as they are being instructed and taught to be utter failurs and total losers as their parents are with no ambition or desire to improve their life. You can succeed with work and education. That they shove their heads up their asses and DEMAND charity only demonstrates how unsalvageable they are.

You were far more patient than I would have been. Thank you for the time you did spend, and for so eloquently expressing what I have often thought... what in hell DO I do for those children? It's nice to know someone else doesn't know either.

I'm reminded of a prayer I saw years ago, something like "Jesus told us to give homes to those who have none, but please Lord, I just got new carpets."

Thanks again for the great article.

I liked this article because the author was truthful, thoughtful and not ideological. I feel as if the converstaion about poverty in this country is broken up into two camps: one that believes they're victims of our evil, corrupt society, and the other that thinks it's all the poor's fault and they should pull themselves up by their bootstraps.

Neither one of these views is correct - but we need more pieces like these in order to have a meaningful discussion of poverty in this country, and what we need to do about it.

the fact that someone like "Mary Smith" can give birth to seven children (or that Brittany Spears' ex can father however many he has, etc etc and lamentably etc) rather puts an end to the notion of "intelligent design", doesn't it?

thanks for your honesty, even if it was depressing

Debra has funded a career on Salon denigrating "her people" without offering suggestions on how to lift them out. As long as the paychecks from the man keep flowing in...

This is a story that my mother-in-law would hear, memorize, and manage to lavishly relate in any conversation that even touched upon race however tangentially. She would hear it as a dire warning and a resounding affirmation that this is indeed how black people are ingrained to live. She just loves to recount stories like these that vindicate her dislike of all non-caucasians. I hope she never sees this sad article.

A few weeks back she fesses up to hating men over 35 -- losers. Then she fesses up to hating black men, even when they are just boys. Now she fesses up to just hating.

You go girl! Go away.

...when they don't have to deal with them directly.

For the record, I've had friends living below the poverty line; they were friendly folk who just didn't have the looks or the social skills to do much more than menial jobs. They were of Seminole Indian stock, and outside of her sewing and him playing security guard, they had no real job skills. They lived next to a crack house, a station which they accepted with some aplomb; they'd lived in trailers before.

Although they were constantly in trouble - the husband wound up in prison, partially because he was a letch whose sexual appetites were almost animalistic - they were good enough to offer shelter to two other people. The girl they helped wound up graduating high school (something neither of them had done) and the guy, who almost became as much a sex addict as the husband, straightened up and began getting an education.

I helped them when I could, but there came a point when we had to drift apart. I couldn't remain a reference for the husband when an employer called me; I hadn't seen him in years, and couldn't honestly recommend him. But if I knew where the young girl and the wife was, I'd still be willing to give them a small loan.

Those people who want to throw the poor in prisons and workhouses, and the ones who want to give them fabulous prizes and cash, should really get to know the poor personally. Not as a class, but as individuals.

This more than makes up for Ms. Dickerson's odd little essay a few weeks ago about the inadequacy of men. LOL.

Everyone wants to help "poor people" in the abstract, but when the kids are hanging out next door throwing rocks at windows and the parents are dealing drugs out of their home, your patience for abstraction soon gives way to calling the police. It's hard enough as it is to get blights on the neighborhood evicted without my own liberal brethren muddying the landscape with silly, idealistic notions of human dignity.

Debra has funded a career on Salon denigrating "her people" without offering suggestions on how to lift them out. As long as the paychecks from the man keep flowing in...

-- Anonymous

Why is it up to Debra to offer a solution? So we can't describe the way things really are without supplying the means for saving the world?

Why don't YOU offer a solution, Anonymous? But then, if you had a solution instead of just potshots at someone who is at least trying to talk about the problem, you wouldn't likely be anonymous, would you?

Be sure that you give the poor the aid they most need, though it be your example which leaves them far behind. If you give money, spend yourself with it, and do not merely abandon it to them. We make curious mistakes sometimes. Often the poor man is not so cold and hungry as he is dirty and ragged and gross. It is partly his taste, and not merely his misfortune. If you give him money, he will perhaps buy more rags with it. I was wont to pity the clumsy Irish laborers who cut ice on the pond, in such mean and ragged clothes, while I shivered in my more tidy and somewhat more fashionable garments, till, one bitter cold day, one who had slipped into the water came to my house to warm him, and I saw him strip off three pairs of pants and two pairs of stockings ere he got down to the skin, though they were dirty and ragged enough, it is true, and that he could afford to refuse the extra garments which I offered him, he had so many intra ones. This ducking was the very thing he needed. Then I began to pity myself, and I saw that it would be a greater charity to bestow on me a flannel shirt than a whole slop-shop on him. There are a thousand hacking at the branches of evil to one who is striking at the root, and it may be that he who bestows the largest amount of time and money on the needy is doing the most by his mode of life to produce that misery which he strives in vain to relieve. It is the pious slave-breeder devoting the proceeds of every tenth slave to buy a Sunday's liberty for the rest. Some show their kindness to the poor by employing them in their kitchens. Would they not be kinder if they employed themselves there? You boast of spending a tenth part of your income in charity; maybe you should spend the nine tenths so, and done with it. Society recovers only a tenth part of the property then. Is this owing to the generosity of him in whose possession it is found, or to the remissness of the officers of justice?