, so you make new piles and stacks. Dusty boxes of junk. That’s why Walmart sells so many of those cheap plastic shelving units -- they know their customers.
When you are poor, if the faucet leaks (costing you extra on your water bill) there’s no money to replace it so you ignore it and hope it doesn’t get worse. There is nothing else you can do. Your fifty-year-old furnace is running non-stop, trying to keep up with the cold while sucking your wallet dry, and there’s no money for a service call or tune up, so you ignore it and hope the thing makes it through another winter. The car is making alarming noises, and you know it needs to be fixed now before something worse happens, but you can’t, there’s no extra fifty or hundred or thousand dollars lying around, so like everything else in your life you ignore it and try to hope that somehow, somehow, you will make it through to...
To what? Everything is falling apart. You are behind on your bills, credit is maxed or cancelled. You have sat down and cried at the kitchen table when you added up all the money you would need to get your life back on track. Maybe you figure twenty thousand dollars would do it. That’s not that much. With twenty grand you could pay off all the bills, buy your kids some decent clothes, and you could maybe even get a better car -- one that might even start every time you turn the key. So you do some math. If you can save fifty a month, and assuming nothing new breaks and no one gets sick and nothing else goes wrong, saving that twenty thousand would only take you…
Thirty-three years.
That’s reality for the poor. So they say *advertiser censored** it. There is no money to fix it, no way it will ever get better, anything they try is just going to fail anyway, something will go wrong, there’s no reason to care. With no hope and no future you live for today. It’s never going to get better, so screw it. Order a cheap pizza. Eat at McDonalds. Smoke. Do drugs. You might as well try to enjoy today, because nothing you do today, no sacrifice or effort, will change tomorrow.
Poverty, real poverty, does not inspire, it is a cancer that feeds on hope.
Personally, I believe we can do better. If we can replace a million miles of dirt roads with concrete and superhighways, if we can build dozens of aircraft carriers the size of small cities, and spend trillions blowing the S*** out of people on the other side of the world, if we can bomb their cities into rubble and then rebuild them on the US taxpayer’s dime then if we can we can damn sure take care of our own. Not ONE child should ever be hungry or homeless here. I don’t care if we have to give them a freaking house. Not one parent should have to choose between clothes for her baby or getting that lump in her breast checked out. And if it means some CEO needs to take a cut in his bonus, well, welcome to America -- that mom and her child, EVERY mom and every child is a whole lot more important to me.
Anyway, this rant is long enough. If you made it this far thanks for reading. If it annoyed anyone, sorry.
