Poverty is being single.
M.F. MoonzajerDynasties rise and fall according to what the Chinese used to call ‘the mandate of heaven’, but life for the peasant changes little.
Kenneth MinogueTags: politics history society poverty
They" hate us because they feel--and "they" are not wrong--that it is within our power to do so much more, and that we practice a kind of passive-aggressive violence on the Third World. We do this by, for example, demonizing tobacco as poison here while promoting cigarettes in Asia; inflating produce prices by paying farmers not to grow food as millions go hungry worldwide; skimping on quality and then imposing tariffs on foreign products made better or cheaper than our own; padding corporate profits through Third World sweatshops; letting drug companies stand by as millions die of AIDS in Africa to keep prices up on lifesaving drugs; and on and on.
We do, upon reaching a very high comfort level, mostly choose to go from ten to eleven instead of helping another guy far away go from zero to one.
We even do it in our own country. Barbara Ehrenreich's brilliant book Nickel and Dimed describes the impossibility of living with dignity or comfort as one of the millions of minimum-wage workers in fast food, aisle-stocking and table-waiting jobs. Their labor for next to nothing ensures that well-off people can be a little more pampered.
So if we do it to our own, what chance do foreigners have?
Tags: hate suffering ignorance violence poverty charity irresponsible extremism third-world passive-aggressive poverty-and-politics
I hate my country. There are so many rich people who don't share their shit. They're like spoiled little ten-year-old bullies on the playground. They hog the monkey bars and the slide and the seesaw. And if you complain even a little bit, if you try to get just one spin on the merry-go-round, the bullies beat the shit out of you.
Sherman AlexieTags: wealth class-warfare poverty greed bullies rich-vs-poor poverty-wealth class-divide
Most people in the Great Britain of (Adam) Smith's day lived in what most of us would regard as poverty. Hundreds of thousands were willing to risk the possibility of death in transit and years in indentured servitude for the chance to escape to the New World. Yet the population of Britain was probably better off economically than that of any major nation on the globe. To put relative poverty and wealth in perspective, let us take the standards of apparel considered necessary by ordinary day laborers, the lowest of the working poor, as recounted in The Wealth of Nations. In England, Smith reports, the poorest day laborer of either sex would be ashamed to appear in public without leather shoes. In Scotland, a rung lower on the ladder of national wealth, it was considered inappropriate for men of this class to appear without shoes, but not for women. In France, a rung rower still, custom held that both men and women laborers could appear shoeless in public. Below France there were many rungs in Europe. And below Europe there were many more rungs still. (p. 56)
Jerry Z. MullerTags: poverty shoes relative-poverty-and-wealth
Pursue money while you're alive, so that poverty will not pursue you when you're old.
Michael Bassey JohnsonTags: poverty make-hay-while-the-sun-shines
For I was hungry, while you had all you needed. I was thirsty, but you drank bottled water. I was a stranger, and you wanted me deported. I needed clothes, but you needed more clothes. I was sick, and you pointed out the behaviors that led to my sickness. I was in prison, and you said I was getting what I deserved. (RESV - Richard E. Stearns Version)
Richard StearnsTags: love compassion poverty christ gospel matthew-25
The poorest person on earth is not the person who has no job, no cars, no money and no house. The poorest person is the one who has no vision. Visionlessness is poverty in disguise.
Israelmore AyivorTags: money vision work dreams house poverty visions food-for-thought car cars poor job visionary poor-people extra-mile israelmore-ayivor perish no-vision poorest visionless visionlessness
She had spears of straw and grass in her hair, not like Ophelia gone mad through contact with Hamlet's madness, but because she had slept in some stable loft.
Victor HugoSome secret of nurture withered a generation or two before I arrived, if it had ever existed before among the poor, marginalized people on the edges of Europe from whom I descend. Both my parents grew up with a deep sense of poverty that was mostly emotional but that they imagined as material long after they clambered into the middle class, and so they were more like a pair of rivalrous older siblings than parents who see their children as extensions of themselves and their hopes. They were stuck in separateness.
I didn't realize anything was odd until I was already on my own and found out that not everyone's parents cut them off financially as soon as the law allowed. I tried to leave home unsuccessfully at fourteen and fifteen and sixteen and did so successfully at seventeen, heading off to another country, as far away as I could go, and once I got there I realized I was more on my own than I had anticipated: I was henceforth entirely repsonsible for myself and thus began a few years of poverty.
Tags: family parents poverty family-relationships coming-of-age 27-28
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