Thoughts on Poverty and Wealth--Post 1

When I wrote an article last month about canning sausage, I mentioned that Paul and I have had times when our income was very low. For example, right after we got married in 1986, I was going to college and he was making $600 a month as a Christian school teacher. Rent was $250 a month. We tithed $60 a month and saved $60, and what remained after taxes was stretched a long way. When I got pregnant a year into marriage, $60 a month went to the doctor instead of savings, and we were just barely able to pay for the hospital bill and all.

Later, when we were working in Canada, our housing and food were provided, and we got a stipend of $60 a month to cover transportation, clothing, postage, phone calls, gifts, cosmetics, household supplies, and so on.

"Extreme frugality" is an understatement for how we lived.

Eventually, things changed and now we are middle-class by the official government charts but compared to back then, I feel like we are astonishingly wealthy.

Canning that sausage and writing about it made me realize that the government charts tally only one type of wealth, and that is dollars.  Actually, there are probably a hundred different factors and resources and types of wealth that make all the difference and can either compensate for a low income or make it all a lot worse.

Such as: 
health
literacy
community support
family support
relationships
land
financial sense and skills
DIY skills
distance from work and family

Somehow the charts and the government solutions never seem to take these things into account.

I had lots of notes left over after the article was done so I decided to do a few blog posts on poverty and wealth, not to draw any real conclusions or to tell anyone what they ought to do or to try to "fix" the poor, but just as a platform to observe and cogitate.

Recently one of my daughters said, "I was reading about the teachers' strike in West Virginia, and there was a picture of the governor talking, and there was something different about him. Finally I figured out it was his teeth! You almost never see people at that level of government with bad teeth."

I think that in American society there's nothing like teeth to divide the comfortable from the struggling. I am extra aware of this because of my mom's obsession with teeth ever since she got dentures at age 17, but research backs me up.

This is a fascinating article by Sarah Smarsh about how teeth denote our class in America.

She says,

‘Don’t get fooled by those mangled teeth she sports on camera!’ says the ABC News host introducing the woman who plays Pennsatucky. ‘Taryn Manning is one beautiful and talented actress.’ This suggestion that bad teeth and talent, in particular, are mutually exclusive betrays our broad, unexamined bigotry toward those long known, tellingly, as ‘white trash.’ It’s become less acceptable in recent decades to make racist or sexist statements, but blatant classism generally goes unchecked. See the hugely successful blog People of Walmart that, through submitted photographs, viciously ridicules people who look like contemporary US poverty: the elastic waistbands and jutting stomachs of diabetic obesity, the wheelchairs and oxygen tanks of gout and emphysema.

I still have crowded, crooked, overlapping front teeth, a relic of a childhood of poverty. I sometimes wonder: should I get them straightened because we could afford it now, or should I keep them as a symbol of solidarity with the poor?

Or is it simply silly to think of spending thousands on straightening teeth at age 55 just because the society around me says it's important?

As the paragraph by Ms. Smarsh says, it's more than teeth that physically defines poverty.

My three daughters and I took an overnight trip to Seattle a couple of months ago to see a play. It was an adaptation of a middle-grade fiction book that the girls loved, and was held in a small theater at the Seattle Center.

We all like to observe people, and after the play one of the daughters remarked, "I was looking around, and I realized everyone looks exactly the same. I just knew they all had plenty of money, and not just because they could afford to attend a play.  They just had that LOOK."

A few weeks previously, when I attended Jenny's choir concert, I had looked at the singers onstage and thought, "They look like they're poor." It wasn't only because they were community college students—they also had a certain Look.

What is it?

Well, their teeth, at least sometimes.

And body weight. 

And also hair and makeup, which I don't know that much about, but the Seattle crowd looked more understated.

It was more than all that, though. Some people have always had a clear path before them, an assumption that their needs would be met as they came up, and an expectation of success. Others overcome astonishing obstacles just to attend the local community college this term. And it shows.

I feel more at home among struggling and poor than around educated and successful, but I connect most with people who have had difficult times but found a way to thrive.

So I have crooked teeth as a relic of poverty, but I also have lots of fillings, because of my dad's strange priorities. More on that tomorrow.