2007 Soap Box Archives

Poverty In Our Time, What It Was

One of the Democratic Presidential candidates has made poverty in America a major issue in his campaign and since poverty should be an important subject to all caring people I have decided to do a series of columns on it, do some digging and try to define the face of poverty in America today.

I have found that the description of poverty is constantly in flux. People identified as poor today vastly differ from those identified as below the poverty line in my formative years.

The first house I remember living in had electricity but no running water. We had a hand pump on the back porch where we got all our water and a sanitary facility you had to walk to. We heated and cooked with wood and didn't have a car.

We bought many of our clothes from the Sears and Roebuck catalog and made installment payments. And I wore patched pants to school many times but they were always clean. And I can remember wearing my Brogans until the soles were as thin as cardboard, but I always got a new pair before they wore completely out.

By today's standards we would be considered poor folks but we never considered ourselves to be poor. We had food, clothes and a roof over our heads, a radio and a male in the family who went to work every working day.

I remember seeing old newspapers used for insulation on the insides walls of a house, people in public with tattered clothes, homes in abject disrepair, children with bad teeth, some of the signs of poverty in my day.

Share croppers who only got money once a year when the harvest was sold had to borrow, charge their groceries and everything else they needed all during the year. And when their part of the money was handed out, sometimes it was not even enough to pay the debts, starting them off in the hole for the next year.

They labored on and on, year after year, living on credit and pouring their honest sweat into the fickled soil, rising at dawn working all day long and longing for the day when they could just break even.

Good honest people who worked incredibly hard, raised good God-fearing children and lived from season to season hoping that the rains would fall and produce a bumper crop.

But even in these circumstances if you were to talk to these people they would have told you that they didn¹t think of themselves as being poor. They fed and clothed their families, sent their kids to school and considered themselves part of the middle class.

People who worked for minimum wage did not claim to be poor. They took responsibility for raising the children they had brought into the world and therein lies the key word we will be dealing with throughout this series of articles, responsibility.

The description of poverty has changed dramatically since those days and in the next column we will try to explore how poverty is defined in these modern times.

Pray for our troops

What do you think?

God Bless America

Charlie Daniels

September 14, 2007