THE LAST REUNION, PART IV: THE SIN OF POVERTY [Su, 1-17-21]

 

CHRIST IN WINTER: Reflections on Faith & Life for the Years of Winter

Seeing in our hometown newspaper the obituary of Paula, my classmate from fifth grade through high school, reminded me of the last time I saw her, at our 60-year class reunion, and all the confusion our last conversation produced. Reflecting on it took far too many words for one column, so here is the conclusion of the four-part series.

THE LAST REUNION, PART IV: THE SIN OF POVERTY  [Su, 1-17-21]

As Paula and I walked out the door after our 60-year class reunion, our final reunion, just the two of us in conversation, out of nowhere she told me what an awful president Barack Obama was.

But she didn’t stop there. One of my frustrations with Obama was that he did not do enough to help the economically disadvantaged, but Paula saw that quite differently. Again, out of nowhere, but apparently linked to her unhappiness with Obama, she started a rather angry speech about welfare recipients.

“Paula,” I said, “you know I was raised on welfare.”

Momentarily she had that “caught with her hand in the cookie jar” look, but recovered quickly. “That’s different,” she said.

I told this story to my friend, Glenn. He said his mother in her last years was the same way, about immigrants of color. She regularly bashed them all.  One day he said, “You know my daughter-in-law is an immigrant of color.” Without even stopping for breath, she said, “That’s different.”

It’s hard to argue with people who dismiss any evidence that does not fit their prejudices with “that’s different.”

“For welfare people,” Paula continued, “it’s a culture, generation after generation of feeling entitled to get something for nothing.”

I flashed back to an earlier class reunion, thirty-five years, the one when I had been on chemo and tired easily. We were having a pool party at Hovey’s house before the evening banquet. I had gone inside to rest in a bedroom. Mike Dickey told Helen to stay at the pool and have a good time; he would go in and sit with me. So she was sitting poolside with Paula and some of the other “kids,” and somehow my childhood poverty came up, the welfare kid who succeeded, just as his classmates predicted. Helen reported that Paula said, “We just respected him so much that we didn’t even know he was poor.”

That made me smile when Helen first told it to me, and every time I thought about it for the next 25 years. It was one of the reasons I sought out Paula especially at each of our reunions. I reveled in that. My classmates respected me! Even as a teen, when I had no resume of degrees and awards and experience. I wasn’t popular as a kid—that required good looks and good clothes and good cars—but I was respected. Just for myself. They had known me when I was nothing but the poor kid, and respected me anyway. That meant the world to me.

Except, apparently for Paula, who would not have respected me if she had known that I was not just poor but on welfare. She had used respect as a way of denying that I was even poor. "We didn't know he was poor..." She had to deny that she knew I was poor, for there was something wrong with poor people.

I was confused. I did not want to continue that conversation at the end of our last reunion. So, I lied. Not completely, because my back really was hurting, the way it always does when I have to stand in one position too long. But I made it sound worse than it was as I explained to Paula that I had to go. She was a smart woman. She saw through that. To her credit, at that point, Paula apologized for having brought up politics as the last conversation we would ever have.  

Paula’s obit said that she was always willing to help people. I’m sure she was. As long as they weren’t black. Or on welfare.

If you’ve always had enough while others had less, if they get enough, too, you think you are deprived.

I miss my friend, and I grieve for her.

John Robert McFarland