Category — Poverty

As we continue to support the challenge against states using voter I.D. laws as a way to disenfranchise the poor and minorities, we submit this update. Admittedly, the need for citizens to identify themselves serves many purposes beyond voting. But when the need to identify oneself in order to vote causes a hardship, or the necessary papers are unobtainable, requiring them in order to vote takes on another connotation, one of discrimination and injustice.

One vote for one person is the most obvious in needing I.D., but I.D. also displays one’s address, legality of citizenship, and eligible voting age. The problem with requiring I.D. for poor and minority voters is their not having the money and/or the information of how and where to obtain the I.D. in the first place.

If a state-certified I.D. is required, many difficult and costly stumbling blocks stand in the way. If the voter has to have a birth certificate, it costs to obtain. If the voter has a name different from the one on the birth certificate, the voter has to have a marriage license or divorce papers, which costs to obtain. If the voter does not or cannot produce a birth certificate, there are many facts that must be proven of when and where they were born, which may or may not be obtainable due to the inability to read, loss of proof, or the inability to find someone who can provide the proof. If the voter is adopted, born in another country, or English is not their first language, the obstacles can be insurmountable.

The opportunity to vote should be the right of all eligible citizens of the U.S. Adding The Right to Vote Amendment to the Constitution is fast and obviously becoming the only solution to this national problem. In the meantime, we hope the data contained below is helpful in obtaining I.D. no matter the purpose.

State issued I.D. cards:

Birth certificates from each state:

Proof of date of birth:

The Right To Vote Amendment:

OCCUPY POVERTY (OP) joins together with Del Paso Heights residents upset with what they are calling “unfair treatment” in the predominately black, low income neighborhood in Sacramento, California. And those residents have decided to organize and fight back. The Del Paso Heights Community Association consists primarily of parents who are standing up for their security against the campus police department, and for the education of their children by the Twin Rivers Unified School District.

The impetus for this activity began when a school district police officer went off campus to make a traffic stop against Tyrone Smith. The officer and Smith engaged in a foot race and Smith was subsequently charged with shooting the officer during the chase. The officer is expected to recover from his wounds, but Smith died a short while later in police custody.

Smith’s death initiated an investigation into the jurisdictions and parameters of campus police. It was during this investigation that a tee shirt designed and sold by the Twin Rivers Police Department was discovered. The tee shirt depicts a child behind bars with the message: “You raise them. We cage them.” This obviously contemptuous message has offended and infuriated parents and spurred them into action.

Organizers of the Del Paso Heights Community Association are therefore registering voters to remove the current school board because parents are upset about the failure of their children in Twin Rivers Schools. According to data reportedly provided by Superintendent Frank Porter, it will take black children “twenty years to close the achievement gap.”

OCCUPY POVERTY stands in support of the parents and their determination to bring better safety and education to their community for the benefit of their children.

For most Americans, it is hard to understand how it feels to be homeless. To not be able to turn the key and walk into their warm, cozy, personal environment is beyond their imagination. But to thousands of Americans, not having a place to call home is their daily reality.

In 1983, I was homeless for almost a year. I lived in a hotel for homeless families. It was a converted 5-story transient hotel converted into a shelter, located in the dreaded Tenderloin of San Francisco. I moved into my “home”, a single room with a bath, for me and my two young sons.

The circumstances of our becoming homeless is very long and too complicated for this submission, but suffice it to say, my life was in turmoil. As was the other 49 families in the hotel.

For the first couple of months, we were required every two weeks to pack all our belongings, move to another hotel down the street for a couple of nights, then return to our hotel where we were given a different room. The purpose of this musical relocation was for us not to establish residency. Some of the more lucid residents were able after a few months, however, to find lawyers willing to fight to have this situation revoked and we were able to remain in one room for the duration of our stay.

Although that was a long time ago, the situation of homelessness exists for many Americans families, and for many more, the crises of limited income, home foreclosures, and unemployment brings the threat of becoming homeless closer and closer.

