Lady Luck is a Fickle Foe

 

Affluence creates poverty. ~Marshall McLuhan

People may rise from the ashes, but if they don’t remember the ashes they came from there is no point to all the suffering that occurred along the way. How many prominent people as we watch the news claim they suffered to get ahead, yet when they are pushed to the point of standing up for and giving the poor a voice they back down and away from the claims of poverty they once totted? It is easy to claim hardship it is another thing altogether to live through the hardship of poverty.

When a person is poor they are not free; the ability to have freedom of choice is removed from their lives. When a person’s belly is growling what is the priority food or voting in an upcoming election? When a person hasn’t had a hot shower in days or weeks does he care if he smells on the subway platform? At what stage of being homeless does humiliation disappear and humility become a way of life? When does it become too painful to remember your family and friends who have forgotten you when life threw you a curve and you struck out? Is it months, weeks or days?

It isn’t easy to see the people we love struggle with things that come so easily for us like holding a job, paying our rent or mortgage, getting married, raising a family or even overcoming our addictions. Since watching the people we care about struggle hurts our hearts why is it we can’t put ourselves in the shoes of those struggling? Why do we shun the ones we proclaim to love?

I ask all who read this blog today to search out your family tree and circle of friends past and present. Find that person you lost contact with because their life didn’t keep up with your successes. Reach out to them; find out where they are. Rediscover who they are. We are never the same after a hardship as we are going into one. Lady Luck’s nature is a fickle one. We never know who she will turn her back on next. Isn’t it better to have our heart hurt a little trying to help someone less fortunate because we feel some empathy then to have Lady Luck turn her back on us and we find out just how lonely it is to be poor and alone?

Whom Can I Harm?

 

Poverty is like punishment for a crime you didn't commit. ~Eli Khamarov, Lives of the Cognoscenti

I was at North Station today in Boston and a homeless man came up to me. He was early 30’s, hands caked with dirt, tops of his shoes ripped off the soles and he asked for 50 cents. I was sitting there on a bench waiting for my train, reading a book and drinking my coffee when he approached me and asked for 50 cents. At first I said no I am sorry I don’t carry cash on me, but as I was saying no I looked into his eyes. They were black devoid of any color and filled with loneliness.

It is funny now as I reflect on this encounter and how his eyes looked back at me; there was no humiliation any humiliation was beaten out of him by living a life way too hard. As the man walked away my stare followed him. He had accepted my no with a shrug of the shoulder and simply walked on to the next row of benches to ask another woman and have her say no to him.

Before he reached the next row of benches and the next woman I yelled after him “Sir! Sir! Here I have something for you.” He ran back to me so fast I didn’t even see him until in a split second he was in front of me telling me he just wanted a hot cup of coffee. I gave him $2 and told him to enjoy his coffee. The gratitude he expressed was overwhelming. I was so grateful I had $2 to give him, that I took the time to assess his condition and that I had found enough compassion for my fellow man to help him.

The $2 I gave him is mere pittance compared to what that humble man gave to me this morning. The woman behind me on her side of the bench started to tell me she didn’t like it when people pan-handled in the station, but as I got up from the bench and called him back to me she got up and left her seat.

I go back to the Jamaican parable in my first post of the rich man who through food in the dirt rather than help the beggar woman feed herself and her family. Who was richer today? Certainly not the woman who got up from the bench behind me; I would like to think I was a little richer today in character for helping a man who had less than I did. If I were to forget what it was like to not know how I was going to eat today when I lost my business a couple of years ago what would I have learned about compassion? The Dalai Lama once said, “If you see yourself in others then whom can you harm.” Today my goal is to not cause harm to anyone because I see myself in everyone.

Who Speaks for the Poor?

 

The poverty of our century is unlike that of any other. It is not, as poverty was before, the result of natural scarcity, but of a set of priorities imposed upon the rest of the world by the rich. Consequently, the modern poor are not pitied...but written off as trash. The twentieth-century consumer economy has produced the first culture for which a beggar is a reminder of nothing. ~John Berger

I feel the discern John Berger speaks of when talking about the poor and how our society today writes the impoverished off as trash. People become trash when they are blamed for being poor like it was a choice in today’s economy. Education, equal pay, family values that promote both parents financially supporting children are used as a way to blame the impoverished for their meager financial circumstances.

