Hildegarde

I got an e mail this week from somebody alarmed that I hadn’t posted in a fortnight.  I’ve been trying to post things on and off since then, just to show that I’m alive.

But I also just handed in the book for next year–the one I was complaining about having so much trouble with–and it’s getting to the end of the term, and it’s Thanksgiving with Christmas coming after, and I’ve been a little messed up.

I thought about posting this morning, and then I didn’t, and then I was going to let it go, and then this link showed up not once, but several times, on my FB news feed:

http://killermartinis.kinja.com/why-i-make-terrible-decisions-or-poverty-thoughts-1450123558

It’s an interesting article, for several reasons.

The first is the fact that it seems to me that both the woman who wrote it and the people who posted it assume that this frame of mind is something nobody else has considered before. 

What it is, instead, is EXACTLY what most people who are not poor think poor people are like, and EXACTLY the way not poor people think poor people think.

It is, in fact, an almost breathtakingly stereotypical vision of the inner lives of “the poor.”

The students I teach are almost all squarely in the ranks of “the poor,” some of them from poverty so desperate it’s barely believable.

And yet most of them also represent the negation of just this kind of thinking.  They may live around and in the sort of determinist negation that this article portrays, but at the same time they are at war with it every day.

And some few of them–not many, but some–get themselves out and on their way. 

This is not to deny that there are some people for whom this sort of thinking represents an acceptance of reality–people who are mentally or physically disabled, or very old or very sick or both.

And that thing about giving in to the impulse to do something nice for yourself that you can’t really afford is probably damn near universal. 

Doing that sometimes–especially if you’re in a situation of long term stress or deprivation–is a human necessity.

But there is a difference between doing that every once in a while (when we had no money and Bill was dying and the medical bills were beginning to look like the national debt, I used to go buy $5 iced coffee every couple of weeks just to let off steam), and doing that consistently and in areas where the downside is enormous.

Yes, it’s really awful to live through a period when you feel unloved and worthless, and where there doesn’t seem to be any way out of the tunnel, but most people don’t just lie down and play dead. 

I know they don’t.  I see them walk into my classroom every single day.  They’re most handicapped if most of the people around them think like this, and the percentages of those from that kind of environment who make it out are smallest–but some of them do make it out.  I’m going to the police academy graduation of one of them at the end of the term.

The second interesting thing about this to me is that the people who posted it seem to expect that it will generate sympathy, or make people who are not sympathetic feel some kind of shame.

It is, as I’ve said, absolutely stereotypical.  This is what I’m talking about when I talk about passivity.

And for anybody who doesn’t start out looking for a way to continue to believe that “the poor” are helpless and can’t do anything for themselves, what this will do is make them absolutely furious.

 And the fury will not necessarily be the result of rich, arrogant douchbaggery. 

Okay, I love that word.  I picked it up from a silly movie, but it’s a lot of fun.

Like I said, the fury will not necessarily be the result of heartless, self absorbed assholes chantering on about things they know nothing about.

The fury will come longest and hardest from those people who have been in the same situation and gotten themselves out.  If you want to hear people bad mouth “the poor,” come listen to those of my students who were born and brought up in it.  They are harder on “the poor” than any fat cat Republican from Yale could be if they worked on it 24/7 for a decade.

But there’s something else going on here–no person who actually thought like this would ever end up in one of my classrooms, because just to get into such a classroom requires more long range thought, and determination, and rejection of economic determinism than this article exhibits.

My students have aunts and uncles and mothers and fathers and brothers and sisters and cousins who think like this, but they don’t.

But if such a person with this mental framework did end up in my classroom, the simple fact of the matter would be that there would be no way to help him.  Or her.

This is not what poverty looks like.  This is what failure looks like. 

This particular habit of thought is characteristic not of “the poor” but of all people everywhere who set themselves up to fail.  They exist in all strata of society. 

If they’re lucky, they have families who help them out and keep them from ending up on the street.  If they’re not, they could have started out with good schools and well off parents and they’ll still end up on the street.

If poor people were really like this–as a class, as a complete entity–then the people who say we should not help them would have a point.

But as far as I can see, they’re not like this, not most of them. 

And even this writer isn’t like this, because no matter what else she’s done, she’s also written the article and she’s also started the blog.