The last taboo

  I just got back from a media leader’s meeting of Savannah’s Poverty Reduction Initiative. You’ve probably never heard of it, and actually it’s probably good that you haven’t.

The Initiative is a new, joint effort by business and community leaders and elected officials here to lower the disastrous poverty rate in the city of Savannah. While any number of anti-poverty plans over the years have been funded, designed and ultimately put on a shelf to be ignored, I have to say this one seems different.

The biggest difference is that the local business community is taking the lead on it, operating from the simple premise that poverty is bad for business. This is a really, really big deal. I can’t tell you how huge that is. A clear recognition that a rising tide lifts all boats may seem obvious, but a more radical point of view could hardly be imagined in today’s America, where in popular culture and in public policy, poor people are increasingly seen as some kind of defective lesser subspecies.

This is true even in inner-city communities nowadays. In many parts of Savannah’s inner city, you’re considered a sucker if you’re not selling drugs. White suburbanites have their own self-destructive equivalents; if you’re not deeply in debt so you can have an SUV and a McMansion to park it in front of, there is something obviously wrong with you. These are cliches, but cliches get that way because they contain some truth.

Jim Stevenson of Savannah Electric, one of the main corporate sponsors of the Initiative, is frank about his company’s interest in reducing poverty. Not only is reducing poverty the right thing to do, he says, but when so many people can’t afford to pay their electric bills, that hurts his company’s bottom line.

He doesn’t say it in that crass a way, of course, but even if he did I wouldn’t mind. It’s just common horse sense. Reducing poverty is a win/win situation for everybody, including the Coastal Empire’s suburban and gated community white-flighters who generally would prefer not to think about or even see these things.

The Initiative is concentrating less on getting PR brownie points than in actually putting the plan together and implementing it. Stevenson was frank this morning when he told the media gathered there that he was less interested in actual coverage of the initiative than he was in getting us to simply be a part of the initiative. In other words, reporting on poverty, not on the Initiative.

We ran a cover story on the subject late last year, specifically my first-person account of a “Poverty Simulation” role-playing game designed to drive home the downward spiral that is poverty in America. (It’s called “You Don’t Want To Go There”; find it by typing “poverty” into the search engine of this site.)

The reaction to the piece was interesting. Less affluent people who read it considered it patronizing and shallow. They said, “you can’t know what’s it’s like to be in poverty unless you really live it” — as if anyone would voluntarily quit their job and default on their home mortgage in order to write an article about poverty. It seemed a particularly cynical and self-defeating response that frankly I didn’t expect. It disappointed me in a lot ways.

More comfortable people, however, just wanted the story to go away. They did not want to learn about poverty, or discuss it, or hear about it, or even acknowledge its existence.

Some of this is simple racism, of course, the convenient and completely false notion of poverty as a strictly minority phenomenon, a black thing. Despite massive welfare reform in the mid-’90s, many white Americans still think there are generations of “Welfare Queens” out there buying Cadillacs and mink coats with welfare money — despite the fact that no American can get welfare now for more than a few years, total, and despite the fact that sixty percent of all Savannahians under the poverty line have a job.

But I have to say that racism seems to play less a role than the enormous stigma that poverty in general has in America. We still, after all these years, hew to the idea that to be poor in America is impossible unless you really want to be poor. We still, deep down inside, blame the victim.

As if someone making minimum wage can afford rent, medical bills, gas for their car, a nurse for their sick grandparent, food and clothes for their children, and — yes, I have to say it — Savannah Electric’s constant rate hikes.

It’s impossible to pay for even basic living expenses on the wage that many, many Savannahians are paid. The math just doesn’t work.

As for the chicken and egg question of what needs to come first — good jobs or a work force that can fill them — I confess I don’t have the answers. My guess is that a group effort is needed to do both at the same time. What do you think?

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