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by Radio Raheem
G21 Staff Writer

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a cathedral of words

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RADIOACTIVE: POVERTY IN AMERICA - RAHEEM provides the second feature for the G21 Focus Issue 2007: Relieving Global Poverty by looking at conditions in what is called the richest country in the world.

Oakland, CA, USA - I never thought I'd see the day but Poverty is back on the table as an issue in American politics again. With Brother Barack and John Edwards actually talking about the fact that there are millions of poor people in this country, folks that need health insurance, folks that need obs that pay a living - instead of a minimum - wage, kids going to bed hungry and getting up to go to schools where the ceilings are falling down and there ain't no books -- Well, it looks like the Last Poets were wrong and the Revolution will be televised.

And, before I get into my main thesis about Poverty, our Esteemed Editor's choice for G21 Focus Issue 2007, I want to take a minute to say something about Brother Barack Obama running for President of the United States. Stay with me on this, please.

• For the first time since before I was born, we got us a Presidential candidate that can spout off some Aristophanes like Bobby Kennedy do in films I've seen from the '60s and make it sound like everyday talking.


• Hillary has to break a sweat now, even with all the money she can get from Hollywood and New York Limousine Liberals, because she is gonnah be up against a master of bullshit to equal her husband, Dollar Bill, while she herself always come off as cold and precise as a knife blade - even when she talking about how she cares about you.

  When I say "master of bullshit," I mean it in a good way. Bill Clinton was a captivator, wasn't he? Remember when, even as that Monica thing was going on and Congress was impeaching him, he still gave that home-run State of the Union address like there was nothing wrong in the world? That was Elvis, Baby! Brother Barack has that same smooth move. Hillary, girl, you better worry.



• He's a brother but he's not quite a brother. He's a Christian but he had a Daddy who was a Muslim. His Daddy was really from Africa but his Momma was white. (Remember when TIME magazine ran that cover with that face of what the 21st Century American would look like and the person was an amalgam?) He would fail an Ebonics test. He ain't got no accent to speak of, like those newscasters we see on TV. He can quote the concepts of Martin Luther King and then switch-up and talk about Wall Street. This brother is Strom Thurmond's worst nightmare.

  And, like I say, with him and John Edwards both putting the issue of poverty back on the table in American politics, an issue you KNOW Hillary wishes wasn't there, John McCain and Rudy Giuliani would never think of, Mit Romney never heard of, that means people got to talk about Black folks, the poorest of the poor in American. Oh-oh.

To get back on track: When you decide to consider the issue of Poverty, as we are doing here at G21 this year, and you talk about poverty in America, you suddenly bring Appalachian Whites, Southern and urban Blacks and Latinos and veterans of our many wars back onto the radar screen of American politics.

Before I go on, I want to say something about those war veterans, because I think not enough is being said in the MSM (Mainstream Media.) Veterans are being screwed.

Enough of us in this country have family who have been in the military to know this. VA hospitals are ill equipped to deal with mental disorders that are the result of our wars, so our government claims those disorders don't exist at all. While our people are fighting abroad, their families are living in substandard housing on Food Stamps. If that ain't poverty, you start to tell me what is. "Support our Troops?" The last I heard, support had something to do with providing for the food, clothing and shelter of a family. Worse yet, when the widows of military men are denied their benefits under spurious conditions - well, I don't have to give you chapter and verse here.

You have heard over and over again how - here in the Gold Mountain - tens of millions of Americans have NO health insurance. I suppose you've heard it so much over so many years that your reaction is "Well, the poor we'll have always." Now stop and think about what you just said.

Really.

Stop and think about how you really said: "Well, Hell take the hindmost."

I ask you to do that because half those hindmost are children. As Moraa Gitaa noted in the introduction to the first piece on Poverty here, in the last edition of G21, quoting the 2006 UNICEF report, the majority of the world's poor and under-served are children. Even here in America, a vast number of children go to schools where there are not enough books to educate them. People in other countries around the world either would not imagine that, by watching the television we beam to them on satellite television or broadcast by way of Voice of America, but you and I know this is a daily reality in most of our cities.

