Good article

[velvetpage]

http://www.alternet.org/workplace/43778/

Excerpt: "I wrote this book because I love this country, and I think America is a gift. Its greatest gift is this: people have come here from all over the world, and all they expected to do was work hard. And what they hoped was that their work would be rewarded. What they dreamed about was that their kids were going to do better than they were. That was the American Dream. And despite a civil war, two world wars, recessions, depressions, the American Dream has survived. Until now."

Comments

[merlyn4401.livejournal.com]

Your comparison is interesting, and brings up what I said in my last response about not being able to forsee the consequences of actions. Bad choice: dropping out of school. Better choice: Finding a teacher or counselor to help her with her reading problem. Bad choice: having two babies - use birth control or get an abortion, or give the kiddo up for adoption. It's a terrible choice to have a child when you are in those straits. Those are two big crossroads where she could have made better choices for herself and not ended up with two kids in a minimum wage paying job and not being able to take care of herself or them.

You know, I don't have all the answers to poverty. Who does? It is an incredibly complex and multilayered problem. I agree that government assistance should be available, on a short term basis, to help people get going. But I also feel that people need to take responsibility for themselves and the choices they make in life.

[velvetpage.livejournal.com]

It's interesting that you bring up birth control, because the people who are supporting unrestrained capitalism in the U.S. are the same people who are funding abstinence-only education, supporting pharmacists' right to limit access to birth control options, and fighting for extreme abortion bans. But I digress.

I want people to take responsibility for their choices. I also want to help them make better ones in the future, and help their kids make better ones. To me, that's where good social programs come in. They should support adults who need to go back and get a better education to make them employable. They should help with childcare for those folks who made the choice, possibly when times were better, and are now stuck with it. Since getting ill is not a choice, medical care should not be one of the things that people are left to take individual financial responsibility for.

I really dislike the rhetoric of choice, actually. It's often a way for people to absolve themselves of social responsibility for needed changes. I don't believe in making people and their children suffer endlessly for past bad choices or downturns in their fortunes. And I'd rather pay for a few leeches than NOT help someone who really needed it and could have improved their lives with it.

[merlyn4401.livejournal.com]

I am really of two minds about the birth control thing. On the one hand, I think abstinence only education is a GOOD thing. Frankly, if more people kept their zippers zipped and their legs closed, we wouldn't have nearly the problem with poverty we have today. Since it has become acceptable to have babies hither and yon out of wedlock, with as many baby-daddies as you please, we now have huge problems of exactly the example you described. A huge factor of poverty would be eliminated if people would stop having babies out of wedlock. There were good reasons for Christianity to have so many strictures against pre-marital sex and affairs - it destroys the family unit. But, on the other hand, abstinence only ed doesn't work, because every other message they receive is sex is wonderful, go for it, it is your right, etc etc etc. So yes, birth control should be taught about and provided.

The social programs you describe are great, but they only help those who WANT to help themselves, and end the cycle. Too many people don't have the basic intelligence, or are addicted, or have some other outside factor going on. I think eliminating addiction, and eliminating out-of-wedlock babies would be two HUGE steps in breaking the cycle of poverty. Unfortunately, those two things can only be influenced by society at large, not by the government.

I don't believe in making anyone suffer for past choices either. But if you absolve everyone of all responsibility for their situation, all you do is create a class of victims who feel entitled, which is where we are right now.

[kesmun.livejournal.com]

The entitlement is a problem, I agree. I also believe that if more people kept their legs shut and zippers up, things would be much better. Abstinence education kind of boils down to "Sex leads to pregnancy and STDs. The only way to completely prevent these is not to have sex, and when you do have sex, have it with someone that you're in a permanent committed relationship with and that you can provide for children with." Repeat that enough, starting early enough, and it might filter through hormones and whatnot. It works for a lot of people.

Unfortunately, those are people that have a strong hope of a life that includes luxuries and other trappings of the modern definition of success.

One of the classic characteristics of poverty is a high birth rate. There are proven sociological and biological factors for this, i.e. more births means more chances of at least one child surviving, more children means more hands to do the work necessary for survival, etc. The unfortunate part is that with modern (usually urban) poverty is that more children actually means more work without more hands to do the work, because of child labor laws. (Note: I'm not saying that those laws are wrong.) In the cycle of work/eat/sleep, one of the few forms of entertainment and/or pleasure (and just about the only one that doesn't usually cost money) is sex. When you are feeding a family of even as few as 3 on minimum wage, especially in an urban environment, milk takes precedence over birth control (assuming you have the time and ability to get to even a free clinic at the usually absurdly few hours such clinics can afford to be open to get the prescription).

Yes, there are programs available. Most of them require reams of paperwork or going to inconvenient places during work hours or both. The system was irretrevably broken from the get-go, mainly because it's not a single system to begin with, it's a disparate network of systems with layers of territorial bureaucracies and poor inter-system communication. There are more cracks to fall into than actual surface area of honest-to-god help.