How honest should parents be?

[Thumpalumpacus]

Of course you are lucky to live here thump, but we have poor people in America who are actually poor. We like to make little kits for the poor people in town. They don't have cell phones. There is a group of mostly mentally ill men living under a bridge near where I live and they don't have extra clothes besides the ones they wear. They often eat from the garbage. They're very kind. It's difficult to spend time with them because it's jut so heart breaking. Theyre truly suffering its very real.

I know that -- I know that. When I lived on the West End of Ventura, homeless were everywhere -- they camped out in the nearby (dry) Ventura Riverbed. I volunteered at a food bank three days a week for a while and got to know a bunch of them and their stories, and it is heartbreaking.

But they are not truly representative of the poor here in America, insofar as I think of "poor" -- which, I suppose, should be properly called "working poor", as that's the way I think of them in my head. The janitors and burger-slingers and convenience-store clerks. The homeless here surely have things as rough as many poor around the world, but even so, if they're in an urban environment, they have things like access to emergency health-care (hospitals aren't allowed to turn them away for lack of resources), food banks like the one I worked at, free inoculations, disability payments from SSDI if they've been diagnosed mentally or physically disabled, and other resources which simply aren't available to a depressingly large part of humanity.

I'm not belittling the suffering of homeless here, nor am I saying that our homeless have it as good as those in the beknighted Western European states, but I am saying that if we put poverty on a scale of one to ten, one being harshest, ten being softest, American poor aren't at one, or two, or perhaps even three.

I'm certainly not saying that that should justify minimizing any efforts to ameliorate it.