The Life of Lou Ruppert

I’ve been thinking lately about the American concept of poverty. Someone once said something like “Poverty in America means having to buy your clothes at Wal*Mart instead of at the mall, or only being able to afford the basic cable package instead of the deluxe one with movie channels.” I think that’s pretty accurate.

I was part of a conversation once where one of my friends identified herself as low income. The funny thing about it was that her family’s income was probably twice what most of the other people in the room were earning at the time. They had a large well-furnished house in the suburbs, two relatively new cars, a vacation home, a swimming pool, and various other things that most people I grew up with never had. I remember thinking at the time, “By what measure does that qualify as ‘low income’?” Then I realized that it actually was low income compared to her neighbors and the people she grew up with. Compared to the inhabitants of an affluent suburb of a major metropolitan area, she and her family were living in a shack, clad in stinking rags!

In The Millionaire Next Door, the author warns people trying to live a simple frugal lifestyle about the dangers of living in “status neighborhoods”. When you surround yourself with people who have more money than you do, you will feel pressure to keep up with them. Your kids will think that taking a four week European vacation every school break is normal. You will find yourself hiding your car if you don’t drive a BMW. Someone else did a study and found that most people, when asked, would rather earn $100,000 living in a trailer park than $200,000 living among millionaire yuppies. It’s better to be the big fish in the little pond than the little fish in the big one.

Growing up, I was surprised when people would tell me that my family was poor. I never considered us to be. Granted, for a couple years we lived in a house that didn’t have indoor plumbing, television, or much for running water, and we did sometimes get subsidized lunches like half of our classmates in school, but we never lacked for anything we needed. We always had food and a place to live. We even had a car and money to see or rent the occasional movie. I always imagined poor kids to be sad creatures who had ripped clothes and dirty faces, and who lived in the motel with their whole family. That definitely wasn’t us! One of my cousins tried explaining it to me that my family was poor and his family wasn’t, because his could afford name-brand foods, while mine had to buy the generic brands at places like ALDI.

In my experience, I’ve found that truly poor people tend to have red eyes and torn clothes. They live in houses made of dirt or mud-bricks. They might have one or two pieces of furniture, usually a stool made of scraps of wood, which they will enthusiastically offer to guests or to the oldest guy there. They own maybe one or two outfits of clothes. Their life’s savings would fit in their pockets. They can’t read. Music is provided by their chickens and goat. Someone who is truly poor lacks the opportunity to significantly improve their lot in life, or even to consistently provide for their daily needs. It is nearly impossible to reach this state of existence in America.

Just outside the boundaries of my property in town lie the suburbs. In the last decade, three yuppie housing projects have sprung up there. Each house is a gigantic $350,000 mass-produced estate, complete with the following “necessities”:

• Two car garage, with wide bays to accommodate the de rigeur Hummer and Escalade when they aren’t being presented for the neighbors’ inspection in the U-shaped driveway
• Giant plasticine façade, incorporating mass-produced replica elements from as many old-money estates as possible, resulting in a kind of mongrelized caricature of a mansion. I like to think of it as putting Hollywood and a few English manor houses into a blender and then shaking the resulting mess over the bulldozed lots.
• Cathedral-high ceilings, to flaunt how much money the inhabitants have available to burn up on heat during the winter, while providing a convenient place to hang themselves from when the housing market crashes and the neighbors realize they’re in debt up to their ears.
• Conservatively selected portfolio of exotic lawn plants and shaped hedges in one more islands of a mulch whose color was selected by a majority vote of the Homeowners Association to match the mandated earth tones in the two story trophy garages.

While I must admit to being jealous of the giant kitchens these houses tend to come with, I have to feel sorry for the kids who grow up in the rest of the house. Their concept of what the baseline is for happiness will be severely skewed. Forget the four year old who has to pee outside in a little wooden shack constructed when his grandparents were his age. To the children in these new developments, locked up in their assembly line castles, surrounded by moats of Stepford-perfect lawns, someone with a 1200 square foot house and two ordinary cars will be someone to be pitied. How will these kids ever relate to truly poor people? How hard will it be for them to be thankful for simple things?

One of the best gifts you can cultivate is the ability to distinguish the line between needs and luxuries, and to be thankful for them both. Next time you’re feeling low on money, count your blessings instead.

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