What are some of the mindsets of poor people that keeps them poor?

In My Humble Opinion
101

Duckster
“My parents come from the Greatest Generation”
My parents were both born in 1920, so I can relate.
Could you tell me about the food rules you lived with while growing up?
I ask because when I was growing up someone made a comment about going in the house and making a sandwich when they were hungry and it blew me away that for some people that was an option.
You ate what was given to you when it was given to you.

Did they tell you " can’t died in the poor house" and " beggers can’t be chosers"

102

For the first part of your paragraph, I forget to mention in my story above that I did have a couple of outstanding, positive examples, and access to the ISD Commodore PET lab during the summer. Those people and the motivation probably had a lot to do in my case.
For the second part of the paragraph, I think being poor but not in a ghetto was important. Granted, the trailer park was a high-class ghetto (things being relative), but school friends, luckily, weren’t universally from there.

103

Yeah, I grew up lower middle class, not poor, but when I got to college it opened my mind because I was exposed to a higher class. Not a huge jump, but I can still see from example how the people who surround you on a daily basis (and not just parents and teachers, but peers) have a big influence on what you expect out of life. When you are around people who are upwardly mobile, it can make you dissatisfied with what you have (for better or for worse.)

104

Sorry, but I can’t speculate on what ifs in my life. What I can offer are friends I grew up with from similar socio-economic backgrounds. Those who were raised by parents with a similar approach to life ended up with a similar outlook on life (and “success” to boot). I also knew friends whose well off and educated parents did not have the self-motivation, work for it ethic and from what I know of them today, their lives are shortchanged on what they could have done, and had more than one opportunity to do for themselves. For that matter, some with more opportunities than me remain struggling and a friends with limited support growing up are stellar successes today.

I think I know where you are going. And ya know, it doesn’t work with me. As an adult with life experiences you can’t figure out that your current path isn’t that great, much of that “blame” has to reside with the individual. I don’t believe the crap that all things being equal, once tainted permanently burned. I think it’s an excuse I see all too often, and American society seems to want to support the “oh, woe is me” self-pity bullshit. IMHO, quite a few people need to suck it up, grow some stones and quit the whining.

Yes, there are people no matter what they attempt, they seem to fall short. As cold and hard as it may sound, there are haves and havenots in this world. But are they “victims” of circumstance or attitude? We employ a dozen “urban youth” every summer at work. They come from motivated families and families who don’t give a shit. They are exposed to people who push them hard every day on the job, and not just their supervisors. We all have a hand in working with them. Granted, each has their own story to tell. Those who excel at work find themselves back with us the following year. Those who don’t either find the job possibilities in their future are not to their liking (some) or they want something for nothing (most). There are always unknowns we just will never know about with these kids. When I do talk to the counselors there is one thread that seems to weave through those who do not come back – they think they are self-entitled and don’t give a crap about what others may think. So based on my own life experiences and working with these kids, I just don’t buy the pity party from adults who chose not to take advantage of opportunities presented to them, know they are opportunities, but could give a rat’s ass because the here and now is more important and easier than working for the long haul.

The only kids, and I mean “only kids” I ever worked with or been around to assist, with whom I felt real concern knowing they would not make it in life were those raised by adults who indulged in pot smoking (greater extent) and tobacco smoking (lesser extent) when these kids were first born until their first years in school. Those kids are so brain-fucked they did not amount to anything. When I dated a teacher for a number of years, any discussions on this subject were universal - pot and/or tobacco smoke exposure at an early age in child development had long-lasting and often permanent brain damage. Those kids just never developed into fully functional people. (Yeah, I know these last comments may rile the ire of doper Dopers and I don’t care.) Granted, there’s a confirmation bias here but it’s hard to refute teacher after teacher after teacher with identical stories of brain-fucked kids in class (from differing socio-economic areas) and the only common denominator is being exposed to pot and/or tobacco smoke at a very early age. In these cases the “mindset” plays an enormous role in future life because their minds are permanently damaged.

