Poor is an attitude

[dawbs]

It's the 'happy darkie' mentality, isn't it?

Just expanded into other countries and races. It's not understanding that money doesn't buy happiness...but it can buy some contentment.

[Wolfie]

A lot of people who have never had any long term experience with poverty (either being surrounded by it or living it) don't understand that when you are worried about when your next meal is going to come and whether you are going to have a roof over your head that night, you don't have time to worry about things like whether or not you are happy, or if you want to do a family night that week.

This.

And even now I teach in a poor school district, but I have taught in poorer- and some people try to tell me just how poor this district is, and it doesn't compare. In this district, the vast majority of families have time to think of family and fun, and not just survival, or how many people they can fit in a house before the landlord kicks them out.

[browngrl]

I searched for the article that prompted this blogger to write this diatribe about our materialistic /depressed society. I think this might be it: blogher.com/impoverished-parenting?page=0,0

The article is NOT about someone whinging about the lack of junk food/material goods - it is a post about how a woman is coping with her reduced financial state post divorce. I guess there is no reason for fundies to let truth get in the way of a godly lecture.

[2xx1xy1JD]

I searched for the article that prompted this blogger to write this diatribe about our materialistic /depressed society. I think this might be it: blogher.com/impoverished-parenting?page=0,0

The article is NOT about someone whinging about the lack of junk food/material goods - it is a post about how a woman is coping with her reduced financial state post divorce. I guess there is no reason for fundies to let truth get in the way of a godly lecture.

Thanks for that link.

The first article seems to have a problem with basic reading comprehension. The second article isn't complaining about the lack of junk food at all. She is talking about trips to the food bank, so clearly the level of poverty isn't just a question of attitude, but she's also clearly proud of the ways in which she is managing to cope and provide for her kids.

I do know people IRL who actually do have attitude issues, and think that the world is going to end because they can't afford a luxury condo or large house, or who consider used clothes akin to child abuse, and if the first article was about people like that, it would make more sense. Even at that point, though, I'd still cringe at the idea of naively calling malnourished kids "happy". You may not be able to cry every second, and at some point, people may simply accept a situation and cope as best as they can, but nobody is truly happy that they and their children are starving.

[gardenvarietycitizen]

Except that there are people who live that way in the US, and Canada. We just prefer to call them homeless and shuffle them off to some out of the way place because those who do have a place to live don't want to have them in the middle of a major city reminding them that there are people in an industrialized, wealthy country who live without proper housing, running water, electricity, or reliable means of feeding themselves and/or their family.

Yes. There are homeless.

But being homeless and living in a tent in the park is not legal. Living in a lean-to made from from tin pieces and a tarp in a park as part of a large shantytown settlement that's been around for years (albeit with various people coming in and out) and has evolved to the point that there are markets servicing it and local governments at least turn a blind eye is a very different thing from trying to do that in a city in the US.

A few years ago in my town some homeless people explicitly tried to start a tent city. They saw some models of experiments in Oregon, and pitched tents together, and asked about putting up some simple wooden lean-tos or something to help with bad weather. But of course it was turned down, because it's against code to live in a minimal shelter like that, and all the land is private. There are official "hours" posted on all the parks. A church offered to let the camp exist on church property, and yet it was still turned down. There were worries that once you start something like that, there will be a race to the bottom, because then people will say hell, why have regular public housing, they can just pitch tents. So, long story short, it didn't happen. (Lack of true public space is a problem in the US.)

In Japan you can find some homeless people living in "blue sheet houses" (structures made largely of blue tarps) in parks, but yes, it's illegal and they're run off regularly, though tolerated more than in the US perhaps. But those parks have public bathrooms and water spigots available (a normal thing!!), which isn't the case in much of the US (ordinary just wandering non-settled homeless people have a hard time finding places to use the bathroom during the day).

I just don't think it's reasonable for people to say "well, no one in the US should complain about being poor or homeless, because they should just look how they do it in poorer countries and pitch a tent by the road and quit whining." There are people in the US who live on $1 a day perhaps, but they are not in the same relative place on the social and economic ladder as people living on $1 a day in places where far more "mainstream" people do it.

[gardenvarietycitizen]

Plus being "rich" or "poor" also depends on where you live and what the people around you have. In a third world country, the kid who owns a rubber football can be seen as "rich". In other parts of the world, a child is considered "poor" if the parents can't afford to buy a bicycle or have one functioning computer with Internet access in the household.

Yes, we are rich in the Western countries but that doesn't make it fair for parents to deny their kids everything with the excuse "oh, but think about the kids in Africa".

Yes. A lot of it depends on how much access to power or social things that you have at the given level. If NO one in your neighborhood has electricity or internet, you're not poor to not have it. If, on the other hand, you can't take care of basic living needs without it, then you're poor without it. If the mayor doesn't have running water or electricity, that's an entirely different social world to judge relative poverty in than your average modern US city.

I don't think internet is quite to that place yet (but it's getting there, and yes, my town is starting to think of things that way) but phone and heating have been for quite some time now. And most libraries think of their internet service as at least partly the backup plan for families who don't have internet at home because it is getting to be more critical for getting bureaucratic stuff done (including job searches!!!). Yet, plenty of people live without phones elsewhere in the world (probably fewer now as cell services have developed - way cheaper to deploy than land lines).