The face of poverty

15.1 percent! Portion of U.S. population in poverty in 2010.

22 percent Portion of children under 18 in poverty.

46.2 million Number of people in poverty in 2010.

22,113 dollars The poverty threshold for a family of four.

11,490 dollars The poverty threshold for an individual.

3.2 million Number of people kept out of poverty by unemployment insurance.

20.3 million Number of people kept out of poverty by social security.

Minus 11.3 percent The change in family income for the bottom twenty percent between 2007 and 2010.

Minus 6.6 percent The change in family income for the middle twenty percent between 2007 and 2010.

Minus 4.5 percent The change in family income for the top twenty percent between 2007 and 2010.

6,298 dollars The decline in median working age household income between 2000 and 2010.

5,494 dollars. The decline in African American household income between 2000 and 2010.

4,235 dollars The decline in Hispanic household income from 2000 to 2010.

49.1 million The number of people under 65 without health insurance.

13.6 million The decline in the number of people under 65 with employer sponsored health insurance from 2000 to 2010.

10.5 percentage points The decline in the share of the population with employer sponsored health insurance from 2000 to 2010.

Statistics are an interesting thing but they do not put a true face on the poverty situation in the United States. For every number in the above statistics that we gathered, there is a story. Here are a few of them.

As so many of you who read me regularly know, we have, for the last eleven years, spent a portion of some of our days working and volunteering among those who would be considered by any definition to be poor. They are people in the bottom twenty percent and most of them have little chance of ever escaping that percentile. And, they are, in the main, good and fine citizens of these United States. And some of them have given a portion of their lives and seen other lives snuffed out in service to their country. From world war two through Korea and on down to Vietnam and even Afghanistan and Iraq, they stand among us as members of generations who were drafted or volunteered to help keep us all safe and secure in our lives today.

Next to the Marion Ministerial Alliance stands a 100 unit housing complex that shelters at least 100 souls and so many of them are the old whose social security benefits do not approach that eleven thousand plateau. Many of them are women who are now widowed who served the greatest generation as housewives and helped to raise families who now, sometimes, serve as their lifeline between true poverty and a half way decent life. Many of them have been abandoned by their offspring for various reasons and face each and every lonely day with courage and dignity in the face of odds that would make the most hardened among us cry.

We had lunch yesterday with a group of three who were among the nicest people that we had met recently. They were having trouble coming up with less than 150 dollars to keep their apartment in an old motel on a main artery between two southern Illinois towns. They were kind and wished me well as I tried to direct them toward a place that might help them out of their predicament. We told them that food was available at the Ministerial Alliance Monday through Friday at noon but, like so many others, we will probably never see them again because, like the rent, transportation from their home, such as it is, down to the soup kitchen is a major problem. We who look at 3.25 cent gasoline with a feeling that it is down from some higher plain, would find it hard to understand how hard it is to come up with enough to get anywhere, even if they had a working car.

There are those whose automobiles are their lifeline to the world that we know, but, if they break down, they spend their days looking forlornly out some window, remembering a time that went so fleetingly past. Without transportation, so many windows close to those in the bottom twenty percent. Transportation for these people is an interesting thing. Many of them stand or sit around for hours awaiting an erratic public transit bus to pick them up and take them where they need to go. Acquiring and keeping a car is a major ordeal as they fall victim to the sleazy car dealers who place monitors in the hoods that will turn off the engine if they are as much as forty five minutes late in making their weekly or monthly payments for automobiles that started out with over a hundred thousand miles on them to begin with.

And then there are those who are in the shelters. The one that we have here in Marion, Illinois tries its best to place as many as it can in permanent residences but, at the end of sixty days, it must turn out those that it cannot place. The street can be a very cruel place indeed. We have seen people emerge from storm sewers under highways where they have spend a cold and lonely night. And they have no money for the coffee that we drink in some restaurant as we see them pass by outside. You can always tell a street person because they carry all the belongings in the world with them at all times. And we cannot begin to tell you of the desperation on their face when, while they sleep, someone walks away with the few possessions that they have. The lucky ones have a sleeping bag while the rest just get by.

