Frankie and Laurel’s recent posts have me thinking . People die of curable diseases because they can’t afford the cure. Even in San Francisco they die. I know such a person.

Years ago, when I helped coordinate the adult religious education class in my church, we had to deal every year with the question of theodicy. Why does God let bad things happen to good people? Who is bad enough to deserve death by starvation, plague, earthquake, tsunami?

It’s an old and difficult question. But it gets a lot easier when you eliminate the long list of “natural” disasters that are caused or made much worse by the conscious decisions of human beings.

Examine the list of famines caused by war: burning of fields, mining of rice paddies, troops fighting in large open spaces where the crops are grown.  Study the plagues caused by the intentional contamination of a people’s water supply to force surrender in war or the unconscious contamination by people upstream who have no choice about what they put into the water for the people downstream because they have no other means of washing and dumping. The knowledge and resources exist, but the political will does not.

Earthquakes, of course, are natural. But the disaster is often man made. In Afghanistan, poor neighborhoods were devastated while wealthier neighborhoods incurred very little damage because buildings in poor neighborhoods were flimsy while buildings in other neighborhoods were earthquake resistant.

As Frankie and Laurel point out, it’s not the disease, it’s not even lack of healthcare; it’s lack of access to healthcare.

The United States suffers from the disease of poverty. In our business, we often see the causes of poverty listed as “lack of job skills, lack of work history, physical disability, mental illness, alcoholism and addiction.”

But these are not the causes of poverty. The causes of poverty are lack of job training, lack of job mentorship, lack of accommodation and training for people with disabilities, lack of residential recovery programs, lack of services and supportive housing for people with mental illness, lack of affordable housing for the underemployed.

Why don’t we have enough of these things? Is it because we can’t afford them? In the United States? In CALIFORNIA? As a homeless activist I used to know said, “This is not a poor country. Someone is making a decision.”

We need to re-examine that decision. We need new priorities.

With the announcement of the resignation Alaska Governor Sarah Palin last weekend, I’ve been reminded of times in my life when I’ve considered quitting.

My first try at college was in 1992, and I found out pretty quickly that it’s almost impossible to be in an abusive relationship and do well in school. My abuser lived on campus with me and much of my freshman year was spent in terror. The next year, I decided to drop out and move home to live with my parents. I remember feeling like a failure and wondering if I would ever go back to school. Two years later, I experienced one of the worst days of my life when I found out that my college boyfriend had killed himself. A few months after his death, I decided to quit my minimum wage job and go back to college.

My transition back to college was not a smooth one. My transcript was marred with bad grades. The admissions representative said that I could take classes for one semester on a conditional basis and if my grades were good enough, I would be accepted as a degree-seeking student. After one semester with a 3.925 grade point average, I was in.

Four years later, I graduated with honors. A few weeks after my graduation, I had the most severe episode of panic disorder that I’d ever experienced in my life. It was absolutely debilitating. I felt like a shell of my former self and I was afraid that I would never be able to function again. I was waiting to hear about a few grad school applications, and was afraid that I was going to be too sick to start grad school in the fall.

An acceptance letter from a grad school in New York City arrived in the mail at the same time that an acceptance letter for a grad program from my hometown college arrived. I decided to quit living in my hometown and to move to New York City so that I could study social work in an urban setting.

During my 3rd semester in grad school in Manhattan, I experienced something that shook me to my core: September 11, 2001. (more…)