When my husband was transferred three years ago, we sold our home and nearly everything in it. We pay for a small storage area in our former town. (JLPen77, it is mostly full of boxes of my books!) We currently rent our home, and it came furnished. Everything that is personally ours fits in my car (Ford Escape) and my husband's pick up-this includes the dog! It was really hard letting go of the "stuff" at first, but then so liberating. I am very deliberate with my choices in what I buy. I use the library a lot more. Compared to many people, I do not own a lot of clothes, but that is one area I am constantly trying to downsize.
Having traveled extensively across the United States, I have had glimpses of an America that I believe would shock people. I have recently read a rash of non-fiction on this topic or related to this topic including: Dopesick, Evicted, $2.00 a Day: Living on Almost Nothing in America, Maid, Factory Man, and Heartland: A Memoir of Working Hard and Being Broke in the Richest Country on Earth to name a few. The problem of poverty is SOLVABLE in the United States, yet we continue to see school systems punish CHILDREN for unpaid lunch bills. Having money, making money, screwing people out of their money is more important than taking care of one another. And rather than look for solutions, our government continues to support regulations and laws that further harm the most vulnerable in our society.
And while our poorest citizens are often hidden from the rest of the world in plain sight, we know the extreme circumstances that many of today's refugees and immigrants are fleeing. Thank you, Davina for sharing Madeline Albright's comments. I would much rather the United States were the world's social worker, as opposed to the world's army.