The demands of OCCUPY WALL STREET and OCCUPY POVERTY is for our government and the powers-that-be to take the plight of the homeless into consideration when funds are dispensed and bills and laws enacted. Protesters are experiencing the nightly cruelty of the homeless by being forcefully removed from our parks, but the homeless are subjected to this victimization on a consistent basis.

We are grateful for those protesters willing to stand up, so that one day others maybe able to lie down in safety and comfort.

I OCCUPY POVERTY, and I’m not alone. There are millions of Americans who have been or are becoming improvised because of the greed, arrogance, corruption and lack of compassion of both our government, and people with big money and power.

As far as the upper 1% of Americans are concerned, I am a non-entity except when it comes to utilizing me as an example, a scapegoat, or a victim to cut back on entitlements and government spending. Then my fixed income suddenly becomes un-fixed and is cut down to shore up mismanaged spending.

And because there was no voice crying out about the injustice to which I am subjected, there was no one to assist me in fighting this iniquity … until now. OCCUPY WALL STREET arrived and the entire picture of my condition and that of millions around the world has changed.

Now there are faces of outrage and demanding voices to speak for those who have been silently waiting; and there are tens of thousands to represent the file folders or case numbers to which we have been relegated. There are determined human beings insistent on obtaining equity, compassion and respect.

Although I OCCUPY POVERTY, I am not, nor have I been lazy or trifling. I have worked, paid into the system, gotten an education and training, never been arrested, been a home owner, tried to become self-sufficient, did volunteer work, voted in every election, and performed my civic duties to the best of my ability. I take full responsibility for my life.

But try though I might, I like so many others, have not been able to advance from my position. Some may say that it is our own fault, and we must take responsibility for the choices we made in life, and to an extent that’s true. However, the disadvantage of one’s origin of birth, color, sexual preference, class, status, age, health, sex, or beliefs should not be a reason to punish or penalize. Our humanity should be enough to qualify for equality.

When I awoke this morning, I had the words of my title in mind, but I was remembering an old Negro spiritual we used to sing in church. “How I got over. How I got over. My soul looks back and wonders, how I got over.” I remember my mother, grandmother and others singing it with gusto, thanking God for helping them to “make it through.” Then I typed in the words on YouTube, and found this song by The Roots, and it changed my whole attitude.

Rather than praise and worship, the words, music and images took my heart and mind into a totally different mood of distress, despair and disturbance. Tears began to flow, and my heart began to ache. For I remember, can almost smell and feel, the sensations of the people portrayed in the video; because it wasn’t too long ago that their plight was my own, and it hit too close to home.

I sit now, at my computer, with my heater going full blast in my cozy third-floor apartment overlooking a majestic oak tree, while the capitol building of the state of California is at the end of my block. There are limos, Lamborghini-es, and other luxury cars nightly pulling up to the restaurants, coffee houses and cafes that line my street.

Happy people sitting outside having lunch, dinner or just over coffee fill the air with their laughter and content. They smile and some even nod as I pass, thinking and accepting me as one of them, an equal. But I wonder what they would think about me if they knew that it wasn’t too long ago that I was homeless, living in a shelter with my two kids…friendless and alone? Would their looks be diverted away from me?

This is not the way I envisioned my day going when I woke up full of gratitude and rejoicing this morning. I had no intention of spending my morning revisiting an episode in my life that I seldom visit anymore. Not that I am trying to forget it, because I think it plays a significant part in my current sense of empathy. But today was not going to be one of those days when it would come back to me with such force, with a video as stark evidence that what happened then was real to me, just as now it’s very real to others.

But now that I think of it, both the rejoicing and the pain belong to me. I embrace them as value which has been added to my life. For without the pain there would be no joy. I would not know that it is possible to overcome and not be genuine in sharing that hopeful message with others. I would also not be able to serve as an example to those who think themselves above and beyond the possibilities of becoming like their less fortunate neighbors. It can happen to anyone.

