I'm poor. My family's poor. My friends are poor. I'm a teacher, and my students are poor. And you know what we have in common? It's not laziness.
My mom has worked her ass off every single day since before I was born, and she's not slowing down. She raised three kids alone, she's throwing everything she has into making sure my disabled sister can have a life, she has a physically demanding job that she has to take home with her, she will never be able to retire, and I have never met anyone who works harder or with a better attitude than her. She never had kids out of wedlock. She never did drugs. She got a college education and a career. She married someone who had a college education and a career. She did everything right. And yet she lives below the poverty line.
Saying poor people in the US are just poor because they're lazy is wrong on so many levels.
One: it's factually incorrect. Your income depends on your health, race, gender, connections (which in turn depends on your family and your neighborhood), and - I know no one wants to believe it - luck. For some people, joblessness and homelessness are one car accident or one cancer diagnosis away.
Two: once you're in poverty, it is incredibly difficult to come out. And children are born into poverty every day.
Three: even if it were true that poverty is always self-inflicted by laziness (which it isn't), claiming so is just an excuse to not be understanding or compassionate to people less fortunate than you. Even if you help out, if you do it with the "Oh, these poor stupid souls need me to show them how to live the right way" attitude, you're ultimately not doing it for anyone's benefit but your own. Now you get to be the martyr who extended an olive branch at your own expense to the dirty Neanderthals who don't even realize how much they need your pity.
Don't tell people to pull themselves up by their bootstraps. It's literally impossible. That's what the phrase was originally meant to convey.
Don't tell people they earn exactly the amount of money they work for. Bill Gates makes over $100 per second. You telling me he's honestly working hard enough to justify all of that? Every second of every day? Including when he's asleep?
Don't tell people they can't call themselves poor if they have things. I have no reason to sell my refrigerator or my video games, and if I did, they would in total cover maybe a couple of weeks of medical expenses.
Don't tell people "you should've just done xyz and avoided abc", because hindsight serves no one even if another person's life or character could be summed up into one sentence with black and white bullet points. People aren't cardboard signs or bumper stickers. There is more to every person you have ever met and will ever meet than you know, including the people you spend your entire life with.
Bad things happen to people who make good choices, and good things happen to people who make bad choices. Try to be understanding of that fact.
And to everyone who has ever rolled their eyes at me for claiming my poverty isn't 100% my own doing, everyone who has ever sneered at my mom for making less money than them, and everyone who believes that a person's wealth is the same as their worth: FUCK. YOU.
Submitted May 20, 2017 at 09:30PM by somecallmenonny http://ift.tt/2qIChr8 offmychest
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