thoughts from an empty head

For not always will the poor one be forgotten,
Nor will the hope of the meek ones ever perish.
- Psalm 9:18

I think I finally figured out what poverty really was when I went to Nuevo Laredo with Robert.

We were going to a Spanish-language assembly and Robert had secured rooms for the both of us at private homes. I stayed with a young couple (whose names escape me - I blame early senility) and their newborn baby in a house that they were slowly rebuilding. My bed was an old couch in a living room whose ceiling was partially open to the sky. I could sometimes hear the baby cry in the middle of the night, her parents financially unable to even think about taking her to a doctor. To this day, I’m not sure how these this young family was able to afford having me over for a brief weekend.

Growing up in my family imbued me at an early age with the sense that the world was an unfair place. My siblings and I never had most of the cool things that other kids had, and trust me when I say that it is very difficult to get children to understand why their toys and books always come from garage sales. Mom and Pop worked their fingers to the bone, though, and kept a family of seven together, fed, clothed and happy, which could not have been easy for a couple of kids from the South Side of Chicago who never finished high school. There are moments, of course, where the absolute lows threatened to overwhelm us. Our time in Alabama, for example, where my father, an electrical engineer by trade, had to settle for working long hours as a clerk at a 7-11 to make ends meet. But overall, our family was better off than we had any right to ask for, considering our circumstances.

To this day, I am grateful that my parents provided me with the proper attitude about work. I mean, look where I am now. I have tech goodies, I work at a nice office, I have a vehicle that doesn’t break down often, I live in a nice part of town - I attribute all of these things to the teachings that my parents gave me when I was young.

Still, the one attitude among people who really never had to to deal with poverty that always stuck me as strange was the feeling of some that poverty was really a matter of will. If you just worked hard and made something of yourself, then everything would be OK. Poverty to people with this mindset was as a old, shabby suit - you chose to put it on.

And I really can’t understand that mindset. Oh, I am well aware that there will always be those who throw their lives away on drugs or booze or whatever other vice you can name. But from what I have seen, this is almost a case of using the symptom to justify a disease. I wonder how many poor people turn to booze or drugs to get away from the pain of their existence.

I have seen people who lived in nothing more than four walls and a roof, with dirt floors and old blankets for walls. I have seen parents who work two jobs just to make sure that they can afford some kind of food to keep their childrens’ bellies full. I have seen people who cannot afford a cell phone and who have never used the internet and who can’t even dream of having a car to get around. And, although I have seen these things in abundance during my time in Mexico, I think the one thing most people in this country need to understand is that you don’t don’t have to go to a foreign land to see these things. In most places, it’s just a matter of walking across the tracks into the “bad” neighborhoods.

Katrina really brought out how bad poverty is in this country. Most people could blind themselves to the bad conditions around them, telling themselves that such conditions were “somewhere else”. Not in MY town. Not in MY city. But Katrina opened all of those old wounds - the poverty, the ignorance, the blight - for everyone to see. And the problem was clear for all to see: take whatever money you have in your pocket right now and leave home - doesn’t matter where you are going, just go. And how many people didn’t understand it? How many people needed the problem spelled out for them? Far too many, because for people with that mindset - the mindset that says “overcoming poverty is merely a matter of will” - they could not understand how there could be this many poor people in their self-acclaimed “best country on earth”.

And that, I think, is the very first thing that needs to be addressed when discussing ways to combat poverty: everyone needs to realize that (a) poverty does exist, even in the richest country on earth, and (b) poverty really doesn’t care how you got there.

I think, once we accept those two facts, we’ll be a little closer to being able to help each other out.