Ann Romney Doesn't Understand Poverty; Poverty is More Than Tuna and Pasta
When I was 19, I lived in a furnished room on Manhattan’s Upper
West Side. My kitchen table was the bathtub with a cover over it. I had no
shower, and the common toilet was down the hall, where some guy named Michael
kept trying to get in. I was going to college at night, working in the mailroom
of an insurancecompany by
day, and taking home something like $48 a week. Given the rhetoric of recent
days, this qualifies me for president of the United States.
I was what is sometimes called "voluntarily poor." I could have
gone home to my parents, where a guest bedroom awaited. I probably could have
hit up some relative for a short-term loan. What
mattered most, however, was that I was in college. I would graduate someday, get
a job, a wife, 21 / 2 kids, a split-level in the suburbs and live the
conventional Americandream. I was
not stuck. I was on my way.
Ann and Mitt Romney had similar days. In her speech to the
Republican National Convention, Ann referred to
those timesof jolly penury. "We were very young. Both
still in college. There were many reasons to delay marriage, and you know what?
We just didn’t care. We got married and moved into a basement apartment. We
walked to class together, shared the housekeeping, ate a lot of pasta and tuna
fish. Our desk was a door propped up on sawhorses. Our dining-room table was a
fold-down ironing boardin
the kitchen. But those were the best days." Oh, what fun to be poor!
Of course, Mitt was the son of an autocompany CEO who became governor of Michigan and Ann had gone to
the tony Kingswood School(since merged with
Cranbrook) where the present-day tuition is $28,300 for day students and $38,900
for boarders. They were both rich — if not in great wealth, then in promise. They were, in fact, living on the American
Motors Corp. stockMitt’s father,
George Romney, had given them.
The theme of Ann Romney’s speech — we are like you—
resonates through U.S. politics. It was sounded at the conventions not just by
Ann Romney but also by Joe Biden,
Chris Christieand Michelle Obama. They all either disinterred impoverished ancestors or harked
back to their own days of voluntary poverty. Michelle Obama recalled that Barack
used to pick her up "in a carthat was so rusted out,
I could actually see the pavement going by in a hole in the passenger-side
door." Of course, the couple in that car had both graduated from Harvard Law,
but Barack Obama forsook a lucrative law career and plunged into community
organization.
Romney, in contrast, plunged into finance. So the onus was on
Ann to show that Mitt could connect. She swung and she missed. Poverty, after
all, is not about bookcases made of planks and bricks but about utter
hopelessness. The poor do not have affluent parents. The poor do not have
college degrees. The poor often do not even have high school
degrees. The poor often don’t have a man in the
houseor, to be perfectly
frank, sometimes the discipline and work habits to lift themselves out of
poverty.
The
United States now is busy shrinking its middle class. The homes of millions of
people have been plunged underwater. Jobs have been offshored and unions have
been weakened so that wages are lower, hours longer and job security a virtual
oxymoron. What is it like to be 50 and suddenly out of work? What is it like to
send out your 100th or 500th résumé? What is it like to spend your savings on
long-term medical care so that you get reduced to poverty?
Not
for a second did I think that Ann Romney got it. This has nothing to do with
wealth. After all, the Kennedys were rich. So were the Roosevelts. Someone who
appreciated the plight of the poor would not have trivialized it with campy
stories from her let’s-pretend past. The challenge is not the isolated person
who has fallen on hard times who Mitt and Ann have helped — I applaud that! —
but the utterly impoverished, the erstwhile homeowner, the financially
precarious old and those who have flunked out of the middle class. They too have
stories about eating off an ironing board and stuffing themselves with pasta and
tuna fish. Only it’s not about the past, but about the present and, worse, the
future.
Article Source: http://www.afroarticles.com/article-dashboard
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