Dreams Detoured: Struggle After the Recession in Greater Cincinnati
cincinnati.com
cincinnati.com
The comment about the father not wanting to accept aid because he is too proud hurts because my family was the same way. I didn't get basic medical or dental care until college unless I was taken to the ER. There were many nights we went hungry and many times we had to sleep on grandma's floor because we had nowhere else to go. I do wish that families would discard their pride with regards to helping their children and accept as much aid as possible to ensure that they are healthy and prepared for the future.
When people attach stigma to public assistance for political purposes, this is what happens. People with a demonstrable, provable need for charity refuse it. Whenever someone prattles on television about people on the dole being lazy, someone who is emphatically not lazy refuses a handout that might have allowed their child to get a dental checkup.
It may not occur to them that the person on the television is so far removed from the realities of poverty that they don't even know how false their words are when they say them. And so poor people, who actually do want to work, are constantly looking for jobs, turning over ever possible lead, and yet still unable to meet living expenses. And then, rather than giving up, they try even harder.
You can examine case after case, and find, time after time, that there is nothing there that anyone could point to and say "Aha, solve this one problem, and this person would not be poor!" You can find a lot of instances where the family was teetering on the knife-edge of solvency, and then just one unexpected event, completely beyond their control, sent them tumbling into an abyss. For a disturbingly large fraction, that is a medical expense--and occurs even if they had medical insurance. For a still-significant fraction, it is a major employer closing down local operations and moving the work elsewhere.
That's not a situation that one can blame on the poor. It comes from a systemic disrespect for the least-valued humans in the community--a disrespect that is compounded by a myth that they alone are responsible for all their hardships.
It is not pride to believe that a poor man should be treated at least as well as a rich dog. And it is not charity if it requires that the recipient throw away their sense of self-worth. There are a lot of things your family could have done for money--prostitution, smuggling contraband, stealing, fraud, etc.--and that sense of self-worth also kept them from doing those things. To discard that "pride", and do anything to survive, means to literally do anything to survive. If your moral foundation is to have things because you earned them lawfully, and you then shift to taking things because you really need them, that does not necessarily stop at things given voluntarily, or in keeping to the law.
However, it's not turning out to be the case any longer. I am so grateful and luckily to have found my way into computers at a young age. I really feel for my neighbors and family who are in similar situations.
I grew up in this place and I feel very proud to call it my home, I left it years ago but it's a special place.
It's hard to describe this feeling to anyone that didn't grow up in the rustbelt. It's so easy to take for granted the things you have and the money you made in our tech bubble. Outside of it there are many real people facing insurmountable odds to make ends meet with limited options for themselves.
I try to keep these things in mind whenever I think I'm having a bad day.
It’s been hard to listen to my parents complain about how terrible the region has become; yet I am grateful for their continued encouragement to pursue my own goals - even if elsewhere.
It’s easy to say “why don’t they move?”
It’s a question I bring up all the time to myself. As it turns out, it is really hard to relocate an entire family once roots are put down - my aging grandparents, my sisters and their families, my fathers’ business, and my mothers‘ career in commercial banking all anchor them to Cincinnati.
My little sister had a similar story, but she moved to Chicago. My other little sister had a similar story, and also moved to San Francisco.
San Francisco just has a better economy than Cincinnati. What feels wrong to me is that this better economy is only really open to the top end of jobs.
It isn't that you can't make a lot of money for low end jobs in San Francisco. While you can struggle in Cincinnati to make $20 an hour even with some useful skills, San Francisco gives people $184,000 a year in salary + benefits to pick up poop off the street.
The problem is that high rents prevent people from moving to San Francisco, even if they could make a lot more money here. I feel like one of the best things our country could do for poor people in the middle states is to figure out how to make rent cheaper in the coastal states. Not just for some protected class that happens to currently have rent control, but for everyone who is looking for a better economic opportunity and wants the chance to move to a more vibrant part of the country.
You are 100% disconnected if you think this is true. The wage gap is an even bigger issue in SF than Cincinnati.
Unskilled laborers moving to SF thinking it's the land of opportunity are likely to be disagreeably surprised.