God in Ruins

Understanding Poverty

I read Ruby Payne's book A Framework for Understanding Poverty hoping that it would provide me with some compassionate understanding for people who I see everyday that are other from me (see post from 9/7/05).  Ruby Payne is an educator who married a husband from poverty and has worked in both affluent schools and impoverished schools.  Her book is an in-depth look at the invisible rules separating three cultures that exist simultaneously in America, but are unfortunately looked at as separated only by economic differences:  the poverty culture, the middle-class culture, and the affluent culture.

Payne's book popped up on my radar at the perfect time. I have neighbors who would be classified as in poverty. I want to feel compassion for them, but it's hard not to feel anything besides rage when I have to slam on my brakes to avoid hitting a kid who's parent is on the front porch sucking on a bottle of beer. But I want to understand because although it's harder to see a life in all of it's complexity, it's necessary to feel sympathy for somebody else; to see that there really is a connection between them and me.

Some points I found interesting in Payne's book (these are generalizations but help to put some structure around the intangible qualities of poverty, middle-class, and affluent cultures):

• Situational poverty or affluency is a present circumstance brought on by a change in events and is different from generational poverty or affluency, which has innate cultural rules.

• Living in poverty is quantified by living for the present moment (i.e. buying food for the day, paying only the bills that are being collected on, valuing a person who is entertaining because entertainment is relief from the struggle of the present)

• Middle-class living is often geared toward the future (i.e. buying food for the week, understanding 30 year mortgages and credit ratings, valuing a person's stability/consistency)

• Affluent living has a strong emphasis on the past (i.e. food is a process of refining tastes, family assets are to be maintained and cultivated, value on a person's lineage and status)

The point she made that I keep coming back to in my mind is that in order for a person to make the shift from one class to another, that person will need at least one of four things:

1) To be in a situation that is unbearable.
2) A gift or skill that propels them out of their class.
3) A strong belief in the promise of a better life down the road.
4) A guide/mentor to show them how to live in the new class.

Why is one of those things necessary to make a cultural shift? Because, as a concentration camp survivor once said, humans are capable of getting used to anything. So, even if I grow up in a home with an alcoholic, non-existent father and a mother working two jobs who dresses me in dirty clothes and leaves me to be abused by my cousins, it is the world I know. To leave the world I know and live a middle-class life centered around stability means that, for a year or two, this new life will feel awkward and uncomfortable.

I don't think the four things one needs to switch classes is exclusive to social class. In my experience, I needed two of those things (promise of a better life and a mentor) to make the break from a dysfunctional family into building healthy relationships with my wife and child (an ongoing process). Although it seems to defy logic, for somebody who grew up in chaos, stability and order feel wrong. My wife can testify that I've found myself in phases of stability trying to beat that stability with a bat because it feels wrong and strange.

I've met artists with similar talents, but wildly different abilities to cope with life. Some handle the lean and plenty lifestyle like they were made for it and others flog themselves throught the lean times. I wonder if the difference is a mentor. In my experience, a mentor is not one of those things adopted to suit our lifestyle, like eating organic or taking up yoga, but a mentor is a guide that leads me out of just surviving into a life that is worth living.

Patio Man: Posted for the sheer pleasure of it.

The following is an excerpt from a book that is bringing me great joy these days.   It's David Brooks' book, On Paradise Drive: How We Live Now (And Always Have) In the Future Tense.

In the section entitled "The Grill-Buying Guy," Brooks describes the mental visions of a single typical suburban man (known as Patio Man) as he stands at the checkout counter of Home Depot buying his overly equipped grill:

In his mind's eye, Patio Man can see himself cooly flipping the garlic-and-pepper T-bones on the front acreage of his new grill while carefully testing the citrus-tarragon trout filets simmering fragrantly on the rear.  On the lawn below, his kids Haley and Cody frolick on the weedless community lawn that is mowed twice weekly courtesy of the people who run Monument Crowne Preserve, his townhome community.

Haley, the fourteen-year-old daughter, is a Travel-Team Girl who spends her weekends playing midfield against similarly pony-tailed, strongly calved soccer marvels such as herself.  Cody, ten, is a Buzz-Cut Boy whose naturally blond hair has been cut to lawnlike stubble, and the little that's left is highlighted an almost phosphorescent white.  Cody's wardrobe is entirely derivative of fashions he has seen watching the X Games.  Patio Man can see the kids playing with child-safe lawn darts along with a gaggle of their cul-de-sac friends, a happy gathering of Haleys and Codys and Corys and Britneys.  It's a brightly colored scene--Abercrombie & Fitch pink spaghetti strap tops on the girls and ankle-length canvas shorts and laceless Nikes on the boys.  Patio Man notes somewhat uncomfortably that in America today the average square yardage of boyswear grows and grows, while the average square inches in girls' outfits shrinks and shrinks.  The boys carry so much fabric they look like skateboarding Bedouins, and the girls look like preppy prostitutes.

Typically, I'm not interested in books or films that poke fun at one person (or people group) for the sake of a laugh.  So it should be noted that Brooks' book satyrizes not just the cavernous existence of suburbanites, but of all different types of Americans.  The truth that is hitting me is this:  the shallowness of our existence is not reflected in where we choose to live, but in the decision Americans tend to make, whether Artsy Hipster or Patio Man, to surround ourselves with people who are the same as us.