Here are some cold, hard facts about poverty in this country. Did Katrina really change things, are we at a time in our history when we will change the way Americans look at the poor, will we do something about this fucking disgrace?
If we don’t do something now when we have seen images that speak of a third world country, when we have seen bodies of the poor floating in feces filled waters, when we have seen houses marked with a big X which signifies a dead person inside, when we have heard of how so many poor people died horrendous deaths as the water rose up until they had no air left, no place to go, no life left in their bodies, if that isn’t enough to make us pay attention and do something about the poor in this country then we will be a nation without a soul. We will lose our pride, our honor, our dignity and our integrity. We will be walking shells of people with nothing left but pure and simple greed in our hearts. We will have lost our humanity.
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We haven’t identified or found all of the dead people in New Orleans. We saw, day after day, the dead bodies sitting in wheelchairs or lying on the side of the road or on the roofs of their homes, decaying before our eyes and we had a government that didn’t see fit to treat them with respect or dignity. We saw what our government has become from local to state to federal and it made us sick, it outraged us, it filled us with venomous rage. We owned that rage, we had a right to feel that rage, we carry that rage with us still but I say we have a place to put that outrage and that is with the living poor, all 37,000,000 of them.
37,000,000 people live at or below the poverty level in this country. 37,000,000 people struggle each and every day to stay warm, to be housed, to be clothed, to be fed. One in every nine people in this country live in abject poverty. How long does it take you to walk down the street or through the aisles of a grocery store before you have looked into the eyes of nine people? Count them as you pass and see how many people living at or below the poverty line you see every single day. Go to a park and count the children, how many are there, how many poor children do they represent?
In Detroit one in three live below the poverty line. Detroit now has an unemployment rate of 15%. There are 10,000 people who are homeless every single night in Detroit.
In Hartford, Connecticut, a city where wealth and good living is the image that immediately comes to mind, 43% of the children, 43% of the CHILDREN, live below the poverty line. The average income is $365. a week. Joe Lieberman makes $1700. a day so far in the year 2006, $213 an hour. That means that Joe Lieberman makes more in an hour than the average minimum wage worker at $5.15 an hour makes in a week.
In the Appalachians, 65% of the people live below the poverty line.
In Pembroke, Illinois, just 70 miles outside Chicago, 60% of the people don’t have running water. There are no sewage lines in the town. They say they are the forgotten people in this country.
A staggering 42% of single mothers live at or below the poverty line in this country.
What do fellow Americans have to say about the poor, those 37,000,000 fellow Americans that are invisible? ‘They have the same opportunities as anyone else.’ ‘Why don’t they pull themselves up by their bookstraps and make a better life for themselves?’ ‘They’re all blacks and Hispanics, they’re lazy, they’re scum, they’re on drugs, they’re in gangs, they’re stupid.’ ‘I work hard, dammit, I shouldn’t have to pay them to sit on their asses.’ ‘I work hard so should they.’ There are a kazillion ‘theys’ but there are few ‘us’ in their raving against the poor.
But it’s not just those people who don’t ‘get it.’ There are also people who should know better, there are people who call themselves ‘progressives’ or ‘liberals’ or ‘good Democrats.’ There are people who lived in the LBJ presidency when poverty was cut by a sizeable number in this country. There are those who have seen, with their own eyes, what determination, resolve, and good policies can do, it can lift people up and out of poverty. It’s not just some ‘pipe dream,’ it’s part of our history that was written by President Lyndon Baines Johnson not so very long ago.
There isn’t one of the 3100+ counties in this country where a minimum wage worker can pay their rent with their paycheck. Not one. Yet, the members of Congress don’t see fit to raise the minimum wage at all. If we had a just Congress, both parties of Congress, we wouldn’t see bills that propose a dollar raise, in a just Congress we would see a bill that proposed a raise that provides a living minimum wage for every single American.
42% of single mothers live at or below the poverty line. That translates into hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions, of children in this country and yet we have men who say they should be able to ‘opt’ out of paying child support. They say they should not be held to account for fathering a child or children they didn’t want but yet they did just that, they fathered the very children they don’t want to pay child support for.
