It’s Costly to be Poor

Growing up in an upper-middle-class suburban neighborhood in California, I did not have much direct contact with poverty.  I heard and absorbed negative perceptions about poor people: that they were lazy, dangerous, and to be avoided.  Even the more charitable thoughts were just that: a form of charity, to be done on a drop-in basis, from on high, and from a place of advantage and superiority. 

One of the great things about living in a city is the ability to interact, both shallowly and deeply, with people from all walks of life.  I regret that all too often I can and still do cocoon myself with others like me, because my privilege affords me this choice.   But I have also made intentional choices to counteract this impulse, and have been thoroughly blessed as a result.

When poverty is neither distant nor academic but a real burden borne by real people who you have real relationships with, it changes your outlook profoundly.  I’m not here to saint or artificially exalt poor people, because that too is patronizing and elitist.  But I am here to say that those who struggle with poverty are people too, and their values and aspirations and fears are quite similar to mine. 

What is different is the buffer of comfort and resources that my privilege allows.  It’s costly to be poor, and that costliness manifests itself in profound ways that make my heart hurt now that I am more attuned to the human experience of poverty.   Simply put, poverty is a force multiplier, in that it wreaks devastating consequences on individuals, households, and communities, and amplifies small setbacks into larger ones and large setbacks into catastrophic ones.

If you are, like me, a well-to-do person living in upper-middle-class comfort, imagine for a moment how devastating it would be to lose a loved one as a result of violence, or bad health care, or accident.  Think of how profound an effect such a singular and isolated tragedy would have on your well-being and on your extended family.

For those living in poverty, such occurrences are far more common.  And the multiplicity of them, far from having a diminishing effect as you become numb to the second, the fifth, the tenth such incident, have an exponentially devastating emotional and financial effect.  Absent the many safety nets that we privileged folk have been able to construct for ourselves (or have had handed to us), these life bombs generate so great a blast and leave behind so terrible an amount of collateral damage. 

If you are a well-to-do person who also happens to be a person of faith, consider how frequent charity to the poor and empathy with the poor is stressed in your religious tradition.  Whoever your God is cares for the poor in our midst, and cares about what we are doing to help and connect with them. 

At this point, many people turn to politics, as a forum for reconciling our values with the policies we want our elected officials to live out, and as a place of frustration that so little progress is being made to do this.  And that is appropriate, as some of the ways we as a society ought to respond to the poverty amongst us is through levers that government controls, like regulation and public investments and social programs.  It is our obligation as individual people to hold our government, which is after all a government “of the people,” to do right by the poor in our midst.

It is also our obligation as individual people to do what we can outside of the mechanism of government, to help and connect with the poor amongst us.  This can take many forms, but the ones that easily come to mind – donating to a preferred charity, or doing a mercy ministry through church – are only as effective long-term as our willingness to not just help the poor but also connect with the poor.  For it is in that place of shared humanity, in which your sufferings become my sufferings and your plight is felt as my plight, that real impact can be made.  It is costly to be poor, but it doesn’t have to be, if we all are willing to deploy whatever political capital, social capital, and personal empathy we have to consider poverty a “we” issue that “we” should address.