Considerations

It’s become clear to me through the com­ments on my post on the min­i­mum wage that we have at least two sep­a­rate issues that are rou­tinely con­flated, if not three or more, and which bear hash­ing out a bit.

First, there’s poverty, which min­i­mum wage means to pre­vent but cur­rently doesn’t, for rea­sons includ­ing keep­ing the unskilled out of the work­force (by reserv­ing min­i­mum wage jobs for part-timers & kids), keep­ing the unskilled from becom­ing skilled (a full-time job makes skill acqui­si­tion out­side of work dif­fi­cult), and as it stands, most basi­cally, pro­vid­ing an annual income that’s less than the poverty standard.

Poverty is real in this coun­try, even if it does not look like poverty in Dar­fur, as Granadaman notes in his last comment.

Sec­ond, there’s home­less­ness, which is directly related to poverty in most but not all cases – all home­less peo­ple are poor, but most poor peo­ple are not home­less. Home­less­ness is gen­er­ally divided into two cat­e­gories: indi­vid­ual home­less­ness, “bums” on the street, and fam­ily home­less­ness, which is less vis­i­ble but more self-perpetuating.

Indi­vid­ual home­less­ness can be related to many fac­tors, as WWT has noted, such as men­tal ill­ness, which often is the result or the cause of sub­stance abuse, men­tal retar­da­tion, brain injury, and other cat­a­strophic dis­abil­i­ties that pre­vent peo­ple on the streets from liv­ing like “nor­mal” peo­ple. Often, home­less indi­vid­u­als will not seek or even will reject char­i­ties such as shel­ters and food banks because of fears, rumors, and bad expe­ri­ences. These folks are not easy to “fix,” and they are the most vul­ner­a­ble cit­i­zens of our coun­try. Many are vet­er­ans – even recent vet­er­ans with tours in Afghanistan and Iraq, which is a trav­esty, sim­ply put. Rais­ing the min­i­mum wage will do noth­ing for these peo­ple, they need seri­ous assis­tance in most cases.

With the indi­vid­ual home­less, we have a choice: we can ignore them as they walk down the street, push­ing shop­ping carts or beg­ging money, or we can step up to the plate and advo­cate for a sys­tem with reaches out to them, sus­tain­ing those who can­not sup­port them­selves and giv­ing a hand to those who just need “to get back on the their feet.”

Fam­ily home­less­ness is not some­thing peo­ple gen­er­ally think about, or even real­ize exists. Sure, one occa­sion­ally hears about fam­i­lies liv­ing in cars or los­ing their homes to fire, but rarely does any­one hear about fam­i­lies who have never held a ten­ancy of their own, or who rou­tinely move in and out of fam­ily home­less shel­ters. Home­less fam­i­lies aren’t much dif­fer­ent from any other low-income fam­ily, aside from their home­less­ness. They have, how­ever, expe­ri­enced some form of cat­a­stro­phe which left them unable to fend for them­selves: the extended ill­ness of a child; loss of their apart­ment to fire; kicked out of a friend, relative’s, or parent’s house because of preg­nancy or drugs. Some spent their entire lives in home­less shel­ters and don’t know any dif­fer­ent way of life. Some “aged out” of fos­ter care and were left on the street with no skills or fam­ily to sup­port them. Most all have spent their lives liv­ing paycheck-to-paycheck and sup­ple­ment­ing their pal­try income with wel­fare, the food pantry, and the kind­ness of friends and neighbors.

Fam­i­lies are more dif­fi­cult to help than indi­vid­u­als because there are more issues to deal with. One can’t sim­ply say “any job’s a good job”: a minimum-wage job won’t pay for hous­ing, heat­ing, child­care, trans­porta­tion to work, med­i­cine, and every­thing else that goes along with liv­ing a “nor­mal” life.

I’ll leave you with a story (a sim­ile for WWT) I heard recently at a con­fer­ence:

A gen­tle­man from the coun­try is at the air­port. This man is 80 years old and never been on a plane in his life – never even seen an air­port, but he’s going to go visit his grand­chil­dren who live across the coun­try, and he’s deter­mined to do it.

The gentleman’s look­ing out the win­dow at all the planes, wait­ing to board his own. He looks out and he sees his plane, a 747 parked, at his gate. They begin to board his plane, but the man keeps star­ing out the win­dow. He’s look­ing, and he sees with alarm that there’s a tractor-like vehi­cle parked in front of the plane, and the ground crew is hitch­ing the plane’s front wheel to the vehi­cle with a long steel bar. The man’s quite dis­turbed at this, think­ing there must be some­thing wrong with the plane, and why are they board­ing it if they’re going to need to tow it; so, he asks the gate clerk why the lit­tle vehi­cle is being attached to the plane, “Is there some­thing wrong? Are we going to be okay? I just gotta get to see my grandkids.”

The gate attendant’s taken aback, but explains, “No, Sir, that plane is a 747. It can fly around the world. It can fly over 500 miles an hour. It can take you coast to coast in under 7 hours. It can cross the ocean at 30,000 feet. It’s a mas­ter­piece of engi­neer­ing, and the flag­ship air­craft of our fleet. But, it can’t back up.”

Home­less peo­ple – be they fam­i­lies or unac­com­pa­nied indi­vid­u­als – are like that plane: They’re mas­ter­pieces of bio­log­i­cal evo­lu­tion; they’re not much dif­fer­ent than you or I. Most have enough fac­ul­ties to sur­vive on their own; there’s noth­ing inher­ently dif­fer­ent about them or wrong with them. They just can’t back up. They need a lit­tle push, a lit­tle help get­tin’ out the gate, and they’ll be on their way. And, if we do our jobs right, and we give them that push, that tug, they’ll fly and they won’t ever look back.

Now Avail­able: E-Book down­load: “Let­ters from Israel: An Amer­i­can journalist’s adven­tures in the Holy Land.“

Every lit­tle bit helps! Any dona­tions to help us keep writ­ing are much appreciated:

No related posts.