the poorer you are the faster you gotta grow up
Man
Tag: poverty tw
Paul Ryan once argued that “liberal government programs give people comfort, but not dignity.”
And to justify cutting Welfare and defunding food programs, Republicans disingenuously equate having the basic necessities needed to live — like food — to dignity. Following that logic, are we to believe that wealthy people somehow have more dignity than poor people, because they have more access to more resources like housing, food and clean drinking water? Do the mostly white residents of Bismarck North Dakota have more dignity than the Native Americans at Standing Rock? Do Donald Trump’s children somehow have more “dignity” than does Little Miss Flint? Because Trump’s children don’t need to depend on free lunch programs?
Wealth ≠ dignity.
Access to resources ≠ dignity.
People living in or born into poverty do not have less dignity. They have less wealth and less political power.
Providing free school lunches to children living in poverty doesn’t “give kids an empty soul” it simply feeds hungry children. Feeding a hungry child is not “giving them undue comfort” or making them lazy, it’s simply feeding a hungry child. How did feeding hungry children become a controversial act for “Christian” conservatives?
Intentionally starving children to teach them the “dignity” of hunger is inhumane.
Stop stigmatizing poverty. Stop equating poverty with a lack of dignity. Stop reinforcing the notion that poor people have no dignity just because they’re poor. There is no nobility in starvation, and there is no benevolence in allowing children or anyone else to go hungry when you possess the power to prevent it.
Read the Open Letter to the CEO of Yelp thing. Also, the reactions to it.
It’s hilarious to me, how this now works.
“You should’ve expected to be fired for this.” Yeah. She did. But after months of starving herself and recognizing she will never claw her way out of this hole, she at least wants to say something. Of course, low wage employees should be silent and grateful for their gruel, right? How dare they talk back or have emotions.
“You complained about the snacks!” Complained? No, she said that the snacks provided at work are literally her only meal, the only food she can afford outside a bowl of rice every day. The only way to interpret what she said as “complaining about the snacks,” is in the context of “I am complaining that all I can afford to eat are snacks and am slowly starving.”
“What did you expect, living in an expensive area like the Bay Area?”
Counter question: Why is this never asked to the employers? So lets actually humor these chucklefucks and say that Yelp, one of the most well known and used websites, literally cannot afford to pay their employees a living wage… because its the Bay Area.
Why are they located there, then? Why are they not located in a more reasonable location that frees them up to pay a living wage? They’re the ones who picked that location and you want to tell me they have zero responsibility in this? No sale.
I mean, sure, if they moved to a less fancy area, they’d have to give up some local conveniences and networking opportunities and some of their favorite eateries, but hey, you have to make sacrifices when your new to the working world. That’s what it takes to “live within your means,” right?
“More whiny, entitled Millennials.”
Uh huh. The world will be a marginally better place when people who sneer at “millennials” finally fucking die.
Power to Talia Jane, and fuck Yelp.
Reblogging this since I have actually seen this fucking argument on my dash this morning.
More Than Half of Americans Reportedly Have Less Than $1,000 to Their Name
In a recent survey, 56 percent of Americans said they have less than $1,000 in their checking and savings accounts combined, Forbes reports. Nearly a quarter (24.8 percent) have less than $100 to their name. Meanwhile, 38 percent said they would pay less than their full credit card balance this month, and 11 percent said they would make the minimum payment—meaning they would likely be mired in debt for years and pay more in interest than they originally borrowed. It paints a daunting picture of the average American coming out of the spend-heavy holiday season: steeped in credit card debt, living paycheck-to-paycheck, at serious risk of financial ruin if the slightest thing goes wrong.
nearly a quarter of the US has less than $100 to their name so stop complaining about donation posts and start complaining about your shitty government
this article got me pissy because i have literally never known a single person who didn’t live like this, i thought this was just normal, and now i find out there’s a whole section of the world writing articles like this being all, “DID YOU KNOW?!?!?!?!?!? CAN YOU IMAGINE HOW THESE PEOPLE LIVE?!?!?!?!?!” and i’m like hey i’m right fucking here ok just ‘cause i don’t pay down my credit card every month doesn’t mean i don’t read esquire
Canada is not magically free of problems, but more and more I am baffled by what our neighbours are expected to put up with.
