Reply #10: "pretending for years that the poor don't exist...." [View All]

[klook]

Good post. Just curious, when you wrote "That is one of our shames that we will have to work off - along with pretending for years that the poor don't exist in this country and their lives are an unending misery" -- does that last part mean mean "pretending for years that their lives are an unending misery"? Or that the unending misery of the poor is one of the shames that we will have to work off?

The reason I ask is that I think it's inaccurate to say poor people have lives of "unending misery." Millions of poor people have birthdays, they fall in love, they enjoy a good laugh, they're proud of their kids, etc. Obviously, some people get very little pleasure out of life, but I think it's a weird kind of stigmatization to view poverty as unrelenting despair.

This is one of the points Jane Jacobs makes in her book The Death and Life of Great American Cities. She advocates planning that encourages mixed-class / mixed-use neighborhoods, and notes that "poor, down-trodden" neighborhoods are often more vibrant and fun than affluent ones.

On the flip side, I don't want to romanticize poverty, just to point out that it's not necessarily the living hell that we sometimes suppose.