There is a message for all of us in this, I think. For me, reminiscing keeps me grounded. For those who are struggling, I wish them God’s best. For those who are reading this, I hope it stirs something in you to reach out to even one in whatever way you can to those disenfranchised by the state of their birth or whatever life has thrown their way. A simple smile of encouragement will go a long way, and with just a little help one day those who are suffering won’t have to wonder how they got over, they will know.

When Arnold Schwarzenegger, Governor of California, threatens to reduce state workers’ salaries to minimum wage, there is a great cry of alarm from many sectors. According to an article written by Jon Ortiz, reporter for the Sacramento Bee, “doctors and lawyers would get no pay…and (the workers who) don’t get overtime would receive a flat $455 per week.” The order to reduce pay would be voided once the state budget is approved, with back pay rewarded and pay levels returned to normal.

Considering this situation by having been a state and federal civil servant during my working years, I can relate as there was a time or two when I was a victim of the same budget-related procedure. Now, as a retiree who is living on the fixed income of Social Security and Supplemental Security Income or SSI, I can again relate to a reduction in income because for the last two years we in my current financial position have felt the pinch of reduced income and no cost of living increases. But I say to the California state workers and all those up in arms about a reduction to $455 a week, try living on less than $900 a month, which is what most of us receive.

I believe that nothing happens by accident and there are no coincidences. Everything in life is being played out as it should, and in every special situation there is a lesson involved. The lesson for state workers may be to feel for a brief period, brought on by political in-determination, what those whose welfare they are in charge of is feeling all the time, due primarily to no fault of their own.

The Bee article spoke of workers having exhausted their savings or not having a nest egg to fall back on and how having to stretch their $455 for a week will be hard for some. But existing on $900 for a month leaves nothing for savings or a nest egg and is hard for everyone on SSI. Our incomes force us to live only in specific areas because of the need for low-income or subsidized housing, and some cut corners or take advantage of whatever extra funds are available, even if that means doing something immoral or other than legal.

Our low-income diets are less than healthy because we usually shop in self-service warehouse-type markets; variety stores where everything is a dollar or less; or the corner grocer that sells mainly junk and liquor. The other option is cheap fast food with all its sodium, fat and unhealthy ingredients. The majority of us have preexisting conditions which are make worse by a poor diet leading to additional health issues.

Because we are usually dependent on the state’s health provisions or MediCal in California, the quality of care is less than adequate even when compared to prison inmates, especially the dental, mental and vision needs.

For state workers, the budget will be signed soon and salaries will return to normal, and workers will be able to continue their comfortable lifestyles. This will not occur for us on the lowest level of state or federal funding. Many of us receiving SSI have worked, paid taxes and lived productive lives prior to our serious physical and mental challenges forced us to seek the only financial solution available. But there will be no restoration of the reduction in our income which has been taken due to budget cuts.

The lives of low-income people who work for minimum wage and SSI recipients will continue as a struggle from day-to-day. I hope that those whose help we depend on to finalize the processes they are in charge of will remember how it was during the time of wage reduction and speed things along. Our well-being and lives depend on it.

In celebration of Juneteenth, I wish I had the ability to express the wave of powerful emotions that washed over me and brought scalding tears to my eyes when I thought about writing this article. My mind flashed on my grandmother who was born in 1865, the year the slaves were “freed,” wearing her long white apron in Louisiana. I saw the fields of cotton my fiance took me to see in 2003 in California because I had never seen similar places down south where my people had labored during slavery.

In my mind’s eye I saw pictures of my black sisters and brothers being attacked with water hoses, dogs, Billy clubs and savagery. Then like fast forward, my mind brought me back to sitting in my bed and a blank sheet of paper, but the pain lingered.

