The War on Poverty

I'm told that I grew up poor. My mother, raising my brother and I on her own, told me that we were poor a lot while I was growing up. But, frankly, I never really believed it (and neither did my late brother...we had too much faith in and love for our mother to believe that she would lead us into real poverty no matter what she said.)

I always had a roof over my head. I always had food in my belly. I always had shoes on the feet that would grow to size 12 by the time I was in high school. I always had clothes to wear to school. I always had toys under the Christmas tree and cake on my birthday. More often than not, I had money to buy comic books (granted they only cost 12 cents back in the day) and go to the movies. I may not have had access to every whim that occurred to me...but, thanks mostly to my mother's selfless efforts and seemingly boundless strength, I never, ever felt poor.

The aftermath of Hurricane Katrina has thrown an unblinking, sobering spotlight on the poor in this unimaginably wealthy country of ours. The sight of poor people wading through the remnants of their lives in the Gulf Coast brought home to everyone what those people already knew. A lot of us have been left behind...for reasons so varied that pointing a finger at one root cause is a study in hubris that I shall not indulge in here...when comes to achieving the so-called American Dream.

(Last week my mother told me that had Katrina hit way back when we were living in New Orleans we would have probably been among those wading through the abandoned dead and the putrid muck...I don't doubt her but I wouldn't dare presume to put myself in the shoes of those who actually did suffer through that particular hell.)

Once upon a time, President Johnson enlisted the citizens of this country in a "war on poverty". It was a noble gesture but that "war"...like President Reagan's "war on drugs" and President Bush's "war on terror"...is not one that can be won with noble gestures and windy rhetoric (in my more cynical moments I reluctantly concede that none of these "wars" may come to any kind of satisfying conclusion in my lifetime...or for a good long while after that.)

I'm told that I grew up poor. I accept that without really believing it (the child in me still naive enough to believe what I believe despite any evidence to the contrary.)