This is a response to a recent article by Walter Williams, Where Best To Be Poor.

According to Mr Williams, I am rich.  I make more than the 2009 poverty guideline for an urban four-person family.  But even if I were classified as poor, I still

• have air-conditioning, along with 83% of poor households.  In all the places I have lived, even when I was without a job, I always had at least two window-sized units (sometimes central AC),
• have plenty of room (more than two rooms of space) as does two-thirds of poor households,
• own a car, right along side of nearly 75% of poor households,
• have a color television, with a whopping 97% of poor households,
• have both a VCR and DVD player.  Walter reports that 78% of poor households have at least one of those, and I
• own a microwave, along with 89% of poor households.

Williams goes on to observe that what used to pass for material poverty really doesn’t exist anymore, since if you have “some mimimum quantity of goods and services deemed adequate for a baseline level of survival,” you are no longer materially poor.  With that definition, I have never known material poverty.  However, I think I am suffering from another type of poverty that he says is much more insideous: poverty of the spirit.

He defines this, in part, as “conduct and values that prevent the development of healthy families, work ethic, and self-sufficiency.”  While I may be relatively healthy, my work ethic isn’t what it could be, and I am currenlty not self-sufficient.  The longer I am not, the more I fear getting used to the dependency.  I do have one thing in my favor: the unwavering belief that what I envision for myself – a life on my own – is not only possible but imminent, as long as I do two things:

1. Express my gratitude for what I have, and
2. Work diligently to make it happen.

I have a plan for this, and in the coming weeks, I’ll document my journey as much as I can.  As for Walter Williams, I wholeheartedly agree with him.  The difference between me and those stuck in a seemingly endless cycle of spiritual poverty, is recognize it’s my responsibility to get out.  However they got there, I want the same for anyone who consideres themselves poor.

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We are visual people.  We like to see things – TV shows, movies, even each other.  It’s the assumptions we make about what we see, or what we think others see, that sometimes get us into trouble.

Take Harry Reid’s widely reported comments about then-Presidential Candidate Obama in John Heilemann and Mark Halperin’s book “Game Change.”  Part of what got to me about this was not only that Senator Reid thought the President was more politically marketable because of his appearance, but he was making assumptions about what the American people would see, and what we think about what we see, based on assumptions we make on a daily basis because of how someone looks.  I agree with George Will that unfortunately, no matter how bad it sounds, Senator Reid is onto something.

Despite the fact it’s wrong, we make judgments and assumptions about people’s looks all the time.  If someone looks thin, we might assume they are fit and take good care of themselves.  If they look fat to us, we may assume the opposite.  If we think someone looks young, we may assume they don’t have the capability or intelligence to do certain jobs or handle certain situations.  All of these assumptions are superficial and, many times, incorrect.  When you add someone’s race to the attributes we make unfair assumptions about, almost nobody wins.  However, I think it is just as tragic to expect that other people are going to make certain prejudicial assumptions, no matter how incorrect they are.  In a way, it’s perpetuating the very stereotypes we’re so against.

All that said, I do have a lot of hope for the future.  Last year, during the week of Dr. Martin Luther King’s birthday, my son told me he thought it was stupid to exclude people just because of the color of their skin.  He was eight at the time, and he’s a visual person too.

Fortunately for all of us, there’s more than one kind of sight.  Because of this, maybe we can expect better of ourselves and each other.

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