I am a person who does not like black rhetoric, in fact I hate it; particularly when we linger and wallow in our ex-slave misery, using it as an excuse not to perform on the level we are capable of; we meaning black folks. But then I remember those who were left behind when the flight to white neighborhoods and a “better life” lured away our teachers, doctors, business people, ministers, and others of higher status and education after civil rights laws were mandated.

I don’t blame them. When my ex-husband and I bought our first home in 1976, it was in a new development with only one other black family. So I can relate to the desire to live the “American dream,” but what about all those who couldn’t leave and escape their stifling environment? What about all those who had menial jobs, but were decent, God-fearing folks who marched, and were beaten and spat on, but were left behind?

They are those on whose shoulders and graves so many of us black folks stand on today, and the generations they spawned are the people we now call the black Underclass. They are that group of low-income, barely educated, unsophisticated, crude people that many of us now avert our eyes from rather than notice or acknowledge. The ones many blacks and others from various ethnic groups are employed to serve because we are teachers, social workers, government employees, preachers, doctors, lawyers, police officers, prison staff, counselors, etc. etc. They are also the ones none of us can seem to accept as fellow human beings. We denigrate them to cases and files, numbers without faces or souls, but characters who are certainly not like us.

To proper society the Underclass are welfare mothers, drug-addicted or incarcerated or absent fathers, low-lifers, irresponsible, criminal, stupid, crazy, less-than-human wastes of time. And we wonder where they came from, or call them “refugees” as they were labeled in New Orleans after Katrina. We can take their children because they are poor and give them to others without a look back or a thought about their feelings. We can make them wait for hours while we take breaks or talk on the phone, thinking they have nothing else to do, and they need us to give them equity of food, clothing and shelter.

But the Underclass are none of these things, and without them many of us wouldn’t have jobs, or be able to live in our comfort zones. But primarily, we should consider that they are the products of the same stock of people from which many of us have come. They are the descendants of the bridges over which many of us have crossed, and they only want what we all want…to be loved and understood. But primarily, we should consider that they are the offspring of the people who were simply left behind.

It’s Sunday morning. I hear many voices  and step out onto my patio to see hundreds of marchers coming from the Capitol building up the street. I live in Sacramento, the capitol city of California. The marchers are wearing colorful tees emblazoned with captions and names…Ed and Sue, etc. They are marching to raise money for cancer research. Having recently been diagnosed with breast and bone cancer, their symbolic walking for a hopeful cure took my mind back, as I have a tendency to do lately, to other Sundays before all this.  

I was born in 1943 in Shreveport, Louisiana and Sundays were always days buzzing with activity. We lived in a small “shotgun” house. Its three rooms lined up one behind the other. Mama and Daddy slept in the front room. 

Mama was always the first to arise. She would pass through our room, my two sisters’ and mine, hastily putting on her apron headed to the kitchen, where brother slept, to start the coffee. Soon the strong aroma and Mama’s persistent urgings would pull us from our beds, wiping sleep from our eyes. 

Without indoor plumbing, running hot water, or the privacy and convenience of a bathroom, we were nevertheless soon washed, combed and dressed. Breakfast  was served and eaten, and Daddy’s putting on his hat was  the signal to proceed from the comfort of our home to walk the several blocks to Shiloh Baptist Church to hear Rev. James bring the sermon. 

With a smile, my mind returns to my patio and I think how so long ago that was, and how everything is so much different today. Mama and Daddy are long gone, and my siblings are grandparents and I’m a great-grandparent. When we talk on the phone, because now we live distances apart, we discuss our health issues mostly. But sometimes we go back into the vaults of our memories and take out a precious event like my Sunday morning remembrance and share a laugh or two. As we remember it, despite our circumstances, life was good then; and even with all the changes, we end up agreeing that life is also still pretty good now.

I wish I had the ability to express the wave of powerful emotions that washed over me and brought scalding tears to my eyes when I thought about writing this article. My mind flashed on my grandmother wearing her long white apron in Louisiana who was born in 1865, the year the slaves were “freed.” I saw the fields of cotton my fiance took me to see in 2003 in California because I had never seen similar places down south where my people had labored during slavery. 

