What the Poor Are Like

Gerry Charlotte Phelps: Chapter 4: What the Poor Are Like

I found this after Googling "poverty." I live in rural Alaska, which has a high poverty rate and high rates of all other manner of bad stuff. Those of us with jobs and houses and toys have a parlor game in which we wonder aloud "what is to be done," because it is patent that nothing any of us do seems to make a dent in poverty's vicious cycle.

In my experience, I noticed that so many people who are poor grew up poor in a family where there was mental illness or addiction, and the children in those families grew up to become addicted and poor and have more children, and so on.

One still wants to help, to be part of a solution, but one soon becomes either cynical, in denial, burned out, or simply stoic.

So many poor people frustrate me. It's almost like they prefer being poor; it's as though they are unwilling to do the work or make the committment to not be poor. It's as though being poor was Home, and they would fight to keep it.

Naturally, it's more complicated than that; also, I understand that my frustration isn't the point. I'm simply sharing my perspective.

There are many programs and opportunities for anyone from this part of the world to do what it takes to not be poor. All of those programs are optional. Many people choose to not participate. Of those that do, most quit: it's too hard, it's too wierd, it's too uncomfortable to hold a job, go to school, manage a life. So many - most, it seems - are booted out of jobs and programs and schools for drunkenness.

It's fashionable to blame the government for first promoting assimilation, and then fostering a culture of dependance, or to blame the missionaries for a legacy of abuse and shame, or the whalers and traders who brought plague. Or, to blame the poor themselves for not doing their fair share in getting out of poverty.

But, plainly, all of that is true to a degree, and also, none of that really matters to any given neglected kid.

The truth is, none of us know what to do. It is also true that what we're doing now is not working, not at all. Therefore, whatever it is to be done won't be much like whatever it is we're doing now.