Today’s topic has little to do, at least little directly, with being a husband. Humor me.
I grew up poor. Not the shoe-less, living in a mud hut, everyone-else-is-poor-because-that’s-our-culture kind of poverty, but the good ol’ American kind of poverty. You know, the one where you live in a trailer park with the fleas and roaches, eat tuna and gravy over Wonder Bread, and Jeff Foxworthy makes jokes about you that hit a little too close to home.
Surely the devastation of poverty in the Phillipines, the AIDS orphans in Kenya, and the malnourished of Ethiopia are pitiable situations. Surely we should do all we can to alleviate these situations.
My personal issue with poverty, however, is one that is often overlooked, I think. We pay a lot of attention, in the USA, to those who are homeless. What about those who are nearly homeless? We like to make jokes about rednecks, white trash, trailer trash, but do we understand how destructive that culture can be? Neil Labute’s play The Distance from Here illustrates in brutal fashion the tough world that kids who grow up in these neighborhoods have to endure. Lack of opportunity, lack of education, and lack of parents with the skills to help their children rise above creates a giant black hole in the rural sections of our suburbs that sucks life, happiness, and health out of the neighborhood.
It’s fashionable to blame these people for their own inability to get it together. It’s the USA, they have every opportunity, right? Perhaps they do, but how can they take advantage of that opportunity if they don’t know where to turn? George Bernard Shaw is famous for saying that the greatest sin in the world is poverty. His play Arms and the Man carries the conflicting message between building big business and using that business to help the poor. Do we carry on as usual with our businesses the way that they have always operated, or do we use the abundance generated from our success to succor those in need?
I was lucky. Even though I grew up in a white trash neighborhood, trailer park and everything. I was given, not a handout, but a hand up. When I was 19 years old I had the opportunity to serve as a full time missionary for two years with the Chinese people of Vancouver, BC. It never would have been possible for me to do that if a kind soul had not decided to fund that trip for me. I still have no idea who it was, but I’m eternally grateful.
I learned things on my mission that helped me overcome the poverty I grew up in. I learned hard work, thrift, balancing a checkbook, serving others, and networking. Those skills have continued to serve me well and I can say that I am well out of the poverty mindset that I grew up in as a child.
Since it’s Blog Action Day I feel as though some sort of call to action is needed. My only call to action is this: what can you do to help someone around you step out of poverty? You may or may not choose to help those in third world countries, but can you reach across town, across the neighborhood, or even across the street?
[...] Blog Action Day by Cory Huff at AGoodHusband.com [...]