It's expensive to be poor!

Courtesy of MediaMatters.Org.

Chatted momentarily yesterday with a few card-playing neighbors in the community room of my apartment building. We three Caucasians outnumbered the two black women. It was Martin Luther King, Jr.'s birthday so the topic of racism came up. A Caucasian woman held forth claiming no racism had existed since the 1960s and that blacks brought on their difficulties due to their lack of accountability. The black women remained silent.

Realizing that arguing with such obliviousness to reality was pointless, I stood up and said, "I respectfully disagree."

At which point, I went on my way.

This morning, I came across op-ed writer Charles Blow's column at the NY Times titled "How Expensive it is to be Poor." Blow touches on the Ferguson episode and effectively refutes my neighbor's charges of the lack of accountability among blacks:

Earlier this month, the Pew Research Center released a study that found that most wealthy Americans believed “poor people today have it easy because they can get government benefits without doing anything in return.”

This is an infuriatingly obtuse view of what it means to be poor in this country — the soul-rending omnipresence of worry and fear, of weariness and fatigue. This can be the view only of those who have not known — or have long forgotten — what poverty truly means.

“Easy” is a word not easily spoken among the poor. Things are hard — the times are hard, the work is hard, the way is hard. “Easy” is for uninformed explanations issued by the willfully callous and the haughtily blind.

Allow me to explain, as James Baldwin put it, a few illustrations of “how extremely expensive it is to be poor.”

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Who will stand up for the poor in the 2012 presidential election?

Courtesy of parentingpink.com.

While the rest of the punditry swoons over the dress Michelle Obama wore last night and her “hitting it out of the ballpark” convention speech, Jim Wallis reminds us this morning of those whom both our Democratic and Republican political leaders too often overlook:

We've got a problem in this country. I know it, you know it, and the politicians know it too, but most won't even say it out loud: poverty. We're bracing ourselves for next month's release of the 2011 numbers -- most economists predict that we're looking at the highest rates of poverty in fifty years.

In the years before the recession, we were making some strides. We had programs like Head Start that helped build strong kids from the get-go. We had high employment, and things were moving in the right direction. But even then, when we had budget surpluses, we couldn't get the nation's political leaders to focus on a real commitment to significantly reducing poverty in America. Then the recession hit, and everything changed. Many of those who were in poverty last decade were pushed into "deep" poverty (less than half of the poverty line) and we have an emerging group called the "newly poor"-- those suburban families whose houses are under water, who can't pay their gas, and whose six-figure jobs dissolved when the bubbles burst. The face and the type of poverty in this country is changing rapidly: suburbs in the largest metro areas saw their poor populations increase 25 percent from 2000 to 2008 -- almost five times faster than in the cities, according to Brookings.

If you're not poor, and you don't have friends who are poor, you might have little clue about what it's like to be in poverty. For too many people before the recession, poverty was about "them." About "those people." Now, poverty is "us" -- those sitting next to us in the pews, fellow workers laid off, brothers or sisters with their houses underwater. We have a whole group of hardworking people, through no fault of their own, who are slipping through the cracks and under the poverty line. According to the Census, nearly half of Americans are under the poverty line or barely above it: they are one paycheck, one health crisis, one breath away from falling below that line. Folks who used to donate their used clothes to Salvation Army are now shopping there; families who used to donate to food banks are standing in their ever-growing lines.

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