The Poor will Always Be Among Us

The more I work in the social services arena, the more I come to see the grim reality behind Jesus' words. I often work with clients whose poverty(material and spirit) is a result of a complex web of addictions, mental illness, poor parental modeling, and plain old selfishness. I have recently been thinking about what it would take to end poverty forever.

We all know that just throwing money at poor families will not lift them out of their circumstances or break the deep cycles in which they are imbedded. Let us imagine then that we were able to provide the most comprehensive wrap around services possible. We give the family stable housing in a neighborhood with mixed income so as not to concentrate poverty, we provide them with job training and positions in jobs making livable wages, we provide their children with day care and the best education money can buy, then we have counselors and therapists provide intensive therapy for both the family as a whole and the individuals, we give them domestic abuse training, chemical dependency training and support, life skills education on how to budget and manage a household. We then connect these families with spiritual communities where they can be loved and cared for, and be given meaning and connection. Even if we did all of this, we still cannot account for an individual's choices. A person's unwillingness and lack of desire to change can make all of these lovely programs as useless as giving vegetables to a lawn mower. I have been in many sessions where I bend over backwards trying to come up with new and creative ways to help families and when the dust clears it comes down to the fact that they do not want to change their ways.

Even if every person on the planet was freed from the curse of poverty there would still come along people who make poor choices both for themselves or in regards to others. A mother chooses herself over her child and uses substances in the womb, that child does worse in school, is less equipped to get a high paying job and thus the cycle begins again. A son is born mentally ill and when he comes of age goes in search of a mate, having children, the cycle begins again. Another people group is oppressed because they are different and given less opportunities in society, the cycle begins again. A company lays off a third of its workers to show an increase rather than a decrease in their already large profits, the cycle begins again.


So what is to be done? Should we give up since the end goal is hopeless? Even though I don't believe we are ever going to free this world from hunger, war, poverty, or hate, there are small successes that give me hope. There are people who do desire to change even though they are oppressed by a myriad of issues. There are people who do change. It saves my mind from despair to know that each individual or family that is brought out of the cycle of poverty means that we have not only freed them, but the generations that proceed from them.