The Symptom of Poverty

Ever since the last "economic crisis" hit there has been no shortage of articles and studies on poverty. I have read a fair number of the articles and listened to many different pundits express their opinions. While some were certainly well meaning and even informative, others simply espousing the same old toxic stew of rhetorical and logical fallacy. In the end much of what I have read, seen or heard about poverty has left me with a hollow feeling and more questions than answers.

Why is the fact evermore broken lives and dreams are being thrown on the human scrap heap all of a sudden headline news? What about the people who have long been on the bottom of that scrap heap? There has been a steady growing underclass of the destitute for generations that got very little mention from the MSM outside of the pretext of crime and drugs or the seminal stories of those who have risen above poverty to achieve great things.

Perhaps the addition of fresher faced formerly-middle-class workers to the mosaic of poverty has provided the mainstream media (MSM) with a more appealing demographic to showcase? The media calls them the "newly poor". In reality they have probably been poor for much longer but were sheltered from poverty's realities by a shroud of debt. Or they were the working poor living a meager pay cheque to pay cheque existence and rapidly descended into abject poverty once their salary could no longer keep up with the rising costs of living or was lost to unemployment.

The increase in poverty news from some sources is an attempt to confuse and even control any meaningful discussion about poverty. We like to think the MSM is there to inform us, after all they frequently profess to do so, but the reality is they are often the broadcasters of spin and obfuscation. They package poverty as a tangled mass of drugs, crime, laziness, evidence of a failing public education system (and used to support private education), a screed that "we" are not doing enough, proof the social security net is a black hole never to be filled and even as not being all that bad of a "job."

The MSM is often accused of bias. Bias of ideology and political party affiliation are the usual accusations. The real goal of the media is not to manipulate the discussion for the direct benefit of any particular ideology. They manipulate the discussion to create confusion. This is why the far-right reader can accuse the media of being "left" and the far-left reader can accuse them of being "neoconservative". They can't be both can they? Sure they can if all they do is confuse the hell out of everybody. And so it has become with poverty, despite all the recent media attention, we may be more confused about the subject than ever before.

What is Poverty?

If we are going to make any attempt to see through the confusion and find solutions to poverty one of the first question we need to ask is - What is poverty? The dictionary says the state of being poor is "not having enough money." Is that really true in a capitalist society?

If you have seen poverty in developing countries it is hard to say that poverty is merely a lack of cash. More money will not provide clean drinking water, secure housing and the ability to shop for healthy foods in a place where the infrastructure does not exist to supply those things to the people. I also have serious doubts just dumping money on the homeless or long-term victims of generational poverty in a capitalist society would do much good for many of them either.

The word poverty has become a loaded word with more than one practical meaning. The meager lifestyle afforded the unemployed but not yet homeless here, would be a standard working class lifestyle in many less fortunate countries. This leads some who have seen the disgraceful standards of living in other countries to have little sympathy for the North American poor. I contend they are not comparing apples to apples.

The poverty in the slums of Africa, Asia or South America is difficult to compare to what we see in North America. But the site of a young child drinking from a filthy stream as his family baths and washes clothes in the same stream is no less or more heart-wrenching than the site of an elderly lady dumpster diving for dinner. What we are seeing are two very different kinds of poverty. One is the poverty of nascent industrialization the other of post-industrialization. In simpler terms, the poor in developing countries suffer from not being lifted up, while the poor in our society suffer from being beaten down.

The poor in North America have been beaten down by the class system, by the media, by good intention, by their own representatives, their own people and by capitalism. The beating down involves removing opportunity, demoralizing, stigmatizing and cultivating the ignorance of the lowest wage earners. Many of the poor need more than just money in order to be able to get a stable foothold in our capitalist greed driven society. Providing money to people who are in despair, who may lack life skills and a support network and who have been the victims of the propaganda of ignorance for decades may appeal to some. However, doing so without the understanding that we are dealing with a larger problem than just money will not solve the problem and may even make it worse. Poverty is about more than just money. Poverty in North America is the fundamental breakdown of our society as a whole.

Honesty

Any meaningful discussion of poverty is impossible unless we are willing to be honest with ourselves. Poverty has many faces. The people living in poverty can be hard working families struggling in low wage work, single-parents, people looking after an elderly parent, laid-off workers, people suffering from a physical disability or mental illness, or screw-ups, no-good lazy welfare-bums, crack-addled street hustlers. The discussion must include the entire demographic. We need to talk about both the people feeling the economic effects of society's breakdown and those feeling the full burden. Both parts are too large to ignore at this point.

"The comfort of the rich depends upon an abundant supply of the poor."
- Voltaire

We humans are living out an epic morality play. For millennia humanity’s most celebrated spiritual teachers have taught that society works best and we all enjoy our greatest joy and fulfillment when we share, cooperate, and are honest in our dealings with one another.
But for the past few decades, this truth has been aggressively challenged by a faith called market fundamentalism—an immoral and counter-factual economic ideology that has assumed the status of a modern state religion. Its believers worship the God of money. Stock exchanges and global banks are their temples. They proclaim that everyone does best when we each seek to maximize our individual financial gain without regard to the consequences for others.

In the eyes of a market fundamentalist, to sacrifice profit for some presumed social or environmental good is immoral. The result is a diseased public culture that proclaims greed is a virtue and sharing is a sin. The symptom of this disease is poverty.