Unfortunately, somewhere along the way, ‘poor’ became the equivalent of ‘trash’

I’ve been thinking about this for a while ... since helping out with Soyoucan’s Christmas deliveries, when the organization gathers resources and delivers food and presents to poor families. It’s a rewarding experience, but I noticed this: we feel uncomfortable using the word “poor” in describing those families.

I don’t mind using the correct terminology by any means and I’m not one of those who eschews political correctness because it’s taxing to be polite.

Maybe people flat out don’t want to be called poor, even if they are. And I can understand that. But there’s no denying a couple things about that Christmas delivery experience: the people getting the packages were poor; and most of them were good folks.

I’m just saying, “poor” isn’t bad. We obsess in weird ways about poor people. Maybe part of it is that we have a fairly high rate of poverty here. It’s something we have to deal with. I’d just like to see us all remember, while we’re dealing with that situation, that the actual people are actually just people.

“The Human Comedy” is a favorite novel of mine. It’s about a “good poor family.” It happens during WWII in a small town (based on Fresno at the time). Most everyone in the book by William Saroyan is poor ... or just out of poverty and most all of them are hard at work.

You see this family plugging away at life and dealing with problems, huge and small ... father has died, big brother is killed in war, little brother works for a telegraph office and has to deliver death notices ... it can be tough. They also celebrate life in plenty of ways. The point is, you wouldn’t know they were poor by how they live or how they’re treated. Being poor was just one of many human conditions.

And, yes, it’s fiction, but it rings true ... for the way things used to be.

Unfortunately, somewhere along the line, “poor” came to mean “trash.” Now, the stereotype seems to be that “poor” is “bad.”

That switch seems to be more about all of us than about them. We’re so worried about not being poor that poor has become a model for what’s despised. Weakness, addiction, foolishness, stupidity, laziness ... that’s what “poor” equates to now. But it’s not so. Poor people are respectable, handy, resourceful, caring, responsible. Maybe they have different points of view on what’s important? Yup. Bad? No.

It’s not poor people who are bad. It’s not rich people who are bad. It’s not unemployed people or millionaire professionals who are bad.

People who do bad things are bad. That’s it. Period.

We went about looking for people for the next issue of our monthly Prospect Magazine who either appreciate mentoring they received or are mentoring others. Financial status was not a point taken into consideration in picking these people. So the subjects of the profile stories came from all sorts of backgrounds, and from around the socio-economic scale. They’re just good people and smart and worth listening to. (The magazine hits the streets Feb. 28.)

And it dawned on me that I’ve gotten quite a bit of mentoring from poor people.

Not to say that poverty isn’t something we’d like to part ways with. Even though I want to attack the stigma poor people have to deal with, I’m admitting that poverty can limit opportunities, can have negative consequences on physical health, can drive mental health issues, can assert itself in some insidious ways, hold young folks back.

But poor people? They’re only bad if they are bad people ... just like in any other social class.

As in Saroyan’s “The Human Comedy,” we have a lot of good poor families around here. They’re our good neighbors.

* Ugh: Questions that keep my friend Tony awake at night:

– What disease did cured ham actually have?

– Why do people pay to go up tall buildings and then put money in binoculars to look at things on the ground?

– How important does a person have to be before they are considered assassinated instead of just murdered?

– Once you’re in heaven, do you get stuck wearing the clothes you were buried in for eternity? Steve Miller is Editor of the Appealdemocrat