A palate cleanser
How to tell the story of poverty
I’ve been watching too much television news. I know this because any time any one asks me, “Did you see that video…” and I can answer “Why yes. Yes, I have.”
So sometimes I scroll social media (or look out for IRL*) for nice palate cleansers. There are actually quite a few of them, TikTok videos where someone does something kind when they think no one is watching, or Facebook videos of the same thing.
In my happy-trolling, I came across the above photo, which ran in the Columbia Missourian newspaper about a local bagel shop, Goldie’s. There are quite a few such places, and I find them inspiring. This particular linked story went viral, much to the surprise of the woman who first posted the photo on her social media accounts.
But I have grown up to be a total drag. This semester, I am teaching an honors course on how the media covers poverty (and how by framing poverty in certain terms, we push solutions farther out of reach). Already, the students are turning in interesting papers on misconceptions and capitalism and the intersection of public perception and reality. One student commented that one of the readings from “Poverty, By America,” by Matthew Desmond (basically our textbook this semester) was depressing.
And it was, no dobut. I reassured the student that the depression can lift once we acknowledged that people (like Goldie’s) are out there trying, and the answers are within reach.
But I’m including this article as a fairly standard way U.S. journalists cover U.S. poverty. I’ve written these stories, myself. The issue of poverty can see big and scary and complicated, but oh! Look! Here are some nice people doing a nice thing.
We need these stories. But we need so much more.
*In Real Life
We need solutions to a multifaceted issue. I wish concrete solutions were addressed more in the media, without turning poverty into a single story problem to fix with a silver bullet. There certainly must be things we could learn from other countries. And an idea that helps somewhat is better than no idea at all. I get frustrated with the contrarians who oppose any idea because it doesn't completely solve the problem. We should continually work at reducing poverty, without expectation we'll end it tomorrow.
More and more, I feel that we will do anything, try anything, talk about anything, to solve our most critical social problems EXCEPT the one thing that actually solves them. To wit: climate change - stop drilling for and burning fossil fuels. Housing: build basic housing for people. Poverty: provide a basic income for everyone. Healthcare access: break down the stranglehold that the insurance industry has on hospitals, doctors and clinics. Other "Bigs" to break down are Big Pharma and Big Ag. Looming behind all of this, like a giant puppetmaster, is capitalism. Solutions that operate within the confines of capitalism will probably NOT solve the problems caused by capitalism, at least not the rapacious stage of capitalism under which we now live. That is why something small like that bagel shop's offer are necessary, uplifting ... and rare.