Yesterday on my way to the commuter train I was accosted by a gentleman dressed in unworn sneakers, jeans and Mountain Equipment Co-Op rain jacket. He was clean-shaven and didn’t smell. He was towing an airline carry-on bag, again without any visible sign of wear and tear.<\/p>\n
“Do you have any change you could spare?” he asked. I could hardly suppress the look of contempt on my face as I turned my back on him.<\/p>\n
This is probably not a good Christian attitude toward the poor. But I happened to spend the first seventeen years of my life in Liberia and C\u00c3\u00b4te d’Ivoire, in West Africa. So from what I saw — but thankfully didn’t experience — I don’t think there are any<\/i> poor people in all of North America.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
I’ll explain further by stealing from John Scalzi’s famous blog post<\/a>, which has always left me strangely unmoved:<\/p>\n Being poor is not knowing what anything costs — because you get everything you have from the local dump.<\/p>\n Being poor is when your kids are chased away from the sidewalk in front of the TV store and beaten.<\/p>\n Being poor is walking 10 miles a day to work, never even having been in a car.<\/p>\n Being poor is almost welcoming toothaches in your three remaining teeth, because they distract from the hunger pangs.<\/p>\n Being poor is when the local dump is your and all the neighbors’ kids’ playground. There is only room in your house to sleep.<\/p>\n Being poor is envying the threadbare school uniforms on the students you see, because you’ll never have a shirt without holes in it, much less ever go to school.<\/p>\n Being poor is living in the outskirts of the city dump.<\/p>\n Being poor is hiding the half a burger you found in the trash from your children so you have something to eat before work tomorrow.<\/p>\n Being poor is when you are the only one of eight siblings that made it past two years old.<\/p>\n Being poor is toys made from wire and bits of string.<\/p>\n Being poor is a house made of cardboard and plastic bags.<\/p>\n Being poor is knowing that having $5 would put your life in danger.<\/p>\n Being poor is when your undernourished kids never have a growth spurt.<\/p>\n Being poor is not having time to make a fire to cook the gristle you found in the trash, and bolting it raw.<\/p>\n Being poor is more holes than underwear, which has never been washed, anyway.<\/p>\n Being poor is everyone having to sleep with their knees drawn up, so the feral dogs in the dump don’t knaw on limbs that stick out of the house.<\/p>\n Being poor is when you step on a nail in the playground, and don’t feel a thing because it didn’t puncture your half-inch of callus.<\/p>\n Being poor is wondering where those groups of kids all dressed alike are going every morning.<\/p>\n Being poor is thinking $0.25 a day is a really good deal.<\/p>\n Being poor is knowing that you can rely on no one at all.<\/p>\n Being poor is a 16-hour day breaking rocks in 45-degrees celsius. The malaria makes you feel cold, anyway.<\/p>\n Being poor is not knowing or caring who your dad was.<\/p>\n Being poor is drinking from the open sewer.<\/p>\n Being poor is dodging strangers’ cars to scavenge their leftover orange peels.<\/p>\n Being poor is thinking yourself lucky to catch a couple of cockroaches for lunch.<\/p>\n Being poor is when grade 3 is the highest form of education you’ve ever heard about.<\/p>\n Being poor is being chased off the sidewalk and beaten. There are no malls in your country.<\/p>\n Being poor is sending your children out alone to beg and steal while you walk 5 miles to work.<\/p>\n Being poor is the police randomly knocking down your house and beating you and your family.<\/p>\n Being poor is when your only mode of interaction with people wearing clothes without holes is begging.<\/p>\n Being poor is hoping someone will throw you the end of their sandwich.<\/p>\n Being poor is a sidewalk with no broken brown glass on it, because you’ve carefully gathered it up to use as kitchen utensils.<\/p>\n Being poor is people knowing everything they will ever need to know about you from one glance.<\/p>\n Being poor is never even dreaming of a $0.01 raise.<\/p>\n Being poor is burning old schoolbooks for food or warmth without ever having a concept of what they are.<\/p>\n Being poor is when the sun and rain are your only source of light and water.<\/p>\n Being poor is scraping the rancid pasta you found in the dump off the ground and devouring it.<\/p>\n Being poor is knowing you can never work very hard, because you’ve malnourished and have chronic malaria and a host of deficiency diseases.<\/p>\n Being poor is never having any possibility of ever using any of whatever intelligence hasn’t been drowned by the malnutrition and malaria.<\/p>\n Being poor is when no one would ever think of the poor as lazy — there’s no such thing as welfare in your country.<\/p>\n Being poor is a six-hour vigil with your child in your lap as she dies of measles.<\/p>\n Being poor is never buying anything, ever, in your life.<\/p>\n Being poor is eating the leftover ramen you found in the dump.<\/p>\n Being poor is when you don’t know not having a family at 14 years old is possible.<\/p>\n Being poor is when you’ve never had an opportunity to be grateful in your life.<\/p>\n Being poor is knowing you won’t be judged, because no one can escape his fate.<\/p>\n Being poor is stealing the single crayon in some lucky kid’s sponsor package.<\/p>\n Being poor is being afraid to pick up coins, lest you be beaten or killed for them.<\/p>\n Being poor is when “shacking up” means something quite literal.<\/p>\n Being poor is never knowing what the numbers on discarded Lotto tickets are meant to represent.<\/p>\n Being poor is being chased from in front of the grocery store and beaten.<\/p>\n Being poor is when the only kinds of “mistakes” your children could possibly make are things that would get them immediately killed.<\/p>\n Being poor is a fever, cough, broken ankle, suppurating ulcer, intestinal parasites and skin fungus that last your whole life long.<\/p>\n Being poor is breaking up the couch you find in the dump for firewood.<\/p>\n Being poor is a $2.00 paycheck advance from a company that takes $2.50 when the paycheck comes in.<\/p>\n Being poor is a lifetime of shivering with malaria and fighting feral dogs when they get too close to your cardboard house at night.<\/p>\n Being poor is a plastic bag for a bed.<\/p>\n Being poor is when there are no shelters in your country.<\/p>\n Being poor is knowing that your poverty is the will of God.<\/p>\n Being poor is never imagining it would be possible to not be poor.<\/p>\n Being poor is not knowing an option if it bit you on the ass.<\/p>\n Being poor is never imagining it would be possible to run, let along get anywhere by doing so.<\/p>\n Being poor is people never troubling themselves with the fact of your existence.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Yesterday on my way to the commuter train I was accosted by a gentleman dressed in unworn sneakers, jeans and Mountain Equipment Co-Op rain jacket. He was clean-shaven and didn’t smell. He was towing an airline carry-on bag, again without any visible sign of wear and tear. “Do you have any change you could spare?” … Continue reading “Being Poor”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-559","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-journal"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/balafon.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/559","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/balafon.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/balafon.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/balafon.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/balafon.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=559"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/balafon.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/559\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/balafon.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=559"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/balafon.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=559"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/balafon.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=559"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}