Lillian Hunt Meeks

Both my parents have built their lives around serving others. My mother is a philanthropist who travels all across the world working twelve hour days to help people in need. My Father is the minister of a small church who has twice made himself very unpopular in the neighborhood by trying to turn the church basement into a temporary homeless shelter. One way or another I was bound to grow up aware that there are millions of people who were less fortunate than I am. That turned into a very personal lesson. My mother's father was an oilman and considered the richest man in the country while my father's father was a baker and anything but rich.

By the time I turned two my father had moved out of the former apartment building that he and my mother had made into a single family home and into a much smaller house just under a mile away. I grew up, moving back and forth, not just between two families but between two worlds. In my mother's world we went to the opera and ate out several night's a week. In my father's world we watched PBS, because we couldn't afford cable and bought most of our clothes at second hand shops. My father wasn't poor, he was middle class.

While my sisters went to the same public school I went to a private school. I've spent some family lunches talking over the distribution of millions of dollars through the family foundation and others hearing my older sister worrying about how she will be able to afford unpaid maternity leave when she gives birth in November. I will never have to spend sleepless nights wondering how to make it till the next paycheck, or how to pay the doctors bills.

Everyone who grows up rich deals with this separation from real-life and their life. In my case that divide is both dramatic and non-existent. I have lived with a severe illness for much of my life. One percent of the people in this country have the same disorder; I am one of a very small number who can afford it. The insurance I have is in no way gold plated but costs much more than 5 thousand a year and still doesn't pay for all the medicine, much less the weekly doctors visits.

Once my grandfather said to me "You know Lil, we're all lucky your mother's a Hunt. Otherwise the whole family would have been bankrupt long ago." A few months later my father had a stroke. Unlike me, he could not afford the luxury of illness. We got through, because my mother's father was an oilman and at one time the richest man in the county. If a middle class Southern Baptist minister cannot count on our government's support, no one can. I support Barack Obama because everyone in the United States deserves a government that is not afraid to help those in need.