Easy Answers to Poverty

By Julia Nelson

Published: August 06, 2008

The word “poverty” is one of the more loaded terms in our national vocabulary. It is also perhaps one the most over-simplified “issues” being bantered about in the public square. The media, for the most part, has explained it to us this way: compassionate people who care about the poor favor government programs to help them. Cold-hearted people who want to see homeless children starve to death do not.

Anyone who knows me knows that I spent the first twenty five years of my life as a committed “social progressive.” I would never flatter myself to suggest that I was or am anymore compassionate than the next person, but I can remember being as young as five and crying over the pictures of starving children in Ethiopia . I asked my mom why we couldn’t travel there and bring them canned goods, and she would sigh, rub her forehead, and declare, “It’s complicated, Julia.”

It was a very unsatisfying answer. I dreamt of joining the Peace Corps when I grew up. One of the few physical fights I got into in school was with a girl telling racist jokes about starving Africans in sixth grade. I grew up very middle class; not upper, not lower, but amid my teenage obsession with buying stuff at the Gap, I was keenly aware of how fortunate I was in the grand scheme of things.

A two week trip to an impoverished Mexican village in South Baja was a turning point in my college years. I gave away bags of designer clothing purchased with hard-earned baby-sitting money, and vowed to live a simpler life. I visited orphans in South Korea the next summer, and while I wept over their need for love, I was unconsciously absorbing the difference in the two cultures and countries, and how it affected the poorest among them. As a young married woman with a toddler and baby number two on the way, my husband and I took in a homeless woman for several months, and tried (in vain, unfortunately) to help her obtain housing and employment. She was in many ways the model homeless woman, but she irreversibly changed the face of American poverty for me.

All of these were just a few of my transformative experiences affecting how I view and understand poverty. So while I am just as comfort-enslaved and sheltered as the middle-class next American, I have been on a journey of understanding what it really takes to love my neighbor and improve the lives of those less fortunate than me. For years, I self-righteously proclaimed that no one cares, and that “something must be done.” There is something extremely soothing and self-important about feeling like you understand a problem better than anyone else, simply because of your passion about it. Yet every attempt I have made to actually help others in extremely challenging economic circumstances has only proven to me how little I know or understand.

Now don’t get me wrong, I’m not for a minute suggesting that we don’t need to care more, give more and try harder when it comes to addressing the extreme level of need around us, domestically and internationally. I have just come to realize that the suggestion that there is any large sweeping way to immediately both relieve suffering and build a better future for the poor across the globe is too often a misguided and arrogant one.

This is true ten-fold when the government is involved. Welfare and other domestic entitlement programs do bring relief, but who thought in 1940 that we would be facing a third or fourth generation born into welfare dependency? Why do people I know who deal exclusively with helping the urban homeless tell me that the biggest obstacle they face is not lack of resources but a sense of entitlement and fear of independence? Foreign aid sometimes brings relief to those abroad, but more often than not merely props up dictators and despots keeps them in power far longer than they would be without our “help.” And one need only look as far back as Somalia to see what can happen if we try to make sure the food gets into the “right hands.”

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