Poverty

There's a lot of talk lately about children living in poverty and how horrible it is.  Well, I and many of my family and friends were terribly impoverished in our childhood and I've seldom heard any of them say they suffered much from it at all.  There are different kinds of poverty and that's what well-to-do people just can't understand.  They seem to equate lack of monetary means as the equivalent of living a life of hell and that just isn't necessarily so.


For most of my youth, I lived in a tiny 2 room apartment that shared a bathroom with 3 other families.  I slept in one bed with my mother and sister, too, and my grandparents slept on the sofabed.  But, and this is important...the little apartment was clean and we all ate 3 decent meals per day.  Our clothes were all washed by hand and ironed.  No, it wasn't perfect and there were drawbacks that you see in any family no matter what their income happens to be but I never felt poor.


Some of my family also come from what you'd call poverty but they gained their happiness in childhood from having many siblings to play with.  Their bond was strong in childhood and remains strong in adulthood.  All of them used their intelligence and tenacity to prosper in life, too, and they can claim at least one millionaire among them.


We all came from the working poor so that could have made a difference.  There is a pride among the working poor that is missing from welfare recipients.  Having a parent or parents who work hard every day even if the paycheck is small gives you hope that you can maybe do better with your own life.  If a family stays on welfare for generations, it seems to make them lazy and unwilling to assert themselves.


There is no shame in being one of the working poor because circumstances affect everyone but I do wish that our government would make sure that by working, even for minimum wage, people would be better off than if they just sat on their butts and collected welfare.  There are some programs in effect but not nearly enough.


Every time I hear on the news about how horrible it is for a child brought up in poverty, I know the speaker has never experienced it themselves.  "Poor" is often a frame of mind and not always low income reality.