The Poverty Crisis

Poverty in America right now means that 15% of people in the U.S. and 1 in 4 children live below the poverty line. In real terms that is a family of 4 living on $22,000 dollars a year or less (Facts from page 24 of the Time magazine or at Time.com type in "The Truth about the Poverty Crisis". note the 1 in 4 quote I got from a source that I memorized the statistic because it demonstrated just how bad this is for all our futures as those 1 in 4 kids grow up.

In my own life my family and I are lucky. As I left my daughter's tutor that has a PHD in Mathematics she told me that my daughter's private school that she attended from ages 7-12 now has 1/3 less students that it had when my daughter attended there. Then she said people aren't donating to keep the school afloat like they used to. This being a very cutting edge school that not only has probably the best educational system yet devised along with being an award winning solar powered and completely ecologically engineered school in every way made me see just how bad things are when they are affecting even private schools in this way nationwide and likely worldwide.

I have told my own story many times here of how my now ex-wife and I survived the early 1980s which was the last time nationwide unemployment went to above 10% and stayed there for a few years. During that time we survived raising three kids ages 5 to 8 until the oldest was 12 by buying inexpensive property with a spring on it but without electricity. By using our savings to buy the land and by selling one of our vehicles we bought the land and bought enough building materials to build ourselves an A-Frame with a loft in which we lived about 3/4 of the year or more(7 feet of snow possible at one time there from December to March). We home schooled our kids using Independent STudy from Oak Meadow School (Look for the online) since we were 10 miles from the nearest small town. Both my wife and I and our kids thrived in this life as we lived a Wilderness family experience and cross country skied during the winters and hiked and climbed mountains and swam in mountain lakes with our friends during the summers. After a few years we bought a business on the northern California coast and moved there with our children and they finished Junior High and High School at good public schools on the coast. By having bought the land and built the A-Frame we had saved about $60,000 in rent over 5 years. Instead we paid only $8000 for 2 1/2 acres on beautiful land with a great view of Mt. Shasta and even though it didn't have access to electricity it did have a spring on the upper end of the land and a septic tank on the lower land and even though we didn't use the water for drinking we used it for everything else like washing dishes. We bought an old huge clawfoot bathtub and a wood cook stove with a built in oven and my Dad built welded us a wood stove to stay warm at night or in the winter from a water pressure tank that he had used while building his own house himself.

 I guess what I'm trying to say is "Where there's a will there's a way." Sometimes, in order to survive these kinds of times you just have to think outside the box. Often, during times like these worldwide if you aren't innovative enough to survive, you don't.