Poverty rate unchanged: Mom says hard times teach her kids compassion
Poverty rate figures show 15 percent of Americans with family incomes under $23,021: One mom in that population sees lessons in compassion for her kids as a bi-product of her family's trials.
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Last month we had one terribly rough week that left me counting my pennies at the supermarket. I came up short and had to ask the cashier to remove an item from my purchase. Two women behind me were annoyed that I was holding them up. "Just put it on your card," one said, exasperated. "You'll just have to come back for it later." The other woman muttered, "Jerk."
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Lisa Suhay, who has four sons at home in Norfolk, Va., is a children’s book author and founder of the Norfolk (Va.) Initiative for Chess Excellence (NICE) , a nonprofit organization serving at-risk youth via mentoring and teaching the game of chess for critical thinking and life strategies.
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I had my 8-year-old with me, learning on the front lines, and had to turn to them and clarify that I simply didn't have a penny beyond what was in my purse, and we would not be coming back for the ice pops I had thought we could afford that day. I apologized and blinked back a big old flood of tears.
The women were unmoved. "Well, next time learn to count before you hold everyone up!"
Being humbled is a huge advantage in life because it opens your eyes and shuts your mouth. You really can't experience that kind of thing week in and week out, that kind of gutting, and not stand by a neighbor who is in financial disgrace and distress.
Before sinking to the no-ice-pop level, I might have tended to avoid people in financial trouble because it's just too scary. Fear tends to hide our social skills. When it's a neighbor, it's literally too close to home.
Very few neighbors helped; only a few even spoke about those moving. Part of that may have been an effort to be polite, but mostly it reminded me of the Shirley Temple film "The Little Princess" where the child goes from rich and adored to impoverished and shunned when her military father is reported missing in action and her bills go unpaid. She was still the same child, only now she was scorned, an outsider, perhaps carrying the disease of poverty.
The writer Douglas Adams would have called it a case of a "somebody else's problem" field. In his books, when something that is just too strange or frightening appears, people automatically don't see it because their brains protect them.
Having experienced joblessness, a brush with foreclosure and making pasta into an ongoing food adventure, I should probably be one of the main somebody-else's-problem-field generators, but I have always been pretty socially backward about most things. I am a journalist. We run toward fire and explosions, dodging all the sane people who are trampling us trying to head the other way.
You might even say I see life through everybody's-problem glasses.
When you run toward problems, you get the chance to report back what you saw. Hence I am here to tell you that in the end, my friends survived the social apocalypse.
They are good people, and they, like our nation, will rise again, stronger, better and even more giving for having been humbled, hurt, and doubted.
Until then, while we may not be comfortable running to help, perhaps at least we can steel ourselves not to walk away from our neighbors when they need us.
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