In my mind’s eye I saw pictures of my sisters and brothers being attacked with water hoses, dogs, Billy clubs and savagery. Then like fast forward, my mind brought me back to sitting in my bed and a blank sheet of paper, but the pain lingered. 

I am a person who does not like black rhetoric, in fact I hate it; particularly when we linger and wallow in our ex-slave misery, using it as an excuse not to perform on the level we are capable of; we meaning black folks. But then I remember those who were left behind when the flight to white neighborhoods and a “better life” took away our teachers, doctors, business people, ministers, and others of higher status and education after civil rights were mandated. 

I don’t blame them. When my ex-husband and I bought our first home in 1976, it was in a new development with only one other black family. So I can relate to the desire to live the “American dream,” but what about all those who couldn’t leave and were left behind? What about all those who had menial jobs, but were decent, God-fearing folks who marched, and were beaten and spat on, but were left behind? 

Those are whose shoulders and graves so many of us stand on today, and the generations they spawned are the people we now call the black Underclass. They are that group of low-income, barely educated, unsophisticated, crude people that many of us now avert our eyes from rather than notice or acknowledge. The ones many of us are employed to serve because we are teachers, social workers, government employees, preachers, doctors, lawyers, police officers, prison staff, counselors, etc. etc. They are also the ones we can’t stand as fellow human beings. We denigrate them to cases and files, numbers without faces or souls, but characters who are certainly not like us. 

To us they are welfare mothers, drug-addicted or incarcerated or absent fathers, low-lifers, irresponsible, criminal, stupid, crazy, less-than-human wastes of time. And we wonder where they came from, or call them “refugees” as they were labeled in New Orleans after Katrina. We can take their children because they are poor and give them to others without a look back or a thought about their feelings. We can make them wait for hours while we take breaks or talk on the phone, thinking they have nothing else to do, and they need us to give them food, clothing and shelter. 

But they are none of these things, and without them we wouldn’t have jobs, or be able to live in our comfort zones. But primarily, we should consider that they are the products of the same stock of people from which we all have come. They are the descendants of the bridges over which many of us have crossed, and they only want what we all want…to be loved and understood. But primarily, we should consider that they are simply the offspring of the people who were left behind.

A few weeks ago I wrote an article about the black Underclass…those who were left behind after the civil rights movement and black flight to white suburbs; but there is another greater, more inclusive Underclass in America, “a social class consisting of people so underprivileged that they are seen as being excluded from mainstream society.” This Underclass consists of people from all ethnic groups who are at or below the poverty line. 

In this Underclass are those who are working poor, parents on welfare or men and women on government assistance, the unemployed, and the disabled. They may or may not be un- or under-educated, but are often thought by the middle and upper classes to be mentally challenged, or have some “problem” which has put and kept them in their situation. 

The Underclass of America are fodder for our prison systems, foster care systems, inadequate school systems, poor medical and dental systems, mental health systems, and any other systems into which the lowest class of citizens are shuffled for attention to their needs. 

The primary causes of the growth and maintenance of the numbers of the American Underclass is a lack of education and support. These citizens are generally reduced to files and numbers; stripped of their dignity and humanity, except when used to fuel “government programs” set up to appear to be compassionate and care-taking, but which are often closed or shut-down when they seem to be working or making on effective change. 

If one would look closely, how can a disabled person or a single parent living on less than $1,000 a month compete or advance in a country where men and women are paid millions to play sports and act or role play, while their entitlements are periodically being whittled down by $5 or $10 to shore up a failing economy?

Is there a solution to solving the plight of the Underclass? Perhaps, but it seems the Bible’s self-fulfilling prophecy has come true in America. The one I paraphrase that says “the poor will be with us always.” I can relate to that premise, but I ask you, does it have to be a deliberate act?