The thought that life happens and all people really aren’t created equal are never discussed by the rich as a cause of poverty. The well-to-do blame the poor for being in a lower class able to be used and abused by the “rich.” A revolt or some calamity is needed in order for the blame for poverty to be placed on those who have created a class of people living in poverty.

What will the calamity to be though? Will the poor rise up in a revolt against the well-to-do? With the political creation of the fiscal cliff and debt ceiling and the news coverage that keeps us all informed of when our economy will crash and burn a class of people have been give a voice; albeit a newly disgruntled voice soft voice it is a voice still the same.

With the protests by the Occupy Movement in 2012 to the re-election of President Obama over the well-to-do Mitt Romney a voice representing the impoverished has risen and become news worthy. How long will it take before the voice of the impoverished becomes a cry for revolution? As Americans when we vote we are voting as revolutionaries, but voting against calamity.

If anyone has seen the new television series Revolution you are watching the likelihood of what our future may entail. Do we really want to learn the value of each other as free men by losing all that we have come to rely on such as food, water and utilities?

As take the train to work each day. People heard on to the train and in/out of the terminal like cattle being sent to slaughter. People are sleeping on benches others are asking for change for something to eat while others are too proud to ask for help and choose to suffer in the corners of the station huddling to keep warm and trying to become invisible so they aren’t looked at with disdain and asked to leave the premise.

The poor may have a new voice, but it is the well-to-do who are doing the talking. Our politicians are talking about the poor, but they really aren’t saying anything to help the living conditions of the impoverished. But how could they give help to the poor? In order to raise the living standards of the poor the well-to-do would have to sacrifice something they covet. Unfortunately coveting is what the well-to-do do best which means the poor will remain figments in the imagination of the politicians who have been voted in to serve those whom they choose not to see for their own selfish comfort.

Definition of Rich

 

We have grown literally afraid to be poor. We despise anyone who elects to be poor in order to simplify and save his inner life. If he does not join the general scramble and pant with the money-making street, we deem him spiritless and lacking in ambition. ~William James

Since the end of 2010 to right now as I type this blog poverty and learning how to live without has been a very humbling experience for me. As 2013 arrives and I look at my past, my present and my future I see a change in how I view myself and how I view the people who cross my path.

There was a time in my life (pre 2010) when I looked through people instead of at them. It was nothing for me to do a whole day of errands and never have a conversation with anyone or look a person in the eye. Strangers, especially poor strangers, were but figments of my imagination. They never really existed to me because they didn’t affect my life in the immediacy; in fact, not only did poor people not exist, they had no existent in my thoughts.

I have been without a vehicle for the 3^rd time in as many years and I have to tell you that asking for rides, taking the train (which I am very grateful exists) and waiting at bus stops has brought me from a place of humiliation to one of humility. A few weeks back I met a Jamaican woman on a bus and after shopping separately at a Wal-Mart we met again at the bus stop and as we got to know each other a bit she told me a parable about the truly rich. The parable goes:

A poor hungry woman was walking down the back alley and she saw a man walking towards the rubbish with a huge platter of leftover food. The woman approached the man with the food and asked if he would share the food with her and her family rather than throwing it away. The rich man looked at her and emptied the platter of leftover food onto the ground. The hungry woman bent over and picked the food out of the dirt and thanked the rich man for his graciousness.

The moral of the story is the woman asking for help feeding herself and her family is far richer than the rich man who threw his scrapes on to the dirt ground in from of the hungry woman. As I stood there listening to the Jamaican woman tell her story I reflected on how many times I had been the rich man and how now I find myself being the hungry woman. As much as we may desire material abundance we will never be able to take such items in to the afterlife with us. In an age when what we have defines who we are it is a constant battle to believe the richest people are those who love our fellows with kindness, gentleness, compassion and true humility.

The true poor are those people who humiliate others of their own race.