Website Wednesday: On Poverty

Maybe I should start with a tip for the day: if you have a freezer with an ice maker bin and the ice maker stops working, do not decide the ice bin gives you more freezer space and use it for food storage. But if you do - TURN OFF the water to the ice maker. Because someday, that broken ice maker is going to get a “Little Engine That Could” thought of: Hey, I can still make ice. Of course it can’t but it has an unlimited source of water to play with.

I bet you can guess what happens when water runs and runs and runs. Disaster!

It was not my refrigerator/freezer but it got to be my damage. Paint buckling. water pouring through the vents. Until we honed in on the source; drip, drip, drip, all night. A royal mess. I’m tired, but resigned. It’s fixable.

Getting on to my website for this Wednesday, it’s something none of us should be resigned to: poverty. I picked up A People's History of Poverty in America by Stephen Pimpare and immediately noticed a layout similar to Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States - a lot of contemporary accounts scattered throughout the book. Then I discovered that Zinn, Pimpare and others are all published by The New Press at http://www.thenewpress.com/. They seem to be a publisher of progressive history books.

Pimpare paints the picture of wealth and poverty in the United States, juxtapositioning the needs of the wealthy to “do good” and the real needs of the poor. He starts with the story of wealthy women bringing flowers to the tenements to brighten up the lives of the poor and being shocked by the poor who only see the flowers extrinsically - as sellable items.

This is not a “feel good” book; the poor don’t get a happy ending, but it’s an extremely readable book about America’s underbelly of poverty. One advantage I found was that you can open it up anywhere and dive right into the dilemmas of the poor in that time period.

But you may be thinking: Not fair. This is Website Wednesday. Where’s the website?

And here they are:

http://www.gutenberg.org/files/28228/28228-h/28228-h.htm
The Battle with the Slum by Jacob A. Riis. A classic work. If you do nothing else, take a look at the pictures. (Not every site has pictures. For me on Firefox it was: Format: HTML - Size 691 KB - Main Site)

http://www.studsterkel.org/index.html
Conversations with America is not only about poverty. Click around and hear interviews Terkel had with the poor, the rich, some greats, some ingrates. An audio feast. If you’ve never read Studs Terkel, this is a great introduction.

And finally, keep up-to-date on the subject with The Institute for Research on Poverty (IRP) at http://www.irp.wisc.edu/
This is: a university-based center for research into the causes and consequences of poverty and social inequality in the United States. It is nonprofit and nonpartisan. Interesting stuff here but not a light read since the Flesch-Kincaid grade level: is 14.5 +.

We often see the poor on their way to jail; not interviewed on some slick TV news show. Some of us may live all or most of our lives away from them. Here's a good way to learn how so many Americans live and have lived.