A war on poverty versus a war against the poor.

I keep seeing spikes in places homeless people used to sleep and police taking the belongings of transients and people arrested for feeding homeless people.  I hear coworkers griping about welfare queens like the Clinton Presidency didn't stop that in the 1990's.  I hear nurses griping about poor people abusing the emergency room because they are not having a real emergency while living in a state that didn't expand medicaid--thus millions still without health coverage have no choice but the ER.  I see people griping about people in dirty clothes and stinking when they walk past them on the street and trying to figure out how to remove those awful people from the scenery.

America HATES poor people.

We have a choice to make.  Do we fight poverty, or more specifically, decrease income inequality and improve opportunities for those not born into wealthy families, or do we just keep treating poor people like the enemy and fighting a war against their right to exist.

Being poor should not be a crime (unless it is a crime committed by the state).  Creating and maintaining poor people via institutionalized inequities should be.



Tenement housing in the United States started soon after the revolution.  In the very early 1800's,  New York City  began replacing single family residences with multistory (low to us now) multi unit dwellings.  Known as tenements, these narrow, low-rise apartment buildings–many of them concentrated in the city’s Lower East Side neighborhood–were all too often cramped, poorly lit and lacked indoor plumbing and proper ventilation. By 1900, some 2.3 million people (a full two-thirds of New York City’s population) were living in tenement housing.  While the wealthy didn't live there, immigrants and eventually freedmen moved there.  It was the original melting pot--a place where a few found ways out and many drowned in crime and poverty.

The idea of keeping all the less desireables in one area quickly caught on and every large city developed their own tenement areas.  Smaller towns had to satisfy this need to not see, hear, or touch the ostracized--the American version of the "Untouchables" with railroad tracks.  Thus all those people that were born on the wrong side of the tracks.

The above pictures are government housing projects.  People with minimal money packed tightly together.  Inevitably the projects are placed in places that no one cares about--many relatively low-incomed have fought them being built in their area and won.  So a city will have one or two or three areas that get the projects.  Those areas are never the ones that the old money is in.  And they are not the areas that the new and developing businesses are buying in.  They put them where the old, culturally diverse, struggling to make it people are.

The places rapidly fill up with those with individuals that gained the least from their local schools.  They provide no mentors for the young as those people are not living in these places.  They are frequently in food deserts.  They are under served by public transportation.  They provide all the children raised in them with a first row seat to despair, poverty, hopelessness, chemical dependency, violence and death.  They are their own kind of public education system.

People that can, avoid ever going near them.  They are dangerous.

Babies and toddlers and little old ladies live in them.  Frequently for their entire lives.

Why do we concentrate all that horribleness?  Why fix it where those without can never know anyone, see anyone, meet anyone in their neighborhood but other people that have no hope but for a  life of crime, addiction or violence?

Drug lords and organized crime become the modern version of RobinHood.

Sports, Music, and Acting become a possible  way to fame and fortune with the expectation that the lucky young man or woman will pull the whole family out of the place they are mired in.

Before Social Security (1935), the poor house or poor farm was where the disabled, elderly, sickly and mentally ill would end up if they didn't have family that could afford to care for them.  The poorhouse was more institutional and until recently, many elderly associated them with Nursing Homes (having visited a few of the poorer versions of the nursing home, I can't even imagine them
when they were poorhouses and unmonitored for abuse and neglect)

Poor farms, which would take whole families at times, resembled prison farms and were not for those that were physically disabled.  They were not better than the poorhouses, but at least there was exercise and fresh air.   Both the poorhouse and the poorfarm had virtually disappeared by 1950 in the US.

Anti-loitering laws were originally to prevent homeless people from sitting in public areas, begging in public areas, and sleeping in public areas.  (then they were altered in the 1990's to stop gangs)

Public urination laws used to be about preventing people that weren't allowed to use public restrooms from urinating in alleys and parks.  (I wonder when and who that was directed at)  These days, the same laws are aimed at intoxicated people, homeless people and those that like to expose themselves.  To think that a homeless person could get on the sexual predator list for having to go #1 is rather interesting.  As every 3 year old knows, we all have to go.

• Citywide bans on camping in public have increased by 60 percent.




Citywide bans on begging have increased by 25 percent.




Citywide bans on loitering, loafing, and vagrancy have increased by 35 percent.




Citywide bans on sitting or lying down in particular public places have increased by 43 percent.
• Bans on sleeping in vehicles have increased by 119 percent. 

But to stop the war, we must stop the hate.
Why do those that aren't poor hate those that are?
Why do we assume that they would be fine if they had worked hard in school, listened to their parents, respected their elders, obeyed the law and gone to church.
Why do we assume that the kids made it to school daily or that their school was teaching them what they needed and not just trying to deal with the effects of a couple hundred poor kids a day--hungry, sick, malnourished, heavy-metal poisoned, PTSD'd kids.  Kids that watched their grandma get beaten, their father shoot up, their mother supplementing her income as a sex worker in a one room apartment, the attendant raping the kid in the next bed of the shelter, the foster dad selling kiddy porn.
And this is where the middle says--"see, I don't want my kid exposed to that, those people, those people..........."

Those people that are living in concentrated abuse and neglect with no way out, no helping hands, no mentors, no hope.  We have created concentration camps for our poor people so that not just one man or one family is degraded, but so that everyone is exposed to everyone else's trauma, abuse, neglect, and insanity.

We have created hell on earth.
Then we hate them for their lack of courage, their inability to rise above it, their moral failures and their ultimate passing on of the legacy of poverty.

My family passed along a love of fried food (yes, you can fry everything, anything and everything), cookies and gardening.  I have friends that's families love beer and football.  I have met people that have reunions to celebrate every graduation from the family university.  We all love to pass along family traditions.  But no one wants to admit their family has pedophiles or alcoholics or gambler's that can't quite quit.  Those get passed along also unless something or someone stops the cycle.  Picture growing up seeing all of the above and more on a daily basis.  And no one ever breaking any cycle.

Why would anyone question 200+ years of desperation, hunger and need leading to a family where every one does time in prison for trying to make some money they only way they have been taught.

Poor people need the same thing everyone else needs to succeed:

• role models that they know well and see daily succeeding
• early access to good learning opportunities--4 years old is too late
• someone to help them process those things they see that scare and terrify them (and not to live in a place where scary and terrifying things happen daily)
• a safe environment that is neither too cold or too hot, too crowded or too empty of stimuli
• healthy food and clean water
• a variety of people to interact with so they can see that there is more than one possible direction to go in their life.
• an understanding of their roots--and an ability to feel pride in those roots
• an understanding of their own possibilities in which they see enough people succeed that they believe they can also.

Everyone doesn't need to be rich.  Everyone doesn't need a couple of vacation homes and a 5 car garage.  But no one should be homeless, hungry, sick without healthcare options,  cold at home, and worst of all--hopeless for their own future.

Poor people aren't the enemy.  Poverty is.  And income inequality is making this worse.  We need to change the "survival of the fittest" mentality to one of cooperation and collaboration to make our country a good home for all its citizens.

The problem is only insurmountable when we keep doing everything the same as we did in the middle ages.