It isn’t just Republican men, it’s also ‘progressive,’ ‘liberal’ men, men who are Democrats who say DNA may now catch them in the net of responsibility so NOW these men think abortion rights are not just women’s rights any longer. No, these men see in abortion a way out for them, it’s no longer a moral issue, it’s a right to not have to pay for the children they father. No matter when conception begins, these men believe they should be free to spread their seeds and not be held accountable. When it comes to their checkbook, fuck the fetus and fuck the woman, it has nothing to do with them.
42% of single mothers live at or below the poverty line and yet women are still paid just $.72 to every dollar a man makes. Women in management positions are a fraction of men in management. Women are often solely and largely responsible for providing daycare for their children, this is still the only industrialized nation in the world without subsidized daycare. These single mothers too often are the only parent present for their children. Many, many men don’t show up, in any way, to support the children they father.
Why are many women single and living in poverty? Every nine seconds a woman is the victim of domestic abuse in this country. That’s 9600 women a day, every single day. Our children are too often caught up in that net of violence. They witness it and all too often these young boys turn into men who carry the next generation of violence against women. The young girls are given the message that women deserve nothing better. The cycle never, ever ends. Is it a coincidence that so many women live on welfare if the violence goes on unabated?
We have a government that is willing to turn a deaf ear and a blind eye to the continuing violence that is perpetrated against women and thus their children. Women are chastened if they stay and are chastened if they become one of the single mothers who can’t make it with a minimum wage job, those that fall into that 42% who live in poverty. They get no breaks from the leadership in this country and they seldom get breaks from those who judge them.
We have to put the two together, women living in poverty and those who are the women who are beaten every nine seconds. Women can’t fight this battle alone. Men have got to step up to the plate here. If Promise Keepers can fill huge stadiums with millions of men a year pontificating on how to control women then surely the men in this country can rally together and find ways of ending this violence against women.
If Promise Keepers can get national press coverage for their Christian values then surely men who want to stop this madness against women can get press coverage for their values in their fight against domestic abuse.
If women are beaten every nine seconds in this country surely many of you know a man who beats his wife or girlfriend. Step up to the plate and call him on it. Step in and help the woman that is the victim of his abuse. Call law enforcement over and over until the woman feels she is safe enough to leave. Help her get her children out of that abusive home.
Talk to men and tell them to show up for their children. Tell them if they impregnate a girl or woman they are responsible. Don’t become one of the men who believes Roe v. Wade for Men is righteous. Don’t become one of the men who are ‘progressive’ or ‘liberal’ that believe they can play but not pay. Your DNA makes you accountable, it shouldn’t be used as a threat to your wallet, it should be a threat to your manhood if you don’t show up for your child.
Some of the mothers living in poverty are mothers because they have no choice. It doesn’t really make a difference to them that abortions are still legal. They aren’t accessible physically for them and they aren’t accessible financially. For many women in poverty it isn’t about what is happening in South Dakota, it isn’t the extremism of carrying a child to term as a result of rape or incest. They are forced to carry their children to term because there is no other way for them so the web of poverty just keeps circling around them.
If there is any silver lining to Katrina it can be that we do something about the poverty in this country. We have a blueprint, we have the legacy of Lyndon Johnson, we know it can be done. It won’t come easily but it will come to pass if we are commited enough, if we demand enough be done, if we see our part in why it continues, if we all get our hands dirty and are willing to look at the hard truths to why the most powerful and wealthy country on earth allows it and allows the numbers to increase every year instead of doing something, anything to make those numbers decrease.
This is not a woman’s issue, this is not a children’s issue, this is not a man’s issue, this is a human issue, this is America’s issue. It is a disgrace. We have heard, we have seen the clarion call, now it’s up to us to step up to the plate.
My favorite quote from Virginia Woolf, “To look life in the face for what it is. To know it for what it is. To see it for what it is. To love it for what it is. And then to put it away.” It’s time for us to look, see, and know this life of poverty so we can love the life we have created for every single American enough so we can put the life of poverty away, once and for all.
This is crossposted at My Left Wing and DailyKos