Scratch Beginnings

by Adam Shepard

  Free financial literacy instruction in the vernacular of the street or in immigrants’ native tongue must be widely offered. Stock market board games sponsored by local companies in high schools sound nice but don’t address the proper issues—needs versus wants, saving versus spending, developing a budget, etc.

  Reading is a core foundation. “Reading aloud” and reading instruction at the preschool level is essential. It helps develop a core competency, and it (hopefully) demonstrates that someone cares.

  Customized bundles of social services delivered by a local coalition of volunteers, nonprofits, and for-profits should be increasingly built into new housing supply. Bring parenting, financial literacy, housing maintenance, and other skills to at-risk individuals and families where they live. Gather a (somewhat) captive audience in familiar, nonthreatening surroundings.

  Reform school funding formulas to make the caliber of instruction more equitable across districts.

  Place the snowballing cry for universal access to college education in the proper perspective. Where should finite government resources go—to support vulnerable children getting started in life or to those more ready to enter the halls of ivy? Fund the sons and daughters of the working poor first, and let them find their way. They may find their way through Job Corps (http://jobcorps.dol.gov/), an apprenticeship, the military, or some other route; or perhaps college.

  These are not aggressive policy changes that will require massive funding. But even if taxes do go up, isn’t that a small price to pay if we can feel confident that we are subsidizing legitimate programs that offer a hand up to the poor rather than a hand out? A hike in minimum wage is fun to talk about, but, in the end, economically speaking, it isn’t a worthy option. Higher wages mean higher costs, which mean higher prices across the board. With a $10 minimum wage, the 99¢ value menu at Wendy’s becomes the $1.99 value menu, and so on, so what’s the point? If $7 an hour isn’t supporting your current lifestyle, then you have other options: (a) team up with a friend or family member to help cover living expenses, (b) change your lifestyle, or (c) use that job as the stepping stone it is meant to be in your quest for better opportunities.

  With all of this said, it is important that I acknowledge that poverty will be around forever. I don’t say this as a downer, but rather as a simple reality. While I have more sympathy for the poor now than when I started, I also understand that poverty is going to be around for reasons beyond a person’s unlucky childhood. Even after countless lessons learned, some people will always find it easier to remain apathetic and make bad decisions, to lie down rather than getting up to fight.

  To a certain extent, I am able to forgive youngsters who have grown up in substandard conditions and subsequently made poor decisions. The young girl who had children of her own before finishing high school? Maybe that’s all she knew growing up. Nobody was in her ear, daily, deterring her from making poor decisions. Role models? Ha! They were making the same bad decisions. Now, at age twenty-eight, she has two choices: (a) maintain her present status or (b) recognize her mistakes and head on the road to create a better life for herself and her children. We are rewarded for good decisions and dealt a lesson for bad ones. Just as we have to live with the joys of having children, for example, we have to live with the financial setbacks. Wendy from Fast Company got pregnant at nineteen, a decision she wouldn’t change if she could. Now a thirty-one-year-old single mother, she is kicking right along—living in a trailer and keeping a close eye on her daughter’s future. She doesn’t spend her paycheck on beer and cigarettes and other such luxuries. She saves. Her back is against the wall, but her sights are set on tomorrow. “I can promise you my daughter’s going to college,” she told me.

  I am unable, however, to excuse the repetition of the same mistakes: the twenty-five-year-old adults smoking and drinking and chasing women or the deadbeats sitting at home, in poverty, watching a movie on their big-screen TV, waiting to scratch off the winning lotto numbers. (I met a guy once on the bus who spent several minutes telling me his method of picking a winning scratch lottery ticket. “There’s a science to it,” he told me. “And I know that science.”) Because that’s all they know? It’s time to grow up. Do you really want to live like that forever? Many have given up, refusing to work hard, and, as I said, I am unable to have sympathy for them.

  The ever-present war between liberals and conservatives on the causes, effects, and solutions to poverty will be debated forever. Good. Let ’em fight it out. But what about us, the rest of us, who don’t have a voice in government or who are waiting for our policy proposals to be debated? Is there anything we can do?

  Um, yeah, there is.

  Imagine if we could reach out to the underprivileged. One out of four, two out of five, one out of ten—whatever. I say that’s more of a success than sitting back and saying, “Well, poverty isn’t goin’ anywhere” or “Um, I’m doing my part: I pay taxes.” Give me a break. You can do better than that. You! You can do something. Forget the government for a moment. You have the opportunity to make a small contribution and become a part of something big. Pick up the phone and volunteer, caution a parent on his or her questionable behavior, make a forgivable loan. Better yet, go down to your local elementary or middle school and volunteer for two, three hours a week after school. Read to a child, help him or her with fractions. Teach him or her how to play tennis. Take him or her to the movies. Both my resident director from Merrimack and my pops participate in mentoring programs similar to the Big Brothers Big Sisters program, and they swear it has been one of the most rewarding experiences of their lives. To take a child to the zoo or to the aquarium or some other place he or she has never been; to make a difference in these young people’s lives; to give them the assistance that they are not getting at home…. You can’t buy happiness like that, and the government surely won’t fund it.

