How Far Is Your Family From Homelessness?{2 american families}

[xchrom]

http://www.alternet.org/speakeasy/diane-nilan/how-far-your-family-homelessness



***SNIP


The subject of abject poverty and its incessant side effects rarely gets a thorough, personal treatment. Watching the steady deterioration of the Stanley and Neumann families as their economic security dwindled was, to those of us who’ve worked in this “field” for too long, painfully predictable but worth the agony because it validated the true cost of our cheapskate economy where average wages have plunged since 1973.

For those puzzled by the decline of public schools, neighborhoods, the American worker, marriage, and life in general, let me connect the dots: when families fall apart as they tend to do when facing draconian financial ordeals, no matter one-parent or two, it gets ugly. The kids most typically struggle in school and at home. Neighborhoods feel the fallout, as do schools. A child’s potential, despite their parents’ best efforts to raise them with solid middle-class values, diminishes, often so gradually that no one knows their future’s gone till it’s too late, an element of the film that I was sadly glad they included.

Alex Pareene’s (and my) painful reality check to the unenlightened: the safety net is not there. Gone. As cities and towns across America—with soaring poverty and unemployment—grapple with Sequestration, slashed revenues and decaying infrastructures, local governments can’t figure out what to do with those households whose economic foothold in the American Dream has been stomped on by union-busting, “compassionate” conservatives espousing self-sufficiency.

Contrary to the “family values” crowd, both sets of parents played by the rules. As they reinforced bedrock tenets—work hard, study and get a good education, go to church, help your neighbor, believe in the possibilities—it was excruciating to watch as their lifestyles dissolved with each job loss and creditor call. Pernicious poverty crushes family life like an empty beer can.

[handmade34]

1. been there...

no one deserves it

[independentpiney]

2. About 7 months

if we can't find any ways to generate income, less if there's alot of unanticipated expenses. Scares me shitless when I think about it, which is pretty often.