POVERTY REDEFINED
copyright 1997
all rights reserved

I always imagined that I was poor when I was a teenager. Grandmother and I lived on her social security and pension of $115.00 a month. Thanks to a few relatives and the kindness of a landlord who frequently waived our rent, we managed to eat and pay the utilities. We lived in what was then known as poverty.

Today such a situation is unimaginable. The government has drawn a poverty line in the sand. Poverty doesn’t mean being poor anymore. Poverty used to hurt, was socially unacceptable and everyone tried to avoid living in it. Now poverty is something that entitles people to special status and treatment under the law. Poverty isn’t what it used to be.

Poverty today is the right not to work and be subsidized by those who do work. It means freedom and freeloading. It is a shopping cart full of groceries, a satellite dish in the front yard and a car. Poverty means receiving at least one or two checks a month in the in the mail along with food stamps and vouchers. Poverty is subsidized housing, cheap health insurance and discounted utilities. Poverty is now an occupation that affords one plenty of time to pursue an avocation.

Poverty is watching rented video movies on a color television. It means having discretionary money for lotto tickets, cigarettes, alcohol and disposable diapers. Poverty is a social event at the local tavern or a protest march on the capital steps. Poverty is political clout and a free college education. It is the pregnant welfare mother living with her gainfully employed boyfriend. Like a clever thief, poverty reaches into the pockets of hard-working Americans.

Poverty is even an excuse for every other social ill. Drug use, child abuse, robbery and even murder are blamed on poverty. People no longer commit crimes; poverty does. Poverty makes people riot and destroy the holdings of industrious and successful people.

Poverty is now defined by agencies of the government and people who haven’t felt it and don’t know what it is. Earn less than $12,000 a year and you are impoverished. Receive a welfare benefit package worth $20,000.00 and you are still impoverished. Poverty is a political tool used to get properly concerned individuals elected to high office. Poverty is nothing but a word hijacked and used for personal political gain.

Poverty in the United States is more than a comfortable living. It is something many protect with religious fervor. Politicians need poverty to rail against and huge bureaucracies employ thousands to administer to the poor. Poverty is big business.

There is no shame in choosing poverty as a lifestyle. An acquaintance of mine refers to her welfare check as her “paycheck.” Offered employment, she says she doesn’t want to face a cut in her benefits.

What poverty really means is destitution. It is the hollow-eyed child with a distended abdomen and the skeletal parent starving in blighted African lands. It is a handful of rice each day for nourishment. Poverty is no heat in the winter, no running water, no electricity and no hope. Poverty is the mother with no breast milk for her baby. Poverty is the homeless man found dead of hypothermia. Poverty is pain and suffering. Few Americans know real poverty.

I still think I was once poor. I remember the bare walls and floors. I remember transportation as getting somewhere by foot. I remember, and it makes me wince when I hear a politician lament the rise in poverty in our nation. What passes for poverty in America would qualify as affluence in many countries. Poverty has changed a lot in the last thirty years. Somehow it just isn’t the same.