I read an article in the NY Times by Bob Herbert, and one of the responses was quite typical of what I see are the attitudes of a majority of Americans in this country. The person talked about the poor and made what could be a compelling argument showing that there aren't as many poor people as we think there are in America. The person listed an impressive amount of statistics, talking about the majority of people classified as poor in America that have 'luxuries' like cell phones, microwaves, decent housing and other comforts. According to this person, while you can't figure all poor people live well, poor people in the United States are less poor than we think.

When I was a kid, my mother used to run apartments for Section 8 people. A lot of times we had to clean up when they skipped out on rent. It was amazing to me to see them with cars, or stereos, or a big TV set, and like the writer, I thought these people can't be poor because they have all this stuff. Of course, I overlooked the less than ideal conditions of the house they lived in, overlooked the rules that were imposed for them to get the crummy house we gave them. The writer of the response also talked about the infamous welfare queen with the cell phone using food stamps to pay for groceries. I have run across that myself many times at the beginning of the month and I have had the same thought, I am ashamed to say.

We tend to put on a Depression Era filter when we talk about the poor. We think of too many people living in a one room shack. We think of no running water, of a family desperately trying to make it by selling apples on the street corner. When I was a kid I thought I would be happy if I made 30000 a year. By my little head, I figured that amount of money would be enough to buy everything I needed, give me something extra to stock up and I could see the world. Of course, that was in the late 70s when gas was still under a dollar a gallon, when eggs were about 50 cents a dozen, when the average home was about 40000. There were no cell phones with payment plans, TV came through an antenna. Even then, you had poor people and people on the edge of being poor.

We can't apply the Depression Era filter to the poor because we are far removed from those times. Like it or not, there are aspects of our society that doesn't fit the third world image of the poor. Now, I would suggest to the person who was so willing to throw out stats about the poor they go to the downtown of a big city and see what poor is all about. A few days ago I had to go downtown and was surprised to see, among the yuppies eating at the high end establishments, the big cars parked on the street, with the buzz you could feel of commerce, poor and destitute people shambled about like ghostly zombies, ignored by most of the population. I would suggest to the person who thinks the poor have it good, because they have cell phones, cable and the like, to actually follow one of them home to see what life is really like.

The poor in America don't look like the photos from 30, 40 or 50 years ago just like the poor from back then don't look like the poor from 100 years earlier. Technology tries to level the playing field but other factors knock out the platform. In a lot of area, it costs more to have a land line than it does to have a phone. Even with a phone, that isn't enough to search for a job. Watch any news show when they talk about what it takes to land a job. You need resumes, you need to send out emails as well as call, you need to be able to get to where the job is. How can you do that if you don't have internet? How can you get to a job interview if your only transportation is a broken down car? If you have to take the bus, you have to work within that schedule, which may mean the night job is out of the question.

Sometimes you just need something to make you feel good. I was able to scramble enough money to get a blu-ray player. It's not expensive, but I bought it because my old DVD player was over 10 years old and I wanted to be able to actually get movies on blu-ray. My DVD player was less than $50 when I got it, but if someone went through my apartment and saw the blu-ray player, they may think that would be something a rich person would get, even though I scraped to get it and I didn't pay a lot for it. While I have seen people buy cigarettes and wondered how they could afford it when they were poor, I have also seen many people bum cigarettes from others or get cigarette butts from the ground so they could get the tobacco to roll their own.

I don't think many of us have a grasp of what it is to be poor in America because we see it from the outside. We are in our cars, cocooned from the streets, going from one point to another so we don't have to be in contact with other people. If we take public transportation, we lock ourselves in our iPods and don't acknowledge the person next to us. Our perception of the poor comes from outdated models and propaganda.