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.