We just ended a below zero bout here in southern Illinois and I cannot tell you the concern so many of us had for the street people out in weather like this. But so many of them have a pride and a sense of independence that will not let them seek any form of help. Where most of us die in the comfort of a nursing home or our own beds with loved ones gathered around, those on the streets die alone and are found up against some wall someplace, perhaps next to a church, or clogging up some storm drain. Do they even count in any of the statistics mentioned above?

We could go on and on about the situations that we have seen but suffice it to say we think many of you get the picture that we have painted with words here for you. And we would like for you to remember the words from the twenty fifth chapter of Matthew in the Christian Bible which say, in effect, that as you treat the least of these, you treat your maker. And as I so frequently look into the faces of these souls, I know that I am looking into the eyes of God.

IOVHO,

Joe

To say that "God exists" is the greatest understatement ever made across space and time.

The Christmas story!

We were at a bible study group the other day and instead of our usual routine, we, as leader, offered to do the story from the book of Luke in the Christian Bible about the birth of Christ. Everyone in attendance asked us not to do so because they had heard it so many times already during this season of light.

We do not know if there is a war on Christmas but we did see a great number of shoppers at the local mall where we hold our Bible study and we all agreed that we would not hold a session on the day after Christmas because of all of the hubbub that might be going on that day. We enjoyed seeing the photo of Fox News wishing everyone a happy holiday in defiance of the Fox commentator who is promoting the idea that there is a war of Christmas going on. If so, it is not as bad as it was back in the fifties and the sixties when it was all the rage to say or print “Merry Xmas� on so many holiday items as they left Christ out of it entirely. We don’t see that so much any more.

In point of some arguable facts, Christ was probably not born in December anyway because the first to see him were the shepherds who came down from the hills from tending their sheep and they would not have been there in the December month. Christmas was copied, for its date, from an old pagan holiday as the surging Christian faith sought to give a broader mix of people something familiar to be able for them to further incorporate the new faith into their lives. It is interesting to note that the Jewish faith has resurrected the once obscure Jewish celebration called Hanukkah over the years in order for Jewish children to be able to join in the holiday festivities that so many Christian kids got to enjoy in December.

As the story goes, the angel Gabriel came to Mary and told her that she had been favored by God to bear the Christ child and that the father was to be God himself. Rumors and legends have stated that Mary might not have been the first person that was approached to ask to do this task but she was the first one to accept the duty and the great privilege put before her. As the angel stood there before this girl who might not have been but fourteen or fifteen years old, he must have thought what might happen if she turned him down. But Mary was willing even though there might have been profound personal repercussions to what she was about to embark upon. She and her betrothed Joseph were not yet married even though she had probably already moved, as was the custom, into Josephs parents house to learn how to be a good wife and mother to his future children before their coming marriage. When Joseph, himself probably but a very young man, first heard of Mary’s plight, he determined to quietly put an end to their marriage plans and disassociate himself from this very young and pregnant girl. But God came to him in a dream and told him what was about to transpire and reassured him that everything would be alright and so Joseph stayed with Mary and saw the whole thing through.

In Jewish customs and in law, if an unmarried woman became pregnant, she could be publicly stoned but it was more often that she was exiled to have her illegitimate child elsewhere and even the child often bore the lifetime shame brought on by the fact that it was conceived out of wedlock. This virgin birth was to follow Jesus for the rest of his life and even when he returned to his home village to try to preach and teach it was remembered there and they tried to do what they had not done to Mary when they attempted to throw Jesus off of a cliff. As the scriptures tell us, he simply walked through the midst of them and went on his way because his time had not yet come. When he had tried to teach, they had sarcastically called him “Joseph’s boy�!

