b8-n-cstr8:

and just class privileged people in general talking about how bad poverty is.

like the main obstacle is not the state, it is the social values of class privilege. if class privileged people stopped thinking that their desire for comfort was ultimately more important than housing for all, we wouldn’t have this problem.

if class privileged people in general opened up their spaces and resources to poor people, without conditions of labor-exchange or such, then poverty would not be an issue.

if class privileged people decided to actually communalize their resources, we would all be fine. there’s more than enough resource in the middle and upper classes to provide for the poor.

Yes! Honestly, as a lifelong poor kid I’m at a point where I really don’t want to hear anyone who isn’t poor / has never been poor saying shit about poverty.

Because so many middle / upper class radicals focus on the bigger abstract aspects of the state and revolution, and while that shit is important, it lets them totally ignore the privilege they have over people and what they can do now within existing frameworks to help people.

Especially in the US, where the middle class lives in such a fucking decadent way, and there are more middle class folks than anyone else here.

There is a very clear difference in the way most poor and middle class people view money in my experience. Poor folks generally know and respect it’s value more. If you spend a lot of time worrying about not having rent money and you don’t have credit or mommy and daddy to bail you out, you know what a couple hundred bucks means. When you can’t afford to buy food, you know what money means.

And if you’ve never been there, I don’t wanna hear about your dialectical materialism or whatever the flying fuck.

genderbitch:

cynicaldouche:

elainemorisi:

aiffe:

chainofaffection:

“Have you ever come across a homeless individual and felt totally uncomfortable?

You see them and you know they are in need, but you are not sure what to do. You know that handing them money is not the best thing. But, you also see that they clearly have some needs. Their lips are chapped. They are hungry. They are thirsty. They are asking for help.

How can you help?

Here is a simple idea - blessing bags.

This was such an easy project. We are now going to keep a few “Blessing Bags” in our car so that when we do happen to see someone on the streets who is homeless, we can hand them a Blessing Bag. I first learned of these bags from my friend, Julie. I am using the picture of her bags (see above) because the ones we took were taken in horrible lighting and turned out really grainy and hard to see what is inside of them.

If you’d like to make your own Blessing Bags, this is what you would need:

Gallon size Ziplock bags

items to go in the bags, such as:

chap stick

packages of tissues

toothbrush and toothpaste

comb

soap

trail mix

granola bars

crackers

pack of gum

band aids

mouthwash

coins (could be used to make a phone call, or purchase a food item)

hand wipes

you could also put in a warm pair of socks, and maybe a Starbucks gift card

Assemble all the items in the bags, and maybe throw in a note of encouragement. Seal the bags and stow in your car for a moment of providence.

This would be a great activity to do with some other families. Each family could bring one of the items going into the bags (ex: toothbrushes). Set up all the items around a table and walk around it with the ziplocks and fill the bags.”

http://kwavs.blogspot.com/2011/05/blessing-bags-how-to.html

Hey, words from an actual former homeless person here.

Those people you see who make you uncomfortable? Those aren’t homeless people, they’re beggars. Well, some of them are also homeless. Some of them are not. NOT ALL HOMELESS PEOPLE ARE BEGGARS. (Also, they’re not all addicts, though some are. You literally know nothing about a beggar’s life except that they are beggars.)

Beggars have a uniform like any other kind of worker. They have to look as bedraggled and dirty and pathetic as possible. If you gave a beggar a chance to shower and wash their clothes, you would be damaging their earning potential. They make their money by manipulating the feelings of people who don’t know much about poverty. That means they have to play to stereotypes, some of which are like a hundred years out of date.

When I was homeless, I did not beg. (I stole, dealt with charities, sometimes even worked. Yes, you can be homeless with a full-time job. I’ve worked 60 hours a week and been homeless. And I mean sleeping in a car or a tent homeless, not on somebody’s couch homeless, though that’s an under-counted form of homelessness. I asked for food once or twice, but I didn’t look like a beggar.) I kept myself clean. I looked like anyone else. That person you pass in the store, on the bus, someone who looks just like anyone else, they could be homeless. The sales clerk who helps you for minimum wage. They could have lost their apartment because you can’t pay rent on that salary.