Jesus, and I considered myself extremely poor when I had less than a thousand in my checking account, never mind my savings account…
America, you need serious help…
I haven’t been working for six months and I have more money in my account than this. That’s not me boasting, that’s me going WHAT THE FUCK IS WRONG WITH THE US???? It continues to disgust me how the system is MADE to keep pouring money to those who don’t need it while stealing it from those who have nothing. What the ever loving hell???
It also permanently fucks up our ideas about money, to a degree that makes it harder for people who get out of poverty to stay out of poverty. When money is an ephemeral thing that can never be saved or increased, only spent, figuring out how to make your money work for you is virtually impossible.
More Than Half of Americans Reportedly Have Less Than $1,000 to Their Name
“Money doesn’t buy happiness” ok and poverty buys what exactly
where is the lie
Out of poverty creates strength and compassion. It’s weird how that works.
i sure wasn’t feeling the strength when i was skipping class because i was too weak to walk there after going 2-3 days without food, and i definitely wasn’t compassionate when i was checking every time i walked home to see if there was an eviction notice on the door. stop trying to fucking make it seem like a good thing.
Poverty is not a virtue. It doesn’t make you a better person. Poverty doesn’t make you “strong and compassionate” it makes you insecure and stressed the fuck out. Poverty makes it so you can’t live your life without the everything being undercut by fear. It makes you hard and angry. We need to do away with the bullshit myth that being poor is somehow better for you as a person. You know who wants you to believe that? Rich people, so you don’t question them.
Mental health worker here. These are things I’ve heard different clients say about being poor:
- the only reason they’re considering suicide is because they’re terrified of being poor again and if they’re dead then at least their kids (whom they love) would get their life-insurance payout and not have to live in poverty while growing up
- that the poverty they live in is inescapable except by desperation sex work they hate, because they’re so mentally ill that they can’t work other jobs–but the sex work makes their mental illness worse because they hate it so much. So it’s an inescapable cycle of mental illness–>poverty–>mental illness
- they’re so poor that they can’t stop their anorexia because they literally don’t have the money to buy food anyway and at least this way they feel good about not eating
- that they can’t come in to therapy that week even though they need and want to because they can’t afford the session
Poverty teaches and reinforces misery and self-hatred. It does not teach strength, it leaches strength until there is nothing left and healing is difficult if not impossible. Often, healing, recovery, and the building of true strength and resiliency are reserved only for those who have the money and leisure time to pursue them.
Poverty did not teach me to be strong and compassionate.
Poverty taught me to eat out of trash cans even when people judged me for doing it, because otherwise I threw up and passed out from sheer hunger.
Poverty taught me to let a “friend” treat me like shit because his mother thought we might start dating so she made steak every time I came over, STEAK, and one meal at his house could mean saving enough food at home to feed my sisters twice.
Poverty taught me that the police were never on my side.
Poverty taught me I deserved what I got.
I was nine when we plunged into deep poverty, and I would not wish that on anyone, and I especially would not wish it on a child.
I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again. Poverty did not make me a better person. It made me a paranoid person. It made me absolutely terrified of the thought of ever being as poor as we were when I was a kid ever again. It makes me question every dollar I spend. It gave me chronic nightmares for years, left me tired and angry and less emotionally stable than I otherwise would have been. It kept me from taking the unpaid internships I should have been doing to give myself the experience I needed to get work in my field, because I couldn’t afford a summer of not making any money and having someone take me back and forth to an internship that wasn’t earning me a paycheck (because you can’t afford to drive, or to buy anything more expensive than a money-sucking junker car when you’re not working, either). It kept me from making friends in school and in college, because I didn’t have the money to go and hang out and enjoy myself, or the money to live on campus and participate in activities meant for people who didn’t have to go home and grab a few hours of sleep so they could be up at 6:30 the next morning to commute in.