After Mary became pregnant she left her home city and went to be with her cousin Elizabeth who was experiencing her own miraculous pregnancy as she was about to birth a child who would become known as John The Baptist, the final prophet who would foretell the coming of the Christ himself and would baptize him before being imprisoned and beheaded after the start of Jesus ministry. The trip that Mary took was about seventy miles over rough, hilly terrain and she stayed there for about three months before returning home to birth her own child. There was a great sense of wonder and duty about both Elizabeth and Mary and when they first saw one another, Elizabeth’s child “leapt in the womb� at the presence of the also womb bound Christ.

As the time approached for the birthing, the Roman leader announced that all the world should be counted and so Mary and Joseph had to return to Joseph’s home city in order to register. It was there that Mary’s time came and we all remember how there was no room in the inn and that the only thing available to them was a stable area where some of the animals of the village were housed. We do not know if there was anyone like a midwife to aid in Mary’s birthing process or if the only person she might have had to help her was the inexperienced Joseph. We also do not know just how hard a birth it might have been. If we follow the tradition that being a Christian is not always an easy road, it may have been a very difficult birth indeed.

As we previously mentioned, the first to be notified of the birth were shepherd’s tending their flocks by night in the hills surrounding the town. An angel appeared unto them and they were very afraid, as you might expect, by what had happened to them so suddenly as the light appeared. Shepherds were on the lower end of the economic and social scale and were not well regarded in Jewish society. They lived with their sheep and often smelled like them as well and it was just not a very well thought of occupation. But they willingly left their flocks unguarded to go into town that night to be the first after Mary and Joseph to see and to worship the newborn Christ child. We are reasonably certain that the unprotected sheep did not go untended in their absence because it was likely that God and the angels watched over them while they were away.

The spirit and the practice of gift giving at Christmas probably comes from the wise men who came from the east on a long journey following a star to see Jesus and his family. They first stopped by to see the local ruler Herod who, having already heard rumors that a threat in the form of another future ruler might have been born in his area, asked them to return on their way back to tell him of the child’s whereabouts so that he to could go and worship him. The wise men were informed in a dream that Herod simply wanted to kill the child so after they delivered their gifts of frankincense and myrrh and other fine things, they went back to their home country by another route and Herod never saw them again. Herod then issued a decree that all male children under the age of two should be killed so Mary and Joseph and Jesus fled to Egypt to escape the threat until after Herod had left the throne. Joseph was informed in a dream when it was safe to depart Egypt and the three of them returned but settled in Nazareth due to the apprehension about the new ruler who had replaced Herod.

And that, with some things omitted, is the simple story of Christmas and the birth of the Christ child who so changed the world and continues to greatly affect it down to this day.

Have a joyous day and remember the reason for the season, as some choose to say.

Regards,

Joe

To say that "God exists" is the greatest understatement ever made across space and time.

These precious days I’ll spend with you!

This piece takes its title from the old pop standard “September Song� which was supposedly sung by John F. Kennedy at a private party during his administration. Some of the words go like this:

“Oh, it's a long, long while from May to December
But the days grow short when you reach September
When the autumn weather turns the leaves to flame One hasn't got time for the waiting game.
Oh, the days dwindle down to a precious few September, November And these few precious days I'll spend with you
These precious days I'll spend with you.

We use the term “supposedly� to refer to whether Kennedy actually sang that song because there are still many who state that September Song, like so much of his Camelot, was simply contrived after the president died to make his time among us appear more than it actually was. In point of fact, it has been said also that Kennedy used to like to sit in his old Boston rocking chair and listen to the words from the Broadway musical Camelot, which was new and very popular at that time. He liked these words particularly:

“And let it never be forgot, that for one brief shining moment there was Camelot.�

John F. Kennedy faced a particular thing when he assumed the presidency on January twentieth, 1961. Every even year president elected from 1840 forward had died in office. In effect, if the presidential election year ended in a zero, every president elected that year had passed away while in office, often violently. To say that Jack Kennedy didn’t know this or was not aware of it would be a mistake. When asked about his death, he replied that he hoped that it “was quick.� Kennedy authored the book “Profiles in Courage� and we still think to this day that it took a special kind of courage to serve in the presidency during those times and with that curse hanging over you. When Richard Nixon learned of Kennedy’s death he was reportedly very upset because he realized that it might very well have been him had the election turned out differently.

