I knew I had to face the issue of poverty, something I had avoided because I never believed what other people said about it. As follows are the arguments I was having with myself. Thinking about poverty can drastically change along the way.
To share the power, you must understand corruption. Sharing power is critical for accepting equality and equity. Avoiding corruption and sharing the power are that which is necessary to reduce and abolish poverty. If we want to eradicate poverty, we must understand the negative effects of corruption at all levels, for:
Corruption Is the Most Powerful Force
That Keeps Other People Poor
Corruption is in politics, churches, law enforcement, business, and schools. It’s in all levels of society. People like to blame poverty on corporations, organizations, ideologies, and religions, but poverty is present at birth in all individuals. We are born naked and we have the innate drive to move out of it. What keeps human beings in poverty is lack of resources kept away by the individual corruption of others. We must also learn to distinguish the real from the fake, including the corrupted agenda of people saying one thing, while intending to do completely the opposite. Before thinking of others, I had to do some soul searching myself. I may be hungry and lack money for long periods of time, but I was not poor. Poverty is much more than lack of financial resources. Poverty is more than three months of stomach-pain hunger. I had health, education, and the capacity to communicate. I had no fear of the future, none. Therefore ‘reality’ said that I didn’t know what poverty really was. Not to fool myself, a solution to poverty cannot be based on whether it would work for me, as I am not poor. I needed to see it from others.
One way to identify the fake poverty warriors is to listen to their message; if they use the word ‘collective’ along with ‘helping the poor’, they are blowing smoke. They are fake! Think of it this way: to eradicate corruption while distributing power is a difficult thing to balance. To fight financial poverty, we must create tools to promote the economy and establish training and education for individual strength. Poverty is not based on income amount, it is the output per capita that establishes standard of living. You must change what you produce. You must have the freedom to produce what your talents and learnings allow you to learn to produce. These are all important elements in getting a neighborhood in good shape. Always remembering that poverty is not just financial poverty, but that there is mental, emotional, and spiritual poverty, which are all in need of tools to get out of the pits, out of the knot. The freedom of an individual to obtain knowledge, education, move at will, to pursue their dreams, earn their own wealth, is what leads to an economy that responds to a free market, setting the stage for a free political system. That will eradicate poverty substantially, if not absolutely!
By definition, no government can create a free economy or a free individual. It is the other way around. Only free individuals create free governments, because if governing requires telling others what to do, that is not freedom. You can lead a horse to water, but you can’t make him drink. Only free people can organize and maintain a free government. As Lincoln said, “Of the people, by the people, for the people” and not controlling the people. A safety net for those falling off the margins also needs to be part of the equation. However, a safety net by itself is too inert. You cannot help anyone out of poverty. You can only commit to do it with them. The answer must be something you do with them, and they do, and the results must include their self-sufficiency at the end. I had reached my conclusion, and I was about to test it in the real life of the Barrio.
Combining the free market with democracy and education, capital financing, the promotion of the individual, along with freedom and entrepreneurship under fair rules is the most powerful fuel for eliminating poverty that has ever been devised, and it makes sense. In fighting poverty, this potent combination is better than religion and better than science in combating poverty, not in saving souls. Don’t get me wrong, eradicating poverty without nourishing the soul is counterproductive, but the real enemy is corruption. The opium of the people is not religion, nor capitalism, as our enemies try to convince us of. It is corruption and the corrupted soul. Other enemies of the well-being of a community are found in the breaking up the family, diminishing and demeaning history, depriving others, promoting intolerance, removing God, eroding the constitution, crippling the ability to earn a living, fermenting animosity in race and wealth, lying, abusing, and promoting violence while weakening law and order. All that comes from and leads to corruption. Despite popular folklore, these social issues are more dangerous than the physical environmental threat to our planet, which can be overcome.
Getting back to communities, I struggled with this question for a long time. Is entering a neighborhood into the Historic Register really an effective step in the progress of the existing community? History, economy, culture, legalities, technology. Is architectural historical preservation a help or a hindrance to cultural continuity? How does poverty play a role in this, pros and cons? How can the concentration of Sonoran, Transitional, and the American Victorian adobes contribute to the district's sense of ‘timelessness’, while at the same time help with economic freedom in a way that helps ALL of today’s men and woman and children in the Barrio face a future not impacted by poverty or discrimination?
That was a bundle to tackle! Any answer would have to do with economics.
It would take considerable introspection to ponder these questions, and I set out to do so through the layers of the onion, and more. In the following chapters, I will examine these questions and offer my evolving perspective, including interjecting the previously mentioned cause of, and the role of, poverty and corruption in all of this.
One thing kept reverberating with increasing resonance:
Provide the tools to “raise the economic base.” No handouts. Another issue to ponder in depth. Sharing the power can be detrimental if done with the enemy from within. And how do you tell who is the enemy from within. This can be more than one type; the evil person, the actual enemy, the power hungry, the envious, resentful, spiteful, infiltrator, controller, hidden competitor, even you with self-delusion. The enemy from within, the corrupt, will not advertise itself.
