A poor excuse . . .

If you want a short, inspirational, somewhat troubling read for anytime, pick up Ron Hall and Denver Moore's "Same Kind of Different as Me."  This post is not a review of the book, but I was thinking about it today as I reviewed the Alabama news of the last few days.

The book is the telling of a real story by Hall and Moore, Hall being a rather wealthy art dealer and Moore being a homeless man,  and how their life-paths crossed. It will make you cry.

In part of the book Moore describes his childhood in Mississippi as the son of a sharecropper.  Slavery had been abolished after the Civil War.  But an insidious system took its place .  Education and opportunity were effectively denied to the former slaves and their descendants.  There was no escape from the former plantation lands of Mississippi for the poor black families who worked in the fields for a share of crops and a minimal existence.  Moore describes an economic system that, while better than slavery, was still oppressive and hopeless, trapping the descendants of slaves just as surely as the muck of a cypress swamp.

Do you remember that Tennessee Ernie Ford song, "Fifteen Tons?"  It was about coal-mining, not sharecropping.  But it describes a similar life.  Who can ever forget Ford singing the last line of that song,

"I owe my soul to the company store."

Many sharecroppers had the same deal.  They bought their meager necessities from the landowner for whom they worked.  The landowner charged convenience store prices and quick loan interest rates. Sharecroppers  often died owing the landowner.

Which brings me to the Alabama news of the week.

Alabama has the fifth lowest median income in the nation.

Alabama has the ninth worst poverty rate in the nation.

Alabama taxes its poor more than any other state in the nation. We are number one.

Alabama consistently ranks in the lower ten to twentieth percentile in public education rankings in the nation.

If you are poor in Alabama, you are among the poor of the poorest in America, you pay more taxes than any other of the poor in America, and your opportunities for escape through education are among the lowest in America.

You pay taxes on the food you need to live, unlike most of the rest of America.

And maybe you'll never read this blogpost, either because you can't read, or because you don't have access to a computer or the internet.

But I can write this, and some of you can read this, because not everyone in Alabama is poor.

Because Alabama is in the top ten, in fact number five in America, in another statistical ranking.

Alabama boasts the fifth largest income inequality gap in America according to Wallstreet 24/7.

We have chosen to ignore the poor.  Lately we have even begun to blame the poor.

So here's a very short read  for we who dwell in the buckle of the Bible Belt.

Headed for a goat barbecue if we don't change our ways.

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