The New Poverty
There is a difference between homelessness and poverty. To be sure, the homeless are poor. But not all poor people are homeless. And on television, the greatest irony is how much sexier homelessness is than poverty itself. Blog Action Day 2008 is today - and they have tasked interested blogs like ours with writing a post about poverty. The goal, presumably, is to end poverty by drawing attention to the problem. The idea, though, that wrangling a group of bloggers and getting them all to write about poverty will somehow solve the problem is a bit ham handed. I believe the assumption is that the blog-reading public doesn't know there are poor people out there, somewhere. People in the blogosphere are pretty hip, though, and the ones that read blogs for information are almost surely aware that some people don't have the income to buy what they need to survive. 
What isn't generally talked about - and most likely won't be discussed much in this year's Blog Action Day - are the working poor of America. These are the people who work services jobs for low wages and minimal to non-existant benefits. Barbara Ehrenreich's "Nickle and Dimed" is a classic tome on this. Unfortunately I think it is only a favorite book among the young and poor, not the people who have the ability to make important changes. Selah. Solving poverty in America will not be about giving a vagrant a sandwich. It will not be about giving vagrants their own shopping carts, or finding kinder, gentler names for vagrants - "members of the homeless community" is about the most medicinal, sterile, berift-of-life euphemism I've heard for it, which is again ironic, considering how dirty most street people are. Solving poverty in America will not be about making ourselves feel good about the problem by writing blog posts on the subject. If we feel we are "doing something" simply because we write or talk about something that needs fixing, and then do nothing constructive to fix it, then things like Blog Action Day 2008 are actually more destructive than they are helpful. They give us a feel-good that allows us to assuage our guilt for our inactivity, and continue on our merry way. Solving poverty in America will have to do with being concerned about providing a living wage for American workers. People on the street are not poverty in America - they are poor, but frankly not having money isn't their biggest problem. Homelessness is their problem. If we're talking about poverty, let's talk about the larger group of people in trouble, the ones working at fast food chains or grocery stores or waitressing who earn minimum wage and are expected to survive on that alone. My solution for poverty would be to give workers in America not just a living wage, but the wage they deserve. Waitressing is a hard job. Waitresses, then, should be paid for the level of work they do. The same goes for grocery store clerks, the person making your cheeseburgers at the drive-thru... We can only underpay these people if we feel their contribution isn't worth more than that. So either they need to strike and show us their value, or we need to see it and bug our Congressman. Our "minimum wage" is due to be increased, but even then the increase will have more to do with what the market can bear than with what people need to survive. Solving that, in my opinion, is what will end poverty in America.
About the Author: Eric Reid
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1 comment so far
cheritycall says:
hy, Do something for help the hungry people in Africa or India,
I made this blog about that subject:
on http: //tinyurl.com/6bz6t7