Being poor means you know you have no voice in the government and you know the government doesn't really care about you...all the patchwork underfunded organizations prove that year after dreary year.

Being poor means you think sleeping in your car-that no longer runs- is a good thing instead of having to sleep under a bridge.

Being poor means knowing the above list(the whole linked list) is just the tip of the goddamn iceberg.

'Poverty is the worst form of violence'--Gandhi

Maybe I would not be quite as bristling if the list were head "Being Poor in America" for being poor means:

You consider yourself well off when you get $2 a day

You travel 5 miles to collect a container of contaminated water to carry home

Each day you have to travel further to collect firewood

Half your children die before they are one years old.

You cannot afford batteries even if you had a radio.

Your nearest hospital is a week's walk away

You have salt with your once a day meal of boiled mealie instead of peanut sauce.

You boil grass to fill your children's bellies

When your dead baby has been removed after a breach birth, you are left with a fistula which condemns you to a life of incontinence and exile from your community.

You cannot afford the school uniform of shirt and short trousers or a skirt so your child will be admitted to school.

The class size in the primary school is 100.

A simple vitamin tablet or medication is too expensive for you to protect yourself from blindness.

You cannot afford the transport to a clinic giving out free condoms to prevent AIDS.

Not having enough straw to make a bed.

Living on the bottom of three concrete shelves in a hostel for migrant gold miners and still have better living conditions than the rest of your village.

Your youths competing in an exhausting and degrading competition in the hope of getting a place in the Ghurkahs regimanet of the British Army to make your family rich.

Dying in a cargo container after your family paid their life savings for you to be smuggled to Europe.

Dying in the Texas heat trying to get to a job paying half minimum wage.

Being thrown overboard when the border patrol vessel challenges the boat that's almost sinking under the weight of you all.

John Scalzi makes some interesting follow-up remarks to "Being Poor" here.

(And for crissake don't tip me for a diary that's really just a glorified excuse for a link.)


Blessed are the peacemakers, for they will be called children of God.

The follow up piece recognises my point and I think I should perhaps add a little. Many of the poor in what we loosely call the "third world" have coping mechanisms. I alluded to one in about mealie (a bit like grits from the south) where salt is the savory you use when the peanut sauce is unaffordable. That is added to by meat in the richer times. It's when there is a distaster, natural like the drought and locusts in Niger or man-made like the exodus in Darfur. that these fragile coping mechanisms fail.

My own childhood was in a relatively poor household. My divorced mother had two older children whose father died in WWII (he was a policeman and died from TB). Our grandmother helped look after me after primary school until mum got back from work. I sometimes joke (honestly) that we were so poor my teddy bear only had one leg. Actually he was a much loved and battered hand-me-down but I did have second hand books given by relatives.

In the 50s and 60s in Britain when I grew up times could be hard but I understood mum's position and tried  not to be demanding. I knew it was difficult for her to afford things like school trips to France so never asked. Still it was sometimes difficult to hide disappointment when my Christmas present was a pair of socks. On the other hand I was not subject to two factors that make life very difficult for parents today, especially in the USA.

Constant promotions on TV for the latest tat and playground rivalry means much more "pester power" is being direct to them. That is true even in the UK and I sometimes flinch when I hear how working class people are desperate to get their kids as much of the latest fads as possible for their Christmas presents. I cannot help feeling that the hours they have to work to pay for them would be a far better present for the kids if they spent time rather than money on them.

One factor of course we do not have is the lie of the "American Dream". Sorry but the likelihood is that there will never again be a President who has risen from humble beginnings. Hard work will not get these kids good jobs unless they are exceptional or, it has to be said, highly talented entertainers or sportsmen. For the rest their family poverty and the poverty of social provision like schools will mean they are unlikely to prosper. For most a stint in the armed forces will be their only chance to even rise to the poorer strata of the American middle class.

I will accept that this psychological or relative poverty can feel as bad and have even more socially corrosive effects than the absolute poverty of the hundreds of millions living on under $2 a day.