Oh, hell yes!
[ul]
[li]“Eat what you want, but eat everything on your plate.”[/li][li]“You don’t like the food here? Then contribute to the grocery money.”[/li][li]We were fortunate when we went out to eat to find Sunday buffets. We were told to “eat all you want because no one is cooking for you at home the rest of the day.”[/li][/ul]
“Beggars can’t be chosers.” An oldie but a goodie. Did you endure the threat (and it was carried out!) that “there are starving people in the world so eat it all. If you don’t you get nothing until morning.”? It didn’t take long to realize that hunger pains are lessened by eating it all the first time.

105

So wait a minute. You think you’d have turned out fine if your parents had been crappy parents who didn’t bother to teach you a work ethic. Yet here you say your friends who grew up poor, but were taught a work ethic, did well. Yet friends who grew up well off, but weren’t taught a work ethic, did poorly.

So does teaching kids a work ethic create adults who succeed, or is teaching work ethic a waste of time, because the work ethic so obviously leads to success that there’s no need to teach it?

Or is it the other way around–some kids are self-motivated and will therefore succeed without being taught a work ethic, and some kids are lazy and it doesn’t do any good to teach them a work ethic, because they won’t listen?

If that’s the case, then what creates a work ethic? Are you born with a certain inborn work ethic, and barring crippling disasters will grow to be an adult with a work ethic? Like, say a kid with genes that will make him grow to be seven feet tall? If some people are naturally lazy and unteachable and destined for failure, how should we treat these people? With scorn? Would it help to raise them a different way, or will they turn out to be failures no matter what?

106

Just wanted to point out that this is not the case. If you are currently in the country illegally, whether by entering illegally or by having overstayed a valid visa, the law treats you exactly the same. That is to say, if you wish to legally immigrate (even via marriage to a US citizen) and you have been in the country illegally for less than a year, you must return to your country of origin and wait three years before you can come back to the US. If you have been here illegally for more than a year, you are barred from re-entry for 10 years.

107

A personal example:
About 4 months ago, we employed a 31 year old mother here on the chicken farm.
Let’s call her Sally.
As she has three felony conviction, there weren’t a lot of opportunities open to her.
She had just left the halfway house and was in dire need of a job.
As part of her parole, she attends a form of group therapy, does counseling and meets with her probation officer weekly to help her adjust.
For once the system was working actively to help her stay out of prison. Her life wasn’t easy by any means but she lived with her mother and could keep at least her daughter and son with her. Things were looking up in Sally’s life.

At first, she was great-smart, responsible and hard working.
We made it as easy for her as we could.
No babysitter?
Bring the kids to work with you.
Unreliable transportation?
Have your mom drop you off and we’ll *loan *you our truck on days when you’re working a split shift so you can rest in the afternoons.
Or we’ll drive you the 25 miles back to your house.
And we’ll make sure you never have to put gas in it because we know you’re struggling.
Doctor’s appointments? Meetings with CPS?
We will be totally flexible about your hours.
Need a lawyer in her custody battle with your ex husband?
We’ll use our resources to find someone who will represent you pro bono.
Doing a good job?
We’ll give you a raise within the first month and a bonus every time we make a certain amount at the farmers market.
And here, take chicken and eggs so you have a source of free protein.
We’re not saints by any means but she was trying so hard, we really wanted to give her a chance to change her life if she wanted to.

Then one of the many ex husbands came back for a visit.
The one that helped her get strung out on meth before she went to jail for assault.
Suddenly her behaviour became extremely erratic.
Sally had a million reasons why she could only work half the hours that she used to.
Then she flat failed to show up for 4 days.
When she resurfaced, she swore she was clean.
I warned her that this was her last chance. Period.
No come to work, no job.

Things appeared to be stabilizing and she was doing much better when yet another old boyfriend came on the scene.
She went back to her old neighborhood this weekend.
This Monday she didn’t come in and she didn’t call so she’s history.
So sorry but we have to someone that’s dependable. Breaks my heart because I really do like and care about her and I feel so bad for her children.

I related the story because I think the qualities that tripped her up that may be shared by other women in the poverty trap:

  1. No impulse control. She squandered money on silly shit.
  2. No ability to see the big picture. She had a hard time grasping that sacrificing and saving now meant a better tomorrow.
  3. No patience. When everything didn’t get rosy almost immediately, she went back to her old instant gratification life style.
  4. No self-esteem. She had to have a man and even a fucked up loser was better than being alone.

