I’ve known poor folks. This isn’t them. The meat?
…the average household defined as poor by the government is equipped with air conditioning, cable TV, a car, a television, a DVD player, and if a boy is in the house, an Xbox or Playstation. The size of the average poor American’s home is actually LARGER than the average living space of a typical middle-income European.
So, the next time someone opens their yap spewing about the poor in America–and all the kids going to bed hungry at night, etc.–tell ’em to shut their yap. While there are poor folks still in America (it’s a truism that the poor will always be with us because its… true), the number of genuinely poor folk is really very, very, very small and completely amendable to local solutions.
Poor kids going to bed hungry? I’d be willing to bet that 99% of “poor kids” going to bed hungry are completely, totally and in every way, shape, fashion and form traceable directly to parents wasting resources on their own gratification. Society’s problem there has a simple solution: punish those parents. If that doesn’t rein them in and compel them to care for their kids before satisfying their urges for personal luxuries, then removal of the kids from the home and further, more stringent punishment of those selfish parents should ensue. And those solutions are best left to local authorities to devise and implement.
I remember growing up poor. Eating sugar sandwiches for lunch because there was nothing else. We didn’t have a car or a tv. Today there are still poor people, they’re just classified differently.
Interesting, Steve. We lived in town when I was a kid, so we only
1. Had a garden and canned most of our vegetables (yes, all five of us kids helped there).
2. Raised chickens and rabbits–the chickens for both eggs and for the stew pot/frying pan/oven and the rabbits for food and for sale of the pelts.
3. Milk was from a local dairy farm–unpasturized, whole. From that we made our own butter, among other foods… from which we had butter sandwiches for our school lunches when eggs weren’t plentiful. Mom baked the bread, naturally.
4. Hand-me-downs made up our wardrobes.Our lunch boxes were Xmas presents from grandparents, and they had to last us until we kids could provide something of our own. (Which we eventually did. “School milk” was a nickel a pint, and in “flush” times we got to have milk with our school lunches… except once I started saving back my milk money to fund my used comic book business in 4th and 5th grade. Lots of luxuries stemmed from that lil business, like string so I could make my own kites from newspaper and small branches trimmed from the trees on our lot, etc… )
We didn’t know that, by the standards of the yet non-existant “Great Society” poverty standards, we were “poor”. Heck, when Johnson’s expansion of so-called “welfare” hit, my parents could’ve qualified for fedgov-sponsored handouts, but we didn’t need that. We knew how to live well enough within the means we had. And we knew that we could make enough to survive if we just looked around a bit and used our heads and spent the effort.
Nowadays? “Unka Shugah” Gimme, gimme, gimme!”
*sigh*
Edit: Again, though we lived far closer to the bone than 99.999% of folks on government assistance today, we weren’t really poor. I can recall driving down Donovan in EP, TX during the years I was in high school (in a car I bought–for cash–with money earned at $1.40/hour in a part time job after school) and looking across the Rio Grande to see the tin shacks where really poor folks lived. And at that, they were better off than many of those they’d left behind in the interior of Mexico to seek a better life close to the border.