In these postings I have often talked how it is harder and harder to poor. This statement of how it is to be poor comes a friend in the local Catholic Worker House of Hospitality in their recent newsletter. There is much more but if you really can hear and see this is all you can handle.

“People are becoming poorer and poorer because States are making demands on them. In our State of Wisconsin, it is not possible to own a vehicle if you do not have insurance. You may not own a home unless you have fire insurance. You must have health insurance or suffer penalties. You are led to believe that you must have a gun to insure your family’s safety. What happens more often than not is that you pay lots of money to insurance companies without getting anything in return. It seems to be legal theft. A minority person seeking work, for example, must usually rely on public transportation to find and go to work. If there is no public transportation to the work site, the person cannot hold the job. If the person wants to buy a car the person must pay almost $200 a month to one of the thousands of insurance companies first.

If the person does not have insurance and is pulled over for a traffic violation the person will face a huge fine or spend time in jail. The poor become poorer. If we at Casa Maria had to buy insurance for our vehicles used for pick ups of needed items for the houses and our guests when we first started the house in 1967, by now we would have paid more than a half a million dollars to an insurance company. That is money that would not have been able to be used to house the homeless, feed the hungry, help prisoners, etc. We have had minor accidents with vehicles, and if we caused damage to another vehicle we made sure that we paid for the damage we caused. We have always trusted God to provide. Christ said that if the birds and plants are taken care of then certainly we humans, the children of God, need not worry.

Our society, which claims to be “Christian” does not believe that God will provide and, thus, demands that we need insurance companies to take care of us. Insurance companies give enormous amounts of money to political candidates so they will enact laws demanding that people get different types of insurance or suffer penalties. If a claim is made, more times than not, the insurance company will find some fine print in the document you signed that will exempt it from having to pay for any damage caused. If the company must pay for any damage, know that your rate will automatically go up each month. In the end, the company will gain back any money it had to pay out. When you see insurance companies building bigger and bigger buildings in our cities and buying up land and houses both here and abroad, you must realize that the companies are only out to help themselves, not you, to insure themselves of more profits from you. What are we to do about this? We must resist this injustice by not cooperating with the powers that be, and give what we have to the economically poor rather than to these very wealthy corporations who take away our freedoms and further pauperize the people of the world. “What you do to the least of these you do also to me.” (Christ) ----Don Timmerman

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