I’ll Buy Them The Ice Cream: Poverty In Our Community
As a member of this year’s Leadership Macon class, one of the classes we took was on the state of poverty in Middle Georgia.
One exercise we did was a role playing exercise- in which we are given situations that some families might face of how to pay bills when they live on a very limited income. Many times people are forced in to poverty- not due to stupidity or laziness, but many times families are handicapped financially by sickness and hospital bills.
An option we were all given is that of allowing your kids to have an extra few dollars for ice cream at lunch. I believe most of us said we would tell our kids too bad- they can’t have that extra few dollars for ice cream, it needed to go to bills instead.
But in reflection, how many of us actually do that? When faced with a large bill, something which you could perhaps put off until the next paycheck, would you maybe take a few dollars to buy ice cream for your kids? Follow my logic here….
Let’s say you owe $500 for rent, and $200 towards electricity, but you have $600 in your account. You get paid another $600 in two weeks. Is it possible you might let the electric bill go past due for a couple of weeks, knowing you can pay it in two weeks, and then you can give your child that little bit of extra for ice cream?
If I had to make that decision, I know I would.
Poverty is a growing concern in all parts of America. But for me, when I look at my babies and think of other children just like them- children who are born in to a circumstance that they did not bring upon themselves- I can’t help but have some compassion.
Max Blau of Creative Loafing reported in December of 2013 that ” 1.8 million adults and children – about one in five Georgians – lived in poverty in 2012″. These are our neighbors, people that we know, people we work with and our kids go to school with. They’re our friends.
The Spotlight on Poverty website states that Child Poverty is at 27%.
When voting this year, keep these things in mind. As someone who has always thought of economics as a driving force behind my vote, my opinions about who I vote for have changed a little over time. Why isn’t sustainable agriculture a part of our economic development policy? What are we doing to aid those in poverty to bring themselves up out of it? Just because I am successful, doesn’t mean I shouldn’t want others in my community to be as well. And honestly, if we are all successful, it serves as an economic driver for our community.
If children don’t have to go hungry, they can perform better in the classrooms. That child can go on to do great things- aside from the very simple humanitarian concerns of not wanting a child to starve.
Think about if you had to make the very real decision between buying enough groceries for your kids, keeping the lights on, and a roof over their heads- where would your decisions fall? And perhaps, if you had the chance to give your child something to make them feel like everyone else- might you do that as well?
Along with poverty we have homelessness. There’ a fantastic video making the rounds
So yes, ice cream is not a necessary item for staving off hunger- but the point behind the exercise, having to choose between a $1 ice cream so that your child can feel normal for once and also juggling what bills to pay when…. it’s overwhelming. But it’s a very real problem in our local communities and across this state. And while it’s easy to look at our own homes and say, I’m ok- I will only worry about myself and my home, the fact of the matter is we’re all in this together. If our neighbor is starving, it will affect us as well. Even if you can’t feel compassion for that person, I believe we can all agree that when families live in poverty they are more likely to produce people who commit property crimes, and that they are more likely to produce children who cannot perform at their best levels in the classroom- which also leads quite literally to a brain drain. You never know what a child is capable of unless you give them every chance possible. And that’s for the best for all of us.
To clarify: there are a lot of people who are living in poverty, about one third of the population in Macon. When I was forced to really think about something as basic as buying a $1 ice cream for my kids- if I would *really* choose paying a large bill over waiting just a little bit to pay that and also letting my kids have a sense of normalcy- I had to give pause. And it led me to think about everything else, how sad it is that we have kids who aren’t getting proper nutrition in our own community.
Love to all y’all
Molly
