Growing up, Sunday dinner was always a special occasion. I could tell because it was the only day we ate in the dining room. My four siblings and I still had to eat our vegetables and clean our plates; there were, after all, children starving elsewhere in the world. But what made it special was that on Sundays we always had dessert. Sometimes it was pudding or Jell-O, but sometimes, if we were really lucky, my mother would bake one of her special apple pies. Once our plates passed inspection and were cleared from the table, they were replaced with pie plates.
As the still-warm pie was passed around, and we each cut a slice for ourselves, I can remember my mother smiling and saying, "Now, don't be piggy; there's plenty for everyone if nobody takes too big a slice."
I've thought of those days and those words many times in later years as I traveled around the country, first in a boxcar, then at the wheel of a semi-truck and finally at the controls of a half-million-dollar airplane.
I was taught in grade school to love my country, even if I didn't understand what that meant. Over the years, as I saw the broad sweep of the land from sea to sea and border to border, I fell in love with not just the scenery but the people. I got to know the hobos with whom I shared "side-door Pullmans" and the workers at the farms and factories where I picked up and delivered truckloads of produce and goods. And I visited the homes of people who could afford to spend half a million dollars on a family airplane. I learned to see the faces of the people, to see their cultural diversity and their economic diversity. And I learned to love their friendliness and their generosity and, when times were tough for them, to feel their pain and sorrow.
There are still a few people around who remember the Great Depression. If you ask, they'll tell you what we're going through now is nothing like then. Nonetheless, now as then, it is tempting to try to find a scapegoat on whom to place the blame for our great recession. Sadly, our pundits, politicos and politicians are all-too-willing to supply them to us. Lately, it has been the poor, with conservatives accusing the government of "gutting" welfare reform.
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America is unarguably the richest country in the world, yet we have always tended to treat poverty as a moral affliction and have built a fictional stereotype of our poor as lazy and dishonest. President Reagan liked to tell of the woman on welfare who used her food stamps to buy one orange and a bottle of vodka. Such stories of welfare fraud abound in our urban legends and, whether true or not, ignore the fact that when the dust settles, the poor are still poor and the fraud money is in the pocket of some "entrepreneur."
So who are these morally afflicted people? A 2010 study by Brady, Fullerton and Cross, that used less than 50 percent of nationwide median income as a measure of poverty, found that 17 percent of the households in the U.S. are living at or below the poverty level; and, of those, 65 percent are households in which at least one family member is working. Further, the study found that the U.S. leads all other industrialized countries in those two statistics.
Want hard numbers instead of percentages? According to the 2010 census, there are 5,259,000 primary families (families with at least one parent and one or more children) living below the poverty level even though at least one family member is working. In addition, there are nearly 4 million individuals outside of primary families classified as "working poor." The same census said many of these families are not receiving any kind of government assistance even though they qualify for it.
But "those people" are not just percentages and numbers. Every one of them has a face. Is it the face of the woman on welfare who bought the orange and vodka with food stamps and now has neither? It could be; there are undoubtedly some like her out there. Is it the shabby, bewhiskered old man panhandling on the corner? His, too, could be the face of poverty.
But it's not necessary to look that far. Look out your front window.
It's that fellow who picks up your trash every week and with his wife is raising four school-aged children. Or it could be the lady serving you Big Macs. She's there whenever she can get a shift that coincides with her children's school hours, and she's hoping her ex will come through with his child support this month. Or perhaps when you drive through that upscale neighborhood on your way to work, it's those guys carefully manicuring that lawn. For far too many among us, seeing the face of poverty is as easy as looking in the mirror.
Perhaps we need to spend more time thinking about these kinds of things in this Election Year instead of blaming government or the poor because we can't replace that aging second car this year.
In his inaugural address, President John F. Kennedy said, "If a free society cannot help the many who are poor, it cannot save the few who are rich." Words to live by from a man who cared.
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But perhaps my mother said it best: "There's plenty for everyone if nobody takes too big a slice."
Russ Rothe of Duluth is a writer and a doctor of philosophy who's also retired after working as an over-the-road truck driver, air traffic controller, Egyptologist and corporate pilot for Cirrus.
