American sentence for poverty

Today is Blog Action Day: Poverty.

In order to honor the solidarity of (what I hope is) a grass-roots movement to get people talking about, if only for one day, poverty, here is an American Sentence:

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The homeless’ cigarettes harsh truth: they smoke to deaden cold appetite.

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I had always been one of those people who look askance at homeless people who are smoking while hanging around. There’s one young man I always buy a paper from. Its Street Roots, a wonderful paper that helps homeless people make a living. He often smokes while standing at the street corner where I work, a stack of papers in hand.

I’ve always wanted to tell him, “Don’t smoke while you sell papers. People like me think: ‘If you can afford cigarettes, you can afford food.’” I think they – like me – are less inclined to help people who smoke.

I did until the day my writing teacher, Martha Gies, told me that down and out people often smoke because it curbs their appetite. Cigarettes are cheaper than food. (She writes for Street Roots and is a low-income housing advocate, as well as an all-around advocate for humanitarianism.)

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Here’s a post about poverty from my poetry friend, Rethabile. He links to other blogs that offer ideas about how to deal with poverty.

Me? I am not going to second-guess why people smoke or think that as long as they hang on to that particular vice I won’t help them. I am going to remember that the faceless have faces. If I can’t feed them all, I can acknowledge that they are human beings.

(I’m an ex-smoker, but that doesn’t matter a whit.)

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