The Meaning of Poverty...

Poverty:

After discussing poverty as an issue being a product of it, myself, I have discovered that any talk about poverty is relative.

I think that anyone who was brought up during or immediately after the Depression, have instilled in them some notion of what poverty means and how dispiriting it can become.

But I have seen few stories coming out of the developed “west” that can compare with these matter of fact offerings. It really seems to put the relativistic nature of poverty into perspective for most of us who thought that perhaps doing without
The TV or their own computer was a real hard-ship.

Consider just these two stories that were passed among friends who had crossed the great ocean to live in the land of freedom and opportunity as they recant some experiences from their own lives.

To set the stage, let me preface my friends’ conversation by saying that I was standing and talking to my neighbors as I often did about their homeland. They were both Scottish immigrants who had come over after the Depression. They were perhaps five or ten years my senior, and very progressive thinking. Only, for some reason they believed that I was a radical and if they spoke to me about government or politics, they would be whisked away never to be seen again…

Nevertheless, it was okay to talk about life in Scotland back in the twenties. This day, we were telling stories about poverty. It was my neighbor who started the ball rolling and after he told his story, there was no need to stick my two cents in. You will see why.

. What started it was a conversation about McCourt's Angela's Ashes where he talks about his poverty and the position of the church. How they were less than helpful.

Frank McCourt used to teach at one of the colleges in Brooklyn where I taught part-time so it seemed an appropriate subject. My friend said that McCourt was a liar and that all his friends who grew up before and during the depression thought so as well. I asked why he thought that.. And he said that it wasn't like he described. He said, yes, things were really bad. And that he had his own stories. But the one that stayed with me was simple and straightforward: He told me that this was the reason he never finished his education. It was graduation day in his hometown. Yet he couldn’t collect his diploma. The reason: He had no shoes and had to wear his sisters shoes and he couldn't be seen walking from the back to pick up his diploma on those polished floors.
I said that sounded pretty poor to me.

It had been my own feeling that McCourt's account of the Church's neglect was pretty much on target but the Scottish folks wouldn't admit to their own hardships so it was interesting that this friend admitted to not owning his own shoes...
Later in the conversation, he told me about some other chaps that were worse off than he. And while he told me many tales, this one has stayed vivid in my memory.
.
It turned out that his mother's best friend had a child out of wedlock and could not go home unmarried with a baby...so my friend's mother adopted the baby as her own.

After fifteen years or so, he wandered off with his friends spending time with his natural mother who also never climbed out of poverty. One Sunday, my friend was sitting down to have dinner after church and his step-brother, now about sixteen, wandered in with a few friends.

My friend's mother was embarrassed because she didn't have enough plates and being hospitable, she suggested to her children that the others eat first off the plates... Her adopted son came up to her and said don't worry his friends were not used to eating off plates. And that newspaper would be fine so they opened the newspaper and filled it up with some hot stew and that was how they ate... We had things tough but clearly not as tough as my friend and when he saw how his step-brother and his friends were living, he felt like a rich man.

Never, never had I heard of something like that....

And this is in a civilized country in Europe.

I vowed to never think of myself as having it tough after hearing about those two accounts.

Interestingly enough, the stories were told in a matter of fact way without being enhanced or otherwise embellished which gave them an even greater impact…and proved to me that my notion of being poor did not come close to what so many others had experienced.

I hope to return to Scotland some day and I know as I sit in a small bakery on High Street enjoying a pie, I will think of these hardships that are never very far away…