Poverty meant that I never, ever took risks, even simple kid risks like climbing trees, because we didn’t have health insurance, and if I broke something, that was several weeks or months worth of groceries that we couldn’t have afforded, and I knew that. It means that I have no idea of office protocol about some things because my parents didn’t work in offices. They didn’t come home talking about who did what at the office today. They came home dead tired at the end of the day, talking about how many times they’d gotten treated like shit, and by extension, I learned that work was something that everyone did and everyone hated. There was no concept of loving your work in my family, because no one had a career – they had a job that treated them like the dirt under someone’s boot, because they were poor. Being poor doesn’t make you strong.
When someone works for less pay than she can live on — when, for example, she goes hungry so that you can eat more cheaply and conveniently — then she has made a great sacrifice for you, she has made you a gift of some part of her abilities, her health, and her life. The ‘working poor,’ as they are approvingly termed, are in fact the major philanthropists of our society. They neglect their own children so that the children of others will be cared for; they live in substandard housing so that other homes will be shiny and perfect; they endure privation so that inflation will be low and stock prices high. To be a member of the working poor is to be an anonymous donor, a nameless benefactor, to everyone else.
― Barbara Ehrenreich, Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America. (via howtobeterrell)
There’s one major flaw with this. It frames the act of living as a poor person as one that is voluntary. It’s not. It’s imposed on people by those with more money from the moment you’re born until the moment you die in the same shitty little town you were born in, or in some other shitty little town where somebody knows you as the janitor or the lunch lady or the waitress at the diner, or that old lady that’s been eating cat food for the past three years because she can’t afford actual food. It’s not something that anyone willingly chooses, precisely because it does take you away from family and deprive you of sleep and health and acceptable living conditions and anything resembling leisure time. It’s not a donation, and to term it such makes it seem like anybody volunteers to get ground under the feet of the powerful.
“Money doesn’t buy happiness” ok and poverty buys what exactly
“Money doesn’t buy happiness” ok and poverty buys what exactly
where is the lie
“Money doesn’t buy happiness” ok and poverty buys what exactly
where is the lie
Out of poverty creates strength and compassion. It’s weird how that works.
“Money doesn’t buy happiness” ok and poverty buys what exactly
where is the lie
Out of poverty creates strength and compassion. It’s weird how that works.
i sure wasn’t feeling the strength when i was skipping class because i was too weak to walk there after going 2-3 days without food, and i definitely wasn’t compassionate when i was checking every time i walked home to see if there was an eviction notice on the door. stop trying to fucking make it seem like a good thing.
“Money doesn’t buy happiness” ok and poverty buys what exactly
where is the lie
Out of poverty creates strength and compassion. It’s weird how that works.
i sure wasn’t feeling the strength when i was skipping class because i was too weak to walk there after going 2-3 days without food, and i definitely wasn’t compassionate when i was checking every time i walked home to see if there was an eviction notice on the door. stop trying to fucking make it seem like a good thing.
Poverty is not a virtue. It doesn’t make you a better person. Poverty doesn’t make you “strong and compassionate” it makes you insecure and stressed the fuck out. Poverty makes it so you can’t live your life without the everything being undercut by fear. It makes you hard and angry. We need to do away with the bullshit myth that being poor is somehow better for you as a person. You know who wants you to believe that? Rich people, so you don’t question them.
This is the damn truth. Poverty didn’t make me a better person. It made me a suspicious, anxious, hard, cold person that stopped giving a shit about other people because I literally couldn’t afford to do so. It has taken years of work to get to the point where I allow myself to care again and even now, my gut reaction to financial issues and people around me having them is to run like they could somehow drag me back to the days when I was a frightened, angry teenager staring eviction in the face (because in all reality, they could. We’re still so close to the knife edge of not having enough to cover expenses but now at least the house isn’t mortgaged and I’m working). so no, being poor didn’t make me compassionate, or strong, or any other bullshit virtue that’s somehow supposed to grow out of the grinding horror of not knowing whether you’re going to have food on the table or a roof over your head this time next month. Those things came out of getting out and seeing how poor people should be treated rather than how we were.
Meg's Mumbles 