I’m done.
My rule is “I’ll try hard to help you but *you’ve *got to be trying harder than me to change your life.”

108

To previous posters: Adrian N. LeBlanc’s Random Family is a work of genius. I just finished reading it for the second time. For those who haven’t read it, pick it up as soon as you can; it is spellbinding and heartbreaking.

I grew up in a working class home that disintegrated into out-and-out poverty when I was 16 and my parents got divorced. My father left my mother with six kids, ages 16 - 3 years-old and his shyster lawyer got him off for just $300 a month in child support.

My mother, who had worked herself to the bone as a homemaker and caretaker of six kids, now had to enter a workplace as a person without any of the experiences that are valued by the marketplace. She worked between two and four jobs, mostly menial/factory labor, just to keep us minimally alive. She lost the house to foreclosure in a few years and drifted from one bad boyfriend to the next with the kids who were too young to leave home. She started to drink. A lot.

But somehow she made it through nursing school and eventually, thank God, found a nice guy whom she married and helped her raise the remaining kids. She recently retired after 22 years in the nursing field, and she retired from a director’s position with a good stipend and lives in a mortgage-free house and has very few debts. She made it.

I bungled around in the world for about 10 years until I decided that the only way I was ever going to have the things I wanted would be to go to college. I started community college at age 28 and worked straight through to my doctoral degree. One of my brothers and his wife (married at 18) had the same vision (earlier than I did) and both are now Ph.D.s in science and biology.

My other siblings seem to be re-living the “poor years” they experienced with my mother. Alcohol, drugs, multiple kids by multiple women to whom they pay child support, no college, and living on the kind of edge where minor car trouble, a big winter utility bill, or a sick kid sets them back for months: for them it is one step forward and three steps back. They don’t budget because there isn’t anything to budget.

Why do some kids make it out and others don’t? Someone upthread noted that we often have to make life-altering decisions before we have the tools to understand their impact (unprotected sex, dropping out of high school, engaging in minor crime). I did a lot of stupid stuff as a younger woman, but was always able to ameliorate the effects though plain dumb luck, though there were times I missed meals because money was tight. One of my brothers made “choices,” if they can even be called that, about sex and had his first kid at age 16, then proceeded to have five more kids by three different women. He’s locked into child support for 16 more years as well as direct support for the kids he is raising in his home.

Poverty is an enormous puzzle, with many contributing factors. If I would have had kids, and if my successful brother has kids, odds are that they would grow up with middle-class values and opportunities. There are already indications that my brother with random kids and a harsh life will have kids who follow in the same footsteps.

Read LeBlanc!

109

I wasn’t talking about your post. I’m talking about the OP and his attitude, not simply pointing out the problems that can hold people back. But yeah, pointing out how dumb it is to not be faithful to your employer, particularly these days, is a bit ridiculous.

Sorry I took so long to come back for replies. I ended up in the hospital with an abscess in my jaw. Tested positive for strep so I guess it was a secondary infection. I’ve been out of my mind and I may have come off as obnoxious in my comments to the OP because I was much sicker than I thought. Misery made me cranky.

It is dumb to do dumb things, obviously. It was dumb to get pregnant when I was just eighteen. It was dumb to quit school but I needed to support my mom while she waited for disability to approve her case. We were afraid we’d lose our home. It took two years for her to get approved. It was great that she got that lump sum but being the kind of person she was she paid her medical bills instead of starting her own business or whatever she could have done with several thousand dollars.

