Let’s Do What’s Good For All Of Us

you at the jobs that have been taken away. But technology—in fact, I get angry at myself every time I step into Walmart and self-check. Because you know I’m taking away a job. I can remember when you used to go to the service station and people pumped your gas for you. I remember when you went into a restaurant, you didn’t have to get your own drink. You know, now when I go to the bank I get so angry when they say, “Miss O’Neal, you can do that online.”

I don’t want to do it online. I want a human being. With the way things are now, the jobs that most people—not your highly educated, not your highly trained—but most average people—there are no jobs There’s not anything that you can do in this day and time without having some type of talent, degree, whatever.

And so we find that so many of the people, that I dealt with at Some Other Place, that were just not able to find employment. It wasn’t if they didn’t want to work. And then you talk about wages; does it not bother you that the person that provides the hamburger that you get at McDonald’s can’t live on the wages that they make? But then you look at their financial statement, the financial statement of McDonald’s and, you know, whoopity doo dah.

What happens to the person that’s not one of the rich people and their house floods, whether it’s a disaster such as a hurricane, whether it’s a leaky faucet, no matter what. What about them? They don’t have that safety net, that security that most of us sitting in this room have. Whenever the hurricanes come, mostly—they cause fear for all of us. But mostly, for most of us, it’s just an inconvenience. We have that safety net. We have insurance if something happens. The poor don’t have that.

I found in working at Some Other Place the poor live disaster-filled lives every day: a sick child, a broken refrigerator, a car that won’t start, you know, not enough hours at work to pay the rent: those are disasters that they live with all the time. And until those of us that are ‘rich,’ which includes you and me, believe it or not, until we start thinking about what’s good for them, we’ll never resolve the problems and everything that our country faces, that our city faces.

Paula O’Neal is a native Beaumonter and Texan who directed Some Other Place for 40 years and volunteered at Calder Baptist Church and across the community, earning many special recognitions.

Iam going to talk about the difference between being rich and being poor. Most of us think about rich as the Trumps—I hate to mention that name—the Gettys, the guy that just bought YouTube or Twitter or whatever, you know, we think of that as wealth. Well, I’m here to tell you that that is not the true definition of wealth. Wealth is those who are economically secure. You, you, most of us sitting in this room, are wealthy in the eyes of most, because we have everything that meets our basic needs.

In dealing with the people that I’ve dealt with, they are only economically poor. They are not all poor people. They are just in situations, in many instances through no fault of their own, because of their circumstance.

How in the world can you ever resolve inequality? It’s a given. By accident of birth, we come into this world on different levels. By accident of family, we come into this—I tell people all the time, you know, “The apple didn’t fall far from the tree,” and it doesn’t in most instances.

I noticed in the program it talks about the basis of economic life is human labor. Lot of people don’t have the opportunity for employment. Look around