I’m not saying there’s anything wrong with begging. And it’s true that some people do actually just look like that because due to mental illness or addiction they sincerely can’t take care of themselves. Some of them are honestly nothing more than scam artists who have no real need, though, playing off people’s sympathy for those who genuinely do need help. But let’s assume that you were giving these to an actual homeless person.

- soap is not that difficult to come by if you are so inclined to have/use it. Many public bathrooms have it. Homeless shelters will give you a bar of it. If you have $10 or so for a truck stop shower, soap is provided. Running water is a lot more difficult.

- believe it or not, they may already have a toothbrush and toothpaste, and if they don’t, it’s unlikely they have any interest in using them. Homeless people commonly cache useful items wrapped in plastic in a bunch of hidden places. If you want to help the homeless, next time you find one of those caches, don’t throw them away. I mean, think about it. If you had to start living on the street, would you stop brushing your teeth? I didn’t either. Plus, if everyone gave homeless people one of these packs, they’d have more toothbrushes than they did teeth. Same with the deodorant—one stick lasts a long time, and they give them to you in shelters. This kind of mismanagement and waste is incredibly frustrating. People are willing to flush money down the toilet to avoid helping you TOO much.

- food is nice! But keep in mind that not everyone can eat stuff you give them. Dietary restrictions like diabetes and Crohn’s unfortunately don’t go away when you become homeless. Maybe this is why they were hoping for cash? Also, some (though not all) homeless people have access to food already through food stamps, soup kitchens, charities, etc. A granola bar is nice, but they likely have other problems. If they need food, they will usually have a sign asking for food, or ask for it verbally! Otherwise food might not be a problem for them.

- I’ve given medicine to beggars when it was asked for. Medicine can be super useful if you have a need of it. But when you don’t have a place to put your shit, you realize what a luxury it is to be able to store shit you don’t need at the moment. At best, it could go into one of those caches, if that individual uses caches, or into a shopping cart if they haul one of those around. Or in a car if they have one.

You know what’s useful, lightweight, and portable? MONEY.

You know what money can be used for?

- the nightly fee of some pay-shelters to keep you out of the elements.

- minutes for a pay-as-you-go phone, which can be used for emergencies, scheduling appointments with therapists, doctors, and addiction counselors, even searching for jobs or housing. There is a TON of bureaucracy involved in getting help when you have nothing, and that shit burns through your minutes. Payphones? What is this, 1980? I still have and use a phone I bought while living in my car. It was $10.

- gas for a car, if they have one. (Commoner in rural areas.)

- a hot shower at a truck stop.

- medicine, including prescription medication.

- items that protect against the elements, in their size!

- transportation. News flash, no bus will let you on for pocket change.

- items you might not even think of, like pet food (some homeless people have pets!) sanitary napkins (even if they don’t look female—remember how the homeless rates go up if you’re queer? Yeah.) condoms (possibly for sex work? Not something you want to assume though!) diapers (adult or otherwise! seriously! You don’t know their lives!) or pretty much anything else THAT IS BOUGHT AND SOLD WITH MONEY.

Does that include cigarettes, drugs, and alcohol? You bet it does. But you know what, if that’s what they need, you’re in no position to judge. I’ve never been through withdrawal, but I’ve seen people go through it, and it’s complete shit. If that were you, yeah, you wouldn’t want to get drug sick, are you fucking kidding me? Offset it with a contribution to a rehab center, whatever helps you sleep at night.

And all this is assuming the person giving you a case of the guilts is actually homeless. When they may not be. And other people you don’t notice around you almost surely are.

That uncomfortable feeling you get, though? That has a name. It’s called INEQUALITY. It means that you know you have shit other people don’t have access to. You probably have resources so that even if you were in trouble, there’d be safety nets. You have the kind of money that you can buy a bunch of care packages to assuage this horrible guilt you feel every time you’re in bed in the rain and you know someone else out there isn’t. Those feelings are right. The world shouldn’t be this unequal. We shouldn’t have houses standing empty while people live on the street. We shouldn’t have food sitting in warehouses till it spoils while people starve. We shouldn’t be punishing people for trying to medicate away the pain we gave them.

