Does anybody remember the War on Poverty? I do. Man, I’m pretty sure we surrendered at some point – maybe in the 80’s. If not, we sure are getting our asses kicked.
Now there’s a War on the Poor. And it’s not the conventional type of war, either. It’s a sneaky war, fought with all sorts of psychological dirty bombs and weapons of mass destruction. We are not equipped to fight it, because we don’t even know we are in it.
I’ve been thinking a lot about what being poor means today, what it meant when I was a kid, and about the trouble we are in as individuals and as a nation. When I was a small kid, being poor meant that you didn’t have enough to eat. Maybe you didn’t have lunch at school, or your clothes were shabby. Usually, your family was huge.
As I got older, being poor meant that you got subsidized lunch or free milk at school. You got to see the guidance counselor on a regular basis. It meant you wore hand-me-downs and drank powdered milk at home. Maybe you didn’t have a winter jacket, or you shared one with your sister. Your mother paid for groceries with food stamps, which, ironically, didn’t look like stamps at all.
Nowadays, being poor looks and feels different. There’s a blind rage associated with it that I don’t think anybody anticipated; we don’t know whom to yell at, whom to blame for our condition. A lot of poor people have cable TV. Cell phones. Ipods. We eat at McDonald’s. Sometimes we are fat (because we can’t afford a gym!) and some of us do drugs. We don’t go to church, we don’t watch or watch out for each other’s kids, and we don’t call on our parents and grandparents, either.
The government doesn’t help us anymore, but if we work some, the credit card companies are willing to let us dangle in the wind a bit. The mortgage and car loan people are right there behind them. No money down! No payments for 6 months! I call this nouveau pauvre – you get a chance to make a jackass of yourself with credit cards and car loans until you get put in the Database of Nitwits. Once you’re in there, forget it. You can’t even get a checking account.
And for those of use in denial, those of us with a 401K or pension, even Wall Street has gotten in on the action – everyone is invested, everyone trades. We are all waiting for money to fall from the sky. Pennies from heaven, maybe. Like we deserve it.
I don’t know anymore. When I am feeling really insightful about it all, I get the impression that our poverty is a question of spirit. I was talking recently with my room mate, the one who doesn’t flush the toilet. She grew up on a farm in the Midwest, out in the middle of nowhere. Her family was poor – they ate what they grew, slaughtered animals, pretty much lived hand to mouth. They canned, froze, smoked, and stored everything. They wasted nothing and threw nothing away. It was important to make good use of everything, over and over. You never knew when you’d have to go hungry.
Her dad mistreated her mom, and he would sometimes beat her. As her two brothers grew older, they began to hit the mom. They hit my room mate, too. The dad became paranoid about the mom running away. He started taking some wires out of the pickup truck when he was not around so that no one could leave the farm. Over the course of a few months, the mom figured out which wires were missing and replaced them with spare parts from the junkyard. One day, the mom and my room mate took off with just the clothes they were wearing and their kitty cat - the dad had always threatened to hurt the cat if they ever tried to leave.
My room mate concluded the story with a comment about how, after she and her mother ran, her brothers broke open her piggy bank and stole all the coins. I could tell this was the hardest part of the story for her to share; she got pretty choked up. Her eyes were wide, her face open and vulnerable. She wanted me to understand that betrayal.
Today, she’s a successful engineer in her late 40’s. She has two small children, just like me, but they live 300 miles away with their father who doesn’t like to hold down a job. My room mate and her husband have a bad marriage, but she is willing to bear the financial burden for the family and the emotional burden of being separated from her children.
When she told me all this, I understood better something that had been baffling me for a while; my room mate eats old food. For real. She buys marked down items in the supermarket that are about to turn, or that have expired. Dented cans, old egg salad, taped up boxes. It kind of gave me the willies, but I figured she was just thrifty. A couple of times, she’s gotten really sick from it, too. Food poisoning. But she still does it. She seems to panic when food has been in the refrigerator for too long; she’ll ask, “Are you going to eat that?” And more often than not, I am just about to toss it out.
That’s poverty.
Yesterday, I went to the food pantry. I’ve noticed the line there has been getting longer, and the past few times I have not gotten much food. Still, it’s more than I had before. This time, the director came out and spoke with everyone about donations being down. She said that most of the food is coming from Cisco, and it’s basically odds and ends that we have to make do with. She said that the volunteers had made up bags, and that it was important for people to just take what was given to them without complaining because it would be impossible to give everyone the same things.
Yes, people had been complaining.
It kind of pricked my heart, the bit about complaining. As far as I know, this is the only food pantry that doesn’t hassle people for names, addresses, social security numbers, and all that. They have been so kind to me. But complaining?
That’s poverty.
I have cable TV, and I’ve seen those commercials with the kids eating from the garbage heap in India. Thank God I don’t have to live like that. That is poverty. That is true indigence, and most of the world has to live in those conditions so that we can have cable TV, cell phones, and McDonald’s.
Here in America, the War on Poverty and the War on the Poor continues. But I have seen the enemy. Our poverty is within. We are making ourselves poor.
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