As the push towards the 2012 elections continues, poverty has come to the forefront, and for good reason: more Americans than ever are on food stamps, and a good number of people (drawing not only on polls but empirical knowledge) are increasingly desperate and uncertain about their future.
One of the long held assertions of Republicans is that the poor "choose" to be poor. Like all stereotypes, there are enough people who do choose to be poor that it's easy to point in their direction and make a stereotype that fits. But there's a strong untruth that isn't revealed in this simple statement: while some people may CHOOSE to be poor, nobody WANTS to be poor.
And the difference is something that needs to be understood by our leaders, our ministers, anyone who has any desire to deal with the issues of poverty.
I'm going to draw on my personal experience here, as for a good portion of my life, I was one who chose poverty. Not a welfare lifestyle, but poverty nonetheless. For reasons I won't go into here, I eschewed higher education, and although I briefly attended college, I just as quickly left it behind, choosing hand to mouth employment in the restaurants, factories, and ultimately in homecare.
The reason was simple: from about 18-27, I didn't believe I would live past the age of 30. This wasn't just a fatalistic post-adolescent angst thing: I buried one younger brother at 16 and another at 23. And nothing in the world around me gave me hope for greater optimism. I believed I had a ticking clock, and I lived like it.
When I was 27, I made the decision to move into homecare. I decided it was time to gain a sense of purpose, a sense of working towards the long term. And I loved it at first, and put everything into it. But I burned out quickly, and I quit about 3 years after I actually should have. I went to working at WalMart briefly because I had become so overtaken by circumstances that I simply couldn't handle being around people.
Leading up to this, though, I did see what was happening, and did what I could to forestall the inevitable. At one point, I even went to my pastor trying to explain what I thought was depression (but later learned was despair -- I was overloaded, ill equipped, and worn out). He came back to me with the simple answer that he had spoken to his wife asking about depression, and she stated "I think all men suffer from it". That was it. No honest, sincere attempt to reach out, to be there...at a time when I really needed him.
Keep in mind these are not words of bitterness -- I'm beyond that. These are words to help people who wonder what leads to poverty and how they can help.
At the same time, my support system was crumbling. I had spent several years trying to rebuild a relationship with my father, only to see him becoming increasingly bitter, cynical and critical -- at a time when I needed people to help me through. I was long on problems, and short on answers.
And the bills were mounting. And having mouths to feed at home certainly didn't help.
In desperation, I did the only thing I knew how to do, an incredibly stupid decision in retrospective, but one that had a fortunately positive outcome -- I ran.
We didn't discuss it with most folks around us, just picked up and left and headed out west, ostensibly to start fresh, but with no knowledge of where we were going or what we were doing. I often liken it to Paul Theroux's protagonist in "The Mosquito Coast" -- I was trying to move forward, but was acting in desperation, not in common sense, and I had no idea where I was going.
This led us to nearly a year in the Nevada desert, where I worked a variety of jobs, from mining to laying septic in the middle of the mojave desert, to day labor. It was backbreaking work, and it was uncertain. On top of that, we hit at the peak of housing in Southern Nevada, and rents were insanely high. Add to that low wages, and our financial situation was not improving.
I'll summarize the "rest of the story" in the post following.
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