Why I Am Fortunate to Have Been Raised in Poverty

 

A short time ago, I became eligible for my Covid vaccine. I embraced the chance. I was never worried about catching Covid, or dying from it. I am old enough to know death is always around the corner. I am also fortunate to have had such a wealth of experiences in life that I probably have used up other people’s quotas of pleasure, as well.

The Covid vaccine works by injecting a small quantity of dead Covid-19 virus into your body. Your immune system rushes to repel the intruders and, over the course of attacking these invaders, builds up antibodies. For me, that is the way life works. You deal with welcome visitors and events every day, but you also deal with unwelcome experiences. Those unwelcome ones teach you more and prepare you more thoroughly for life than the pleasurable events.

If I wanted to approach life pessimistically, I could complain about how inequitable life had been to me as a child. Extreme poverty, social isolation, lack of opportunity, prejudice … all the common complaints of those people who view themselves as poor and as victims. But none of that is true. I was blessed to have been raised in a radically impoverished environment. I believe that I have been more fortunate than most people raised in a middle-class or upper-class community.

My claims likely will arouse the ire of those who believe that everyone who is poor is there due to circumstances beyond their control, that everyone who lives in poverty wants to remove himself from that experience or that everyone even views poverty as an undesirable condition. Let them be upset! Sanctimony does not bring a person closer to understanding and paternal attitudes about others do very little to heal any chasms that exist.

In truth, I am one of the lucky hundreds of millions in the western world who are defined by our income, rather than who we are. If we have a lack of material wealth, relative to an arbitrary standard of poverty, we are not just branded as “poor,” but we are branded as being part of a lower socio-economic class. In other words, lack of money has also relegated us to a lower social echelon, by virtue of that economic paucity.  It is a condescending phrase borne of a condescending attitude.

Live the life before you critique!

My parents struggled to earn the money they needed to raise their family, but they never failed to keep us in clothes, living under a roof, eating a meal. That made us richer, in money, than many others in this world. However, we had advantages that many other children desperately need. Our parents instilled – no, drilled – in us the belief that a lack of knowledge, a lack of morality and a lack of curiosity were far more insidious symptoms of true poverty than a lack of cash could ever represent. That made us richer than the wealthiest children raised without intellectual and ethical curiosity and conviction to act on those values.

Still, I was raised in a two hundred sixty square foot house, built from recovered lumber from an old garage, without heat. Six of us lived in that tiny space. Our family’s income never exceeded $1,500 in a year (slightly over $9,000 in today’s dollars) and averaged under $900. One room of the house had no floor. We had no television for the first eleven years of my life. Most times, we had no car, but lived in the country. Not one of us ever had a single piece of new clothing. We had no indoor plumbing and no source of running water. If we got sick, we recovered or we did not: there was absolutely no commercial medication; just the natural remedies that grew around us. The list of supposed markers of poverty were everywhere, but, still, I was not poor in social status or in the wealth of experiences.

My life was a Huck Finn/Tom Sawyer existence. Because we had nothing, we found excitement and joy in the smallest of things: spring runoff water, playing cricket with tin cans and sticks or building a helicopter with old pieces of metal, car seats, wood and branches. Because we had nothing we needed to improvise and create and, from that, I have learned extensive lessons in all the trades and crafts.

Not having wealth and living in a community that had only a modestly higher standard of living than we did, we learned to rely, not on money, but on knowledge and ability. A lowly farmer can fix any piece of equipment or create a tool where none exists, yet he is regarded as of a lower class when his ability actually is superior to most.

While the stress of living hand-to-mouth can be immense and lead to family conflict, it also strengthens bonds by compelling people to work together to achieve a goal. From that joint effort arises camaraderie and from that camaraderie grows real friendships and the willingness to overlook differences and find commonality.

How many of the wealthy could survive a week of pure income hardship; not relative, but pure? Go without even one meal. Do without a vehicle or the money to pay for gas. Have to scavenge for wild plants for your vegetable part of the meal? Wear clothes worn by strangers until they were threadbare then handed off to the unfortunates? Even do without telephone, Internet or television for only a day or so? Walk to work in the snow, slush and rain because he or she could not afford the luxury of public transportation?

