Cartoon by Dave Walker. Find more cartoons you can freely re-use on your blog at We Blog Cartoons.
Today life has me by the end of my nostril and is pulling upwards. Hard. If anyone has ever done that to you you'll know it really hurts quite a very lot. And then you are in their power and will have to go anywhere their two fingers drag you. You are 'following your nose' but this time it has nothing to do with the local curry house as you walk out of the Hare and Hounds. But i digress. Even before my ('my'=loosely used term- hopefully what i mean is 'her') washing machine broke and had to be mended to a still broken-but-with-new-problem status, i was annoyed but now i'm riled and almost upset. Not only do I have to try and wear the same socks for a bit longer (actually not really a problem) but we've been leant over a barrel and... dragged by our noses by the bank's overdraft charges.
I don't want to be melodramatic about this. But this is the state of affairs: In the third world, people grow stuff and then eat it and sell what's left over. ( Or they go to work and earn a living, but for arguments sake we'll talk about the pre-industrialist, poverty stricken parts for now) If that crop fails they go hungry, possibly even starve to death. In the first world; at least the bit of it that I know about, you have to get someone to give you money for doing work or giving them a product you've made. If you cannot find someone to give that product to or the person who gives you money for doing work gives you less than you need to pay for broken sodding washing machines and killing bastard (sorry) squirrels who infest your attic merely out of spite (it must be - there's not a shortage of perfectly good trees in Totley) then you potentially are in the same position as the 3rd worl-ite. OK not quite - not many middle-class white people are growing those mal-nutrition pot bellies but without being trite about the plight of the genuinely starving in Africa, the proximity to a clinical state of poverty is not all that much further away for a number of middle-class me-types than them.
OK so the difference is that hopefully if things get really bad the government in England will write off your debts and give you some benefits - but only if you get paid nothing much at all. I, on the other hand, like many others, manage to tread water, getting IN just enough to pay the unavoidable OUTs. If I was to take a leaf out of the third worl's book, I would sit outside my house with nowhere to go and nothing else left to do that would be of any help. (note - I have a genuine concern and compassion for people in that kind of state) but there is a cultural dimension to this argument - I will be financially in poverty, because I can't pay my bills or feed my children, emotionally in poverty because I can't handle the stress of it all, optional-ly in poverty because there's no more avenues to go down to help myself, its just a slippery slope - but I will still have to go for a coffee if my friends ask me or travel across the country to a stag do, or talk about holidays with people who look exactly the same as me - well dressed, well fed, happy-ish, but whom are not in my position. The very last expression of my poverty that I will admit to and reveal is cultural - in England poverty is far off - for the OTHER people. We have iPods here thankyou.
Well, and this may sound dramatic, but this is the point - it isn't... At any given point I am only a few months/unavoidable events away from bankruptcy, homelessness and hopelessness. However, I am also only a short distance from becoming mega-rich. However, I will only ever be considered as one of the richest 5% of the world's population.
Starvation is not a probable cause of death for me, the NHS tries not to allow that. But suicide rates are high for people who feel the delicacy of our balance. I can see how totally easy it must be to lose all hope, whole still presenting the model middle-class image. In the 3rd world you can have solidarity, perhaps even be spiritually wealthy as you die of hunger. I would still rather die of stress and be spiritually cancerous, in a nice hospital bed. Strange, isn't it?
3 comments:
Wow...love your post Joel. You're blog is awesome...will defo be checking this one every day! Write lots and lots you're very very good x
hmmm, ......although i appreciate you are not well off by any means, to compare yourself to third world poverty i find really difficult. You own a house, you have a car, a tv, furniture, you buy new clothes that are current fashion..... where as people in real poverty struggle to have any clothes that are not rags, live in a mud hut and really do go for days, weeks with no food.
Athough i appreicate that it is difficult to say no to going to coffee, stag dos etc and that people generally do not expect people to not be able to afford these things, which makes it hard for you. i still think it is incomparable to third world poverty.
Anonymous, you seem to be hearing what I'm saying but not really listening. I did clarify that being in poverty in the third world is worse than being in poverty in the first and you can tell if you use common sense that i am using the word poverty in such a way as to a) draw attention to the fact that just because you live in England - and more than that, just because you seem to be middle class - doesn't necessarily mean you are comfortable or can manage. Its a simple point. b) What is 'rich' and what is 'poor?' - I was born in Kenya and worked in a remote village in Tanzania for 8 months. I know what poverty looks like in the third world, but i also know that very many of those 'poor' people are very much less in a state of poverty than we are - in very real, very un-patronising, very humbling ways. Again, I'm not the first to say this.
I have no desire to be self-pitying, and i really am so grateful for everything I have - physical, financial and otherwise - especially as I see clearly how most of it has appeared in my possession from other's generosity and from the grace of God.
However, I think it is a valid topic to think about the struggle of so many in a society so based on finance. Perhaps the poverty of those in the third world is a seperate topic but it has been recently docuymented in various media that homelessness is these days a lot closer to all of us than we previously thought possible.
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