Not Poor Enough

[McCamy Taylor]

“______!”

That was another silent scream. I do that a lot lately.

Ok. Sit back. Take a deep breath----

I. You Are Not Poor Enough if You Own a Car

I wish I could show you the print edition of today’s Fort Worth Star Telegram. At the top of the opinion page is a piece reprinted from the Austin American Statesman. Written by Ken Herman, it is called “American hardship comes with modern conveniences.” The author quotes a Heritage Society paper written in 2007, by Robert Rector, who insists that the poor in America are not poor enough.

http://www.heritage.org/research/reports/2007/08/how-poor-are-americas-poor-examining-the-plague-of-poverty-in-america

Most of America's "poor" live in material conditions that would be judged as comfortable or well-off just a few generations ago

Rector says you are not poor enough if you own a car. Rector would like us to imagine that the poor own flashy vehicles—low riders or Cadillacs with shiny hubcaps---and that they like to joy ride around town during their endless free time. I wonder if Rector has ever stopped to consider how he would get to work if he did not have a car and if his city did not have public transportation? If you glance down the page of the print edition of the Fort Worth paper, you will read that Richland Hills, a suburb of the city wants to get rid of its buses, which allow the poor to get to work and seniors (who are disproportionately poor) to get to their doctors’ appointments.

Owning a car is not a privilege. It is a burden for many lower income Americans. Their vehicles are old. Their tires are bald. They can barely afford to pay for gas, much less maintain their cars and keep up their insurance payments. Poor workers in America’s suburbs and rural areas would jump at the chance to give up their clunkers, if their communities had public transportation.

II. The Only Good Welfare Queen is One Dead of Heat Stroke

Rector is alarmed at the number of poor people who have air conditioning. In his “good old days”---1970, the height of the Nixon administration---36% of Americans had AC. Now, he complains, 80% of the poor are able to cool their sweat boxes when temperatures reach 105, as they may do for weeks at a time in the South.

Air conditioning is the reason why the redder than red southern states have become so prosperous in recent years. There would be no Toyota plants in Alabama if employees had to endure southern summers in our modern, cheaply built, poorly ventilated apartments. High tech industries would not be relocating to Austin if they had to survive an Austin summer---the way I used to survive Austin summers as a child---with nothing more than a fan and an open window. You can not leave your door or windows open any more, unless you live in a gated community. You will get robbed or murdered.

Old folks are particularly prone to heat related illness. Old folks are also more likely than the rest of us to be poor---

Is that how the Heritage Society plans to solve our Social Security crisis? Let all the old folks die from the heat?

III. Not Sick Enough

Only an idiot could write:

There is little or no evidence of poverty-induced malnutrition in the United States.

Look at the working poor in America. Many of them are overweight, suffering from diabetes and hypertension, because the cheapest food is greasy and salty, designed to ease hunger pains but poor in nutrition. With mom working two jobs, she does not have time to prepare cheap, healthy meals from scratch. That microwave that Rector calls a luxury? She needs it because she may not have more than 10 minutes to get supper ready for the kids once she gets home. And the television that Rector says the poor do not deserve? That’s her baby sitter. Have you ever tried to pay for child care when you make minimum wage? A color TV is much cheaper.

Only a heartless bastard could boast

Some 13 percent had a family member who needed to go to a doctor or hospital at some point in the prior year but did not go.

As if the 87 percent who did not have to forgo necessary medical care makes it all right. There is a lot that Rector glosses over with that statistic. He does not tell his readers that among those who can not get care are:

Sally, 42 whose breast mass has just metastasized to her bones, because she could not afford a biopsy.

Bill, 45 whose children are now orphaned, because he could not afford to get his chest pain treated before the heart attack killed him.

Henry, 23 the schizophrenic whose family is dead, because the voices in his head told him to kill them. Henry’s community does not have any mental health services for the poor. Now, his state’s criminal justice system will take care of his mental health related expenses.

Maria, 10 days, whose grandparents are trying to scrape together the money to bury her. Maria was born prematurely to a mother who could not get OB care because she had no transportation to take her to the nearest clinic, 30 miles away. Maria's mother, Selena, is in the ICU now. In two more weeks, she will need her own funeral plot. Complications of unsuspected, untreated pregnancy induced hypertension caused her to suffer seizures and then a stroke shortly after she signed in at the local hospital emergency room. The wait that night to see a doctor was ten hours. That's because the other 87 percent were not willing to die like dogs in the street in order to prove to Rector and the Heritage Society that poverty is a killer.

Heritage assholes, this fuck you is from the kids whose only decent meals are those provided at their schools. They used to get lunches during summer break at a local park, but nearby residents objected to the sight of all those poor, mostly minority children eating. This fuck you is from the disabled elderly whose utilities were cut off. Their state had allocated funds to help them pay their electricty and water, but their governor decided to use the money for something else, something more important. No one would dare to treat the poor so badly, if not for the corporate shills standing on the street corners proclaiming that the poor in this country are not poor enough!