In this first week of the Christian Eastertide an elderly woman I met years ago named Mrs. Elliott is on my mind.
It was during an unusually cold winter in my hometown. Two of my friends and I took Mrs. Elliott wood to burn in an old tin heater she was using to keep her home warm.
The night before we arrived she got a neighbor to break-up one of her chest-of-drawers so she would have something to burn.
There was a chill in the house as we entered. Pictures of FDR, Martin Luther King, Jr. and Jesus hung on one of the walls of her tiny living room.
We stacked the wood next to the stove in the even smaller kitchen. As we turned to leave Mrs. Elliott said, “Thank you, boys. I might have frozen tonight if you hadn’t brought me that wood.”
That wood delivery was the first of hundreds that winter, and the beginning of a inner city ministry of providing free truck loads of wood to the poorest of the poor.
All of us involved discovered a startling reality that first year, that Mrs. Elliot was one of hundreds of people we didn’t even know existed, people hidden in plain sight whom we had never seen.
They lived in shacks and hovels, some with rotted boards that left half the living room floor exposed to dirt. More than a few had no running water in the winter because of frozen pipes. They kept blocks of ice in the bathtub and would chip off pieces to melt for water to drink and cook with.
More often than not only one stove burner worked. Broken windows were covered with cardboard, and in a few instances some of the people were using buckets as toilets.
Most of them rented these places that should have been reported to the city for code violations, except the residents begged us not to do anything. The slum landlords would just evict them, they said, pretend to shut the place down, and then rent them out again after the city stopped paying attention.
I remember all the times those of us doing the deliveries would get back in the truck and say absolutely nothing as we pulled away. We were simply stunned at the level of poverty that existed in our own city.
Mrs. Elliott, and all the people I met over the years, changed my life. I want to believe they made me into a better person than I would have been.
More than anything, they are the reason I don’t believe in small government, why I am not a Republican, why I recoil whenever I read or hear a conservative say that the best solution to poverty is a free market.
It’s for sure they’ve never met anyone like Mrs. Elliott. They’ve never seen up close and personal living conditions like those of the people to whom we delivered wood.
They only look at statistics rather than real people to justify unfounded, broad generalizations about wasted government spending on social programs, as if the lives of real people don’t matter when making public policy.
I wish conservatives who criticize the modern welfare state could spend some time with people like Mrs. Elliott.
I wish Speaker Paul Ryan would leave his privileged life and spend a day with an American poor family to see firsthand what life is like for them every day.
Maybe it wouldn’t do any good, but after my own experience of meeting Mrs. Elliott and so many like her, I have to believe that he would moderate his views.
I believe he would see that insisting the expansion of health savings accounts is the key to providing assistance to people who cannot afford insurance works only for people like him, that a family with both parents working, but still struggling to put food on the table will never have a health savings account, or any kind of savings account.
Of course, I know that will never happen. My sense is that Ryan and people like him will believe a free market works for everyone even if it doesn’t, and that a smaller government is what our country needs even when it isn’t.
So Paul Ryan – or anyone like him – will continue to live in his privileged world and never bump up against the real lives of people who are as far removed from his way of life as he is from theirs.
And that is why I – and everyone like me – will continue to fight for them, for those who have no power, no voice, no influence.
We will continue to demand that millions of Americans like Mrs. Elliott will not be forgotten by their own government led by politicians who boast to the world that we are the wealthiest nation on earth.
The former WWII Army General, Dwight Eisenhower, began his presidency in a speech in which he said: “Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed.”
We were once an America that could be inspired by words like those, but it doesn’t seem like we are anymore.
But every time I think about meeting Mrs. Elliott on that cold winter day a long time ago, I feel a tinge of hope, perhaps a last gasp wish, that somehow, someday, we might become that kind of nation again.
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