"No Child Left Behind?" Don't make me laugh! On the one hand, we say we are going to make schools accountable by making sure that we do regular testing of people meeting grade-level standards and then, on the other hand, we force Black and Latino students out of the schools before the tests come up so that the particular schools meets our Federally-mandated standards and keeps getting something out of the small pot of money.

We've developed yet another new term for this phenomenon: "Push-outs." We don't have only "Drop-outs" for schools anymore. Our "Compassionate Conservative" ideology has never given us "Push-outs" who add to the millions of hopeless youths on our streets.

Hey, so what? They have a choice. Instead of slinging and getting dead or in jail, they can join the military and go to Iraq. Wow! Now I get it.

I consider myself a lucky man. I been working at the Port of Oakland a long time now and my job seems fairly secure. My wife, Tanya, works for a bank downtown owned by the Japanese. She's been there for five years. We can afford childcare for our daughter while we are at work.

Where we live, in West Oakland, California, we are the exception and not the rule. There are other working families like us but most of them, some of them personal friends of ours, have men and women who have to work two jobs in order to get by. If they have a lot of kids, they are in a world of hurt.

How it is when you are poor is that you make light, you joke about your conditions. You joke about how you wait for the "death threat" (ha-ha-ha!) from the electric company before you decide to cough up a payment and keep your lights on - even though then you have to pay a few extra dollars in penalty because your bill is late. You joke about how many different ways you can make a pot of beans stretch over a week. "Well, it started out as a side dish. Then I decided to turn it into chili. Then, this weekend, it was beans and rice." (Ha-ha-ha!)

That old nursery rhyme, that originated with European serfs, about "peas porridge hot, peas porridge cold, peas porridge in the pot nine days old" ain't so damned funny to you because it's a valid description of how you "repurpose" food over time.

And, Lord knows, you don't want you or anyone in your family to get sick. One single serious illness or injury will put you on the street. That single hospital bill will be the end of your life as you are knowing it, scraping by. That is life for the poor here on the Gold Mountain.

If you have child with a disability of any sort, and you are poor, forget having anything resembling the joyous and fun-filled American life you are watching on TV. Whatever care you can't provide for yourself - meaning that one spouse is unavailable to work - the cost of the additional care required keeps you taking out "PayDay" loans to make ends meet at $20-$30 on the hundred in interest from the modern and legally-sanctioned loan sharks that are in every poor community in this country. It's not indentured servitude. That would be a leg up. Now you are really a slave: none of the fruits of your labor accrue to you.

There is no such thing as saving in America anymore. That is why we have to borrow from the Chinese and the Japanese to pay for our wars.

The stark, the horrible face of poverty is everywhere to see in the cities of America, the Gold Mountain, today. It's a good thing, I' m thinking, that men like John Edwards - going down to New Orleans to rebuild somebody's house - and Barack Obama - making his run for the presidency talking about a poor child going to bed hungry - are part of American politics again.

John Kerry went windsurfing and George Bush hung out at a big-ass Texas ranch. According to them, America was rich. That meant that poor folks didn't exist at all, as far as they were concerned. Oh wait! That's right; they're both rich.

Make no mistake about it, most people in America, the real America, aren't shopping at Wal-Mart and Target because they have disposable income. Most people in America don't sit around a dinner table talking about bargains that their friends might have missed because they are socking cash into a trust fund.

There are no streets paved with gold here. There are streets rife with pot-holes that we have to navigate to a job that pays us what "the market will bear." Then we go home every night hoping that our marriages won't break up over money issues, that we can figure out a way to afford to get our kids into a "good" school, that none of us get sick. That's life on the streets of mainstream America. That's the life I see on the streets of America every day.

Poverty is local but it is also global. I think you'll find more people who can identify with what I've talked about in this article - all over the world - than people who cannot.

Peace Out.

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