Blog Action Day

Yesterday, was Blog Action Day. Each year bloggers are given a theme and encouraged to blog about it. Last year the theme was the Environment. This year the theme was Poverty. Last year I participated, this year I had intended to participate and did not.



Which is not to say I haven’t been thinking about poverty. I have been, just everything I have thought about writing has seemed so out of touch.



I work at the welfare office every Friday. A friend of mine whom I work with at the welfare office, who likes to think of himself as a rough and hard man had tried to find an elderly woman a homeless shelter for the night and every agency he called was filled to capacity. He told the eighty-two year old women that he couldn’t help her and then he left the front desk so that no one would see him cry. I lost it too. He was my support system, the one that helped me be strong when stories were too emotional. He no longer works at the front desk.



I don’t feel comfortable blogging about poverty. Even that sentence irks me “blogging about poverty”. What do I know about poverty? I don’t even recognize my own privilege in this country.



Yesterday, I was at a donut shop in a low-income neighborhood trying to get some studying in before I was to go work for a social service agency next door. An elderly couple, he 64, she 65 (they told me) asked me what I was studying. When I told them Chemistry they asked me if I wanted to be a pharmacist. They were very nice people, and impressed that I was going to college. I didn’t feel comfortable telling them my true aspirations because I felt it would be arrogant and so I said “Yes, it would be very nice to be a pharmacist”. Then they asked me, and why they asked me I don’t know, what my chemistry instructor’s name was. I answered “Dr. Smith”. The women responded “You have a doctor as a teacher? That is really great! Doctors know more than teachers.” The couple then began to discuss between themselves how much more doctors know than professors.



We hold medical doctors in too high regard in this country. We hold what they do as much more sophisticated than it really is.
It is not black magic…okay maybe anesthesia is black magic but the rest isn’t. Who was I to discuss this with them? I am the elitist, with my education who knows the difference between a PhD and an MD. Who am I to blog about poverty, on my laptop with my wireless connection?