The beauty of poverty

 

Poverty, to be picturesque, should be rural. Suburban misery is as hideous as it is pitiable.
Anthony Trollope
 

The picture above is of my grandparents' home where they raised 13 children. It had two rooms and a vegetable garden outside. It sits astride a desolate moor where the wind howls and the panorama is breathtaking. My grandfather was a herdsman for the local farmers, that job entailed walking around the small mountain (large hill) opposite this cottage and ensuring all of their cattle were accounted for. My mum and her siblings often went cavorting around the mountain with him although I imagine as children they were faster and found it more enjoyable than my grandfather.

 

If a free society cannot help the many who are poor, it cannot save the few who are rich.

John F. Kennedy

 

 



My own childhood was in a different kind of poverty, with very different challenges. My parents left the stone cottages of rural poverty and moved into the sprawling poverty of the urban estates the government built in the 1970's to rescue the rural poor of Northern Ireland from their two room stone cottages on desolate moors. The difficulty with cramming so many impoverished people together into row houses is that we tend to get out of control. The image above is ingrained as "normal" in my mind.

 

It never ceases to amaze me how naive the professional classes are when it comes to poverty. It was painfully obvious they had no idea why the children of the people they'd "rescued" from rural poverty were so angry and so prone to violence.

 

Now I'm in America and my American friends are inundated with political sound bites promising Nirvana for the middle classes and an access point for everyone else to either join the middle class from the horror of working class or as a safe harbor so they can pretend they aren't really one of the 1%. It seems there are no poor people in America who actually vote. For not one politician has yet to speak to them about their problems. Except perhaps to promise everyone else that we'll figure out a way to stop them from being "poor" and that one day they'll figure out how to get rid of those poor people.

 

I was poor. Today I am no longer poor. I live in luxury undreamed of by my grandparents or my parents. But more than half the people on this planet still carve out an existence from horrific poverty while looking out at well fed faces peering into their world as if at exotic creatures at the local zoo!