“Empty pockets never held anyone back. Only empty heads and empty hearts can do that.”
~Norman Vincent Peale
I first heard about Blog Action Day my first week blogging. I think it’s a tremendous idea; people across the world, hundreds of tongues, all wagging on the same subject. I promised myself that when the day came, I’d dip my quill in ink.
Today is that day.
I cannot speak with authority about the two billion (plus) people who live in this world, surviving on less than two dollars a day. Theirs is a poverty for which I have no authentic frame of reference. Only movies, television, and other frivolities of our industrialized world have illuminated such misfortune to my eyes.
I cannot speak with authority about the characters in my country or the souls in my state who, through no fault of their own and every effort to evolve, have found themselves destitute. They have countless stories to tell, and could tell them far better than I.
In the year 2008, there is no shortage of poverty in this country. We have poverty of our minds, poverty in our government, and poverty in the methods in which we teach tomorrow’s leaders. This is too much for me to tackle now; I’d like to start with something smaller.
Today, I will discuss the poverty I know, the kind which litters the few square miles where I grew up for the first fourteen years of my life; the same square on the map where I’ve returned to live for the last seven.
When I was small, during that window when my memory is more like fuzzy analog television than HDTV, our family didn’t have much. My parents worked daily to build their small business, and every dollar mattered. Our clothes were second hand, coupons clipped for every purchase.
Before they started their business, both Mom and Pop had lost their jobs. My half sisters were living with us, we had no money coming in, and desperately needed assistance. My mom, against my father’s formidable protest, applied for welfare.
I understand my pop’s position. To me, getting a check for work I have not done, yet would be perfectly willing and able to do, would be akin to having the bottom of my foot sliced opened, horse hair sewn inside; every step an excruciating reminder that my life must alter its course.
Unable to pull ahead, and unwilling to stay behind, my parents risked it all in pursuit of a dream. They traded the security of their check for the back breaking eighty hour work weeks intrinsic to building a flower shop on a foundation of nothing. By the time I was an adolescent, the business was a success and we were able to move a few miles east.
When Daisy and I bought our first home, we came here, back to my old neighborhood, on the other side of town.
I do not speak of the hundreds of hard working families who surround us. They who get up early, work all day, and return home to the endless exhaustion of being mindful mothers and fathers.
I speak of those with big screen tv’s, bathing themselves daily in their deity’s bluish glow while waiting for the mail truck to pull curbside with their check.
This is not poverty, it is sloth.
What shatters my heart when I see this, is not that these people live off the sweat of others. That merely raises my ire. What truly kills me is that these people are teaching their children to wander inside an aimless circle rather than soar in a neat line, straight ahead.
There is often something missing in these situations; a single ingredient that could twist the tide in the opposite direction.
Fathers.
Now there is a poverty eating part of our population; they who think it’s acceptable to have a child and then leave it to chance. That is a poverty of the soul, that if enlightened, might extinguish the horrors it’s left behind.
Writer Dad
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My better half, Namas Daisy, has written a terrific post on poverty as well. You can find it here.
