Things can always get worse
Presidential candidate, Donald Trump, who built his fortune independently having just a “small loan” from his father, has been quoted as having remarked that a homeless gentleman had more money than he while his debt amounted to one billion dollars. I can’t say a lot for his situation at the time, but I would guess at his still having a spectacular home, food in his fridge and a fancy car. The rich often endure debt, but it is a mistake to think that Trump has ever suffered poverty. I tend to think a little differently when I pass the homeless on our streets.
With my own situation in chaotic decline, I too have had to borrow a small sum of money in order to get ahead. For yesterday’s interview, which I believe went pretty well, I had to borrow just £30 (not Trump’s million dollars) just to get a train ticket. It will be repaid next Friday.
No, mine is not a situation of dire poverty, but it is technically characterised as such — not dire, but poverty. When I pass those less fortunate, I empathise and I wonder… how would I come back from there?
The further into poverty one gets, the more difficult the return seems to be. To keep a roof over one’s head and food in the cupboard, one first sacrifices things like a phone connection and credit for your mobile, activities of leisure, the internet and means of transportation. There’s always something else one can give up in order to survive a little longer; you find you hold on to the things you truly believe you need. As a programmer, that includes my laptop — it did include the internet, and we’re working to get that reconnected having just endured a day without. In order to come back from this though, a person needs tools and they need support.
Without the net, a job search becomes more limited, and communication with potential employers much more complicated. Programming slows as reference materials and library dependencies become inaccessible… though, speaking of library dependencies, I expect that’s where I’ll be uploading this article from — grateful that I live in a city, where these have not been closed… yet. The prospects available to a person in poverty become thinner and thinner, a matter worsened under certain governmental policy which has made certain barriers to social mobility a little harder to overcome.
It is often said by the successful that the way they achieved what they did was through hard work. I don’t doubt that. Success really is hard work; some years it’s harder still and some years it’s easier. There are some who aim to make it easier and some who protect the interests of the already successful and stable. In an ideal world, we’d do both, fairly maintaining the interests of those at the top while giving those at the bottom a helping hand up. Because it isn’t just hard work that leads to success. It is, in all cases, built on the shoulders of those who laid some groundwork. Trump started with a loan from his father, others are similarly born into wealth, more still take loans from their banks and Kevin Smith started his successful film career on several maxed-out credit cards. To succeed, we first need to understand — something which comes from reading, books and articles — and we need to be able to communicate our ideas — by phone, by mail or through the internet. Success is hard work but it still doesn’t come cheap; it is built on top of an excellent foundation of knowledge and resources provided to us by others.
This is why I’m a fond supporter of recent efforts by Utrecht in the Netherlands and Ontario, Canada to introduce a basic income. Many are critical but I believe it’s bold, compassionate leadership. It’s leadership which understands that growth isn’t incubated in a vacuum; a sapling supplied no air will never flourish into a tree, just as ambition supplied no knowledge and no resources will never flourish into success. The basic income may require a small tax increase, but it’s a payment which increases the spending-power of consumers and the capabilities of small businesses and independents to hire more, grow further and do more. It’s a small price to pay to foster the growth of a nation’s income.
It’s why I’ve said I’ll never pay a wage that’s below the Living Wage. Any less, I think, is hostile to growth. It’s just something that, as yet, I can’t fight. I’ll never qualify for a small loan of a million dollars, I won’t be maxing out several credit cards and I wasn’t born into a wealthy family. Matters have gone from bad to better to worse for me and my family. I won’t be able to afford another long journey any time soon, or countless journeys for frequent coffee meetings with potential investors and clients. At the moment, we don’t even have an internet connection. All I’ve got is hard work, and to succeed I need to convince anybody I can that investing in someone like myself — impoverished, without basic resources — is a good deal. No man is an island, hard work without a helping hand does not beget success and there’s nothing to be gained where nothing’s ventured.
As for now… I’m grasping at straws, desperately trying not to fail further, attempting as hard as I might to actually do something instead of working for a minimum wage which doesn’t yield nearly enough to get a labourer onto the next rung of the ladder to something — anything — resembling success. I’m doing that for now, keenly aware that… things can always get worse. What is a boy to do?
