this post was submitted on 20 Sep 2023
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The world will never recover until poverty is seen not as a character flaw, but as a failure of society itself to provide for the most vulnerable.
My freaking God. I volunteered at a local charity org a bit this summer and one of the first things they told us in orientation was that "most people think that poverty is about what people lack. But it's actually a mindset." That pissed me the heck off not gonna lie.
Was it a religious charity org? Those ones are often condescending assholes like that..
It was, unfortunately, yeah.
There is no hate like Christian love.
Did it occur to you that poverty has psychological impacts, and that poverty over numerous generations creates a culture and mindset of poverty? Generational poverty is absolutely a culture and mindset, as well as a lack of resources. This is not the same thing as GOP Christians saying people could pick themselves up by their own bootstraps if they just fucking change their mindset.
Did it occur to you that they didn't say generational poverty was a culture on top of lack of resources, but that the lack of resources actively wasn't a part of what makes someone impoverished. That sounds a lot like bootstrap mentality to me.
I have close friends who grew up under the poverty line, and to tell me that their life experiences were nothing but their mentality was a kick to the teeth.
We have the resources to be able to properly address material lack. Is the flawed mentality really the impoverished mentality, or is it the one that finds a certain percentage of the population to be an acceptable, even natural, even necessary poverty rate? The mentality that supposes that every member of society should earn their own privilege to exist? It seems like one of these mentalities is much, much more harmful than a set of defense mechanisms that protect individuals psychologically from systems that are literally designed to exploit them.
We should not be trying to mold poor people into being ideal wage laborers. We should be making society more inhabitable to human beings.
Yeah, you should have told the homeless charity you just joined the truth about homelessness!
It was a religious charity org. They weren't spreading or accepting any evidence-based truth.