You take in work under the table--babysitting, housekeeping, ironing.

You let someone turn your water back on illegally after going 34 days without and someone calling child welfare on it.

You smoke more cigarettes, a nervous wreck.

You don't sell your meds (although it is very hard for some  elderly not to fall for it ), no one has under the table work for you, you have no cigarettes--what do you do? Email a letter to the editor. Miss your daughter's poetry reading because you don't have auto insurance and can't afford it or the new tag due this birthday month and don't want to go to jail.Or you drive w/o insurance (illegal). Your phone goes off and you need it --your auto insurance quotes are about to come in as call-backs and to call them again necessitates a mile walk to a payphone and you can't walk a block; and 50 cents for each call to the insurance agencies in the Yellow pages and you have no money-- so you write the phone company a rubber check, hoping you can make it good somehow when it gets to that. Another illegal act you'd never do if not desperately broke.

My grocery store was next to the north Tampa public housing project until they raised the projects last month, and when I was buying diapers, I'd find a bag of diapers open and one missing when I'd got it to the checkout counter. You'd find an orange juice carton open and the top fifth missing. Cookies open and 4 gone. But mostly it was the necessities they stold--diapers and tampons , drinks of milk from a carton for sale, carefully leaving the rest there so they could not be busted. It made you think, bless her poor heart, and say a prayer for this lady. Or child--I have seen them send in the children. I could tell so much, but with no credentials or degrees, it would only be read if it were in fiction form,( and good reading).

The Other America thinks the poor all hang together, since we (they) (it) lumps the poor together themselves and send them all to the same clinics and hospitals; we end up meeting there. On May 1 at the closest oral surgeon taking Medicaid , in St. Petersburg, Florida, $10 worth of gas round trip from Tampa where I live, I met a family from Ft. Myers, Florida. This was the closest Medicaid oral surgeon to them, too. It had two dentists but one of them stopped taking Medicaid 2 weeks before.Does this make any sense? Those least able to afford it have to make a round-trip 6 hour drive to get an aching tooth pulled, while those on the highest economic level can pick a dentist a 10-minute drive from home ..At my pain doctor's the next day, there were 2 sets of folks from Bradenton Florida and a man from Lakeland. The Bradenton people didn't know each other but soon did, as one unfortunate, very nice, proper, lady had taken a bus to Tampa and was missing the bus home waiting so long to be seen, and there was not another bus til 6 p.m. and then her pharmacy in Bradenton would be closed when she got home.zher appointment was at 10:30 a.m. and she'd rode the Greyhound all day to get there and then sat there past noon so far and going to miss the 1 p.m. bus because the Tampa buses to get her to the Greyhound station only run every hour themselves and she had to transfer once and hadn't even been seen yet .

So she struck up a friendship with the couple from her city too, a blond man with a heavy tan and wizened with wrinkles and perhaps too frank, and a pretty white-blonde, his wife, with casual clothes (khaki capris, small  blue and white knit top, lightweight  light blue cotton jacket ) was stunning, the kind that isn't too made up although they have a bright red lipstick on and lots of makeup, because they do it well and look good with it, a tiny mouth with classic Betty Boop lips , always smiling with sparkles in her eyes. They agreed to take the other one home. So the poor meet. But there are some of us isolated who grew up upper middle class and don't know you're suposed to soak beans 24 hours before cooking them the first time a charity gives us that for our hunger.

It is probably assumed we meet in our downtrodden shared neighborhoods but the infirm and elderly don't get outside and the neighbors may not be poor just us or they may be the rotten-egg poor you don't say hi to on the street like my neighbor Hank Carr who kept aiming an AK-47 at his girlfriend's son threatening him until one day he blew the 4-year-old's head off in the house behind the one across the street from us. Then killed 3 cops.

Perhaps we meet in line to turn our electric back on or to appply for help with bills, but we don't talk to each other, we have pride, we don't pry.

Mostly we hear that the other guy's bleeding while we are getting medical care. He's yelling or upset  at the long wait or quality of service he gets and says he is just going to go to his old doctor  and write a rubber check--at least he'll be treated with respect.

As soon as the methadone clinic quietly opened up near me where I get day old bread--the closest store by me--big signs began filling the Hostess shop's window saying we don't have a public phone, rest room, don't take atm and credit cards, require shirts and shoes, have no money on the premises, cannot change a large bill....having once run a busines just across the  street past one small cheesy motel and one house, I empathized with the lady, the only  African-American store-owner surrounded by Middle Asian , Turkish, Iranian  store owners and doctors. They wanted to use our bathroom all the time too, I told her, and she said ""it's bad, it's bad...the Bible says to treat your brothers like you want them to treat you but . They want too much. They just want too much."

We close up against the poor in our minds becasue they want too much, are rude, have mental problems, anger management problems,won't quit unfruitful lifestyles, take their anti-pyschotic meds.We think of them all as a batch.
Most of the poor in America are under 16.

They are our schoolchildren, not the junkie you lost your car stereo to.

I don't know any solutions. here my daughter is getting lauded by the English department of the 7th largest school district in the U.S. as the second best poet in the ninth grade, and she can't afford to get her school yearbook, with 20 days of school left.

All I know is what catholic social teaching says to do:

1. resist "compassion fatgue " or living in a state of constant aggravation and select one current issue that speaks to your sense of justice.

2.Get informed.(Expect to swim in murky waters; there are compelling-and conflicting-arguements on all sides.)

3.Own any prejudice. That has the potential of interfering with a decision that seeks the well-being of all. Become even more familiar with your own biases.

34.Take the issue to your faith community. Dwell with it in prayer, scriptures. with friends, with people whose opinion differs from yours.

5.Make contact with groups whose works support your own informed conscience. Sign petitions-make phone calls-donate time and money

6.Make your opinion public. Letter to Editor, House and Congressional representatives.,etc or be a political person.

 

Possible solutions: All doctors must take on so much percent Medicaid patients

Funds to get yearbooks for students desirous but unable

If I said share a little more equitably, you'd be saying I'm communist or socialist. I know when I mentioned at a focolare meeting that their ideas sounded like socialism , everybody froze.

(The Focolare are a worldwide non-denominational Christian group who read the same Bible verse every month and live it out all month to make the world more as Jesus was asking us to make it--a brotherhood, a family. They believe his radical ideas of deep love of neighbor are the only agent for change in a world gone evil. They ask you give one-third your profits, if you own a company, to the poor.They began with 4 or 5 teenage girls in Germany or Hungary reading the Bible to get through the daily bombing of their  world going on around them. They are   approved by the Catholic Church as "The Work of Mary.")

How strange, that the American president is vowing to give billions of dollars to the third world now to stop AIDS there, saying that the American people will not pass by the beaten traveler laying on the side of the road, an allusion to the Good Samaritan proverb, and he is called a Christian; but those advocating the kind of change in our hearts Jesus said was necessary  and we the fallen in our society know are, are labeled "socialists".