Poverty: Easing the Pain, Part 1

NOTE: Please read my previous blog post, "Poverty Sim: Walk in My Shoes," before you read this one. It will put into perspective my motivation for continuing to brainstorm about poverty.

Admirable hours--most banks close at 5:00 most
days and are closed on Sunday, making it hard for
working people to get their banking done.

Poverty: Yuck. Poor people: Can't be punished enough for being poor. Or that is how it often looks to me. It seems like every piece of assistance comes with a value judgment attached, or with a sneer, or with a shower of condescension. Those people are poor because that's what they want. They don't want to work. All they want is a handout, all they do is suck the surplus out of the economy.

I hear these attitudes all the time, from my middle class friends, from political candidates, from the very people who serve the poor. Harsh words for the despised, the discarded.

Yes, I know I'm a bleeding heart liberal, but I do not want to end poverty. What I would like to do is restore respect for a group of people who work very hard, even when it doesn't earn money; who care deeply about their children and their children's futures; who jump over a hundred hurdles a day and never get to the finish line. I would like to find ways

(1) not to end poverty, but to ease some of its worst stresses;
(2) to remove some of the chains that bind people to poverty;
(3) to establish dignity for every person regardless of whether they get food assistance or subsidized childcare, or work in a jobs program instead of "real" job.

Many BHPH car dealers overcharge for the car,
loan at obscene rates of interest, repossess
fast, and sell the same car again.
(Rinse and repeat.)

Heather Pennington from the Ohio Association of Food Banks said she wanted to know more about the people in my county (Vinton, perennially one of the poorest in Ohio) and what might help them, in food terms and in general. Accordingly, I have been brainstorming with myself (always fun to call on my many selves), with co-workers, with the internet. Every time I came up with something, I wrote it on a little piece of paper and stuck it into an envelope. Last week I had a wonderful time hashing all the ideas out with Heather and her associate Dawn on the front porch of my ramshackle bungalow on the edge of McArthur. I think they were wondering exactly how many little pieces of paper were in that envelope.

Heather asked me to type up the list for her and I thought: "Bing! If I'm going to type, I might as well type right into a blog entry, then cut and paste them to her." Never waste a keystroke. So, here it is--my list of ways to make the lives of poor people in my region less stressful and more productive.

DISCLAIMER: My purpose in this blog today is not to discuss feasibility or all the problems people have had who tried to implement any of these ideas in the past. And, these ideas are not new. People know these ideas. But implementation has been sporadic and best and non-existent at worst. Keep in mind--I am not trying to end poverty, just to ease the stress and strain of it.

Enough caveat emptor. Here we go.

Barefoot and pregnant: Cheap and easy birth control.

Early pregnancies make possible
the classic 5-generation family photo
and allow for the rise of a matriarch
whose power crosses many
generations.

I know that condoms are cheap and easy, but men don't like them and often won't use them. That's why this strategy is directed toward women preventing their own accidental pregnancies through the patch, the pill, the shot, the shield. These do not prevent sexually transmitted diseases, but that's not the issue that drains the energy out of our women. The shot and the shield would help in the prevalent but under-reported instances when the man throws the birth control pills or the diaphragm in the wood stove and insists on having sex anyway; or when sex is only marginally consensual; or when the husband will not let his wife have the car to go to a doctor's appointment. My local domestic violence shelter can tell you some horror stories about how "accidental" pregnancies are often associated with family abuse. They exposed my own condescension on this issue.


Have I put your nose out of joint yet? Read on....

This is a quaint vision of the parent-teacher
conference...but I mainly selected this picture
because Bob Cousy is featured in this issue.

School conferences on Saturday and Sunday. Yes, each child's whole family may come along, and yes, teachers definitely need to be compensated in some way for doing this. But I am advocating weekend parent-teacher conferences--let's have a party. Get some pizzas cooking; get some Ski delivered from the local distributor; plan some entertainment for whoever is waiting around in the cafetorium. I do not buy the stereotype that poor parents don't care about their kids' education. They have many barriers to weekday conferences--no paid time off from work, being fired for absence from work, distance from work places, multiple users for one vehicle, no child care for the other children in the family or elder care for Grandma, no appropriate clothing for the institutional setting...are you getting the picture? I believe that, given the opportunity, poor people will demonstrate how much hope and concern for they have for the education and future chances of their children.

Stay with me now....

In Appalachia, the road to recovery is rocky and
full of detours and hairpin curves.

Community-based treatment and treatment beds. Every parole officer, social worker, and law enforcement officer, or anyone else whose life intersects with addicted people is familiar with this issue, and efforts have been made in my community to attempt to make help available locally. Too often, though, a person who desperately needs drug or alcohol addiction treatment has to wait weeks or sometimes months for a bed to open up--and the bed may be 50 to 150 miles away. These sufferers are often lost to the system by the time treatment is available.

We all know that the War on Drugs has neglected to supply funding for treatment. But in rural communities, this is especially serious. The number of counselors, therapists, psychiatrists, and mental health services in general is minuscule and services are far apart. I can't get blood work, a mammogram, and a bone density test without driving to three different towns more than 100 miles apart. Put me on drugs, give me a broken-down car and gas at $4.00 a gallon and I am not going to get to treatment.

The best painkillers are simple phrases of love and
appreciation.

The rural poor also suffer disproportionately from painkiller addiction. And it's not only the dealers who are getting rich. Drug-makers are dumping huge numbers of pain-killers into the system, and doctors are prescribing them. If you read my "Poverty Sim" blog entry, you'll remember the upstanding gentleman who ended up committing robbery to keep his family together--it wouldn't be a hard decision to sell just a couple of your pills to a neighbor. Twenty bucks could get your kid a nice outfit to start school in.

Are you getting me now? Still with me?

I apologize for dragging you through all this, but please don't tune out. I've got a lot more to share, but this blog entry is getting too long for a single-setting read (which violates my "rules of blog"). I'll try to post Part 2 on Monday.