Send Us Hatemail ! mailbag@conservativecave.com
0 Members and 1 Guest are viewing this topic.
dig a pony (21 posts) Mon Nov-24-08 01:47 PMOriginal message Poverty is a relative term...from someone who knows I wasn't paying much attention when my partner's W2 form came in last year. He had made about $3500 or maybe $4000 for the last 3 months of the year...the rest was from a former employer who didn't take out taxes. He made about $7,000 with him. I only worked very part-time for the last three months of the year and before that, received some extra funds through student loans. I looked up the poverty index for a household of two people and we were just hovering above it. But since we don't have a large overhead (no car, cable, cell phones, Internets, vacations, etc.), it didn't seem all that dire. It still gave me pause and I always say "I'm broke," never "poor." One is temporary and the other is a way of life. We do not get any help from government agencies or charities, even though we probably qualify. If we are getting by, then I don't think I should apply for those things. Let those who are homeless or have even less than us get the benefits. Well, that's how I feel anyhow.Remember when Oprah got flak for not opening a school in the inner city? She said it was because poor people in the USA have a sense of entitlement and that they already have free schools and too many don't seem to take advantage of the things they DO have. Look at African countries where the children will travel by foot for miles and miles (sometimes without proper shoes) in order to get their education. It's probably human nature: when something is hard to come by, one values it more. Africans who come here advance quite well, according to stats I have read. I say poverty is relative because even eating once a day is preferable to those who have to search by themselves for anything they can find. On tv last week, I saw a 90+ year-old woman from Africa (Congo?) who was taking care of her grandchildren or great-grandchildren and had been roaming for two days, not being able to find food for them. She said she wondered if she should throw herself in the lake because she couldn't provide for them. How heartbreaking is that?!Thanksgiving is this week. No matter how long you have been unemployed or underemployed (it's been 11 months for me), if you can read this, your life is far better than someone else. We can always see what we don't have. Even wealthy people get depressed and feel their lives are shit. Money can ease tensions a bit, but it doesn't alleviate them. I still think that we need to be grateful for what we do have and all of us have something.
tmfun (1000+ posts) Mon Nov-24-08 02:03 PMResponse to Original message 1. Yup, no matter how shitty it is here, it's no where near as bad as places like Haiti, Darfur, etc. That kind of suffering is beyond most of our abilities to even comprehend.
dig a pony (21 posts) Mon Nov-24-08 02:13 PMResponse to Reply #1 2. Whew...thanks...I was bracing for an outburst about "how you could?!" Not knowing you were you, that is...I am interested in this particular forum because it's a pressing issue, however, I have found it quite depressing and demoralizing because I am afraid that some of this is more about people's general attitudes towards life than a particular circumstance they are facing.
tmfun (1000+ posts) Mon Nov-24-08 02:29 PMResponse to Reply #2 3. Well, congratulations, you already got a thread locked! You're going to do fine here. I'm the President of a homeowners Assoc. One thing I've learned on that job it that it doesn't matter what you do, somebody won't like it.DU is a lot like that. How you deal with it is up to you. Ignore works for me. You seem to have a different approach.You seem to be intelligent and articulate. You'll figure it out.Despite it's faults, one of the things I love about DU is that there are thousands of people around the globe scanning countless sources of information and reporting back here. If anything of importance (or not) happens anywhere, you can be pretty sure it will show up here first, way before the corporate media reports on it and often when the corp Media won't.
cbayer (1000+ posts) Mon Nov-24-08 02:57 PMResponse to Original message 4. Locking The OP has left the building.Cheers,cbayerDU Moderator
Remember when Oprah got flak for not opening a school in the inner city? She said it was because poor people in the USA have a sense of entitlement and that they already have free schools and too many don't seem to take advantage of the things they DO have.
