My
girlfriend got me hooked on reading Gawker. It’s an entertaining
website that mixes news with some social commentary. My favorite part of
this website is the commentators, some websites have a lot of trolls
(CNN and Yahoo for example).
While other web sites have well thought out commentator with no
trolling (The New Republic and Atlantic Cities are really good ones);
but I digress…
Gawker
has been running a series of letters from their readers about their
unemployment experiences. To be honest, some of the letters seem far too
fantastical to be true, example being an ivy league lawyer who was
earning $250,000 a year
who now can’t get a job. I don’t know what to think of that, it seems
almost impossible to think that someone with an advanced degree and a
long career could fall into long term unemployment without the aid of
Alcohol or Drug Dependency.
These
Gawker unemployment letters frighten me. Unemployment is a scary thing,
unemployment coupled with losing everything that you’ve built over the
last decade is incomprehensible. Thinking about these articles has
provoked another series
of thoughts; what does it mean to be poor? In the case of the ivy
league lawyer, she’s broke, but, I would venture to say that she is
poor.
Being
poor is a cultural issue. The libertarian noble prize winning economist
once stated that being poor is a function of not having enough money,
which is like saying someone is wet because they are covered in water.
The Atlantic Cities
ran an interesting article about board game from the 1970’s called
“Blacks and Whites” (generally, the game was about Housing Policies in
the 1970’s known as Red Lining when a certain type of person could not
get a mortgage in a certain neighborhood, these
neighborhoods were marked in red ink in broker’s offices’), the game
had no end, in fact if you chose to be ‘Black’ then you would have no
chance to move out of the cycle of poverty.
Being
poor is a cultural issue, a deep binding culture that is almost
impossible to shake off. ‘Black and Whites’ ‘s main issue of housing
discrimination was addressed in the mid-1970s with a law called the
Equal Credit Opportunity Act
which, among other things, banned red lining. Even with the housing
discrimination issue fixed, African Americans still have not made great
strides toward economic prosperity. Why?
Anecdotally,
I know of two cases in which men from poor southern back grounds rose
to become successful and wealthy. In both cases, they become lawyers;
and, most importantly, they struggled to divest themselves of their
Southern Accents.
Their Southern Accent was a relic and a badge of shame of their poor
rural backgrounds. If you are to lift yourself out of poverty, then you
must release the symbols of your poverty. In this case, their Southern
Accents would be looked down upon at a Northern
Ivy League University.
The
culture of poverty surrounds us, it’s more than the food purchased with
public assistance or rent stabilization checks received by land lords or
energy coupons redeemed at gas stations. I’m fairly certain the only
way to get out of
the cycle of poverty is home ownership and gentrification (not
wholesale redevelopment). I’m not sure there’s any other way to break
the cycle…
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