We were fourteen years old on November 22 and we were a freshman in high school sitting in a biology class dissecting an earthworm when we learned of John F. Kennedy’s death. Although we did not like it when Kennedy was elected in November of 1960, we had come to love the man and to care deeply about he and his family, his presidency and our country. We were at an impressionable age and Kennedy had made a deep impression on us! As we stood in front of the high school awaiting a ride home through a rainstorm that fateful Friday, we still remember the lonely feeling that we had as we confronted the day and its enormous ramifications for us and our life and the nation’s course as a whole.

We grew up way too fast on that rainy Friday afternoon.

We went home and watched the non stop television coverage of the passage of a person who defined what the presidency could mean in the hands of a man who knew what to do with it. And Kennedy, with his Irish wit and presence, had always known what to do when in front of a television camera. He was our first telegenic presidential presence. They don’t speak of the term charisma much any longer but the word came to prominence when used to define the presence that Jack Kennedy had when speaking or in front of a television camera. People were drawn to him and that is absolutely no lie. When we look back at his lone run for the presidency, all odds were stacked against him with his opponent, Richard Nixon, holding the advantages of incumbency as vice president following the mostly successful and positive presidency of Dwight David Eisenhower.

It was those televised presidential debates seen by much of the country that seemed to turn the tide in Kennedy’s favor. Those who listened to the debates via radio thought Nixon won. Those who watched on television thought Kennedy won. In the end it was one of the tightest elections in American political history. John Kennedy’s father Joe, a man of some wealth, stated that if he was going to buy an election, it wasn’t going to be a landslide!

It has been said that a story cannot be complete without an ending and November 22 was that ending for the Kennedy presidency. The Kennedy detractors said there was never any Camelot and that it was nothing more than a contraption set up to glorify the now slain president. That was probably the early beginnings of the hate that we currently see for the first black president of the United States. We think that John F. Kennedy would have been so proud to see a black man elected president of the United States. There are those who say that Kennedy was tardy on the civil rights issue and perhaps they were right. But John Kennedy grew each and every day that he inhabited the White House and he was coming around on civil rights just as he was on so many other issues of his day. There were, however, issues at the time just as important as civil rights. Kennedy had small children and he wanted them to grow up in a nuclear free world. When Barack Obama was elected president, he made the statement that he would like for his children to live to see the twenty second century. For Kennedy, he just wanted to see everyone’s children live outside of the threat of annihilation posed by the bomb.

In this time fifty years later we tend to forget that the Cold War was raging against communism and that John Kennedy had a great deal on his plate. And then there was the looming issue of southeast Asia and Vietnam. Kennedy was postponing making any big decisions about Vietnam until after the 1964 election and there are those who have long felt that he would have chosen a different path than Lyndon Johnson did on Vietnam. As it was, it was about nine months after Kennedy’s death that Johnson committed the country to a full blown defense of South Vietnam. We need not forget that John Kennedy was a cold warrior at the height of the Cold War. But John Kennedy had seen the staggering effects of the greatest war that had ever been fought and had come the closest to death in the Pacific theater than probably any president who has ever held the office who was not assassinated had faced with the possible exception of George Washington who was constantly shot at but never hit. His assassination was a body blow to many who had seen what Kennedy had survived with his P.T. 109 experience and the medical problems with his back that had caused him to be given the last rites of the Catholic church in the early 1950’s. When John Kennedy rode in that open car this day fifty years ago he did so in part because he believed that no one would ever want to harm him in the country that he so loved. He had been warned about Dallas but had replied that there could not be any part of this nation that he would have to be afraid to travel to and be publicly seen. No American president has ever ridden in an open car since that time.

