Deserving?

Another report on child poverty based on research done on nearly 1300 Christchurch kids since 1977 tells us what: that if you're born poor you're likely to continue to be poor; if you're born in a better-off family you're likely to do well.   Hardly a staggering revelation.

'Child poverty' is an emotive phrase and does its job pretty well, but what it somehow indicates is that the children are poor, rather than that the families they come from are poor.  There's no point separating the children from the families.   A more realistic phrase would be 'family poverty' but for some reason we don't want to go there.

And on top of that, we still have the general mentality that the poor, if they try hard enough, will pull themselves up.  Some poor families do.  But with the inequality between rich and poor increasing, it's the poor who have a long way to go to catch up with those on just the lowest rung of the rich ladder.

There's political talk of tackling inequality, but it's got an uphill battle against the political mentality that the wealthy deserve what they have, and deserve more of it.  It's always seemed ironic to me that those who are already well off get more benefits just by being well off.  Is your name well-known?  You'll be first in the queue at the famous restaurant.  Are you on the rich list?  People will fall over themselves to give you more stuff.  How does that make any sense?

From the time they're born many rich children live in incubators that keep them from knowing what goes on in the wider world.  Their worldview is limited to the 'deserving' rich that they find themselves surrounded by.  (Of course, as with everything, there are exceptions, and many rich children actually break out of this incubation and discover the rest of the world.)   People tell them that they deserve what they get (the TV ads that insist that women should look good 'because you're worth it' is an offshoot of this idea) and of course they believe it.

Being told I deserve something (unless it's a good whack around the head) is something I've usually reacted against.   We came into an unexpected inheritance a few years ago - a friend told me we deserved it.  Why?  Had we been particularly good in our behaviour?  Had we done heaps of things for other people?  (The answer is no in both cases.)   On what basis could we possibly have deserved it?  It was gift, and we were exceedingly grateful for it, but there was no way we deserved it.

The poor don't deserve what they get either  - or don't get.  Circumstances can easily drive someone into poverty; none of us are immune from it (including those rich people who've had startling falls from grace).   Of course there are some who are in poverty because of their own behaviours; but the majority, the vast majority, are not.

So when I hear that ministers of Parliament are 'setting up a ministerial committee on poverty' I groan inwardly.  Unless there's a major change of view about how things work in the world, I don't think it will do a thing.   And that major change hasn't happened for a long time.  

Single parents are brilliant...Often!

Today I received a tweet from someone called Alison (she goes under the name of @plus2point4 on Twitter). It was retweeted to me by someone I follow.

Anyway, she's promoting a website called Single Parents are Brilliant. It's in reaction to the British Prime Minister, David Cameron, basically laying the blame for the recent riots in the UK on people who've been brought up by single parents.

Now I guess what he's saying is that boys (in particular) who come from fatherless households (or households where the male isn't their father, and isn't married to their mother) are likely to be the young men in society who get into trouble. To an extent, I don't disagree with this view. I believe that society is in a dangerous place in terms of bringing up heaps of young men without a father in sight. The same thing is happening in New Zealand, and is a cause for alarm here too.

However, what's happened is that Cameron seems to have lumped all young people who've been brought up by single parents under the same grouping, and this is what's got people like Alison hot under the collar. When I first saw the tweet, which basically consisted of: Today we are launching the new campaign to show the world how BRILLIANT Single Parents are, I was at first inclined to lean towards Cameron's point of view.

But then, of course, I had to stop and think: I was brought up by a single mum! (It was a long time ago, admittedly, so I've a kind of right not to have thought about it straight away!). My father and mother split up when I was three - my understanding is that my mother thought he would follow her after she left him, but he didn't. My mother was fortunate to have had the support of her own parents, who welcomed her back into the family home - even though she herself felt she'd made something of a failure of her marriage. It wasn't the done thing to walk out of a marriage in those days (I'm talking about the late forties.)

Suffice to say, here I am, 60 plus years later, and as sane as most men. I think the help of other family members made a big difference, but that doesn't change the fact that I grew up essentially fatherless. (We never had any communication after he and my mother broke up.) The lack of a father hit me emotionally when I was in my mid-twenties; until then I'd sailed along without it seeming to be much of a problem. I guess I dealt with it by writing about it - and eventually marrying someone who was also brought up by a solo mother! We declared that we would hang on in there so that our children wouldn't have to go through the same emotional ups and downs we had experienced. And we have.

I was also fortunate, when I was living in London in my twenties, to be asked to do a bit of 'fathering' for a boy who was himself being brought up by a single mum. Luckily this boy and I got on like a house on fire, and we're still in touch today. He's now a happily married man, doing a high-powered job.

So, yes, I have to agree that single parents can be brilliant. Sure there will be some disasters - it's the nature of life on this planet. But there's no simple box into which all single parents can be slotted - many make a really good job of parenting. Some do struggle. And a host of other factors come into play, just as they do in any walk of life.

So, Mr Cameron, it seems you might need to find some other 'reason' for why the riots happened in your country....

John Michael Talbot

Back in the days when I used to run the Christian bookshop, one of the top-selling artists at one point was John Michael Talbot.   He sang simple, straightforward songs he'd written himself, accompanying himself on a guitar.   Most of the albums had subtle background music - and sometimes choirs - adding to the mix.   In fact, I remember one person saying that without these, the music wasn't all that remarkable.   I think that's a bit of an overstatement.   Certainly the additional music made a huge difference in emotional content to the basic simple songs, but not every song had these big background accompaniments, and the tracks that were done in a simple way were often highly effective. 

Like so many artists at that time, Talbot kind of went off the boil in terms of sales, and I haven't thought much about him in recent years.   I'd got the impression that he was a priest or monk, but in fact he's neither.  He joined the secular Franciscan order, but was never a monk.  The entry in Wikipedia tells us that he's now married to a former nun, and that he founded a integrated monastic community of celibates, married people and families called the Brothers and Sisters of Charity. 

In spite of my not hearing much about him, he's never stopped producing albums and has been doing big tours around the US for a number of years.   In the video below he talks about moving into a much smaller scale ministry, one that emphasises simplicity, and which is much more like a road tour without all the hype and paraphernalia; something with an element of serendipity in it, by the sound of things.

The other thing that's noticeably different is the long flowing white beard.   I remember him as having a short beard in the old days, but this gives him the look of a Patriarch.   Interestingly enough, on the video, he sounds like a young man still.