Not really broke

As a family man with a young son, the cable tech, an acquaintance, personally knows the battle to pay every bill on time with enough left over at the end of the month for food and maybe a bit of fun. But, not every cable television subscriber prioritizes as he does. All too frequently when he is sent to collect or disconnect he hears, “I can pay the bill, but I guess I won’t have any groceries.”

One customer blatantly played on his sympathy. Pulling out the cash needed to pay the delinquent bill, they turned to the watching children, “Sorry kids. No food this week.”
If you can’t afford to feed your family the basics, you can’t afford to entertain them expensively. The children would be healthier all the way around with the television turned off and food on the table than watching inane television shows with growling stomachs.
Limited resources do strike a sympathetic chord – especially when the circumstances involve children – as it did the day my son returned from a school Valentine party to say that his best friend did not have Valentines to hand out that year. His mother had told him they could not afford to buy the cards.

I regretted not knowing in time to get some for him. I really felt for his family – until I remembered having seen his momma smoking cigarettes. One less package of cigarettes that month, maybe one less cigarette per day and that child would have had his valentines. But his mother chose the luxury of burning cold cash as hot tobacco over giving her child the simple pleasure of addressing a box of valentines. My sympathy merged with my anger that a child ranked so low in his parents’ priorities.

“If you can afford to smoke, you ain’t broke,” said a co-worker who smokes, but quits when bills exceed cash.

Several years ago my husband and I heard an urgent plea for our cash – yet in the same breath the petitioner stubbornly insisted, “I am not going to pawn my television to pay it.” Yet, pawning the set would have funded the need.

I know the falling stock market has wiped out years of savings for retirement.
But consider this quote from survivaltopics.com: “Much of what the richer half of the world throws away is still in usable condition. We throw into landfills clothing items due to small stains or because they are no longer are in style or because they no longer fit us. Partially worn tools and still usable tires go into the heap.”

Times may be difficult, but poverty has not yet arrived when closets overflow with clothes, trash bags bulge on the curb and we casually junk items that children south of our borders salvage from the city dump.

Some estimate that around 150,000 Brazilians earned their living in 2002 by collecting aluminum cans. “Every country in Latin America and the Caribbean has its own word for garbage scavengers, or people who make a living by extracting valuable or reusable materials from other people’s waste. Though reliable numbers are hard to come by, experts estimate that there are several hundred thousand garbage scavengers throughout the region, and in some countries their numbers are increasing. They can be seen sorting through bags of trash on city sidewalks, public parks or outside supermarkets and apartment buildings,” according to the website Brazil.com.

Hard times may be in our futures, but the old adage holds as true today as it did during the Great Depression “Use it up, wear it out, make it do or do without.” Honest, hardworking folks can stretch a dollar many, many ways. Those who want what they want, when they want it and will not sacrifice a luxury for a necessity deserve the deprivations they then endure – but why do they have to rob from the family table to get it?

(Joan Hershberger is a reporter at the News-Times. E-mail her at joanh@everybody.org)


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