Steuben Courier Town Square

The social scientists tell us that when disaster strikes, human beings drop all the petty antics of ...well, being a human being.... and work together for common interests and the common good.  When all of us face the same giant, we perceive the common threat, and an unconcious realization surfaces that by working together, every individual as well as the community in general will benefit.  Sometimes this is a conscious thought, and people with this talent usually find themselves volunteering in a leadership capacity or as a volunteer working with other people in other places affected by disaster. This dynamic of human interaction is going on right now in Birmingham, Alabama. I saw it after the Good Friday earthquake in Anchorage, Alaska in 1964; after the floods created by hurricane Agnes across the Southern Tier in 1972; and after hurricane Hugo scrubbed clean not only the South Carolina coast near Charleston, but a huge swath of the landscape into the Carolina Piedmont in 1989. We look each other in the face, see the same bewilderment, feel the same fear, and something deep in our hearts connects us one to another in a way that was not possible just a few hours ago.  Compassion, hidden deep within the human soul, springs to the forefront - almost as a defensive mechanism to help us deal proactively with the devastation that has been visited upon us.  How fearfully and wonderfully we are made!

So how are we dealing with the devastation of poverty that has been eroding our community and our region of the country?  Poverty has done exactly what every other natural disaster does to human community.  It takes away homes and livelihoods, like a tornado ravages a town.  It isolates us the way a flood tears down bridges and digs up highways and railroads.  It pits us one against another as resources dry up, and we each fight to hang onto our individual slice of the economic pie while keeping someone else at bay, like seagulls fighting over a scrap of food, "mine, mine, mine!" We talk a lot about cooperation and collaboration - and we do work on some things together  - but the truth is that we will rarely sacrifice in order to help another struggler overcome, especially when we judge that struggler to be deficient, needy, temperamental, or infected with an entitlement mindset. Whew!, that last observation is pretty judgemental in and of itself, isn't it?

My point is that as individuals we may each feel overwhelmed by the poverty that's right in front of us like a fallen tree on the road, but as a community we have yet to look into each others' eyes, and do something that will connect us one-to-another at the heart level.  I believe compassion fatigue has affected some of us; others just look away and may even privately thank God that, "I'm not one of them".  We give food, we donate money, clothing, outdated and unused furniture and house wares; we may even donate cars and boats - but we haven't connected the dots to see the big picture.  Poverty is overwhelming us, and it's not just about lack of jobs.  Changing your economic status may change the outward aspects of your life, but not touch the inner workings of your spirit.  In fact a positive change in economic status sometimes reveals the true poverty of the spirit. In the America of today, economic class translates into cultural class, and cultural class divides us - just like it did in the old country that so many of our forebears fled; just like it did before the other great cultural awakenings in our history: women's suffrage, World War II's Rosy the Riveter, the Civil Right's movement.  We've been through much as a nation and as a people, and by and large we've risen above our circumstances.  How fearfully and wonderfully we are made!

So, what will be our response to the poverty that is diverting our taxes to Medicaid instead of maintaining the infrastructure necessary for commerce, like snow-plowing and salt for our roads and paving machines to keep our byways in good repair.  What will we do to combat the poverty that's sending away our brightest young men and women who know they have to go elsewhere to find work, careers, and opportunities.

We are fearfully and wonderfully made, endowed by our creator with talents, and talents can be honed into skills.  The problems of poverty are too big, too great a giant, for any one group or organization to overcome.  We have to start working together at the individual level as well as at the institutional and community policy level.  Citizens, agencies, government, non-profits and school districts, we can all start looking each other in the eye, and agree that we must work together to defeat poverty.  If we do not, the disasters of broken lives and broken community will have defeated us, and we will have betrayed the hard work, sweat, tears and sacrifices of the generations that harvested the forests and broke the land that made it possible for Bath to have once been the Jewel of the Southern Tier.

Can we get it back?  Do we want it back?  We're better than what we have been.  In the words of an American hero who may have saved the White House from a terrorist-piloted jetliner, "let's roll."