The peculiar result of living every moment without the supposed security of money accomplishes several things. First, it forces independence and self-reliance on an individual. It fosters creativity as we struggle to survive. And, oddly, it develops a perverse pride in many of us, as we recognize that it is not we who are poor in many ways: it is the wealthy who lack the breadth and depth of experience that our lives cultivate. Indeed, more than a few of us actually look down on the rich, because they are, in our eyes, weakened by their lavish lifestyles.

We can survive in the harshest of conditions but that also means that we can embrace the meagre pleasures that come our way. Yes, most of us would welcome the money, but we do not need it. We have intelligence that comes from living life day-to-day.

Most of us have learned to understand others and see their plight sympathetically. That holds true for how we view the rich. We can see that they, too, have to struggle. But we also see that it is a choice for them and not a choice for us.  We have learned the value of the moment. We have learned the value of other people. We have learned to lend a helping hand, instead of a boot to the face of people near us, who are attempting to keep themselves from drowning in economic hardship. We understand, because we have been through it.

It is true that poverty is not a disease or a virus, but it is a threat, and my dose of poverty has helped immunize me against the risk it poses. I have gained. I have learned to respect others and treat them fairly. I have learned that no person is inferior because of income or social status. I have learned generosity of spirit. I have learned self-reliance. I have learned the value of every moment in the world around me. I have learned that, had I been raised in an economically affluent lifestyle, I likely would not have had the advantage of experiencing these lessons so deeply. So, yes, I am one of the fortunate people who was raised in poverty, and for that, I am richer.

The Not-So_Subtle Connection Between Stress and Poverty

 People are poor because they are less intelligent that others, right? People who are poor are less educated than the wealthy because they are less intelligent, right? People are poor because they lack confidence and drive, right? Poor people perform more poorly at most tasks because they are unwilling to devote their energy to the task, right? WRONG, on all counts!

Stress obviously goes hand in hand with poverty, but rich people also worry about money. The difference is that the poor don't worry simply about money. Ongoing, continual poverty creates an environment of stress in which conflict, food insecurity, violence and housing worries, among many others arises because of the stress, but also feeds the stress even more. Thus, the entire milieu of poverty perpetuates the stress, which gives rise to other issues, which makes climbing out of poverty more difficult.

This study, out of UNICEF Research Office, June, 2016, when on to report that providing short-term relief in the form of cash payouts did not reduce perceived stress, even though it improved economic security. Thus, it is clear that it is the environment of poverty that perpetuates the stress and exacerbates related issues and that the solution is not as simple as quick cash, if the long-term outlook for the subject is still one of poverty.

But then, is the root of the problem that people are poor firstly because they are less able and intelligent than others? Actually, the opposite may be true.

According to Alice Walton, writing in the University of Chicago Business School's journal, The Chicago Booth Review, being poor may lower your IQ by as much as thirteen points.

A young man, a few decades ago, from a very impoverished background, was scheduled to write his Mensa qualifying tests. In the weeks prior to the test, in addition to having lived a life of deprivation, his mother and father both suffered what would be life-ending illnesses, he was forced to leave the house in which he had been raised, he was called on to assist a neighbour battling a fire that threatened his home and the young man had used up the very last of his finances for the month to pay for short-term accommodation. To say the least, he was under stress. He scored 138 on the Mensa test, high enough to qualify for membership.

Two years later, he wrote an IQ test again. He scored 165. That is a huge difference, seldom seen in intelligence testing. Yet, the only factor that had changed was that now, his income was stable and reasonable and the other stressors in his life had dissipated.

Poverty lowers one's IQ, not the other way around.

There can be little doubt that not having a decent education correlates very highly to making less money in the workplace. But being poor also makes it extremely difficult to realize one's potential academically.

There are myriad stories about people forced to leave school prematurely to support the family. Others cite lack of enough money for tuition as the reason why they did not proceed to post-secondary studies. It is not that these people don't want an education. It is that they cannot find the economic means to get one, and, in turn, remain mired in poverty.

