Looking at Poverty

 

 Recently stumbled across an obscure website that offered up philosophical questions for people to write about. A lot of the questions, while interesting were a bit too abstract to really affect how most people live in the present. For example there was a questions asking if the human species will still be around in a thousand years. My short answer is yes, but the circumstances of that existence will depend greatly on how things go for the next forty years.

There was one question though that struck home with me:

“What life-altering things should every human ideally get to experience at least once in their lives?”

Right off the bat my first thought would be that everyone should somehow experience poverty. I'm talking the full-blown belly hungry, wearing rags, homeless, cold, and hopeless poverty that millions of essentially invisible people suffer through everyday. Just to get the full scope of the condition this experience would include living in a third-world slum being terrorized by drug gangs whose product invariably makes it way to the streets of America. Where things get so dangerous that Central Americans pack up their meager belongings to make a desperate trip to the believed safety of the United States.

I've seen the reports of whole families, moms with small children, to kids no older than twelve fleeing for their lives. It goes without saying that untold thousands die during that passage while others face exploitation that borders on slavery. Even if these refugees are extremely lucky by making it to the United States to find jobs and a home, they often have to face conditions ranging from indifference to outright hate from Americans.

You can guess they types of Americans I'm talking about. These monsters range from the semi-literate blue collar type who hates anyone with a darker skin tone. Then there are the uppity suburbanites who live in their protective two-thousand square feet cocoons and bitch about tax dollars going for foreign aid all the while clutching their Bibles signed by some mega-church preacher who drives an Italian sports car. (I'm talking Joel Olsteen and anyone else pulling this shit or close to it.)

I figure the average middle class American needs to spends anywhere from two weeks to two months in the shoes of a Central American refugee. Let's go whole hog and include in the experience the backbreaking, dangerous, and disgusting labor they provide so Americans won't get their hands dirty. The middle class folks love their cheap, year-round fruits and veggies never once thinking how they got to Walmart.

Ideally, after the average blue collar to middle class American survived this experience they would come to realize that they are far closer to being a refugee than ever joining the rich elites. That all it takes to fall down into bankruptcy and then poverty is for a recession to hit, or have a family member come down with a debilitating illness. That they can spend decades playing the accepted game of going to work everyday, paying taxes, never taking a handout, to one major disaster leaving them destitute and homeless.

For me, one of the bizarre aspects of our time is how the rich elites have deluded working class folks into believing they are on our side. That billionaires and multimillionaires gave a shit about the people who have to struggle with mortgages, pay bills, put food on the table, then deal with hospital bills and sending their kids to college. That a legion of welfare deadbeats and illegal aliens are going steal your precious lifestyle.

I don't come to my opinion just on a whim of bleeding heart liberal guilt. My mom was a mentally disturbed alcoholic who looked for companionship from similar individuals. I've experienced poverty of varying degrees and at times the uncertainty that comes with not knowing where you'll sleep some nights. Luckily, I only spent a few years in that situation before I went to live with my grandparents.

So poverty is not some abstract concept for me, when I see someone on the street I at least feel a hint of what they're going through. One of the major problems with our society is that many others can't, or simple refuse, see how others are forced to struggle.