But where does the dumb stop? It was dumb for us not to buy a new car because the used one we scrimped and saved for keeps breaking down. . .right? Was it dumb to not buy new? I don’t know. But I’m really freakin sick of that car breaking down. And the van. The tires. . .we just can’t afford the tires. Things keep coming up. Like the hospital, where you’re asked to leave money on the way out. I was still out of my head and gave them everything I had in my purse, everything I had in the world at the time. And THEN I realized I left with a prescription that needed to be filled. So I had to borrow. And Mig missed two days of work because we had no one to care for our child while I was sick. So the roofing position was filled and now he’s out looking for something else. It’s about to rain so I’m figuring he won’t find anything today. He had a side job but they canceled. Last night when I was talking to my daughter the phone went out. Not from not paying. It’s something in the wiring. Now you’d think it’s just a few bucks to get a phone, but I don’t have a few bucks. So now I’m phoneless. Shit just PILES AND PILES! I mean, hell this morning I got up to fix some cereal and the goddamned milk was chunky, but it doesn’t expire for three more days. You can’t HELP feeling like maybe you really are cursed. Yeah I made dumb mistakes, just like everyone else. But I’ve also worked hard, from 15 to five years ago when everything really started going to hell. When nothing else panned out after my job was eliminated with the school system my car gave out. I met a guy who said if I was willing to work my ass off I could drive for his crew, so I worked construction. I am not the type believe me. I’m a pale delicate thing and I almost quit after the first three days. But I had no other options so I busted my ass for several years until I met my SO, and at the time I was clueless about immigration. I didn’t even think about him being in the country illegally. I knew he came here as a child so I didn’t even think about it. He had a social security card he thought was real but it wasn’t. His ignorance, his fault of course. But I didn’t know. We fell mad crazy in love, consummated that love like bunnies (with condoms, always ALWAYS with condoms!) and a few months later I got pregnant. Not having an abortion was probably dumb, but coulda-shoulda-woulda, right? We both had decent jobs at the time, and I have very few material needs. We were happy. Then he lost his job and I discovered what it actually meant to be an illegal immigrant. Then of course I couldn’t work construction being pregnant. Then our little girl had special needs so for several years there were so many doctors/therapists/psychiatrist appointments not to mention daily therapies I did on my own with her. We just struggled to get by thinking just a few more months and I’d feel comfortable leaving her with others. She was a very difficult child who tried my patience (and I have a LOT of it). Perhaps it’s just paranoia but I could see someone getting frustrated easily and taking it out on her. With her being non-verbal I was afraid she was being hurt and couldn’t tell me. Eventually I came to a point where I was comfortable, but now I just can’t FIND a job. I have various low-level office skills. I can paint like a mofo, I have experience working with children in the school system. . .but nobody is calling. And now my phone is broken!

What I need to know is how to STOP doing these dumb things that don’t seem dumb at the time.

110

And I’d like to point out I have an older brother who grew up with me, exposed to the same childhood, who went on to college and has been a teacher now for 20 years. But he has screw-ups too. Major ones. He’s been married several times. He drinks too much. He overspends. His daughter, same age as my oldest, is going down a dark and dangerous path. He has big problems. But he married a woman with a good career; when they overspend they just charge it all and pay it back later, along with ridiculously inflated interest. We don’t have credit cards. When I was 18 and pregnant with no financial means my friend and I went to one of those credit card sign up extravaganzas they used to have at the malls. You got free gifts for applying. There was free food and drinks and balloons for the kids. They were handing those cards out like candy bars. I got a card with Sears, Goldsmiths and Dillards. I never used the last two but I used Sears for emergencies for a few years, then it got to where if I paid the minimum I never saw the balance go down. I did one smart thing. I got rid of them all.

Now it’s not so easy. I wouldn’t qualify for credit with a loanshark probably. And I think it’s for the best but it sure would be nice if I could just go charge a gently used tire instead of filling the tire with fix-a-flat until it just doesn’t work anymore. Or a doctor’s visit instead of waiting until I’ve passed out from pain and had the ambulance called.

Anyway, I’ve examined the differences between my life and my brother’s. He was already gone when my mom got sick. He worked part time and went to college while his wife had a good job with the IRS. His life seemed a lot smoother in the beginning. He was able to build a nice cushion in case he fell. When he did fall it wasn’t that bad. I mean, not financially. He’s had some heartbreak. But he brought a lot of that on himself because, like me, he did dumb things. He got his wife pregnant when they were young. He had trouble with booze, gambling, and women.

But you know, he’s not a dumb man.
Neither am I.