It is perhaps the mark of the Kennedy presidency that it changed America in ways that we are still discovering, setting in motion a chain reaction of events that still cascades over us today. If one does not believe that Kennedy’s death changed America one must believe that the war in Vietnam most certainly did. And, John Kennedy might have altered the outcome in Vietnam. Like so much of the unfulfilled promise of the Kennedy presidency, we will simply never know. But the facts are clear on a few things. John Kennedy did send us full bore into space and he did give us the Peace Corps and those, with their actuality and their potential promise, are not small accomplishments. The debate has raged for decades about what America and the world might have looked like if John Kennedy had not died on this date fifty years ago. In addition to that, we lost decades of the sage advice of what would have been a very respected political elder statesman. John Kennedy was only forty six years old when he died. It was said that John Kennedy, like his son, wanted to publish a newspaper or a magazine of influence after his presidency was finished.

I was but a child on the morning of November 22, secure in my world and confident about the future. By that evening, I was a man full of doubts that have plagued me ever since that time. It was a hard transition from a future full of hope to a time far away from that promise. John Kennedy had said that “to those that much is given, much is required.� We and the greatest generation before us from whose ranks he sprang, were prepared to give as much as we could, but few have come forward since then to ask very much of us. “Ask not what your country can do for you, but what you can do for your country,� seems a very distant statement now.

I will not be alive to commemorate the one hundredth anniversary of the Kennedy death so this date is something special for me. In just a couple of years we will be commemorating the one hundred and fiftieth anniversary of the death of Abraham Lincoln. We saw Lincoln brought back to life in theaters just last year and we wonder who, as yet unborn, some one hundred years from now, might bring John Kennedy back to life, if for just a little while. But he is gone now and we are in the autumn of a life that has gone so swiftly by. And, we suppose that it is perhaps not such a long, long way from May to December after all. But this day fifty years ago remains as one of the two tallest mile markers of our life.

John Kennedy has been gone for fifty years and much has transpired since his passage from the scene. We were, and still are, deeply affected by September eleventh, 2001 and the words of September Song concerning the days growing short when you reach September also mean a great deal to us. “September, November, and these few precious days I’ll spend with you.�

IOVHO,

Regards,

Joe

To say that "God exists" is the greatest understatement ever made across space and time.

September mourn!

It has now been twelve years since 2001 and the fateful September day that will live on in so many memories. It has become our self appointed duty to pen something in commemoration of this date most every year since it occurred. We were deeply affected by the events on this date a dozen years ago and we cannot seem to let go of it, perhaps out of fear that those who were lost on that date might no longer stand for what they came to stand for any longer. In the aftermath of the attacks, those lost came to represent bravery and heroism and other fine ideals. Now, like so many of our national icons, they have begun to recede to names carved on monuments whose touch with the rest of us seems to fade with each passing year. Many of the widowed have remarried and the fatherless and motherless have grown older as they proceed on with a life without the guidance of those that they loved. And some have died carrying the unique memories of the lost that only they possessed with them. It is the way of death as memories pass away.

Certainly, as September eleventh began, all they stood for was a group of Americans on their way to work or whatever they were about that morning. They had no idea that within a few hours they would join a fraternity of the lost and would be commemorated annually on the site in New York individually by name by those, like us, who simply do not want to let them go. It is not that we want to rehash negative things just for the doing. It is just that so much of what went on was so touching, tender, and tragic that we want the world to know and continue to remember that those things did not go on in vain and that there was some meaning to them far greater than the instigation of a bunch of mindless and cruel terrorists actions. If the terrorists celebrated the night before they died, we shall continue to commemorate those who perished because of what they experienced and what they came to symbolize.. We do not do this to give immortality to the terrorist but, rather, to give meaning to lives that we lost as we crossed over into a new age. So many who perished that day did so voluntarily in the line of a duty that called them to the tragedy in an effort to save other human beings in distress. Those are among the brightest and most enduring memories that we should take from that day. We should also remember those who called their loved ones from the doomed towers and aircraft so that the last thing that they might hear from them were words of comfort and love. And we should never forget those who jumped to their deaths from those heights who led us into the new world in which we reside. Trying to cling to a few more seconds of a life well lived in such a basic human trait.

