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On Being Poor

8/7/2016

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Being born poor is really OK. Becoming poor is not. Maybe not at first. Later when the experience subsides and you figure out ways of either not being poor, or seeming not to be poor, having been poor is almost euphoric. 

The pleasure of buying something expensive is heady. How great not having to weigh up the frivolous pleasure of acquiring the thing with the dull realisation that poverty asserts. That the thing will mean that some essential will stay unpaid and annoyingly present in your thoughts. Yes, essentials: food to transfer into energy, to work or learn, so as to earn and buy and to not be poor; clothes to wear and clean and to appear worthy of the gift to work or learn, so as to earn and buy and not to be poor.

The student years of poverty whether worn as a mark of initiation or of natural circumstance become naturalised in the mind. Poverty is so normal that the lack of extended pleasures become invisible. They are consigned to a fantasy realm. Deemed appropriate for the others, the morally questionable others who must be so completely without empathy and conscious.

The student becomes the worker who becomes the employer who becomes retired and then remembers all the things that have been forgotten.

Being so correctly poor is exactly the same as being so correctly rich. Knowing that wealth has been acquired by just means, or by means of circumstance, or by slow and steady attrition ends with a disregard for poverty. Is this what disregard for those trapped in poverty is? A forgetting, a kind of willing blindness? Am I too casting judgement? I think I am. I remember again the danger of ideologies. The fanatic rightness of a deemed truth, an ideal. 

I trip. I fall. My hands scratch into the dusty earth. I wipe away the grime from my face, my nose, my eyes. I smile at the fading light of a beautiful afternoon and remember. There are no ideals that I can see or hold or really know. There is only circumstance. A treasure so easily unremembered.
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