Via Shakes comes the story of an over privileged doochenozzel who thought he would prove to the world that poor people really are poor because they are lazy and don’t understand the value of hard work and savings.
Let’s start with a few things the asswipe forgot on his way to playing poor.
1) He’s a dude, a young, single white dude with no children. When looking at the census numbers, women between 18 & 64 with children are 30% more likely to be poor than a man in the exact same situation. Elderly women are are 2.7 times more likely to be poor than elderly men.
The numbers are even more disturbing when looking at race. Overall, 22% of Black men and 26% of Black women live in poverty. For whites, only 9.1% of white men are poor.
So before we even look at things like education, he starts out with a greater likelihood of being able to earn a living than virtually everybody else in the country.
But that’s not all folks. He starts with a college education. Some of us (me, hello) have been working on a college education for about 12 years now because we do not have the funds to both support ourselves and attend school full time. Financial aid, for the poorest of us, barely covers tuition and books. It is not uncommon for students to work full time (or more) and attend school full time. And when that is the situation and somethings gotta give (like say your boss threatens to fire you because your class schedule is interfering with his work scheduling) it is usually school that goes first. An education is great but it’s damn hard to get an education while homeless, so basic needs get met first. That’s simple human psychology. I would love to introduce the doochnozzle to Maslov’s pyramid, but since he already has a college education I am sure he knows about it.
So he’s a young single white dude with an education. And he’s healthy, in no small part due to the fact that he probably had things like health care and good dental work up until he decided playing at poverty was a solid plan. Do you know how many days of work I have missed because of an abscessed tooth? More than a week. If I had dental coverage I could get it root canaled and crowned, or even just pulled. But I don’t have it. And neither do most people in poverty.
And let’s not forget, it’s not like he’s really poor. He had a credit card with him for emergencies. He had a way out of awful anytime he chose. He could quit a job if his boss was a dick. Some of us don’t have that option, especially poor women who are sexually harassed (oh that’s another one I have experience with multiple time over). And if worse came to worse, say if he didn’t have the money to pay his car insurance and it lapsed and he got pulled over and arrested for it, well he still has Mom and Dad and his credit card to bail him out.
Poverty means there is no out. There is no back up plan, there is no benevolent savior, there is no way to save for a rainy day when you’re $300 in the hole every month for just basic living expenses. Poverty is awful because it is finite for the individual in it. The myth of the bootstrap is just that. The tokens of exceptionalism that are occasionally trotted out in front of us are no different from the Catholic church telling feudal peasants that if they were good they’d get rewarded in heaven. Poverty is not an individual disease, it is a cancer on the society that creates it. Only massive changes to that society will cure it.
So Mr. Doochnozzle, you start out with a shit ton of privilege and you end with no real knowledge of what poverty looks like.
