I've been taking a 33-week Catholic social justice class called JustFaith at my church, exploring social justice concerns and programs in my community, in the US, and in the world. We've done a huge amount of reading, including one of the several books Jonathan Kozol wrote about the South Bronx; and Cloud of Witnesses, a collection of short biographies of social justice activists that was published in Sojourners Magazine, edited by Jim Wallis; along with other books on compassion, racism, and Catholic Social Justice teaching. I got to hear Jim Wallis speak in Los Angeles last weekend on the theme of his recent book, God's Politics: God's Politics: Why the Right Gets It Wrong and the Left Doesn't Get It.

I suppose the most disturbing book we read was Dispossessed, Mark Kramer's study of the urban slums of Nairobi, Manila, Mexico City, Bangkok, and Cairo. We don't have that kind of poverty in the United States.

The program also involves four "immersion experiences," face-to-face contact with the poor. We ate with the homeless and later cooked for them and provided them lodging in our church hall in a program called The Gathering Inn. We spent a day in Colusa in the Central Valley of California, touring substandard housing and talking with organizers and volunteers in a local community organizing project of the PICO network. We attended a Mexican-American fiesta and talked and feasted with Catholics from our area we'd never met before. And then this week, we spent two disturbing hours in the county jail (on a tour). I do volunteer work every week at a women's center in Sacramento, and I have contact with the poor there, too.

In Colusa, we found twenty housing units in the back yard of an old house. The apartments were little bigger than jail cells - about 10 feet wide by 15 feet deep, with a bathroom and shower facility in a separate building. Those twenty units were shut down by the city six months ago, but another apartment we visited smelled of gas and had obviously dangerous electrical and plumbing connections. The occupant was a farmworker, about fifty years old, who hasn't seen his family in Mexico for eleven years.

Yes, there's poverty in the United States. I suppose many of the poor here have television and aren't starving, but they don't have the security of stable housing and employment and health care and a home with two parents. They may have a car to drive, but can't afford to insure it. I suppose many of the poor are mentally ill or lacking in intelligence and skills, but certainly society has an obligation to help them deal with those shortcomings. I suppose that drugs also have a lot to do with the causes of poverty in the U.S. Recent immigrants also have a tough time during their early years here, especially if they came here illegally.

Every once in a while, I'll hear somebody blame the poor for their poverty, and that kind of thinking drives me crazy. I've met a lot of poor people, but not many of them seem to be poor because they're lazy. Usually, their poverty seems to be caused by the hopelessness of their situation, but their inability to find a way out of the deep hole of their poverty. If you grow up in an area plagued by violence and drugs, how likely would you be to have the strength to find a way out? Many of the American poor just don't have the intellectual ability and focus to be able to do a job – there are a number of people I've met that I can't imagine anybody wanting to hire.

So yes, there's lots of poverty in the United States. It's all around us, but often not easy to see. And there aren't any easy solutions to it. Before we pass judgment on the poor, we should make sure we've taken the time to mingle with them and to see things their way. Think about how we'd deal with such a hopeless situation. Certainly, there are heroes who have pulled themselves out of their poverty - but how many of us would have that sort of courage in a similar situation?

A decade or two ago, there was a short time when it was almost fashionable to have compassion with the homeless in the United States. I don't know what happened - I think people got bored with the issue of homelessness, and forgot about the poor. Maybe once again, it's Time to Remember the Poor.

-Joe-

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Here are a couple of worthwhile Jim Wallis links:

• Mother Jones interview
• God's Politics Blog