Oil leaks, to this day, from the battleship Arizona out in Hawaii as many still go there to commemorate what happened on a similar day back in 1941. We were there in 1986 and the tour guides stated that the United States government would do nothing about that seepage until the last survivor of Pearl Harbor had passed from the scene. After seventy two years we are sure that is closer at hand. But September eleventh is different from that. Most of those killed at Pearl Harbor knew, in theory anyway, that they had signed an oath that included dying for their country while those in New York were merely reaping the continued benefits of what countless generations before them had fought and died for--life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.

The radicals who pulled off the New York attacks would tell you that all Americans are equally guilty of raping and pillaging the supposed purity of their faith and way of life. They would tell you that the pursuit of oil and other material things has defiled a sanctity and a way of life that has gone on for centuries, if not millenniums. They would also, by demonstrations of their faith, like to take the entire world back to the eighth century or thereabouts to a time when iron religious rule dominated the scene and any one who deviated from that norm would be instantly put to death. Those who instigated the September eleventh attacks despise all things that they consider modern but if you read the Holy Quran it does not espouse anything similar to what was done to New York and America that day in September of 2001.

Like the Bible and so many other basis for religious faith, the Quran is a book of love at its core and that is what it teaches. But, there was no love in the hearts of those who did what they did twelve years ago today, only hate.

So many lost so much on September eleventh and we have all had to go forward in our own individual and collective ways toward a future that looks far less bright than it did before that first plane hit that first tower and changed our world forever. Many events have transpired since that day twelve years ago. Others have been killed but not in the numbers that died on that one single day. But more have collectively died because of what happened that day. Over five thousand people have perished in combat from the two wars that started, in one way or another, from what went on that day. And almost countless numbers of civilians have either died or been displaced since that time came and went. And then we have the maimed who live in a world all their own but not of their own choosing. Only those like the terrorists would choose a world like that for themselves and for others. It says in the Christian Bible, judge not lest yea be judged. Those who did what they did on September eleventh not only passed judgment on others who were, in the eyes of much of the world, innocent of the charges against them, but they also carried out the self imposed sentence of their own volition on the promise of a ticket to a paradise that seems so meaningless in light of what they did. So many have died, through the ages, for causes far bigger than themselves, but, to die for hate is a very belittling thing indeed.

To say that September eleventh marked a watershed in our collective history is to make a great understatement indeed! What has been facilitated by what transpired that September day and the losses in lives and treasure are almost too voluminous to record.

There were those, including ourself, who had some realization that things were going to be different going forward than they had been in the past. It took no genius to figure that out. But we do not think that anybody had any real idea of the magnitude of the world that we were so abruptly thrust into by the dramatic and heartbreaking events that occurred on that beautiful September morn. The world of innocence that we knew was gone and was replaced by something that we still have not really completely defined. Now, and all too often, we seem to be collectively in search of a definition instead of a life. Revelations by individuals such as Edward Snowden merely put a punctuation point to that fact.

There still has not been a day to replace what happened on September eleventh, and, God help us if there ever is. Like the day of infamy in 1941, it remains with us in more or less complete form. But, like the day in 1995 when they bombed the federal building in Oklahoma City, the opportunities for supercision are always there. On the site of the New York attacks today, a great new structure has arisen and a commemoration of what occurred has been built. But what we should never forget is the simple fact that what man builds, other men can easily tear asunder and cast us even deeper into tomorrows that will dominate what has passed. That September eleventh could be eclipsed is incomprehensible to us today but we should remember that September eleventh was incomprehensible to us before it occurred.

So, we cling to our September eleventh and pray that there is not another even more horrible day as yet unnamed. And we hope and quietly pray that it is not so terrible in nature that we will not be able to even count or name the lost.

IOVHO,

Regards,

Joe

To say that "God exists" is the greatest understatement ever made across space and time.