We and our children take basic civil rights for granted

Forty years ago, the greatest threat to American blacks came from a society that denied us the basic civil rights that we and our children today take for granted. In my lifetime, blacks could be turned away from lunch counters or any other place of business simply because of the color of our skin. Thank God for leaders such as Martin Luther King, Jr., Andrew Young, the NAACP, and so many others who risked and often surrendered their lives for equality.

Sometimes those who sought to take the civil rights - or the lives - of blacks wore the bedsheets of the Ku Klux Klan. Sometimes they wore police uniforms, wielded batons and guns, and went accompanied by attack dogs. Either way, we always knew who the enemy was.

Today, the biggest enemy of self-sufficiency and financial wellbeing for blacks, and indeed for the working poor and lowermiddle class, is much more indistinct. Today, the enemy is anyone who passes on to his or her children a combination of good intentions and lack of knowledge about how to be self-sufficient. In other words, increasingly we are our own problem.

We are the problem if we do not know how to teach our children the value of a dollar.We are the problem if we do not teach our children that it is not howmuch money you make that matters, but how much you keep.We are the problem if we fail to teach our kids that economic literacy is every bit as important as geometry.We are the problem if we don't demand more from our banks when they fail to meet our needs. I have nothing against right triangles or the elements of the periodic table, but there's a whole lot more to life that neither the schools nor parents are teaching kids.

In the twenty-first century, we cannot afford to be lukewarm with our intentions. That's as bad as the people - fellow ecumenical leaders, at that - who bitterly criticized Dr.King when he was jailed for fighting racism in Birmingham, Alabama. Good intentions, which I define as being lukewarm, are driving low- to moderate-income citizens everywhere, into the poorhouse. The road to hell - and bankruptcy - is paved with good intentions.

The bottom line here is this: you can only give what you've got. This article asks the question "What have you got?" Mentally. Spiritually. Emotionally. Economically.What do you have to pass down to your children about financial literacy, and about life? Ask yourself these four questions: How much do you earn? How much do you save? How much do you spend? How much do you owe?

The main obstacle holding you back isn't Birmingham's Bull Conner and his baton-wielding goons. The biggest problem that we face on the road to becoming financially strong is vagueness. Most of us simply don't know how much we earn, save, spend, and owe. We have a vague sense of these numbers, but we are not entirely sure, often because we don't want to know. The true numbers can be depressing!

Don't feel bad if you couldn't answer the four questions off the top of your head.

We and our children take basic civil rights for granted

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