“We can’t be an island of prosperity in an ocean of misery” the phrase said by my friend Jeffrey at a recent meeting has been simmering in my head for days. Even though he was referring to Yale’s situation in the context of New Haven, I couldn’t help to think how meaningful this is for all communities. Being an island of prosperity is dangerous and unsustainable if misery is the only thing you can see from your beaches. Why, because that is a tsunami waiting to happen.

Like it or not we are all connected. Even if you live in the highest hills of north Hamden whatever happens in the south, east and west of Hamden affects you. poverty creates nothing but hate and crime and quoting the words of my friend Shirley “if the folks don’t have anything and you do, guess where they are going to get what they need”. That is why even if you are the most selfish person in this planet, even if you are one of those that wouldn’t pee on man on fire, if you care about yourself you have to help improve your community.

Just in case you were thinking, charity is good but is not the solution to poverty; donating your used clothes to the salvation army is nice but doesn’t make a difference, putting a dollar on the firefighter boot is great but it doesn’t generate good jobs. You have to teach a man to fish, of course you have to spice up the fishing lessons with food because nobody learns with an empty stomach, but the plan has to be fixing the structural problems that create poverty.

I personally believe that the key to fix every single problem in our society is good jobs. I am talking about union jobs that pay descent wages and offer good benefits. People have mixed feelings about unions and I don’t blame them. I think that there are great thing and bad thing about unions, but the bottom-line for me is that only union workers can have working class jobs without living in poverty. Only union housekeepers make enough to have a house and send their kids to college; only union janitors can afford to  have only one job to support their family and not 2 or 3. If someone ever come up with another way to get the same results, let me know and I’ll check it out, in the mean time, I’ll stick to my definition of a good job.

A community that offers good jobs has less poverty and by that less problems. We have to make an effort to encourage good sources of jobs to come to our town, if we own a business we have to do the right thing and pay descent wages, we have to invest in our schools so our children have the tools to access good jobs. And we have to do all of this without constantly complaining because we are paying for things that don’t affect us, because in the end everything does.

In Hamden the situation is not that bad, but we still have a lot of work to do in the south end where most of the pockets of poverty concentrate. We have to create programs that help people overcome the barriers that prevent them from getting good jobs, we have to offer good jobs and most of all, we have to stop looking at it as the bastard child that we wish was not part of our town. It is amazing the amount of racist and awful comments that you can read online about the south end of our town. I am positive that the racist and the greedy are not the majority, but they are certainly loud, and if we can hear them it is because we are not making enough noise in our corner

I know it is hard; I know that we all struggle and when we are having problems making ends meet it is hard to think in helping anybody else, but we must. We must push through our own struggle and our own selfishness and start fixing the waters that surround us. Let’s do it for ourselves. Let’s work to make our town an ocean of prosperity!