When I was a kid, I read a short story about a boy whose grade-school class was collecting money to help the “poor.” He told his parents, and they gave him an envelope the next morning — told him not to open it.
On the school bus, he held the envelope to the light, listened to the clink of coins.
As his teacher talked about poverty he sat at his desk, rubbing the three coins through the paper of the envelope until he could see the faces and some of the words (they were pennies), that was the day he realized, “We’re poor.”
I remember wondering what his life was like. Did the “other” kids beat him up, laugh at his hand-me-down clothes and thrift-shop pants? Was he the butt of every rude joke and dirty trick? Did they call him names like “white trash” and “scrounge?”
Did he fight back, disappear, or both?
Unlike the boy in the story, I well knew my economic status. Dad built our house from the ground up, using lumber from an old barn. Its tar paper roof and its remoteness from town bore testimony to the tension between his income and the needs of six children. He left to work each day and returned to his land each night, hoeing long rows of corn and beans in the evenings.
We were the last of the homesteaders, pioneers in a modern age.
I was proud of the battle, a wild Indian never to surrender, a rebel never to bend. Some days. Other days, I wept and wondered why being different should make you a social leper, why poverty was an unforgivable crime.
Unlike many, I survived. I was lucky — I didn’t get raped, abused, shot, arrested, jailed or addicted to opioids or meth.
I managed a college degree and a relatively stable life.
Yet, even in my limited success, I remain the odd one out: the poor have gotten only poorer, a downhill slide from the 1970s that continues through the generations.
The “economic booms” of the 1990s knocked them down and scratched their faces, the 2008 financial crisis stole their hope with its “great recession.”
These days, “social media” companies poison our social discourse by feeding hate-filled trolls under every bridge, and politicians refuse to build or lead but seek only to tear down and crush all they can.
No change there, I suppose. But where now is the truth, so evident in the face of every child, rich or poor, that the world is an amazing and beautiful place? A place where we can grow and thrive, a place were we all of us belong?
Until one day, perhaps, when the poor will inherit the Biblical earth.
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Mark Gibson was longtime editor (and gifted reporter and photographer) of The Dalles Chronicle and, later, Columbia Gorge News. Mark died on June 21, 2023; this previously unpublished column was written in May 2023 and recently unearthed by Mark’s youngest, Columbia Gorge News reporter and photographer Martin Gibson, who took Mark’s photo, above.
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