We’re Poor(er)

The Inner Voice
Jul 30, 2017 · 3 min read

Something strange is happening. I noticed it at the height of the great recession. I had read about thrift stores but never seen one, not in my working class, middle income neighborhood, but suddenly, they were everywhere. They were cool and they were packed with young people looking to reanimate looks of the past with trends of the future. At the time, I didn’t think this was a marker of a permanent turn in society, but it seems to be part of a new reality, one where the term middle class moves deeper into poverty and the poor move from deprived to desperate. I want to say this, but then at the same time, the price of apartments and homes are going up and selling out. New multi-million dollar ventures are popping up all around us, cool new eateries, micro-breweries, bike shops, artisan pizzas and they all cost a premium. They promise to meet the new cultural demands of conscious corporate responsibility. They promise to plant trees, donate meals, create community gardens, educate kids, give to shelters, pay for college, do you notice a trend here? Some of the things they are promising, like eco-awareness by using recycled goods and only using reusable materials, buying locally and covering their carbon foot-print are great! Wonderful in fact. The social conscious programs are what worry me, there is an endless well of need that is cropping up around us and we seem content to buy expensive products and hope that the undisclosed donation to random shelter will help stem the blight that is highly visible.

I get angry every time I see a feel good post. I didn’t immediately understand why I felt angry, over time the answer became clear. Images and stories or artists painting benches so the homeless can sit, or videos of people donating money and filming the gesture, the headline grabbing attention of giving help, but really just offering an act of kindness has stymied the hard work of building a fair and equitable society. We are making human rights political and asking corporations to fix them through our consumerism. How did we get here?

The few who are doing the actual work, those who started movements around eating locally, thinking about our communities, being responsible for each other started displacing the products of major corporate players. New businesses build these “buzz words” into their marketing platform, they reorganize their business model to capture a share of your income and while some are authentic, most are not and there is no way to discern one from the other. Are companies like Starbucks and The Gap (RED) better options to Dunkin and Ambercrombie? Are they less worthy than the local coffee house and the young designer who opened up shop in your town? Are we in a better world because everyone of these actors has decided to care a bit more about the world? Yes, I guess, but does that mean anything when in real terms, people’s wages are not going up and hunger is becoming so prolific that food pantries are now almost an expected service at churches. Is our world better when homeless shelters have waiting lists and low income housing has longer waiting lists spanning near a decade? Are we better off when income disparities between who has and who hasn’t is growing faster than the GDP?

I’m over the feel good acts, I want a world where artists are painting benches outside of the apartment for formerly homeless men and women to sit. I want food pantries that specialize in cooking home made meals with and for the disabled and elderly who can no longer do these things for themselves, as an act of love, not families and young people fighting off hunger despite hours of work. I want people to have jobs that will pay market rate rents in a society that values the workers that keep it going. I know we can get these things and I know we have a long path ahead of us, but settling for anything less is simply not an option. Hit me up, let’s start changing some things.

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