The Unitarian Universalist Congregation of the Palisades	UUCP P.O. Box 709 Englewood, NJ 07631 Phone: 201-568-5540

When I was a child---long before most of you were born, there were pictures in the newspapers showing people in India living and dying on the streets of Calcutta and New Delhi. That astounded me as I could not picture such a thing happening anywhere- but certainly not in our wonderful county—we took care of our own-right. I remember the days when the homeless were the “hoboes” a romantic group that rode the rails, stole freshly baked pies from kitchen windows and were celebrated by Woodie Guthrie and Pete Seeger. I’m not sure it was all that romantic, but homelessness was not a front-page item. But then things changed. The mental institutions were told to discharge their patients to group homes that would care for them better in their home communities. We all know that only the first part of that directive was implemented. They were discharged but not to group homes which few communities would accept, but to the streets where most of them could not cope.. No home, no counseling, no health care, what did we expect of them? What we got were hundreds of lost souls wandering on our streets with no recourse. Then in the early Eighties, the Reagan administration cut the affordable housing budget by a huge amount, so that homes for the lower middle class dried up and families with small children appeared on the streets and knocking on church doors. This was a new event, one that galvanized the houses of worship and groups like yours. It was a rallying cry that brought hundreds of good caring people to help the poor and needy. And help they did. That was the time that many clergy and lay people came together to form ministries like the Inter-religious Fellowship. We created shelters, churches and temples opened their doors, they contributed funds to keep these places open—and it was very exciting. I sometimes wonder who benefited more- the religious community that found a worthy mission or the poor who were sheltered. That sounds silly, but let me tell you that having an important mission is very exciting to people who have spent a lot of meeting time deciding what color napkins to put out for the ladies’ tea! But as often happens in our instant gratification society homelessness grew old. Other issues hit the media and this issue was not going away any time soon. In fact it was getting worse. Welfare reform was introduced which did cut down on the welfare rolls, but did little to lift people out of poverty. Social services that were supposed help the poor were emasculated. Housing subsidies (Section 8) have diminished to the point that you must wait for someone to die—or get rich—before you can get a voucher. Jobs don’t pay the rent much less any decent life style. The congress diddles with raising the minimum wage level from $5.15 and hour to 6 something when any shopper or homemaker will tell you that to live adequately in most parts of the country and certainly in Bergen County you must earn at least $16.00 an hour – and that is not to live luxuriously just adequately. And the enthusiasm for helping the poor is waning, because it is a problem that does not want to go away. At the IRF we work harder every day to get volunteers to staff our shelters, but many have burned out or moved on to other causes And then there is employment. Good jobs are diminishing or going over seas. Most jobs that people in our shelters can get are either part time—no benefits or staggered hours, so that they can’t plan their lives, arrange child care or even get an additional job, because they never know when they will be working. When our parents immigrated to this country, it wasn’t easy, but if they could start in a job pushing a broom, answering a telephone, or doing some menial work, they could expect to rise through the ranks to a better position and more money. Where are you going to rise in McDonald’s? Who can count on retiring from a job that they started on as a youngster? Buy outs, moving the business, downsizing all these things make finding good, steady, rewarding work very difficult.. No wonder so many people aspire to create their own businesses. What has happened to the American dream? It seems to have risen to the top of the champagne glass, which is the symbol for our economy. A few very rich people are enjoying their dream wallowing in their champagne bath while the middle class struggles to hang on to what they have and the poor descend into a permanent underclass. As a life long liberal I hate to say that, but from my observation, it is true. As generation after generation struggles with the minutia of daily life, the things that make life good disappear. Who has time to smell the roses when the garbage at your door drowns it out? Art, music, theatre, museums are not part of their picture. A great many of them live in communities where the schools are failing one generation after the other- and does a parent who is trying to juggle two jobs have time for PTA activities? What little entertainment is part of their life is on television showing them things they don’t need, but that look so good that they think they do. I’ll bet there has not been a boy between 8 and 12 in the shelter who did not have a play station or X-cube, which cost about $300. These are people who can’t pay rent, but feel that if your kids can have these things, then why shouldn’t theirs! And can we blame them? Of course there is always the exception, the one who manages to struggle out of poverty, but most of the people in our shelters tie their goals to getting through tomorrow. Many of their dreams have been beaten out of them, by the daily struggle to feed their family, to find a home. You would be amazed at the numbers of calls we get from women crying that they are being evicted from their homes and they have no idea where they will sleep tonight. Where can they go? How can they care for their children? Who will help them? Unfortunately many of these folks come out of families who have endured the same struggles and the family can’t or won’t help them. I can’t tell you how many people in the shelter have told me that they get no help or support from their parents or siblings---in fact many have told me that they have no contact with their family because there was some kind of conflict. It makes me want to cry! How can a mother give up on her children? One of our past residents came back this week to tell me her story. She had left the shelter to a rented house and things were going fairly well, except that she had not had a long-term job for a while. Then her house burned down. She lost everything she owned and of course she had no insurance. Because of the disruption caused by the fire, she lost her current job. She moved in with her dad. But after two weeks, he insisted that she leave because he couldn’t stand the chaos created by her four active children. Her three-year-old son who should have been evaluated for a learning disability was so disruptive in a free day care that he was dismissed. As a result, she could not accept a good job, which required her to work some evenings. Without childcare, she could not take the job at all. That evening, as she was weeping, she told me her only solution was to give her four children up to foster parents until she could get on her feet Nobody in her family was willing to help her. Can you imagine the despair of even having to contemplate giving your children up to DYFS – an agency that is, at best broken? Those of us who have solid family support don’t know how lucky we are! But can we really blame these families who have struggled all their lives with their own problems? If you are climbing a ladder hanging on by your fingernails, are you in any position to pull someone up that ladder with you? So I guess what I am saying is that when I first started in this work, I felt that the homeless are just like you and me. Many of us might be just a couple of paychecks away from a shelter—but that’s not really true. I’m sure that someone in this room has lost a job in the last few years and has felt pretty desperate, but they did not end up in a shelter. There were family, friends, and resources of education, of connections willing to do what it took to help get over the hump. There is knowledge of how to use the system to help you through the rough times. If Susie, the young woman I told you about, had known of early intervention with her son, he would have been in an appropriate class for his disability. And if many of the young women who come to us with their children had not become pregnant when they were fourteen or fifteen, they would have finished school or perhaps gone on to college or some kind of training to make them ready for meaningful work. Is there a solution for these problems? There must be. The title of this talk is “The Poor You Will Always Have With You”. Steve wanted to call it, “My Joyful Journey,” and I suppose that’s true, but there should be a way to allow those who want to rise to do so. Our President says that the economy is getting much better—That’s true if you are only thinking about his rich friends who are making obscene amounts of money, living in houses that make Versailles blush! It has not gotten better for the poor and the disparity between the rich and the poor is getting wider every day. We need to advocate for a living wage—not a minimum wage, but one that people can live with dignity. We need to advocate for healthcare for all, so that the poor don’t have to wait until they are dying to go to the doctor. We need to advocate for subsidized housing, so that those who clean our streets, care for the elderly, pick up our garbage, and do all those menial jobs that are so necessary for us to have a decent living can have decent places to live themselves. I’ve heard some sages say that a certain amount of unemployment is good for the economy—I’ll bet they are not unemployed! I am neither an economist nor a political scientist, but I know that as long as a small percent of the population is living off the fat of the land and the rest are struggling to keep body and soul together, there is something wrong. And I think it is up to us, who have the wherewithal to influence our government, to do the right thing for all the people.

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