Poverty

Yesterday I was asked what poverty looked like to me. It’s a great question, made greater by being asked at all, because there is relativity in the word. I know there is an official number that marks the line between “middle class” and “poor”, but as they are crumbling into one another faster than you can say “Dollar Store”, I can say with certainty that the face of poverty is changing, and may not look like what you think.

For me, the face of poverty is fear. It holds it’s breath at the grocery store checkout, in that endless moment after the card is swiped and before the word “approved” appears.

It wakes you in the middle of the night with thoughts of preventable colon cancer; it flinches when the phone rings, when the car doesn’t start right away, when you feel a cold coming on, when April comes.

The face of poverty mocks you with prescriptions you can’t get filled, the concert you can’t go to, the happy facebook post. It laughs at your annual haircut, your un-pedicured toes, the choices you’ve made along the way.

The face of poverty is pain. It throbs in the broken tooth; it aches to buy your son a gift; it cries for those who have so much less.

Maybe the face of poverty looks different to everyone. But please, let it not look like shame. It does not have to hide in the shadows, nor does it need to be defined in the same way by everyone. Poverty does not only belong to third world countries, or marginalized populations, or the homeless and the starving. It belongs to us. It’s in the face of the single mother, the artist, the aging; it is alive and well on the seacoast; it is everywhere.

When you see the face of poverty, may you look it in the eye with compassion and leave shame to some poor urchin in a Dickens novel. When you become the face of poverty, I hope it softens you enough to ask the question of others; what does poverty look like to you?