I think the primary reason is usually a lack of ability to delay gratification, and/or actually really understand why one might want to.
There’s very little reason that a young person can’t graduate high school with a relatively moderate amount of effort (let’s face it; just graduating high school is stupidly easy; making straight-A’s is not nearly so easy).
Then that person could enlist in the military (pretty much an always-there fall-back job) and either make a career out of it, or learn some good habits and technical skills (mechanic, electronics tech, computer stuff, etc…) and get out and have a skilled job of some kind. Or if they want, they can go to college on the GI Bill.
Sure the military could suck in many ways and requires committment, but where else are they going to feed you 3 times a day, let you live rent-free in the barracks and teach you stuff? And when you’re done after a few years, you get benefits for the rest of your life, and they’ll pay for most of college?
This was my fall-back plan if my parents were somehow killed or impoverished and I couldn’t go to college like we’d all planned.
It seems to me that if you’re a poor kid from the ghetto, the military & GI Bill are a sure-fire ticket out if you’re willing to sacrifice a little and make a commitment to do something that you may not enjoy at the moment, but that will pay off in the long run.
What does the OP have to do with what Al Bundy posted? He quoted some rich guy saying “lead in your pants” was all you needed to not be poor, and then gave examples to prove it correct. If all you need is energy not to be poor, then being poor means you have no energy. Since it is unlikely he is talking about physical energy, it makes perfect sense to interpret it as meaning “not being lazy.”
The only thing the OP has to do with it is that, by identifying the poor as an “other”, it becomes socially okay to say bad things about them.
Enlisting in the military means you’ll have to go on active duty at some point, and likely end up putting your life in danger. But more importantly, it means you may have to kill people. Killing people for money–a lot of people find that unethical.
Graduating is stupidly easy if you come from a normal family.
It’s harder if you are homeless because your foster home kicked you out on your eighteenth birthday. It’s harder if you are so stressed out with sick family members that you can’t concentrate. It’s harder if you just never got the basic education you needed before moving up to the high school level. It’s harder if you don’t get decent meals. It’s harder if you are dealing with the after-effects of sexual abuse, and trying to protect your siblings from it. It’s harder if your mom is on drugs and not taking care of your siblings.
None of these are excuses, but there are things that can stack the deck. I’ve had friends who’ve been in all of these situations, and yeah, high school was a different experience for them.
I think Al Bundy explained very well that some poor people work their way out of it, and some don’t. I think Forbes was making a very good point; you don’t have to be born with the gift of high intelligence in order to succeed. I don’t see it as picking on poor people to say that it takes energy.
I have known quiet a few people who are chronically poor. In each case, they have been *extremely *irresponsible in their life. They have a tendency to do stupid things and make poor decisions. And to make matters worse, they blame their plight on other people. Lather, rinse, repeat. Hence the reason they are chronically poor…
It’s odd to me to see so many people talking about ghettos and urban poor, beacuse when I think of multi-generational, centuries old poverty in America, I think of Appalacia and rural poor.
As I said upthread, the US is not a terribly socially mobile society. You pretty much die in the class you are born into (if you don’t slide backwards). In most studies, the US is tied with the UK in social mobility.
Some of the comments here reveal that a lot of Americans seem to think there is something morally wrong with poor people as if they have a disease that you can catch. In fact, I think a better question is what is it about America that creates multi-generational poverty like you see in Appalachia?
In reading the posts here, the majority seem to concentrate on people who have very low incomes/ mean surroundings/ lack of education and the difficulties that ensue with those combinations.
However, it is possible to enjoy a good income and still be poor through sheer inability to budget, handle or put aside money. I had a friend who was a barrister, and whose wife worked in a well paying government job. They were always short of money- not so much in the sense of no food on the table (although eventually that happened) but by constantly frittering away money. Such things as they would have a bought lunch together every day at a restaurant type venue, both smoked heavily, and drank heavily.
Although you would have expected them to be well off it sure wasn’t the case.
