Our poor little rich boy governor

By ROY PULLUM

The other day, multimillionaire GOP Gov. Matt Bevin released a commercial where he talked about his childhood "hardships.:  

I confess that I got teary-eyed when I heard him say that his childhood home had 3 bedrooms and only one bathroom.  My heart bled for him when I heard him say he did not have insurance until after he was in the Army. 

How sad that he had it so rough.  The rest of us should be grateful that we did not have to endure such hardship.  I am sure his abject poverty molded him into the great humanitarian who  wants to throw 400,000 sick Kentuckians off Medicaid, who pushed for "right to work" legislation that ensures poverty for the working class and who opposes the prevailing wage.

I could tell our governor a little bit about poverty.  While his tub was porcelain, mine was a #2 washtub with the water heated over a coal stove.  There were two bedrooms in our home with one also doubling as a living room. 

My bathroom was a hundred feet from the house.  It had two holes, but no waiting.  Our faucet was in the yard.  It often froze when the temperature went below zero. 

I did not have a separate bed until my brother Bill got married and my other brother William went into the army.  Prior to that, the three of us slept together.  That was kind of a problem when William came home with the measles, chicken pox and the mumps.  My parents never had to look up a neighbor to get me infected with those childhood diseases.  The virus was lying right beside me.

I can tell our governor about being delivered by a midwife because Dad could not pay the doctor to come and deliver me.  I could tell him about untreated asthma that has morphed into COPD because we could not afford breathing treatments.   I could tell him about the folk medicine my mother prescribed because we could not afford the doctor or medicine from the drug store.

Yes, our governor had it "rough." But Eastern and Western Kentucky coal fields, as well as the inner cities of Louisville and Lexington, are full of people who would have relished that porcelain tub, those three bedrooms and the other amenities he called "rough and tumble."  Maybe he ought to quit trying to poor mouth and listen to people who know something about real poverty.