David McRaney  |  Journalist

Big screens and screen doors

I recently went over to a friend's house in Canebrake.

For those of you who don't know, Canebrake is one of those pre-fabricated, affluent communities built a small distance from Hattiesburg so as to make the people who live there feel a strange combination of garishness and safety.

Anyway, I had never been there, and it wasn't really his house. It was his stepfather's house, and he rarely visited. But, he told me that his stepfather had the largest television he had ever seen, and we wanted to play a video game on it.

So, I walk into his living room and sit down in one of his five massage recliners facing a 220-inch projection screen television and pick up a controller like it's no big deal. But, deep inside I had the oddest feeling wash over me.

I was awe-struck, dumbfounded. The refrigerator costs more than my car. I thought I might cross my legs and flip a vase into the air.

But I kept it to myself. No one has to know I grew up poor unless I want them to.

But let's get something straight. I grew poor in America, and that's a whole different kind of poor. Let's go a little further, shall we? I grew up poor in America as an only child at the latter half of the 20th century in a state that has a low cost of living and a relatively low crime rate.

So, I never really knew I was poor, and I'm sure my parents never truly considered us to be in a bad way financially because we had plenty of friends and relatives who were in the same boat as we were.

I may have spent 18 years of my life in a mobile home back in the woods of South Mississippi, but I never dug through a trash heap with metal hooks looking for scraps of metal and food.

Poverty is a tricky word. Just walking through Best Buy will give you a good idea of how lucky we all are to be living in this country. The average income in America is about $40,000. Compare that to the global average, which is around $1,200, and you start to get the picture.

The average person on Earth lives on less than the price of a pack of cigarettes a day. The average citizen of the United States, without any other debts, could buy 1,000 packs a month. Factor in the culture of debt that charms us into believing we can all afford flat screen plasma televisions and GPS equipped SUVs, and you can understand just how skewed our understanding of wealth and poverty is.

Consider this: The average American is walking around right now with about $8,000 in credit card debt. The total U.S. credit card debt in 2002 was close to $60 billion. And collectively, as Americans, we own 1.2 billion credit and retail cards.

So, although I grew up poor, and technically still am, I'm fully aware that compared to the rest of the world, I had it pretty good. Plus, I never really knew I was poor until I went out into the real world and met people from affluent backgrounds.

I had plenty of toys and clothes, ate well, watched lots of "Sesame Street" and "Mr. Rogers' Neighborhood" and always had computers to play on. But, my mom and dad both worked, and they only had one other mouth to feed. I never knew that they dealt with debt and insurance on a daily basis, and I never knew that we lived paycheck to paycheck because my parents did a great job of giving me everything that they never had growing up, so, compared to their own farming and outhouse upbringings, I experienced a well distilled version of poverty that seemed laughable to people that grew up in my grandparents' generation.

I remember a family on my bus route that still lived in a shoddy wooden shack with chickens visible through the floorboards. I thought, "Now that's poor." But, they also had six kids and one income. Today, that family no longer lives in a shack, and the children have all gone off to make something of themselves. One is even a scientist in a prominent laboratory.

You won't see many homeless people in the South because there is a grand, gold-laminated, jewel encrusted ladder that hangs from the clouds in this country. The distance from the ground to the bottom rung varies from place to place. Around here, you can actually work at a minimum wage job and still get your hands around that rung to begin the climb. If you lived in New York, where a two-bedroom apartment costs in the thousands, then you could barely reach it with your fingertips.

Although most people live paycheck to paycheck in a state of perpetual debt, true poverty rarely rears its head. When it does, whether you live in a trailer park or a suburb, we all seem to wince and look the other way.

Maybe we've seen too many episodes of "Cribs" and think one day we'll all have marble countertops. Or, maybe we've seen too many toothless grins and pulpwood trucks, and think that one day they'll demand payment in full.

Originally published in The Student Printz on December 8, 2005