I think some of the mentalities are the same, but a major difference is that urban poor are at least geographically situated to find decent jobs, rural folks are most definitely not. Where I grew up, it was Tyson’s, Wal-mart, farming or GTFO. I chose the latter. However, I didn’t grow up poor, my family was educated, etc., so I had no impediments to “seeing my way”.
Even if someone is perfectly fine with the ethical issues involved in joining the military, the military might not want them. There are a lot of physical and mental health issues that would close off that path entirely.
People in Appalachia are poor because of isolation-there simply are not a lot of jobs in the region. Face it, if you want a better life, you most likely will have to move-and this was done many times in the past-many mountail folk left the hills in search of greener pastures. There are many nice things about living in the hills-clean air, hunting and fishing, etc…but you cannot eat scenery.
I’ve stated on other threads that I grew up poor and in a single parent household. Because we weren’t in an urban setting where everyone else was in the same circumstances, I realized that I was poor, and detested it. Fortunately I was able to see that everyone else that wasn’t poor was really not different than me, and so I didn’t succumb to all of the dumb stuff that the other poor people in the trailer park did. I joined the reserves during high school (basic training was my post-junior year summer vacation), graduated very near the top of my class, went to college, but then dropped out to go active duty (I wanted to participate in Desert Storm, but it was over too quickly!) in the Army. I wasn’t a grunt, though; I had a very highly technical career. I did my time, and joined the real workforce, where I’m quite happy today these 15 years later.
I’m not sure how I would have turned out if I’d lived in a white ghetto with no exposure to non-poor, people. I suppose I would have only had poor friends (rather than friends with boats and lakeside mansions), had poor-people attitudes, taken part in poor-people activities, and would have had no expectations that I could ever not be poor. I don’t know this; just conjecturing.
If you entered the country illegally you cannot fix it by any means. Marrying would only work if he entered the country legally and simply overstayed his visa.
I don’t have any evidence, but I doubt that ethical considerations are a widespread issue against that.
Remember, this is the same demographic that has lots of teenage births, absentee fathers, problems with being criminals, and apparently very little problem letting someone else “take care of them.” None of which are particularly ethical, you know.
And IMO, it’s a patently stupid choice to think “Hmm… I could be poor as shit for the rest of my life, or I could take a relatively small, calculated risk and join the Navy and get out of this type of life. I think I’ll choose poor.”
Johnny gets the sneekers, when he outgrows them they go to his brother Sammy, who wears them for about a year then his sister Lonie gets them and when they are starting to get shabby they go to Lisa to play in the mud with. It is called Hand me down clothing. I wore my brothers hand me down jeans for play clothes back in the 60s.
Hand me down clothing is indeed a wonderful way to save money. Now…who’s not doing that? We not only get hand me downs from cousins (as our family has a 13 year span between differently gendered children, there’s not really sibling hand me downs) and give them to friends when we outgrow them, but try to fill in the gaps with thrift store clothing instead of new.
Judging from the masses of people at the thrift store, I don’t think we’re the only ones doing this.
Hand me down SHOES, on the other hand, are a bad, bad idea. Shoe wear patterns vary considerably from person to person, and wearing shoes that don’t fit right with soles worn in the wrong place for your body can lead to terrible foot, ankle, leg and back pain and even feet that don’t grow right. Thus sayeth my pediatrician: hand me downs are great for clothes, but buy shoes new and get as expensive as you can for good support and foot development.
I think that shoes that are only worn occasionally for special occasions would probably be ok. You buy the kid some black dress shoes and he only wears them 4x before he outgrows them, there’s not much wear at all.
For everyday shoes, yeah, it’s probably a bad idea.
Those of you who are mentioning luck as part of the equation, how much luck is required to get out of a poverty situation?
Some posters here have given good examples where luck plays a part but it does bother me how many on the left (not necessarily here) seem to place luck as the overriding factor.
Anecdotes don’t mean shit but I do know poor and lower middle class people from growing up and living amongst them. Hell, some of them are related to me and some of them are friends, really!
Roughly about half simply lack ambition or to be blunt about it, they are lazy. As long as some of them have enough money for beer and some reefer they are good to go.
I just want to make sure that personal responsibility stays prominently in the discussion also.