Yet, even in grade school, through high school, performance levels among those of a lower socio-economic class are lower than classmates from more affluent backgrounds. It defies the belief of many outside the low SEC that poverty implies a moral failure. Performance suffers because the person is preoccupied with more immediate concerns. Try mental math when you are being chased down the street by an angry dog! Your thoughts are hardly on anything other than that immediate moment.

Like any achievement, rising out of poverty requires confidence. in the belief that, first, you can do it and second, that it is sustainable. Living in poverty tends to steal from people the ability to plan for a better future. The day-to-day nature of existence at the low end of the SEC denies people the ability to take a long-term perspective. Oxford University and the Joseph Rowntree Foundation report that, when facing poverty, people have a much more difficult time making decisions, doubt their choices and have lowered attention spans. That is, the moment intrudes on the future.

Most governments in the western world have introduced tax-free investment plans and retirement savings plan options to allow poorer people to set aside for their future, but the plans are entirely unrealistic Saving anything for tomorrow is unreasonable when today's needs are far from met. Consequently, a very small fragment of those in the lowest socio-economic group even consider retirement and contingent saving.

This forces them even further behind their more affluent counterparts, which, in turn, impacts on their confidence, their ability to focus on development and growth and forces them into the primary survival channel for the poorest of the poor: day-to-day existence.

It is not that the poor don't want better opportunity, or hope to succeed and grow. IT is more that they are trapped in an environment that saps the ability to stay afloat, much less thrive. They may have had the ability, the intelligence and the confidence to move ahead, but poverty, daily, robs them of those skills and we, in turn, lose out because hordes of people that, given the right opportunity, could contribute in very significant ways, to the world around them.

Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/10427976

Remote Communities Suffer Poverty Differently Than in Urban Centers

 Four years ago, I was on a flight to a remote Manitoba First Nations reservation. In the space where there used to be a passenger seat next to the pilot was stacked 432 boxes of potato chips. In the rear cargo space were hundreds more. They were being flown to this reserve, a mere two-hour flight north of Winnipeg on Lake Winnipeg, for the community store, owned by a large national company. The regular passenger fare on that flight was approximately $350.00. It was more profitable for the airline to ship the snacks than carry a person!

But the real point is the cost to the consumer of these snacks. Because of the light weight, the grocery store felt that it could justify shipping junk food to the reserve by air. In 1986, Berens River and Poplar River reservations were served, in the summer, by a barge that ferried goods and vehicles in along Lake Winnipeg. That helped to reduce shipping costs of fuel (diesel for generators, gas for trucks). However, that barge discontinued operation some years later. That only left winter road supply lines and air cargo. Both were exceptionally costly. In 2018, most of the East Road was completed, connecting those two first nations communities to the outside world. Still, even on these accessible reservations, food cost remains exceptionally high.

One of the false claims made by many people unfamiliar with the high cost of food in remote First nations communities is that “we” are giving them too much, and that the money they get is more than they need. Those people often point, as well, to the high incidence of obesity and diabetes as proof that First Nations people in these communities are choosing to live an unhealthy, indolent and indulgent lifestyle. Yet, the reality is the polar (no pun intended) opposite for northern communities such as Berens River.

Some of the cheapest food products in the Berens River stores are snacks such as chips and candy bars. These also are the cheapest to ship into the community and represent some of the cheapest foods. Then, there is relative cost. A four-liter container of milk costs four times as much as a two-liter container of pop. The soda provides instant energy and a feeling of fullness. Same with the chips and chocolate bars. And, the snacks don’t require refrigeration in homes that often do not have a refrigerator that works.

As a consequence, the diet of many of the residents consists of junk food, leading to obesity and illness.

While a typical food basket may cost $146 in Winnipeg in 2018, for instance, it was $366 in Berens River. All other costs of living are similarly disproportionate. So, if a typical family of six, living at the poverty line in Winnipeg, needs $53,000 per year to survive, that same family in Berens River would need $133,000 per year!

It is this disconnect that many of us have between our world and our perception of how we compare to others that limits our ability to empathize with those in dire circumstances, such as those in our First Nations communities. Poverty is not solely a phenomenon of underdeveloped countries. It exists here, in our own back yard, and we don’t have to fly far to experience it.