Who Speaks for the Poor?

 

The poverty of our century is unlike that of any other. It is not, as poverty was before, the result of natural scarcity, but of a set of priorities imposed upon the rest of the world by the rich. Consequently, the modern poor are not pitied...but written off as trash. The twentieth-century consumer economy has produced the first culture for which a beggar is a reminder of nothing. ~John Berger

I feel the discern John Berger speaks of when talking about the poor and how our society today writes the impoverished off as trash. People become trash when they are blamed for being poor like it was a choice in today’s economy. Education, equal pay, family values that promote both parents financially supporting children are used as a way to blame the impoverished for their meager financial circumstances.

The thought that life happens and all people really aren’t created equal are never discussed by the rich as a cause of poverty. The well-to-do blame the poor for being in a lower class able to be used and abused by the “rich.” A revolt or some calamity is needed in order for the blame for poverty to be placed on those who have created a class of people living in poverty.

What will the calamity to be though? Will the poor rise up in a revolt against the well-to-do? With the political creation of the fiscal cliff and debt ceiling and the news coverage that keeps us all informed of when our economy will crash and burn a class of people have been give a voice; albeit a newly disgruntled voice soft voice it is a voice still the same.

With the protests by the Occupy Movement in 2012 to the re-election of President Obama over the well-to-do Mitt Romney a voice representing the impoverished has risen and become news worthy. How long will it take before the voice of the impoverished becomes a cry for revolution? As Americans when we vote we are voting as revolutionaries, but voting against calamity.

If anyone has seen the new television series Revolution you are watching the likelihood of what our future may entail. Do we really want to learn the value of each other as free men by losing all that we have come to rely on such as food, water and utilities?

As take the train to work each day. People heard on to the train and in/out of the terminal like cattle being sent to slaughter. People are sleeping on benches others are asking for change for something to eat while others are too proud to ask for help and choose to suffer in the corners of the station huddling to keep warm and trying to become invisible so they aren’t looked at with disdain and asked to leave the premise.

The poor may have a new voice, but it is the well-to-do who are doing the talking. Our politicians are talking about the poor, but they really aren’t saying anything to help the living conditions of the impoverished. But how could they give help to the poor? In order to raise the living standards of the poor the well-to-do would have to sacrifice something they covet. Unfortunately coveting is what the well-to-do do best which means the poor will remain figments in the imagination of the politicians who have been voted in to serve those whom they choose not to see for their own selfish comfort.