Blog Action Day 08: Moving Slowly on Poverty
In the last hour or so of the day (on the West Coast, at least), and even though this site is still under very active construction, I wanted to drop a quick post for Blog Action Day ’08. The topic of the year is poverty.
As I am a white Anglo-Saxon male who grew up, if not in, at least adjacent to, the suburbs, most people would assume that my experience with poverty is minimal. They would be correct. I have never known clawing hunger for days on end; have never lacked a roof, four walls and a carpeted floor; have never been the subject of an exposé on wretched conditions in the inner city nor a child with baleful eyes who could get by with a mere 75 cents a day.
No, being in the first world, I like to imagine that I can get by, due to my place of privilege in Maslow’s hierarchy, on just my principles. One of my friends recently posted on facebook a quotation by Protestant minister William J. H. Boetcker, from which I take the following excerpts: “You cannot strengthen the weak by weakening the strong[...]” and “[You] cannot help men permanently by doing for them what they can and should do for themselves.” As much as this sentiment reeks of the hackneyed arguments people make for trickle-down effects between classes, there is something to be taken from it, and it has everything to do with urgency. Continue reading »