Many Reasons Why

I have been poor. I have been sick with no doctor. I have been at the emergency room because there was nowhere else I could go. I have been fired from a job. I have been overwhelmed by bills. I have overdrawn a checking account. I have used a credit card to supplement an income which didn't cover my expenses. I have borrowed money from friends that I could never repay. I have washed clothes in the sink and tried to dry them by an open oven door. I have shivered under multiple blankets because a landlord wouldn't provide adequate heat. I have poured a Baggie full of change into the coin counter at the grocery in order to buy dinner for myself and my child.

But when all is said and done, I was never completely out there with no one. I never would have ended up on the streets. For all the stress, terror, and helplessness I felt, if it had come to that, I could have called someone.

It becomes easy for people to judge the poor when they are continually depicted as "other". When you know how close you have come to being there, you know that the poor have a face and a name. You know what kind of desperate choices you make, fueled by fear and exhaustion.

I have drawn from my own experiences two things: gratitude for the financial and emotional stability that I have now, and a refusal to judge others whose lives are constrained by poverty.

 

Show me a prison, show me a jail

Show me a prisoner, man, whose face is growin' pale

And I'll show you a young man with many reasons why

And there but for fortune, may go you or I

Show me an alley, show me a train

Show me a hobo who sleeps out in the rain

And I'll show you a young man with many reasons why

And there but for fortune, may go you or I

Show me the whiskey stains on the floor

Show me a drunken man as he stumbles out the door

And I'll show you a young man with many reasons why

And there but for fortune, may go you or I

Show me the country where the bombs had to fall

Show me the ruins of the buildings once so tall

And I'll show you a young land with so many reasons why

And there but for fortune, may go you or I, or I

Phil Ochs - There But For Fortune

 

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