The Rich and the Desperate /
After years of poking uninvited into other people’s misery, Gary Knight and I, co-editors of dispatches, had the routine down. But this place was particularly scary. Acrid coal smoke tinged the air with forbidding brown. Hostile eyes stared from behind windows opaque with dirt. We turned a corner to find basic Bosnia: blackened hulks that had been houses; a building imploded from inside leaving scorch marks up to what was left of a roof.
Families squatted in the ruins behind jagged glass, warped shutters, and doors hanging off their hinges. In litter-strewn patches of garden, all but scraggly weeds had given up the ghost.
Gary carried only a pair of Canons. He moved as confidently as if he owned the place, but his antennae crackled at any sign suggesting he ought to bolt for the jeep. I watched his back while scribbling notes against a sturdy wall that protected my own. You never know when a stray shot might ruin your morning.
Near a bombed-out and abandoned steel plant, I stopped a passerby in a filthy field jacket and clapped-out sneakers. He muttered monosyllables in reply to my questions and then scuttled away. In the neighborhood’s only open bar, two morose old men emptied glasses of what looked like plum slivovitz. It was 9 a.m.
Smoke led us to the smoldering ashes of one house. We found orange flames fast swallowing what remained of the one next door. Was this some personal feud or ethnic cleansing? No one was around to ask. This being no man’s land, firemen did not trouble to respond. We met a priest who tried hard to express optimism, but the average age of his flock was over 60.
Gary stopped to photograph a building, boarded up and chained shut, the classic icon of what happens when the worst of times replaces the best. I could make out a faded word on the salmon-colored façade. It read, “Appliances,” not in Serbo-Croatian but rather in English. This was greater Youngstown.
We had come to Ohio on a global look at “poverty,” as elusive a word as exists in any language. Our purpose was to pin it down and see what might be done to address it. Webster is clear enough: “The state or condition of having little or no money, goods, or means of support.” But what is little? Youngstown hit the skids when the steel mills closed in the 1970s, and nothing has since taken its place. By World Bank standards, that outlying community we visited – Campbell (pronounced Camel) – is awash in wealth. Average income, the U.S. Census Bureau says, approaches $14,000. The Bank defines extreme poverty as making less than $1.25 a day. Almost a billion people qualified even before the world economy fell apart.
The broader poverty measure, recently doubled to $2 a day, takes in half the people on earth. Many in South Asia or Africa survive on $2 a month. Extended families help in emergencies, and belief systems keep them going. Americans cut adrift from society can be miserably poor with a thousand times more income.
Poverty receded from 1990 to 2005 because of expanding economies in China and India. Now the global crisis taking shape threatens to undo those gains. The extremely poor, meantime, are more desperate than ever. With falling-domino layoffs everywhere, the United Nations calculated early in 2009 that 50 million people had recently lost their jobs. The total is likely higher.
But poverty is less about numbers and abstract definitions than it is about individual human lives. When people are poor, they know it. Across all cultures, basic needs are the same: food, a roof, water, sanitation, and medical care. These can be met if governments, companies, and individuals set comprehensive courses of action and do the right thing. Religious teachings give reason enough to act. But this is not about charity.
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