Poverty.

Why in this day and age, where we have abundance of far too many things do so many people live in poverty?

Poverty is something that affects a lot more than what we can purchase. Poverty levels can have quite an impact on a persons mental health. People who live beneath the poverty line are three times more likely to have increased psychological distress than those who live more comfortably.

Children who are raised by struggling guardians can see their academic outcome not be as high as those from a wealthier family. So it is essentially generational.

Poorer families are unable to find other alternatives than their local state school. It’s just not that simple. The area a person lives in can determine a lot, for example if you live in an area that doesn’t see much in terms of financial help from the government then the school you attend may not do as well as in an affluent area, with high earners paying higher taxes and their schools receiving more in the way of grants and funding.

It is suggested that the poor remain poor and the rich stay rich because of the way in which they are raised. Poorer families raise poor children and vice versa.

The first seven years of our lives are basically our ‘programming’ years, where our minds are like sponges. We are permanently in what’s known as a ‘theta’ state, which can be compared to that of a hypnosis state. Everything you witness around you becomes ingrained in your mind and this cements what you think you know, what you are conscious of. It is our conscious behaviour that will determine how our lives will unfold. So if we witness hunger, struggles and stress due to financial instability, that can become what we know and expect, like a self fulfilling prophecy, unless intrinsic changes are made.

Society has changed and developed throughout the years, you only need to look at technology to see how far we have come but one thing that has remained unchanged is the way the schooling system operates. It has remained unchanged from how it was back through the industrial age which prepared children and developed them to obtain the ability to work within industries.

The education system as it stands now and as it has always stood is just sufficient enough to create very good workers, without a need to critically think or to have big dreams or aspirations. This way the ones pulling the strings, the fat cats of business with an abundance of money wont need to feel threatened or concerned that the poor folk may raise the bar and start aiming at the top bracket.

The top bracket earners have made damn sure that economic growth does not filter down and as things become affluent at the top, the purse strings get so much tighter at the bottom.

These high earners blame the severe deprivation at the bottom on the fact that the less fortunate just make terrible choices and live out their lives with negative behaviour. When in fact there are many structural factors that can be attributed to the cause of poverty because of choices being shaped by some of the following things; racism, gender based discrimination and economic dislocation.

But if the schooling system teaches us nothing of money, how to obtain it, save it, invest it, how else do we learn?

The fundamental lessons in school are there to prime you for the work place, we are taught to be afraid of making mistakes and being scolded, and in the work place if we don’t adhere to rules we could potentially lose the food on our table.

The sad reality is, parents depend on the school system to inform the children about all the necessary knowledge to help them through life because more often than not the parents time is spent working more than one job meaning that they barely have time to educate their children on things the system fails to. Business knowledge is almost taboo, never taught in schools but passed down through families.

Social conditioning begins in school, there are the children who are lucky enough to have nice new things, but then there are so many children who feel left behind and can’t keep up with the latest trends and feel inadequate, this carries on into adult life also.

We are conditioned to believe our value as a person is determined by how wealthy we are, and this in turn affects our self esteem and so we engage in a vicious cycle of not having a lot of money but not having the self belief or determination to aim higher.

In some instances poverty can be due to a fundamental attitude, if you have a poor mental attitude it can make it harder to find the strength to push through and succeed. Societal factors are purposely built in order to keep us maintaining a negative outlook which restricts our ability and want to grow.

Austerity is a giant factor of why life is made so hard for so many, to the point where people don’t get the chance to demand better.

Austerity is there to literally erode away hopes. And it works,

“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 word by the rich.

Consequently, the modern poor are not pitied but written off as trash”

John Berger

The government have made it so our earnings are disproportionate to the costs of living. Government policies make it almost impossible to have anything in the way of savings. Having a welfare system can also discourage working for those who are less driven, it encourages complete dependence on the system and the system is structured in order to fail the poor and keep them poor. The system also discourages families being together, due to work and school hours and the need to basically sell hours of our lives in order to be able to survive and pay bills.

A better option for poverty is to create better conditions for profitable investment, new and affordable ways for people to invest, and perhaps to invest in things that would benefit society as a whole.

Trends in economy, lack of education, dense population in small areas, high divorce rate, illiteracy, epidemic diseases and environmental factors i.e. adverse weather conditions all play a part in aiding poverty. Not to mention war and violence in areas of the world having a huge negative impact.

The top bracket of earners and the politicians keep us very separate, they use divisional tactics in the media to keep us fighting amongst ourselves and in competition, they focus on race, religion, jobs, ethnic background, social status, sexuality. When we are so distracted we don’t recognise just how little tax the top earners are paying in comparison to the middle class. The top 1% have half of the worlds wealth. They deprive everyone else of any kind of chance to progress and better ourselves.

The only help we obtain from them is the opportunity to apply for a loan, and this works in their favour entirely, banks offer loans and expect high interest on the return, and the fact is the banks don’t loan physical cash, they basically increase the digits in your account and when you pay the interest on money that was never really there in the first instance, this is how they extract money from society and into the top bracket, and we don’t see that money again as it’s kept within the top bracket. So as a society our physical money is paid back to the banks yet due to inflation year after year with wages remaining low we are being drained and hence how we all end up in poverty.

We are taught to want what we don’t need, we are distracted by the material and allow our wealth to determine our worth, it’s now a very normal thing for us to be;

“…efficient, professional, compulsive consumers, it’s (our) civic duty, consumption”

George Carlin.

We have become content with what we know, and that is that we are now obedient workers living in fear with a compulsion to own ‘things’ and let that define us. We are surrounded by advertisements enticing us to spend money we don’t have, and spend our days paying off our debts.

It’s now at a point where people are so poor that buying a house is not something we are able to do, even if we do ‘buy’ a house we live out our days in this house paying it off, with interest. Not only that but if we miss payments for whatever reason, that house may be reclaimed by the banks or the government and sold at auction to line the pockets of the rich tax evading upper class and that money wouldn’t even be noticeable because they already have so much.

The blatancy of greed and avarice is truly very cruel, our society is one where mothers and babies die on the street, homeless in the cold yet a Queen can make a speech about austerity on Christmas day, wearing a crown sat next to a golden piano and that is totally acceptable.

Another example is the Pope in the Vatican stressing about the need to feed the hungry whilst surrounded by gold.

We have more than enough to make sure the hungry are fed and that children have a home.

Why do we accept things the way they are, it’s unjust and wicked.

If we are to change things it has to start with us, there are so many ways to help others who are struggling, we can be kind, it costs nothing but is priceless, if we can we can expose desperate and sad people to new experiences, be supportive and encouraging, don’t expect things in return and keep our expectations high for them.