If you want to REALLY help the poor, go buy a pen and paper and write to your representatives. Stop blaming “generational welfare users” for being “leeches on the system.” Tell them you want to see real aid going to people in your community. Tell them to fund the mental health system, which is inadequate for the demand and constantly getting slashed. Tell them you don’t want to see food stamps cut for bad grades! Tell them a stitch in time saves nine, and if they helped people who were losing their homes, maybe there wouldn’t be so many homeless. Tell them to decriminalize drug use and prostitution. Tell them to support programs like Insite. Support universal healthcare, because you’d be surprised how many people end up homeless due to illness, either in themselves or a family member. If you’re ever in a position of power, such as a landlord or employer, don’t discriminate against people who don’t have a current address. Also don’t discriminate against marginalized groups by race, gender, orientation, ability, etc. These people are more likely to end up homeless because of this BS. Check out charities in your area doing actual outreach with the poor, many of whom are not beggars and not visible. And if you’re going to give a beggar something, either ask them what they need or just give them fucking money.

You can’t make that uncomfortable feeling go away with the wave of a magic wand. You can’t buy exemption from the fact that you HAVE and others DON’T with some soap and granola.

And if you’re going to give a beggar something, either ask them what they need or just give them fucking money.

All
Of
This

Finally someone tore that shit post apart.

I was too inarticulate with rage as a someone who’s been homeless to hit it.

jasminethey:

I like how people are explaining what poverty is to me and then are using western poverty as a fucking example to explain it to me.

BACKGROUND TIME:

• grew up in India until I was 7
• didn’t have a fridge in India until I was around 5
• didn’t have a washing machine until I was 6
• grew up not having a lot of toys
• slept on the marble floor until I was 7
• didn’t have the same luxuries a kid in western countries would have
• had to PAY for a good education
• That meant paying for textbooks and shit at elementary school level

TELL ME ABOUT BEING POOR AGAIN.

So whenever I talk about being well-off, I’m talking about “OH HEY AT LEAST IT’S NOT AS BAD AS IT USED TO BE WHEN WE LIVED IN INDIA”

No really tell me about how it is to be poor.

I started considering I was well-off as soon as I left India and came to live in UK. Even when my dad didn’t have a job and we were struggling over in the UK, I STILL considered myself as being well-off.

Oh and guess what.

I wasn’t poor in India either. I was “well-off” there as well. Not poor enough to be living in huts or in the camps meant for Sri Lankan refugees but not rich enough to be living like middle class Indian people were living either.

BECAUSE CLASS DIFFERENCES ARE DIFFERENT IN A “THIRD WORLD” COUNTRY.

When I say well-off, I mean we were fed. We didn’t have all the luxuries. We had very little toys compared to other kid. But we had hand me down clothes and food and shelter. That was well-off to me. What I’d consider “lower middle class” in India is what you’d consider “working class poor” or even poorer than that. My definition of well-off and your definition of well-off are NOT the same. They are definitely not the same. 

And I’ve only been what I consider myself to be “rich” for the past 6 years or so. I’m middle class by UK standards. 

You would probably consider my upbringing to be “poor” but I consider it as being “well-off”.

So the next western fucker to come here explaining what it means to be poor in a western country to a first gen immigrant kid from South Asia is going to get punched in the goddamn face.

