A question of motives…

Genevieve Peterson: stop revering or persecuting the poor

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overty is, of course, a complex issue, and it is not therefore easily solved. While it continues to linger, people get a little antsy, and their angst manifests in some rather confounding ways at times. Some people like to blame the poor claiming they are “undeserving” if they spend their welfare money on anything other than “essentials.” Others choose to “identify” with the poor by moving into their neighbourhoods and living just like them.

While the former is severely judgmental, its primary fault is in the misunderstanding of how poverty is formed. It fails to recognize that part of the dynamic of being poor is the inability to escape from the cycle of bad decisions. It fails to acknowledge that bad decisions come not necessarily from bad morals, but rather from a failure of society to educate and foster the individual into desiring a more “aspired” life.

It fails to recognize that individuals will still want and get their “comforts,” whether they can afford them or not. The irony is that wealthier people behave in exactly the same way and buy all sorts of luxuries they can’t afford. The only difference is that they are able to afford the basics in the first. The assumption that humans will work on some linear hierarchy of needs is faulty in my view. After all, don’t you often want things that are superfluous and sacrifice the need in the process?

And then there is the latter: people who identify with the poor. While this can be an incredibly noble endeavour, it can also be a little misguided. It becomes a question of motive. Are you living incarnationally because you feel it is what you have been called to do? Because you want to humble yourself? To sacrifice all that you could have and sit along side the destitute? Well that is all good, but a greater purpose should be understanding and then emancipating those around you, and not so that you can feel some kind of altruistic self-worth.

Talk to a poor person and ask them what they want… I doubt they would say that they want you to be like them. They want to be like you! They don’t want you to jump in the pit with them; they want you to pull them out! They only reason we jump in the pit is so that you can first understand the urgency to get out of the pit, and second use your social capital to get them out. Yet I find again and again people wanting to identify with the poor, as though they hold some holy secret that was given only to them as some sort of consolation prize from God.

My point? Read the beatitudes and start to question what they look like in practice. Stop revering or persecuting poor people as though they are the answer to your personal happiness and understanding of the world.

Writer: Genevieve Peterson is an officer in the Australian Southern Territory. She is currently appointed to the Social Programme department as a social policy consultant and is helping to transform the neighbourhood of Collingwood in Melbourne. She is more Brengle than Coutts, more Catherine than William, more Grimace than Ronald, more pepper than salt, more Phoebe than Monica, more rice than pasta, more Ashley than Mary-Kate, more Ernie than Bert and more Wall-e than Eve.

1 Comment to A question of motives…

1. Captain Peterson:

   This is a good start. You are right on one had that none of us deserves to live out the consequences of choices good or bad in perpetuity and on the other that poverty itself is not particularly holy.

   My standart quip about incarnational living is that I can’t afford it. The costs of protecting (insulating) a middle-class family from the worst effects of living in a poor neighbourhood are just too high. So I visit my community.

   Here’s my problem with the way you’ve posed the issue. Whenever I talk to poor people about how I things got that way or people who’ve come back from a bout of it, they can outline in great deal the way it happened, but not why..They can’t list a single or group of choices that led to it or out of it. And these are often people given to frankness.

   Whatever our circumstances we DO always have choices (real choices about the goodness of our lives) but I don’t think these choices have an impact on poverty.

   Andrea
Andrea614Regent on February 19th, 2009

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