Who is poor and how should we treat them? The history is
interesting though his writing style seems to leave the juicy details in the
footnotes disappointingly. Tracking
attitudes about the poor seems like a job that could easily dredge up some
interesting and shocking language from pop culture. Anyway, as I think about
this I feel like giving our culture a break. The question of who should and
shouldn’t be considered poor, who deserves help and who doesn’t is ultimately
knotty because of the fact that it’s a micro and macro issue. Any one
individual’s situation is a STORY, a set of discrete circumstances. It’s not as
though every impoverished person will have an easy villain we can target to
pinpoint the cause of their misfortune. But we’re simple animals. We evolved
from the chimpanzees who were skittish enough to run up a tree when the wind
rustled the tall grass, not from those who chose to ignore it and had their
throats ripped out by a saber-toothed tiger. Effects must have causes, and our
brains demand that those causes be clear, near, and simple. So the man in heavy
work clothes holding a cardboard sign I drove past on the way here? The literal
hundreds of us who passed him on Noland Road had to take at least a moment –
consciously or unconsciously – to figure out why we didn’t stop and help him.
I tend
to lean towards the micro. If I give him $5, that’s enough to buy just enough
of something to contribute to his possible dependency problem. Of course,
therein lies the prejudice. That story makes sense to me – beggar takes his
alms and runs to perpetuate his problems. I’ve hurt him by helping him. Of
course, I also see the macro, and it leaves me equally paralyzed. Here’s a
person with limited options, whose misfortunes have put him in a position of shame
the equal of which our society only has a few levels below – maybe the bright
orange jumpsuit of the “perp walk”. And even if he turned my $5 into a small
bottle of booze to help the obliterate the pain temporarily, the trap is
unavoidable. ‘Why doesn’t he get a job?’ I’m sure many other drivers think on
their way by him. As though it were that easy. There’s that monkey brain again:
him need money, job give money, him need job, why him not go get job. The psychological, social, emotional, legal,
and familial load that any person bears everywhere tangles and twists. Things
are complicated. But we want simple answers.
As I
read this though, I found myself catching whiffs of an anti-capitalist
sentiment that I find troubling. It’s not that I don’t see problems with
capitalism; it’s that poking holes in the system doesn’t create a new and
better system. So I find myself wondering, well, what then? I certainly don’t
trust “the market” to solve all of our ills, but I can’t wrap my brain around
many solutions that would effectively “end” poverty.
Prepare yourself for a
massive leap of an analogy: Today my students read “Stopping by Woods on a
Snowy Evening.” After getting past all the literal interpretations : “he’s an
assassin who is going to kill someone,” “he’s a robber who is going to the man
who owns the woods house,” “he’s lost in the woods.” We started digging into
the poem. As with any great poem the experience, no matter how many times
you’ve read that poem with that type of kid, is always massively different.
We honed our analysis in on this moment. There he is contemplating those
“lovely, dark, and deep” woods – pining for them (pun intended). But what moves
him on? What pushes him forward? “I have promises to keep.” My students began
to discuss life as a never ending series of obligations pushing us forward,
creating our meaning for us. And when I read this, I find myself thinking that
(and I know this is a horrible thought probably planted in my liberal brain my
brilliant and conservative father) maybe the gritty and sometimes vicious
results of poverty are the gears of capitalism turning. That without the threat
of those consequences, we stare into the deep, dark forest and wander off into
the snow.
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