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This morning in Sunday School, we tried to balance a budget for a family of six living in New Jersey after watching a video (now 9 years old) showing them sitting at the kitchen table with a calculator and a stack of bills, trying to figure out how to rob Peter to pay Paul. There was not enough money for even the most basic necessities, let alone books or piano lessons for the children.
The combined annual income of both parents working full-time was a little more than $22,000, not considered below the poverty line. The family’s rent in a rundown, dangerous apartment complex in was $950 each month, half of their take home pay for a place where they were afraid to let their children go outside. The exercise was frustrating, looking at their bills, the past due notices. The need for new sneakers. For childcare for the youngest. The budget did not balance. No amount of beans and rice or deprivation would ever make it cover the most basic necessities.
Yet, these people got up every day, got on public transportation and worked as hard as they could, keeping the hope for a better future alive.
The irrefutable message of Christianity, to feed the poor and take care of widows and orphans was preached in the sermon. There were tidbits about higher taxes for the wealthy or even perhaps just the well off to fight a war on poverty. Patricia referenced a quote from Walter Brueggemann, the great modern day theologian about how money has become a narcotic in our society.
So all day today, I’ve been mulling the issue over. I have no answers. But I do know that this family does not live next door to me. They are other people in another part of town. I have to worry about eating enough fresh vegetables—they have to worry about eating at all.
Not 20 minutes ago, Wolfie, my 21-year-old, walked in the house, back from the Chevron around the corner. It took him probably 30 minutes, much longer than it should have, and he told me he was distracted by one of his friends—Menio, a 58-year-old homeless guy who needed a ride somewhere.
I have told Wolfie it is not his mission in life to give rides to people down on their luck. I have told him it’s incredibly dangerous. In fact, I thought he’d given up the practice. Then tonight, he began to tell me about Menio, an Italian New Yorker (he doesn’t speak Italian), who went to college and studied philosophy (which Wolfie has also studied). My son told me he and Menio talk philosophy, that this gentleman, who apparently lives in the alley behind the Fire Station down the road, is quite smart and in particular, knows his ancient philosophy.
Neither he nor any of the other homeless men who work the parking lot at the Chevron ever ask Wolfie for anything, he says. They don’t want to hustle him, they say, because he’s cool. He treats them with respect, as if the fact that they work in a gas station parking lot panhandling does not make them inhuman in his eyes. (Peak business hours are 4-6pm, when non-homeless driving people get off work. Menio and his friends ask for money as they go in the store, then usually get a little money when they come out—people never give on the way in, my son has learned, it’s always when they’re leaving. Maybe while they’re in the store getting their chips and sodas they realize how very little a dollar is to give away. Maybe they feel sorry. Or guilty. Or afraid.)
I learned a few other things, too, from this fairly open conversation with my youngest son. There is a small tent city in a strip of woods behind the Chevron. Many of the people there seem to drink a lot. Most are felons of some kind. Oddly, they are fairly clean (one washes his clothes in a nearby creek, others get water from outside water spigots when people are away from home).
I will continue to strongly discourage Wolfie from giving rides. It worries me terribly. But one thing I am quite proud of is that somehow, he sees beyond the trappings of poverty to know that there’s a human being there who has value and intelligence and who deserves kindness and respect. But what is better than the words that I’ve formed to describe the situation is the fact that he doesn’t even consider the idea that he might treat them as anything less than a fellow human being.
