Being a better person: Week 1

I have been doing fairly well at my goal of reading more, watching less crap, and generally being more thoughtful.

I have almost made it through Peter Enn's Inspiration and Incarnation, which is not really my style, but definitely worth the read. This is especially true if you really want to like the Bible, but find it super duper problematic.

I'm trying to read more literature, but have found myself drawn far more blogs at this point. Today's post is based off Rebecca Lujan Loveless' post over here.

She says a lot of powerful things, but what struck a nerve with me is her mention of how poor people are not involved in the discussion about how to alleviate poverty.

Just take at the recent World Economic Forum in Davos for evidence of this. While Davos is defnitely an extreme example, Ms. Lujan Loveless has a point. We don't invite homeless people to the homelessness discussion. We don't invite the single moms working two or three jobs. Sometimes we invite the pretty poor, or the formerly poor, but we sure don't invite the ugly poor.

We can feel sorry for the pretty poor. We can put their faces on our blogs and raise money to get them backpacks and shoes and stuff. I'm not saying this is bad, but it isn't the truth about poverty. We don't talk to the people who frighten us, we don't invite them in.

I think the reason is because they're still broken. We see poverty and poor people as one and the same. We don't invite poor people to tell us how to alleviate poverty, because how could they know, they're poor!

We see them as part of the problem. Only those who have overcome poverty can tell others how to do. Poverty is a problem to be solved. Poor people are a problem to be sovled.

We still see poverty as an individual failing. Some people have better excuses than others, but the fact remains that we don't invite a minimum wage worker to speak on poverty precisely because he or she clearly can't extricate him/herself from the minimum wage job (but they should still be happy to even have a job and just stop complaining already, but that's a post for another time).

Poor people are not a problem to be solved. Poor people are people. Sure, there are some who may have "put themselves in poverty", but there are many rich people who are rich simply by the virtue of being born to the right parents.

Poor people are people. And as long as we consider them to be "other," we can't do a damn thing about poverty.

I have lived on both sides of the poverty. I much prefer the one I'm on now.

I go to walmart and see overweight teenagers in pajams buying mountain dew and cheetos with wic cards and screaming at their children. These are the ugly poor. You can't put their face on a mailer.

They seem so different from me. I made better choices. I see why we don't invite them in. They are different.

But the difference doesn't make it right. I'm idealistic, and I'm throwing that out there to let you know I'm aware of how idealist what I'm about to say sounds: Maybe part of the problem is that no one has ever asked them. Maybe no one has ever valued what they say, so why even try to say something valuable?

I have seen people in Cambodia fall victim to the idea that only outside help matters, and I see it here. It's not because we have social safety net programs. While there are certainly people who abuse them, there are many who use them for the purpose for which they were intdended.

The reason many Cambodians relied on outside assistance was, in my opinion, because every told them they had to. Don't get me wrong, Cambodians certainly went through hell, and have needed outside assistance at various points throughout their history, but from the Colonial to UNTAC periods, they were not treated as people. To the French, they were resources, to the UN, a pawn in a much bigger political game.

I'm not going to talk about personal responsibility and poverty. I'm not going to talk about how systematic injustice impacts poverty. Those are too big for you or I to do anything about on our own. I will say that we can make better choices. We can choose to see the humanity in the people of walmart. We can invite them in. And we can be better for it.