  One of the most popular programs at my college was Alternative Spring Break (ASB). Rather than spending the second week of March sipping on margaritas and bronzing their skins on the beaches of Miami or Jamaica or Cancun, students headed to places like Philadelphia or Chicago or the Bronx where they picked up a hammer and built a house for a needy family. And on their own dime, too. So, don’t tell me that we don’t care. Please. Americans care. Programs like ASB flourish. Maybe we underestimate ourselves, but—one at a time—we do care.

  Which reminds me…we need more heroes. Boy, do we need more heroes. Ken Griffey Jr. is a hero as are Larry Bird, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., Ellen DeGeneres, and Oprah Winfrey, but that’s not what I’m talking about. We need more neighborhood heroes, more small timers stepping up against the crowd to show what it takes to embrace change. I hate to keep bringing him up, but Derrick is the perfect example. He is my hero. There’s a reason why he rose from the pits of poverty and made it out while others haven’t—hard work, discipline, a good attitude, smart decisions. It doesn’t happen if you sit on your front stoop sipping on a can of beer, and it doesn’t happen if you are reckless with your hard-earned money.

  And do you think BG looks up to Derrick? You’re damn right he does. Guys like BG who never had anyone to look up to have no other choice but to look to their peers for guidance. Can you imagine the effects if we had more guys like Derrick as role models? Guys with their mouths shut, walking the walk, showing what it takes to avoid being another statistic. Wow. It could become contagious. It would be like a real-life multi-level marketing scheme.

  I was at the airport once, and a guy really put this attitude into perspective for me. We were at the baggage claim, standing back, watching everyone attack the front of the conveyor belt to retrieve their bags. “Look at this,” he said. “Look at these people. They’re all so hungry to fetch their own two big bags of luggage, but nobody cares about that little old lady over there who is struggling with just her one. Ha. That’s life for ya.”

  There it is. Life is like a baggage claim: you can be aggressive and self-serving or you can be aware of those who nee
d help and lend a hand.

  You can say what you want about my project, how it was flawed because of this or that. What if I had picked Jacksonville or Mobile or Savannah out of the hat instead of Charleston? And what if I had kids to tow around or what if I wouldn’t have struck the luck that I did in working with the greatest mover on the planet? Fair enough, but I’ve heard it all from the people who have critiqued my book along the way. I hope, though, that the criticisms of this book don’t take away from the fact that my story is by no means unique. The point stands that we can do something about our plight, or not. It is what it is. Get out and do something. After all, what is the alternative? Scrape by forever, complaining the whole time about how we’ve been done wrong? I’m telling you, it doesn’t have to be that way.

  So, here I go, to retreat into my white-collar world, armed with my college education and the personal belongings that I have acquired over the last year. But let’s be honest here. Excluding my college education, is my life really that different now? I’m going to use the same spending and savings tactics that I used in Charleston. I’m going to continue to eat Rice-A-Roni and buy shirts for $10 and search for cheap entertainment. I’ll seek inexpensive transportation until I can afford a nicer car. And you better believe that a series of corporate executives are going to get the same speech that I gave to Curtis at Fast Company. I won’t stop until one of those guys hires me on to fetch him coffee in exchange for his expertise and the opportunity to climb into the ranks of management. I’ll work my way up that infamous corporate ladder or perhaps go into business for myself, hopefully finding something that I am passionate about along the way.

  That’s how it’s supposed to be. A blank canvas and unlimited upside potential. It’s the foundation of the American Dream.

  In chapter eight, toward the end of my stay at Crisis Ministries, Leo told me what he thought the three types of people are in our world. My friend Surry offered me his version:

  Those who make things happen;

  Those who watch things happen;

  Those who sit back, scratch their heads, and wonder, “What in the hell just happened?”

  There it is. Three choices. Reread that and think about it for a second. One, two, or three. Three choices. That’s it!

  Which one are you?

  About the Author

  ADAM SHEPARD is a 2006 graduate of Merrimack College in North Andover, Massachusetts, where he majored in Business Management and Spanish. Serving as a resident advisor during his upperclassmen years, he began to take particular interest in the social issues of our nation.

  Scratch Beginnings is Shepard’s first book. He lives in Raleigh, North Carolina.

  Visit www.AuthorTracker.com for exclusive information on your favorite HarperCollins author.

  Credits

  Jacket photo © Steve Brantley

  Copyright

  SCRATCH BEGINNINGS. Copyright © 2008 by Adam Shepard. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.

  EPub © Edition SEPTEMBER 2008 ISBN: 9780061981777

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  1 Barbara Ehrenreich, Nickel and dimed: on (not) getting by in America (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2001).

  2 Barbara Ehrenreich, Bait and switch: the (futile) pursuit of the American dream (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2005).

  3 The Doctor’s book of home remedies: thousands of tips and techniques anyone can use to heal everyday health problems/by the editors of Prevention Magazine Health Books; ed. Debora Tkac (Emmaus, PA: Rodale Press, 1990).