This I Believe

I believe that money is not the key to happiness, or love, or fame or any of the things we tend to think it will do for us.  Having a lot of money, when that was the case, didn't make my life happier, although it made it easier.  Money does buy freedom -- from being hungry, homeless or without transportation.  It means being able to pay the bills on time, not having to worry about how much you spend at the grocery store, or when you need a new pair of shoes.

Money does not make you a good person.  In fact, some of the wealthiest people I've ever know, were less generous in many ways that some of the poorest of my family and friends.  I grew up in a blue collar, working class neighborhood.  My mother stayed at home and my father worked as a public school janitor.  We were poor.  But there were people in the neighborhood who were poorer.  Like the four children who moved in next door the summer I was in eighth grade.  They came to Kansas from Mississippi with their recently-divorced mother, and piled into their retired grandparents' three-bedroom home.

The mother was a cheap-beer alcoholic who spent her days leaning on the fence between our yards.  She chain smoked and sucked down can after can of Carling's Black Label or Hamm's beer, which she bought in cases.  She was, by turns, angry and abusive or teary and philosophical.  She was on welfare.  Sometimes she was too drunk to feed her children, so they came to our front door, asking my mother for help.

Mom stretched her very tight food budget a long way with macaroni and rice.  We never ate at restaurants.  But when the neighbor kids pressed their noses against the screen door, she made them peanut butter and jelly sandwiches with cheap white bread, store-brand peanut butter and homemade jelly.  When Mrs. H offered my mother bricks of yellow-orange cheese from her welfare commodities, Mom turned it into grilled sandwiches, and fed them to Mrs. H's children.

I won't say this was always done with grace or without complaint.  The bottom line, though, was that my mother -- and less explicitly my father -- could not see someone who was hungry and let them stay that way.  They were children of the Great Depression, who had known poverty and want.  They had, at times, been fed and clothed through the generosity of others, even when those others had little of their own.

Through their example I learned that poverty is a relative concept.  There is always someone else who has less than you do, and the decent thing to do is share with them what you have, be it a little or a lot.  Because of my parents and what they believed, I have learned that money is neither the root of all evil, nor the source of salvation.  It is a commodity, like the welfare cheese my mother used to feed hungry children on those long-ago evenings.  And when we have enough of it to take care of ourselves, we use it to help others.