THE PROBLEM OF POVERTY

"The rich are different than you and I."

--Ernest Hemingway

"Yes. They're better."

--F. Scott Fitzgerald

Of course, many of you must be thinking that there's much more to this poem than just racism and contradiction and confusion, and you'd be right.

In our country, as in others, there occurs the strange phenomenon that I will refer to here as the poverty line. What I am speaking of is an actual, demonstrable, physical separation between the properties of well off people and/or institutions and that of the poorer sort. For most of my life I have wrestled with this: that line is always there, but how? Why? For a long time I bought into the standard Republican dodge that the poor simply don't take good care of their property, that they let the place get run down. (Liberal types have become to become horrifically guilty of this same sin of late, arguing that boosting income for the poor is the key to improving their treatment of their property.) Horseshit. I've lived and worked in and among the poor for a fair amount of my life. While individual problems, such as stupidity, drug and alcohol abuse, carelessness, recklessness, fecklessness, and pure bad luck do lend themselves to the degradation of the properties in which the poor reside, the argument that the poor, as a unified whole, take bad care of their places has no substance, in part, though not in whole, because it ignores the single major fact in the matter: the places the poor live are in bad shape when the poor get there.

That includes "public housing" or "the projects" or whatever you want to call state subsidized housing. When new, those places are badly designed, cramped, built with the meanest materials by the lowest bidders; they are terrible places built with the least of best intentions. On seeing some such structures, newly built, I have, on occasion, had an epiphany: the windows, some of them, will soon be broken. Hell, just looking at the places from the outside, I've had a strong desire to break a window myself. I mean, these places are depressing

But I digress.

The places the poor inherit are already run-down. This bears no further explanation. The immigrants, the New Americans, by and large land here under conditions of poverty; they continue to live in conditions of poverty, for the simple fact that that's what's available to them. They work for low wages. The conditions are not horrific, as they were in olden golden days, but they are not good, and they are not heartening. And they are separated from us by that line, that invisible, sacrosanct line separating the haves from the have nots. The idealist in me thinks that maybe, if only we could erase that line, if we could somehow smudge the distinction between rich and poor, then racism and classism and fear and intolerance would evaporate like a morning dew, and that the country club snoots and the bankers and the politicians would drop their subtle, yet definite, biases and come to embrace these strange Others. The realist in me knows that this line has been smudged time and again, smudged and fudged and fiddled and rubbed raw, but it will not go away. Regardless of how idealistic and "liberal" and forthright some of us may be, we still live in a world where money is power, and power in this country means, largely, having better things. Lives and deaths and lakefront properties are commodities. Tell me I'm wrong.

I've been obsessed with poverty and the poor forever, practically for my whole life. I'm not entirely sure why. I could ascribe it to "White Guilt," the weird phenomeneon by which, in the 60's and 70's, white people managed to convince themselves that, by not actively being part of the solution, they were part of the problem, but that's not it. (I confronted this in college; no soap, kids.) I have known some fairly smart people who have fallen victim to White Guilt. It's powerful stuff, and it can wipe you out. You get to the point that any pleasure is a guilty pleasure, and suddenly the guiltier pleasures are justifiable. Or you put yourself in a position where you are supposed to alleviate suffering, and you go up against it and up against it and what you can't see is the window pane The System has in place to keep you from actuallly, objectively alleviating the suffering. Or you idealistically think of the wandering homeless poor, "there but for the grace of God go I," and then you get in with them and you discover you're in with a bunch of feckless losers who don't want your help. And on and on and on.

On the flip side, there are people who turn the guilt to their advantage, people who have made helping the poor something enlightening and enriching, making it a positive part of their lives. I've known lots and lots of those, and, for the most part, I can't take a thing away from them. They do good and they make a difference, and if I or the world sees a futility to it, well, they just don't see that. I remember an ad guy I met once, years ago when I thought I might go into the ad biz, and thank God that didn't happen, who used his company's resources to do ads for the yearly drive to provide the homeless with a Thanksgiving dinner. Where he saw chartiable work, I saw a slick ad campaign. I tried, and failed, to convince him that my view of the matter was the accurate one. (And here's how slick Uncle Jim was back then: this was during an interview.) Can't take a thing away from them. Glad they do what they do.

I'm too cynical to donate to United Way, but I've been known to hand a ten dollar bill to a pan handler. Because I know how great it's going to make the guy feel, because I've been down like that, not to the point of actually pan handling but close to it, and I'm realistic enough to know that, in human terms, money really does make the world go 'round, and it's not just ten bucks I'm handing him, it's tidings of comfort and joy.

(My favorite Christmas song was, is, and always will be "God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen." Because, y'know, I think everyone deserves tidings of comfort and joy, especially in December.

So when I was in Modesto, back in 1998, driving around with Doc Nagel's wife, Kim, we passed from one neighborhood to another, from the poor houses where the Mexicans lived to the mid-scale rental houses full of Young Professionals & the upper echelons of the working class, and the distinction was so clear it was breathtaking. Like so many other things in California, it wasn't that it was bigger or better or anything; it was just clearer. The next couple of days, it just kept hitting me. That line, that damned sacrosanct line, was everywhere. And we went into the stores, & restaurants & neighborhoods, crossing that line, and everyone was perfectly nice, except the one time when the woman at the head of the grocery line didn't understand English enough to explain to the clerk that she didn't want to buy what she had in her basket, she had just brougt it up by way of example to try and find out where the stuff she really wanted was. Then some tempers flared.

Oh, who the hell am I kidding? The Line is there because we live in a society that's full of rich biggots trying to make a profit off the poor at the least possible expense. I know that. I knew it all along. But it would have been harder to make my point had I just blurted it out up top.