Don’t you fucking DARE tell me what being poor is and what it feels like to be poor. 

thespithouse:

as someone who publishes comics and attends a lot of indie-comic cons, i’m pretty familiar with what is considered fair pricing on a zine, and usually cartoonists price their work very fairly. but then i go to say, the ny art book fair, and some 10-page zine of blurry photos taken with a dumbphone is getting sold for like $15-$20, meanwhile 20+ page screen-printed hand-bound comics are sold for like, half of that. is it just me that notices this discrepancy between underground art comics and “art books”? why does a pretentious attitude equate to adding an extra $10 bucks to the price of an otherwise pretty uninspiring zine? 

i’m thinking about this time i attended a zine conference at MoMA hosted by printed matter, where some privileged young ladies stuck their nose up at the idea of selling  - (shudder) - ART COMICS, saying it would bring down the quality of the rest of the work in the store. (ahem, FUCK YEWWWWWWWWWWWW)

the only negative experience i had at PMF last weekend was with one young lady who was selling a couple of photo-collage-essay zines. we agreed on saturday that we would trade (my 16-page screen-printed full color mini usually sold for $6 for her 10-page b&w photocopied zine being sold for $10) . I came back around on Sunday to do the trade (and maybe this was because she was in the presence of a cool friend this time, or perhaps she hadn’t sold anything all weekend), but she scowled at me and told me kind of nastily that she “had to pay her rent,” and therefore, kind of said “fuck you” to my follow-up trade suggestion. i was a little astounded by the change of attitude, and a little embarrassed to have been shut down in front of our mutual friend, but walked away with an “okay then!”

i’m sorry, but i believe if one’s attending a zine fair like that, which is really about community and sharing artwork and experiences, and not so much about making money (although it’s a plus), one should not have that kind of attitude. recalling the conference at MoMA again, I think of the people there arguing that artists need to be able to make a living off their art books, which is why they felt entitled to charge $30 for a 10-page hand-bound conceptual art-zine that is nothing but close-up photos of say, couch fabric-patterns. yet the people arguing this were CLEARLY of a privileged background (you know, on their iPhones the whole time, wearing outfits entirely from boutique stores, fancy new leather shoes, $500 glasses, etc)… and then I think of all my friends who make art comics, and most of us are fairly poor in relation… yet we have no problem trading with other artists. 

what gives? can someone please explain this phenomena to me? we’re all artists right? so why the stuck up attitude from one set of artists to the other just because they charge more for their work? i believe artists have the right to be supported financially, but ideally they should be supported through community or government-sponsored programs and not by ripping others off… but maybe i’m just off my knocker again.

in short i hate capitalism. god bless america, good day. 

Yeah this kind of thing is a bummer. Generally I think it’s just class entitlement. The way people born with money view it is VERY different than the way poor people view money.

After talking to a lot of middle and upper class kids about money it’s become pretty evident that a lot of them literally do not understand poverty in a real way. They take their way of life for granted and think the rest of the world is just “lazy” or whatever.

These kids are raised with an entitled attitude, told that the world owes them shit, and it seeps into their art and entire life.

I mean, I only just now started pricing my zines and art to try and make money instead of being in the red, because I’ve always been super aware of money and wanted to have a fair price that poor people like me could afford to pay. Hell, if anything it got to the point where my poverty made me feel guilty about wanting a profit off my work!

ink-and-vanillin:

chirpofjoy:

A song I could listen to forever.

Poor Girl’s Blues - Jolie Holland

This song always makes me feel good! I remember there being a lot of hand-wringing over messages like this, especially the once-popular block print patch of a person in bed with text reading “I didn’t go to work today/I don’t think I’ll go tomorrow.” All this worry of it being “classist” or whatever, because poor people need work & glorifying poverty is bad etc etc. Like ok, if you aren’t going to work because you’re living on savings or fortunate circumstances, maybe don’t gloat about it. I get that. But it was so funny and indicative of a common type of background that so many radical kids assumed that most people wearing the patch would be in that situation! Outsiders romanticizing actual poverty is, indeed, wack. But what those arguments failed to account for is the deep sense of guilt and shame when you’ve actually grown up poor (and I don’t mean being 20 and living in a studio for a bit.) People were SO torn up over that “I didn’t go to work…” patch, overthinking it and writing long complex screeds on it, and I just had to laugh! Because the first time I saw that patch, I was out of work, homeless, feeling like I was doomed for coming from poverty and not being “educated”, and that I was disposable human scum for not having a job. Even though I’m anti-capitalist & anti-equating-your-work-with-your-self-worth and all that jazz, the internalized classism and shame runs deep. So the idea that my politics could apply even to this situation, and, even though being broke sucked, that I could feel ok about not working for a while and resist the stigma was so great!