Please understand I’m not making excuses. I’m examining my life and where I’ve gone wrong and trying to find out how to fix it from the place I’m in now. Sort of a hijack I suppose, but the OP irked me because I’m not some lottery card scratching boozehound who sits on the porch all day smoking weed and guzzling a 40. I do have some debilitating anxiety issues and phobias. I do have a tendency to be the one everyone in the family expects to take care of the sick and elderly. I don’t drink or smoke or take any drugs except ibuprofen and Afrin. I’m overweight but I’m spry like Hurley. I don’t hold grudges against others for getting ahead. I do acknowledge thought that often it’s not through hard work. They have skills I don’t possess, but I don’t hold that against anyone else. Most of my friends are more successful than I’ve been financially, through special skills, working smarter, or marriage to the right person. And there’s been quite a bit of luck involved with their success too. Why lessen it? Why not acknowledge that luck plays a part? Why must poor people just be uneducated dumb people who can’t control their dark urges to gamble, fuck and party?

I’m not stupid. I do understand credit cards. I do understand the value of an education. I’ve pumped this into my daughter’s head from birth. I homeschooled her because I wanted her to have a better education than the schools here provided. She just took her ACT and got a 26, wants to join the military after college, loves learning. I did good with that one. :slight_smile:

After writing all this out, I think that maybe I’m still poor because I didn’t value having money for a long time and now I’ve developed a rather defeatist attitude. First family, then work. That’s been my life for 25 years. There was no time for anything else. I’ve never been on a vacation, I’ve never been to a nice restaurant, I don’t have a TV anymore because ours broke. It’s not that I wouldn’t LIKE one, but until my daughter’s internet contract runs out she’s agreed to cover this bill (she doesn’t really have a choice) so I watch what I can on the internet. When that’s over it will be just one more thing I don’t have. I have one pair of shoes, one bra and one dress; my funeral going garb. It doesn’t help that my partner is just like me, willing to bust ass but developing the same anxiety and negative attitude about it all. All we want to do is work and pay our bills and yeah, have a little fun in life.

111

When you were growing up, did no one tell you not to do dumb things? I’m not trying to be mean here. I am genuinely curious.

I grew up in a conservative Roman Catholic family. Went to Mass every Sunday. Attended Catholic school for 12 years. Had strict parents. Suffice to say, things like morality, ethics, and plain 'ol “right vs. wrong” were crammed down my throat on a daily basis. This gave me some armor when I became an adult; at the very least, I knew how I should behave, and I knew how to make good decisions. (Growing up, I did not always make the right decisions, obviously, and felt extremely guilty afterwards.)

I’m not trying to be holier-than-thou here; God knows I’ve made my share of bad decisions. But my upbringing permanently ingrained a sense of right vs. wrong in me, and how to not do “dumb things” that could adversely affect my life and the lives of others. As I grow older (I’m now 42), I become more and more conscientious of how my actions and decisions affect my life and my family, and I try really really hard to make good, smart decisions.

If you were not raised by parents or guardians who instilled a sense of right vs. wrong in you, and how to avoid making wrong/dumb decisions, then you are certainly at a disadvantage. Not sure what advice to give you. I am not a particularly religious person anymore, but if you need some guidance and direction on how to make smart decisions, you might try joining a church.

112

I think one very key difference between someone who is chronically poor, and someone who is not, is how much they value their professional/work life.

My work is a very very very high priority of mine. I’m 42, have never been fired from a job, and have only called in sick once in my life. I get up every morning at 5:00 AM, head to work, and do my best to impress my employer. I have never been unemployed. At the same time, I went to college, worked my ass off, and majored in an area (engineering) that gave me a good chance to land a good paying and secure job.

In other words, my professional life has been *extremely *important to me. More important than just about anything else in my life. It allows my family (wife and 3 children) to have a comfortable life.

I’m not telling you this to brag… there are millions of people like me. I am simply relating this to shed light on a significant difference between poor people and middle class and upper class people. I have known many people who have been chronically poor, and none of them valued their work life… work was a 3rd or 4th priority.

113

Are you kidding? Have you ever met, say, a nurse’s aide? They live that shit.

