2018 is approaching us at breakneck speed and the one thing I truly wish we could truly leave in 2017 is poverty shaming. I realize that probably won’t happen, but can we at least address our knee jerk reaction to judge and insult those we view as “beneath” us? Each month there is a new headline featuring a politician, celebrity, or slightly more fortunate average Joe dragging the poor for the unforgivable crime of being poor.
Degrading another person based solely on their financial resources (or lack thereof) is ridiculous, counterproductive, and makes the person doing the shaming look like a heartless dick. Instead of shaming the poor, let’s focus on identifying the problematic trains of thought that are perpetuating the idea that poor people deserve our contempt.
Not Working is Horrible but Low Paying Jobs Equal Failure
The narrative that poor people are horrible human beings who refuse to work is circulated more or less constantly. We’ve all seen social media posts accusing unemployed adults of living like royalty off of our tax dollars. Pictures of overflowing refrigerators, videos of people using food stamps to buy lobster, and social media pages accusing recipients of welfare to be the scourge of society are everywhere.
Surprisingly, (or not depending on how jaded you are) the people pushing that narrative also claim that menial workers are failures. A person who is working for minimum wage as a house cleaner or taking your order at Starbucks is too lazy to get a “real” job. Either a person is a complete waste of a human life for not having a job or they are laziness incarnate for having a job that doesn’t pay a living wage.
Owning Anything is a Sin
With each new iPhone release there is a fresh outcry against poor people purchasing a nonessential item. How dare a person making $16,000 annually spend $12.00 a month on an iPhone that is now much cheaper after the release of the newest iPhone model! They should just be happy with that single Lifeline phone their household qualified for even if it barely works and can be disconnected at any moment due to an employee error. Before you start shaking your fist at your device yelling about poor people not needing cell phones please keep in mind that not everyone’s idea of a nonessential item is the same.
In a now infamous episode of The O’Reilly Factor the former Fox News anchor and current millionaire (his estimated net worth is $85 million) demanded to know why all these so called poor people had the audacity to own “lots of stuff”. During his rant O’Reilly questioned how Americans could really be poor if they owned things like microwaves, air conditioners, refrigerators, more than one television, and a computer. His way of thinking is depressingly common since apparently owning anything considered a modern convenience means that you are lying about your finances or just hopelessly incompetent meaning…
Being Poor is Always Your Own Damn Fault
In spite of numerous studies conducted by Princeton University, Stanford, Yale, and media sources around the world explaining how the cycle of poverty is difficult to break people still insist that poor people bring poverty on themselves. Forget the recession, ignore the fact that a poor blue collar worker is more than likely going to raise their children to be another poor blue collar worker, and disregard every single poverty tipping event that is outside of a person’s control. Anyone who is poor is solely responsible for their own poverty.
At the rate the attitudes toward those living in poverty is deteriorating it’s only a matter of time until someone decides to remake The Grapes of Wrath to show America that the Joads were really just shiftless ingrates.
