....and that line isn't what the government tells you it is. Those of us living it know where it is. Once you've fallen below it, you don't need the government to tell you you're there. Nothing like multi-millionaires telling us whether or not we're officially poor. It's like a man telling a woman in childbirth that she isn't feeling pain, she's feeling "pressure." Anyway. I've read a couple of diaries recently by Kossacks also suffering financially. So I wanted to share a couple of resources I've checked into, in hopes that I can help a struggling Kossack.
Some time ago I joined a group called "hOURS." If you do an Internet search you might find it, and the Philly local chapter is a Yahoo! group. It isn't a barter group, but it works like this:
Member A is, say, a gardener. Member B, who is a hair stylist, needs gardening done. so Member A does gardening for Member B. Member A then has credit for the hourly pay for gardening, for however many hours gardening s/he did. Member B has a debit for that dollar equivalent in hair styling.
Member A, with credit, needs auto repair done. So Member A finds an hOURS member, Member C, who does auto repair work. Member C does the car work for Member A. Member B, who got gardening work from Member A, has a debit. So some other member, needing a haircut, gets it done by Member B. And so on. You sign up with whatever service you have to offer, and everyone pools their services. I hope this description is clear and understandable. If it isn't, please reply and I'll clear it up.
There is a web site: www.swapace.com. I registered but I've never swapped anything. But I wanted to pass along the site in case it might help another Kossack.
For much of my adult life I've spent a lot of time among the wealthy and others, like myself, who are struggling. I'm fond of many of the wealthy I know, so I'm not comfortable critiquing them, and I'm loath to use generalizations about any group, since we low-incomers so often are called lazy and unintelligent. But living as I do traveling back-and-forth between wealthy and low-income communities, I've noticed some patterns. Maybe it's because the poor know first-hand what a slander "lazy and unintelligent" is, so many of us feel solidarity with each other. But I've found the poor to care deeply about current events issues, though they're so overwhelmed just trying to survive that you don't see them standing in front of a Whole Foods store collecting signatures on petitions for Greenpeace or some other worthy group. I find them to be deeply civic-minded, and maybe that's because they live with the consequences of what greed, and what the system, does to the poor. I also find that if they learn that I'm having an especially acute financial crisis, they're turning their pockets inside out looking for a way to help out. Of course they can't because the affluent and wealthy have sealed us off from the world of the haves, cut us off from financial resources. But the poor have a deeply generous, compassionate spirit.
I struggled with whether I should have even written the previous paragraph because the generalizations bother me, but I can't find a way around it. I find an indifference to suffering in the wealthy community that troubles me. They see their mountains of money as rightfully theirs because they worked hard for it, after all, didn't they?
As if the poor don't work hard for what little they acquire in return?
I looked up the word "greed" in two places:
www.dictionary.com calls greed "excessive or rapacious desire, esp. for wealth or possessions; and
Webster's Seventh New Collegiate Dictionary calls greed "inordinate or reprehensible acquisitiveness."
This always brings me up against the wall of definitions--what is inordinate? What is excessive?
The poor usually know it when they see it. I'm not calling for the wealthy to just start handing out cash. That won't solve anything. But even though I don't have a plan with answers, I still have the right to ask hard questions. I have the right to name a practice as very wrong. And that's what I call the wealth disparity in America.
When so many Americans are undeservedly impoverished, how can the wealthy think they're prospering?