114

Oh I know you’re not bragging! That’s great! I haven’t been that way ever, and I’m sure it relates to how I was raised. My family was more the type to work hard enough to pay the bills and spend any extra time together. I valued that so much more than work or my own education. I was just always the caretaker.

But in other ways I was the same way as you though, with working. I have never been fired either, and kept every job I’ve had until circumstances made it impossible. The two jobs I loved the most were cases of the job being dissolved. Both in the city school system. I worked there a long time but they just reduced the TA position to almost nothing and most of the programs were shifted out to contractors. Like the vision screening; it’s no longer done by the system, they have the optometry college handle the load now. I had one job I quit when I was a kid, and I did it in anger but never since. I’ve always worked at least one, sometimes two jobs. In high school before I quit I had two part-time jobs and tried to go to school every morning, do homework, and take care of my dying mom. When it got close to the end I quit working altogether and took care of her exclusively. Then I did the same with my grandparents, who died one after the other until nobody was left but me.
I guess maybe that messed me up in the head a little.

But anyway, I was always loved everywhere I worked. Even in construction I tried to do everything the guys did, and before I got pregnant I was supervising a crew simply because I put forth the effort to learn basic Spanish. It was fun! But I guess there’s not much room for advancement unless I started my own business, but I can’t do the estimating and pricing and I was never good at generating business. I don’t like cheating people, and to be honest that’s really the only way to make good money contracting out when you’re just starting and you don’t have a huge pool of potential clients. Or at least that’s how it seemed with the guys I’d work with.

115

I grew up in a single parent home. My mom was a sweet shy woman who went to work every day at the same company for 30 years. Goldsmiths. She put tickets on items. For thirty years. She didn’t really teach me anything valuable when it came to the future. She was dreamy eyed and told me to marry rich. We never really discussed college, and by the time I was in my teens she was very sick. She’d had a bad bout with viral pneumonia that caused congestive heart disease. She was also morbidly obese, so there was always this or that diet she’d be trying, going to healers and doctors and just trying to make it through the day. There wasn’t talk about my future. When I was growing up I really wanted to be a housewife more than anything. I still do, to be honest. That’s my dream job and I’m really good at it. I think it may be my “special talent”, but what a sucky talent. I don’t know what to do with it other than be a good housewife.

My mom instilled good moral values in me. I’m a good person. She didn’t teach me about finances or encourage an education other than “I hope you go to college one day so you’ll find a good man” or whatever. Stuff like that. We didn’t discuss hopes and dreams. Maybe that talk depressed her knowing she wasn’t going to be around. She never pushed anything with anyone. My father left before I was born but we went to see him sometimes. He molested me. But I won’t get into that. Suffice it to say he wasn’t around and didn’t offer any financial support for his children even when my mom was bedridden. He just didn’t care.

My grandparents were sharecroppers’ kids who married at 14. They grew up and kept the same jobs for years and years and years and lived in the same home with the same furniture with the same cars all my life and probably years and years before that. They were not loving talkative people so no, they didn’t give me any education on getting ahead. I just learned by example that family (and their god) was the most important thing in the world. No wonder all I wanted to be was a housewife!

I hear ya. I’m 40 myself and I’m starting to really feel the impact of not being more career-minded. And now I have all these stupid anxieties and phobias that hold me back.

116

Honestly if I were you rushgeekgirl what I would do is dependent on your living situation. If you rent you need to find a cheaper place at the end of your lease and move there. If you own you need to move things around so that you have a spare room and rent it out. In fact you could probably call local colleges and speak with the teaching majors and find someone majoring in special needs and see if they need to rent a room for $150-$200 a month. Housing is generally speaking your largest expense so that is where you can expect to get the most benefit for making changes.

