Get the mop out...

This article is about "living poor." At least that's the title. But before the author actually gets into how she "lives poor," (and incidentally, there is very little substance in that thread, despite the fact that her article runs two pages long), she feels obliged to practice some verbal diarrhea by indicting our entire society:

Yet there is another reason I hesitate to call myself poor -- the cultural baggage associated with the word: Poor people are lazy, stupid, immoral, shameless and incapable of making smart decisions. Poor people are losers; our country loves winners. We want poor people to trade their rags for riches. We want them to embody the American dream.

Most of all, we want to believe that poor people are shiftless and depraved and always to blame for their poverty. Otherwise, we'd have to face the possibility that someday we, too, could wind up on the business end of the bread line.

Without resorting to acronyms for expressions I don't use, here are my thoughts on this:

1. ACK.
2. This woman does not know very many nice people. (And I wonder whether she knows any...)
3. This woman must not know any real conservatives.
4. This woman is a liberal class warrior who puts evil words in all of our mouths.
5. This woman sounds as if she thinks she's the only person with internet access who understands poverty or cares about the poor.
6. This woman is smart about her spending.

I know poor people, and I know people who make and spend more money. No one I've met in my LIFE - to the best of my knowledge - thinks that all people who are going through financial hardship are lazy, stupid, etc. On the side of the fake coin that the author uses, though, I do know a few who think poor people are just unlucky. The truth is - as usual - somewhere in-between "they're all just lazy" and "they're all just victims," depending on the individual, and these dishonestly-created divisions are the milk that class warfare thrives on.

Class warfare is destroying our country.

People are individuals, and as individuals, we react differently to the varied situations in which we find ourselves. Some individuals are stupid and have lots of money. Some are stupid and have no money. Many are smart and have little money, and many are smart and have lots of money.

YOUR INCOME IS NOT THE MEASURE OF YOUR PERSON, and despite the author's protests to the contrary, she does hold herself up as noble, by virtue of holding those not in her situation as ignoble.

Here's the one good part of her article:

I might not have selected this scenario for my life. But now that I have it, I'm going to see what I can learn from it. My hope is that it will make me wiser about what I eventually seek.

Hear, hear!