How Shall We Help the Poor?

Democracy is two wolves and a lamb deciding what is for lunch – attributed to Benjamin Franklin

That sounds harsh, but it is not intended to be. That is how it works out over time. The poor stay poor; the rich stay rich. Racism plays a part but is not all of it.

Here is what we need to do to end poverty and its insidious effects:

1. Ensure that everyone has a safe, healthy place to live. To do that we must control the ratio between income on one hand and rent or property ownership on the other. That means the government will have to interfere to some extent with landlords’ decision making. See #3 below
2. Educate everybody’s children. You cannot leave that up to the teachers’ unions and the local school board. They both have vested interests that work against the goal. Take them out of the equation. “Defund the schools” if you will. Education must have a strong employment and job skills element with student choice about what kind of job she or he wants to work toward. Encourage entrepreneurship. Set up loan programs to fund the start up for qualifying ideas
3. A living wage for everyone. You cannot put this burden on small business. It just will not work. Everyone must have an income that will house them adequately, feed them and their children, care for the children while they work. Only the government can pull this off.
4. Criminal Justice Reform. Examine every criminal law. Look at who violates it, what is the consequence of the violation, is the punishment commensurate with the violation? Empty the prisons of people who are not a physical threat to society. But if you do not take care of 1, 2, and 3, this part will not work.
5. Mental Health Reform. Assign a professional guide to everyone with serious mental health issues.
6.  End our role as the world’s police. Bring the military, military aid, and weapons funding home. Give up on taking sides in wars around the globe.  Prepare our scaled down military to defend our shores, not from refugees but from those who would use force to harm us. Instead, fund a comprehensive domestic service that pays a living wage and does productive work in our communities and public places.

Who will pay for all this? It must be the people who will benefit financially from it the most: the corporations and people who are making the most money from our current system. They will naturally profit as our society gains equality, knowledge, and stability. Start with the billionaire corporations and individuals and work your way down through the millionaires and into the six-digit earning group if necessary.

It is doable. It makes sense. It is fair and equitable. It takes race out of the equation. Why not? All we must do is overcome the resistance of the people who have a stake in the status quo – like corporate boards and big unions – the people who hold all the money now and will fight to keep it. But there are enough poor and middle-class sympathizers to outnumber the money holders. The percentage of people at the top of the food chain has become smaller and smaller until they are now outnumbered. We just have to stand up.

Oh, and do not give this approach a name that will tie it to history. It is not socialism or communism. It is a fair economy.

Haiti and the Zoo

The Quilt – Part 3

I love this picture. We bought the t-shirt at a Baptist encampment up in the hill country from Petionville. Petionville is the wealthier part of Port au Prince. The little compound has a restaurant, a souvenir store and a small zoo. Roberta would occasionally load all her kids into one of the large trucks, along with Charlene and me and would haul us all up the hill to what they called “the zoo”.  She would feed us all in the American style restaurant after we had checked on the animals.

Our trip to the zoo was just one of many delightful memories of our time in Haiti. We visited the country for about 24 years and we spent two of those years hosting the Estes Church’s guest house for medical teams and other transient missionaries. While there, we met lots of fascinating people, including Roberta’s friend Bobbie. Bobbie was a retired education professor who wanted to improve the Haitian educational system. She and Roberta worked out a plan and Bobbie would come down every three or four months bringing along some of her former students, now teachers in Tennessee’s school system. They formed relationships with teachers and principals in some of the more promising schools and began to teach them how to better reach their students with the material they wanted them to know.

Bobbie was hit hard by Roberta’s murder. You can read her reaction and much more about Haiti in Charlene’s new book "Roberta - Joy and Courage in a Clay jar Too Soon Broken"

Don't Forget Haiti

Several have commented that what Haiti needs now is food, water, medical and building supplies. But ironically, that is what Haiti needed all along. It was just that people were not noticing. This Tom Toles political cartoon comes to us from the Washington Post and is right on target.
What Haiti also needs are hope, education, good health care, farm to market roads, a stable government, and a place in the world market. The challenge for all of us will be to keep Haiti on the radar when the next disaster strikes somewhere else and the world's relief organizations rush off to help out there. Haiti needs people to love her. She needs people who will respect her citizens, and who will work to assure that they have a voice
in their own government and in the affairs of the world market. Let's don't forget Haiti when the excitement is over.