'What you believe to
be true depends on who you believe yourself to be'
Antjie Krog, Country of my Skull
This appeals to me for much the same reasons as the memory quote in my last post does, thought it implies a greater degree of self-determination and -definition. It is however, equally true, how we perceive the world depends to a large degree on who we perceive ourselves as being. As a white-middle-class-Oxford-graduate-master's-student, I approach with world with the basic assumption that my being female will not hold me back. As a lefty-liberal-hippy-do-gooder type, I see things that are easy to change, and cannot understand why others don't.
Today I read a New York Times article (http://www.nytimes.com/projects/2013/invisible-child/?smid=tw-nytimes#/?chapt=1) about a homeless girl in New York and her family. I read it with a growing anger that what happened to her, and to so many like her was so easy to fix, finding the fact that no-one was utterly incomprehensible. This is because, in part, I view my relative affluence as a mark not of hard work but of luck, I happened to be born to a family where the primary breadwinner brought in a more than sufficient wage. My parents in turn happened to be born into families where the same was true. Though I presume at some point in my family's past there was a point where someone had to beat the odds to succeed, arguably neither myself, my sisters or my parents did. Poverty, likewise, is not generally the fault of the poor (as I believe we discovered over a century ago now, yet still the same views are propagated - people just need to work harder). Though often those in poverty make arguably bad decisions, they are probably no worse than many of my peers made at similar ages, we just have a better buffer against such decisions being our ruin.
Once one views poverty not as a choice, then you can begin to see the ways to help those who are not currently as lucky as you. The article mentions the huge sums raised to refurbish the mayor's mansion in New York, paid for by private philanthropy. Why such philanthropy could not be directed toward refitting the shelter in which this girl has spent a quarter of her life is a question that immediately springs to mind. And the question, I fear, is that people don't care. They look at people who live in such places, see the bad money decisions, the drug addiction, the alcoholism, and do not stop to consider, whether maybe, if I were in the same position, would I turn to such comforts. Its easy to make good life choices when the consequences of bad ones are so minimal, so much harder when your balancing on a precarious line, treated as less than human, your complaints ignored, your petitions for help disregarded.
Though I understand solving such problems is complicated and difficult, still I cannot shake my basic worldview and the truths that restricts me to:
I am lucky, privileged and fortunate. I worked hard to get where I got to today. But others are not, and can work just as hard, and not get anywhere, because they were born in the wrong place, in the wrong circumstances, or simply made a bad decision which I could easily have escaped. Given this, society should be ordered to help them before me, to listen when they speak in the way that I can make people listen when I do, to view their situation as one we could so easily end up in ourselves and thus prevent anyone suffering in this way.
It would be easy to read the New York Times article, and comfort ourselves with the knowledge that 'things like that don't happen in Britain'. Recent figures showed that for the first time in the UK most of the people in poverty are in work. This is unacceptable. We have a record number of food banks this year, while ministers sit by and say 'its not as a result of our policies'. Poverty is an ever increasing endemic in the UK, and we can no longer comfort ourselves with the 'truth' that it is elsewhere, we perceive ourselves to be liberal, but in the name of austerity have allowed for a raft of cuts to those who need it most, while we in the middle remain essentially cushioned from the excesses of economic distress. This is a perception that needs to be changed to allow us to see the truth in all its uncompromising devastation.
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