War on Poverty or War on the Poor?

1/3/2014 5:26 PM

Merry, Happy, yea, yea, yea, and I’ve already broken a New Year’s Rez by not writing at all, at all, until the third day of 2014. But damn it, I’m writing, here and now.  And here’s the question that gets me going:

When did the War on Poverty become the War on the Poor?

When? President Johnson, LBJ in his day, declared the War on Poverty, and over the next decade, poverty plunged to less than half the percentage of Americans that were in poverty when the programs started.  This was unemployment insurance, section 8 housing, food stamps, any number of programs to make sure that kids didn’t go hungry, that they got fed at home or at school, that they had homes, beds, books, even vaccinations against the diseases that had decimated their parents’ generation. Lots of the support went to the kids’ parents, because kids shouldn’t have to cover the rent, and maybe just help doing the groceries, not have to take a job at eight or ten years old to put food on the table.

But over the last twenty years or more, this has slowly, slowly, become the War on the Poor. Slowly, because it takes a lot of time, and thousands of small fractions of a degree of effort, to turn the hearts of Americans against their fellow Americans. To blacken the souls that once opened hearts and hands, offering support to the least among us.

Most recently, within the last three months, what used to be Food Stamps, now called SNAP, was cut off to five million men, women and children. But corporate farmers got their USDA-approved price subsidies and tax breaks.

In an economy that creates fewer jobs in a month than are needed to employ just the new people joining the work force, while 7% are unemployed, and almost 20% are underemployed or have stopped looking for work, long-term unemployment was terminated to 1.3 million adults already past whatever support their states provided. And another 1.9 million who had just arrived at that point. That’s 3.2 million people who won’t have money to buy food for their kids, pay the heating bill in this winter cold, cover the rent. And those businesses will have 3.2 million less customers, which will make those businesses want to hire more people? For fewer customers? But the US Defense Department got all its sequester cuts restored to full funding levels, to pay all the corporate contracts for new ways to blow stuff up.

America doesn’t even have the balls to create a jobs program, like all the programs back in the Depression, from creating trails in national parks and building post offices and parks, to carving new roads across America, and digging the water mains and sewer mains under hundreds of American cities.

No, we Americans can’t create poor people fast enough. The bankruptcy laws won’t let you discharge your credit card debts anymore, or your catastrophic medical debts. And God help you if your business fails. If you put any of the effort on your own credit cards, as so many small movie makers have done for their first efforts, well, see the start of this paragraph.

America used to be the land of the second chance, of the chance to start again, and again . Now, with the student education debt, the credit card debt, the medical debt, you’d better get it right the first time, ‘cause it’s your only time. “Support” has become a “handout”, the poor are “welfare queens”, and “mi casa es su casa” has been shown for the lie it always was, as the rule really is “I got mine, and will do what it takes to keep you from getting yours.”

I could go on, and quote stats, and discuss individual charity versus government programs. And believe me, I will. Later.

In the meantime, I end this first scream of the New Year with the bumper sticker that annoys me more than any, “Practice Random Kindness and Senseless Acts of Beauty”.

This may be a lovely sentiment while you stand in line at Starbucks, but a large number of Americans think it’s also the only way to help the poor, and every day are doing everything they can to stop any organized program of kindness or thought-out act of beauty. Like the poor box at the church is going to feed 80 million Americans. Sure.

More soon.

PS: I’ve been gone for over a week, and missed an awful notice: a beautiful woman lost her beautiful man to a horrible, implacable disease last week. Bobbi Buescher’s husband Jim lost to pancreatic cancer, and we all lost to it, too. I wear my ‘53’ cap proudly, and recommend the following organized program of kindness: donate to the education fund being set up in his memory. Yea, you’ve been hit up all season, especially by politicians you’ll never meet. Bobbi and Jim walked the walk, and he deserves the memory.

Donations can be made to:
 Foundation for SAAC
 c/o James F. Buescher Legacy Scholarship Fund
 1200 Paseo Camarillo #100
 Camarillo, CA 93010

 Checks should be made out to:
 Foundation for SAAC c/o James F. Buescher Legacy Scholarship Fund