This is in fact exactly what I did about 2 and a half years ago. My roommate moved out and that was no big deal because I could cover the rent on my own. Then 3 weeks after she left I lost my job. I was putting time into job searching and selling stuff I didn’t need or that she left behind on eBay and I took a part time job making $10/hr for 15 hours a week while I was looking. I knew that even though I was doing everything I could to take care of my finances I would not be able to cover the rent on that apartment on my own so I started talking to people and found a woman at my part time job that was being evicted. Her exboyfriend was kicking her out of their place and she needed somewhere to live. She moved into the spare room at my place right away and paid half the bills. In the end she ended up being a less than stellar roommate but putting up with her eccentricities allowed me to live off of a part time salary while I found something better without touching my savings. I didn’t know how long it would take me to find a decent full time job and I knew that this wasn’t what I wanted to use my emergency savings for so I leveraged my greatest asset, the spare room, and that decision was the best one I could have made. If I had waited it out I would have been forced to take the very first job that came along and I wouldn’t have ended up at my fabulous current job. If I had waited it out I would have used up all of my savings so when I ended up with a $500 hospital bill I would have been sent to collections and my credit would have been trashed. If you can stand the thought of sharing your house with someone else or the three of you living in a 1 bedroom apartment in a cheaper part of town it is probably the fastest way to reduce your expenses by quite a bit.

117

Rushgeekgirl: Re-reading your posts, I think I can see where you made a life-changing mistake: getting pregnant at an early age with no means of supporting the child.

I don’t mean to be beating up on you over this. But decisions have consequences. Decisions we make as teenagers will have lifelong repercussions. As just one example, many of us were very careful to not have children we cannot afford. In my situation, I took measures to ensure I would not get a a woman pregnant before I was married and had a stable career. I knew that doing so would be very detrimental to my (and the child’s) quality of life.

For the most part, good things happen to people who make good decisions. And that’s the way it should be. By the same token, people who make foolish and irresponsible decisions have a higher probability of being poor. And that’s the way it should be. Responsible people *should *be rewarded, and foolish people *should *be poor.

Again, please don’t interpret my comments as being holier-than-thou. I admit I am being overly simplistic in my comments, as there are many examples of people who have “overcome the odds.” But they are the exceptions, not the rule.

118

Oh God. Reading this makes me want to find God, just so I can thank someone for being born in Scandinavia instead of America.

That sounds overly hateful. I really don’t mean to say that living in America is a bad thing for everyone. I’ve been to America, and the parts I’ve seen are lovely. But I would certainly not want to live there, dealing with all that.

Okay, I do have something to contribute. The Scandinavian countries have some of the lowest bars to education in the whole world. School is free all the way to University, you have a right to student loans and funding no matter who you are or what your credit is or who your parents are. Schools in general are good; I’m not saying there aren’t problems, local or systemic, but a typical child will get a decent education for free most times. There is nothing, in theory, holding people back from getting as much education as they want.

And still, even with all this, a child is statistically unlikely to achieve a higher education then its parents. Why is this? No one really knows, but there are theories. Mostly it boils down to this: “Education” is a culture, and we need help from home to manage. Dropping someone from an uneducated background into a university with no help from home can be compared to sending someone off to a foreign nation, where they don’t speak the language, with nothing but a cheap touristy guidebook, and tell them to start a business on their own. Some might manage, sure. Most wouldn’t. And that’s just the ones that make it to university in the first place.

I would never have managed without the support and advice from parents who had been through the same thing. Pretending this stuff is easy is missing the point completely, I think.

I think poor people are poor because they haven’t the first clue how to stop being poor, and no-one to teach them.

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We do rent a room, and this is the lowest rent we could find. $500 a month for a two bedroom house with a large back yard where we have a huge garden growing. I will not find anything this inexpensive that fits four people. We sleep in the living room for now because we’re thinking of renting the other. We’re not having the best luck with this renter but since it’s Mig’s BROTHER I can’t say anything.

But I can’t even think about this. I saw those children begging and crying for food on the news tonight and all I can think is if I have a penny to spare it’s going to feed those kids something. I can’t get their faces out of my mind.

Today I had to give away my dog. It was the right thing to do. She’ll be in a better home and we’ll save 15 dollars a week in food alone.

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Actually, this is pretty much true in the United States as well in terms of the availability of educational loans all the way up to a professional degree (MD or JD) or a PhD (the bachelor is available through loans and the graduate work comes with a stipend), although the degrees themselves certainly aren’t free and the student debt can be pretty enormous.