Since I have been too sick to do much of anything this week, I have had a lot of time to think about things I don’t always think about.
The other day, for example, I was wondering how hard it really is for people to get by these days.
I mean, people talk a lot about how bad things are, how there are so many people caught in the cycle of poverty. But, when I look around, I see people who are supposedly poor, with lots of material goods and nice cars, and I wonder how bad things really are for people.
I used to work at a place that employed mostly people without college educations. Many of them, myself included, were single mothers. The pay was not that great and many people were struggling financially, yet they went out to lunch a few times a week.
I left there with the impression that most people who struggle financially are in that situation due to poor money management and bad priorities.
But is that accurate, I wondered.
With this topic on my mind, I stumbled upon an interview in the Christian Science Monitor with Adam Shepard, author of Scratch Beginnings: Me, $25, and the Search for the American Dream
Alone on a dark gritty street, Adam Shepard searched for a homeless shelter. He had a gym bag, $25, and little else. A former college athlete with a bachelor’s degree, Mr. Shepard had left a comfortable life with supportive parents in Raleigh, N.C. Now he was an outsider on the wrong side of the tracks in Charleston, S.C.
But Shepard’s descent into poverty in the summer of 2006 was no accident. Shortly after graduating from Merrimack College in North Andover, Mass., he intentionally left his parents’ home to test the vivacity of the American Dream. His goal: to have a furnished apartment, a car, and $2,500 in savings within a year.
To make his quest even more challenging, he decided not to use any of his previous contacts or mention his education.
At the end of 10 months, “he had moved into an apartment, bought a pickup truck, and had saved close to $5,000.”
The effort, he says, was inspired after reading “Nickel and Dimed,” in which author Barbara Ehrenreich takes on a series of low-paying jobs. Unlike Ms. Ehrenreich, who chronicled the difficulty of advancing beyond the ranks of the working poor, Shepard found he was able to successfully climb out of his self-imposed poverty.
The concluson:
To meet that guy [in the wheelchair] at the shelter, [makes you wonder] ‘Can he get out and go to college and become a doctor?’ Maybe, maybe not. I think he can set goals….. You can use your talents. That’s why, from the beginning, I set very realistic goals: $2,500, a job, car. This isn’t a “rags-to-riches million-dollar” story. This is very realistic. I truly believe, based on what I saw at the shelter …that anyone can do that. [Emphasis mine]
I am not posting this to say, “See, we don’t have a problem with poverty in America.”
Not at all.
The point I want to emphasize is that I think we are dealing with the problem in the wrong way.
We ask, what kind of programs can we create to give people more [food, clothing, shelter, health care, etc]?
But what we should be asking ourselves is, how do we help people learn the skills they need to manage their money and make better choices today to build a brighter tomorrow?
Isn’t that what we want for people?
Isn’t that what people want for themselves?
