One word you will not hear in Tampa

There is a political convention going on in Tampa. One word that you will never hear during the flag-waving, chest-thumping orgy of machismo, money, and "morality" is poverty. The folks in Tampa do not believe poverty really exists and, if it does, is the fault of person who finds themselves with few resources in our capitalist paradise.

The crowd in Tampa can be forgiven for their beliefs about poverty. After all, their political, business, and religious leaders have spread that message far and wide. If you do not think that the poor are poor by choice or consequence of their own actions, then you have not been properly indoctrinated. You have also been told that the few "legitimate" poor people can be cared for by the church and charity. And if you are affluent, then your exposure to the real world of poverty is nonexistent unless you seek it out. Unless you leave the walls of your gated community or enclave of beautiful people, the poor will exist only in the occasional panhandler encountered on your travels for business or pleasure. Tampa has one of the largest homeless populations in America but the convention attendees will never look for them or see them.

Now that poverty has become a dirty word that sparks revulsion and anger among a major segment of the political spectrum, life for the poor is about to get harder even as more and more people join their ranks daily. The meanest streets in America are about to get even more brutal.

The poor are numerous, their suffering is real, and the resources to help them are scarce and drying up. If you want to help, then there are a few simple things you can do. First, educate yourself. The facts are out there. You will discover how many people in America are living in extreme or deep poverty, including those that satisfy the international definition of extreme poverty - living on less than $2 per day. Get engaged in programs that assist the poor. See, hear, smell, taste, and touch their lives. 

The real faces of poverty cover a broad spectrum. There are people that grew up in terrible schools, navigated the temptations and pitfalls of street gangs, and lack the means to migrate to hopefully greener pastures. There are the mentally ill that quickly find themselves living on the street. There are blue and white collar workers that lost their job and cannot find anything that pays them nearly as much as they once did. There are older people that have little in the way of life savings. There are the disabled from birth defects, trauma, or disease. They are all people life kicked in the teeth.

Part of your education should be to take the Food Stamp Challenge. Get the tool kit. Keep track of the time you spend trying to find cheap food, the nutrition quality of what you eat, and how you feel. Wimps do it for a week. Try it for a month to get the full effect to food pressures day in and day out. If you shop at a big box club store, be sure to take the pro-rated cost of membership off the top of your budget. 

Last but not least, think about how to define poverty. The folks meeting in Tampa define poverty as not having stuff. Carefully massaged numbers from all the right think tanks suggest that many people who have little money still have some nice stuff like a television, cell phone, and car. To be poor in their eyes, you have to be completely destitute with nothing to your name. 

It is more about a lack of resilience than stuff. This discussion gets to the heart of the matter:

but then he turned it on it’s head – he looked at each of us in the room and said to us, what happened if after this meeting [bit of a parry-phrase happening here, don't quota me by this] you got a couple of phone calls, telling you you had lost your job and there had been a fire at home which had burnt down the whole place including all your stuff and the bank called telling you that someone had gotten into your account and cleared out all your money and there is nothing you can do about it… and so within fifteen minutes of this meeting you had lost all your stuff..?

how long would it be before you had your next meal?

how long would it be before you found a place for you and your family to sleep for the night, or the next few weeks or months of nights?

how long before you found yourself a new job, whether back as a powerful executive in a company or serving coffee at the local Starbucks?

and the answer to each of those questions, and possibly some others, was not long at all…

so possibly the definition of POVERTY is not so much the LACK OF STUFF as it is the LACK OF FRIENDSHIP OR TOGETHERNESS

because that is how you would get your next meal, a place to stay, and your next job – through the people and network resources and connectivity you have…

To be resilient means to have the resources to get back on your feet. If you fall on hard times but have a social network of family, friends, and neighbors to help, then you will be in a much better position to find a new job, place to live, and the resources to stay afloat. If you are poor and everybody you know is also poor, then getting out of poverty is virtually impossible.

Natural disasters expose the vulnerability of a community. Hurricane Katrina hit those with the least the hardest because they could not get out of the city, take care of themselves on the road, or rebuild.  Ditto for economic disasters.

A poverty of resilience means no personal or social bootstraps to pull yourself up with.

The Tampa crowd have brainwashed themselves into thinking they do not need any help from other people and never will. Perhaps their personal resources are sufficient that they do not have to imagine having to rely on the kindness of others. It is not hard to be resilient when have much more than you need.

So poverty is about your physical and social environment. It is also about your psychological environment. Poverty is about few joys. Not having food or drink you enjoy to lift your spirits or share with friends. Not feeling safe in your home, neighborhood, and city. Not having the simple pleasures that we all take for granted. No variety of any kind. It is about an abundance of fear, anger, despair, and revulsion. You can find temporary relief from the psychological pain in drugs or alcohol, but those escapes will only increase your pain over time.

Poverty also means having no power and few advocates. We have politicians that are deliberately taking away the rights of the poor to vote. And since the political machine requires money to produce legislation, poverty means no influence. Too many of politicians even want to increase the vulnerability of the poor to predators, such as criminals, debt collectors, and abusive legal systems.

And poverty is spiritual. It is tough to feel God's love when too many, even religious people, are calling you worthless and a drain on society.

Poverty is common, becoming more common, and sucks. Jesus said the measure of your soul is whether you lift the cross of those in need. That sounds about right to me.