I’m doing better now. Not having health insurance or money in the bank or prospects for any kind of career is crappy, but this song makes me feel pride as a creative striving human being when I’m in the prep kitchen up to my elbows in duck fat.

Good song but reblogging for Una’s above commentary, which echos many of my own feelings. I personally always loved that patch. I’m poor and I grew up poor, and it can be really hard dealing with all the shame that society puts on you, and when you add radical politics to it shit can get weird. I grew up being told I was welfare scum, and it’s hard to reconcile that shame with anti-capitalist feelings, especially when so many of your fellow radicals assume you come from money like they do.

It took me a long time to feel OK with the fact that I dont want to work myself to death to prove a point, that I just wanna work as little as I can to get by. And I have been and it’s pretty awesome and I feel really lucky. Sure shit is hard, I’ve never had a safety net and probably never will, no parents to bail me out, no health insurance, but to me I’m living how I want, more on my own terms. I worry about being evicted every month, but otherwise capitalism doesnt have me by the throat in the same way as when I was working at fast food joints, so whatever.

Anyway yeah read what Una said cause she’s smarter than me and is a much better writer!

kimvonc:

This is an incredible documentary. It’s mind blowingly sad but a must watch.

This is a very powerful documentary of the lives of children in Romania in the late 1990’s living in a subway station. Heartbreaking movie. Children shouldn’t have to live like this. Unfortunately, it is not just in Romania, all over the world this problem is widespread. I’m glad this film brings a bit of this to light

I found myself forgetting the ages of these children, but after finishing the film the pictures of some of the children have yet to leave my head months later…..This film was meant to over the eyes of people, and I guarantee it will to anyone who gives it a chance too.

Children underground- on netflix too

Yeah, I saw this years ago, it’s a pretty depressing film but it was done is a comparatively respectful way. I hope shit turned out okay for most of them.

a-deathly-shadow:

skullvomit:

royceicon:

“Crackers” 

“For awhile we lived near a truck stop with a diner in it. They had these little crackers  you could take next to silverware.  A lot of days we didn’t have any food to eat, so I would walk over to the place and grab a bunch of the crackers and take them home. I did this for awhile until the people at the diner told me to stop.”

Possible piece for the aforementioned childhood memories collection. I hope I can do it without being too self indulgent or boring.

i did this when i was a kid too. and i would take jelly packets from the gas station. i also stole toilet paper from people’s houses because they had the nice kind instead of the huge scratchy toilet paper rolls my mum would steal from her work

also “ketchup soup” which is just ketchup in a cup of hot water

Oh yeah, jelly, ketchup, mustard, any of that shit you could get for free I snagged by the handful. It was awesome when we had bread, but when we didn’t it was enough to feel like you kind of ate something.

I also would dig out cups from the trash of fast food joints that had self serve drinks and I’d get a bunch of pop that way, though we never lived close to such places so I only did it now and then. For some reason shoplifting didn’t occur to me until I was a preteen. I wasn’t the smartest kid.

Never had ketchup soup or stole toilet paper from people, we just stole it from businesses and churches.

Had an interview with the food stamps lady on the phone. I guess they’re gonna let me know if i get anything eventually. It would be nice if I got a little bit at least, though I feel kinda bummed for being back in that system since I grew up in it.

Bobby “Blue” Bland - Poverty

Considering the subject matter this is actually a pretty upbeat song. “I guess I’m gonna die, just like I’m living- in poverty”. That line pops up in my head a lot.

Approaching poverty in the US requires putting together the pieces of an extremely large and complex puzzle. And perhaps it’s time to admit that we’re no longer looking at a single puzzle, that some of these pieces do not fit because they are from an entirely different puzzle which needs to be assembled separately. This is a large country, with a lot of people in it, and those people come from such varying backgrounds and experiences that it is impossible to compress them neatly into one.

This is a really good article.

As someone who’s experienced both rural and urban poverty in different parts of the country I definitely agree that the shape of poverty is drastically different depending on the contexts involved.