Problems are easy to identify, solutions are another matter.
I drove by our neighborhood soup kitchen the other morning. (By the way I love the idea of having a soup kitchen for the homeless in our neighborhood. Twice a week, Charlotte’s homeless are fed, given groceries, and checked on in one of the city’s best neighborhoods. Out of sight, out of mind is not a solution.). Two things happened, I noticed that before eight in the morning, people were already lined up for the noon meal. Second, I could hear my grandmother’s words ringing in my ears. She was saying, “they are so poor they don’t have a pot to P*** in.”
As a child she used that phrase to describe more than one resident of Memphis. I didn’t know its meaning, but I knew I didn’t want to be that poor. You might want to look up the phrase’s origin. It might surprise you. It did me, but when I did, it reinforced my wonderment of why in these days poverty and hunger are still with us. If we can fly to Mars, and develop a vaccine in less than a year, why do we have millions of our neighbors living in poverty and starving every day?
See the problem is easy to identify, but the solution eludes. Well here is an idea. We all become part of the solution. I emphasize the word “all,” for it is easy to delegate the problem to someone else. It is easy to propose we tax the rich, let the government or charities handle the poor, or a million other ways to pass the buck, but those passes have not worked for centuries. Until poverty and hunger become “our” problems, and we all pitch in, they will remain.
In this country, no one should be so poor that they don’t have a pot. Be part of the solution.
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