First World Problems - My Mission Statement

Poverty hits close to home for me. It's in my home. It's in my family's homes. It's a generational doom that grips us like a genetic disease. I look at my children and tabulate all the things I can possibly do to prevent the disease from spreading to them as well. I'm not the only parent who is hoping the cycle stops with them. I'm not the only parent who cries for their children's futures. My voice isn't alone, but it often feels like the chorus of voices crying out against poverty in America are ignored or discredited.

Unlike poverty in developing nations, poverty in American has a different face. Instead of visibly starving children with sunken faces and distended bellies we have morbidly obese children washing down their potato chip breakfast with off brand soda. What defines American poverty is not the abject destitution that third world countries face - first world poverty is much more subtle and is far harder to define. Food insecurity, housing insecurity, obesity, educational disadvantages, work scarcity, the school to prison pipeline, rampant inequality, low wages, drug and alcohol abuse, depression and mental illnesses, and the cycle of these things that self-perpetuates through generations, over and over again. We might not have children dying in the streets of starvation, and that fact makes it easier for people to ignore it, to argue that it even exists.

Sasha Abramsky, author of the book "The American Way of Poverty", states "poverty in America is relative. And it's about a lack of basic necessities and a lack of security, so an uncertainty as to where you're going to get food, an uncertainty as to how you're going to pay your most elementary bills, and it's about a reliance on either very imperfect government institutions or very overwhelmed private charity."

We have "safety nets" in place, do we not? Isn't there food assistance, housing assistance, welfare, and charity? We already have help for the poor, why should we bother investing ourselves in anything more for them? Wouldn't that create even more dependency, even more mythical "welfare queens", even more poverty due to laziness and greed?
We're worried about giving too much in America. Worried about creating entitlement among the poor. We've got to make sure these people don't think they can get a free ride on our tax dollars. But low wages and high costs of living ensure the poverty cycle continues, and even hard-working families struggle to feed their children and keep the lights on in the homes they can't afford to live in. Even with assistance based on income, it's prohibitively hard to pull oneself out of poverty if the income being earned isn't enough to support a family.

 


Where are the good-paying jobs the poor can seek to assist in their exodus from poverty? The opportunities simply do not exist for the poor to succeed. There are few jobs available, and many of those that exist pay wages below the poverty line. Well-paying jobs don't often go to the poor. The poor cook your food, clean your hotel room, scan your purchases at a checkout, scrub the toilets at your mall, and scan the classifieds with the hope that they can find a job that doesn't require them to wipe America's behind without being able to pay their bills.


What does the future hold for my children? Will they succumb to poverty? Will they succeed? Statistics suggest they will fail to leave what they were born into, and it causes me physical pain to consider it as a possibility. To accept the staggering possibility that my children will live as low wage workers struggling to survive is impossible. I can't give up on their futures - I can't give up on any child's future.


Change. It's dirty, it hurts, and it's not going to come easy, but the future of so many children like mine are worth it to me - is it worth it to you?