Anyone watch the 20/20 Diane Sawyer show on Poverty in Camden? (legal, drug)

[j33]

Originally Posted by rescue1

le. I have heard that 62% of the people under the poverty level do not work at all.

And where exactly did you hear this. I've known plenty of poor people (when I was a kid, I was one of them), and most everyone worked their rears off often trying desperately to correct a childhood mistake (e.g. not going to college, dropping out of school, getting pregnant, doing something stupid and getting a criminal record that destroys your prostects of getting a good job).... I don't know if this will be deleted or not, but the below post on 'being poor' has made its way around a few message boards. I think it is very relevant reading for those who are a bit too 'self righteous' about those in poverty (edited to keep within space limits)

Being poor is knowing exactly how much everything costs.
Being poor is getting angry at your kids for asking for all the crap they see on TV.
Being poor is having to keep buying $800 cars because they're what you can afford, and then having the cars break down on you, because there's not an $800 car in America that's worth a damn.
Being poor is hoping the toothache goes away.
Being poor is knowing your kid goes to friends' houses but never has friends over to yours.
Being poor is going to the restroom before you get in the school lunch line so your friends will be ahead of you and won't hear you say "I get free lunch" when you get to the cashier.
Being poor is coming back to the car with your children in the back seat, clutching that box of Raisin Bran you just bought and trying to think of a way to make the kids understand that the box has to last.
Being poor is wondering if your well-off sibling is lying when he says he doesn't mind when you ask for help.
Being poor is off-brand toys.
Being poor is knowing you can't leave $5 on the coffee table when your friends are around.
Being poor is hoping your kids don't have a growth spurt.
Being poor is stealing meat from the store, frying it up before your mom gets home and then telling her she doesn't have make dinner tonight because you're not hungry anyway.
Being poor is Goodwill underwear.
Being poor is not enough space for everyone who lives with you.
Being poor is feeling the glued soles tear off your supermarket shoes when you run around the playground.
Being poor is your kid's school being the one with the 15-year-old textbooks and no air conditioning.
Being poor is thinking $8 an hour is a really good deal.
Being poor is relying on people who don't give a damn about you.
Being poor is an overnight shift under florescent lights.
Being poor is finding the letter your mom wrote to your dad, begging him for the child support.
Being poor is a bathtub you have to empty into the toilet.
Being poor is stopping the car to take a lamp from a stranger's trash.
Being poor is making lunch for your kid when a cockroach skitters over the bread, and you looking over to see if your kid saw.
Being poor is believing a GED actually makes a goddamned difference.
Being poor is people angry at you just for walking around in the mall.
Being poor is not taking the job because you can't find someone you trust to watch your kids.
Being poor is the police busting into the apartment right next to yours.
Being poor is hoping you'll be invited for dinner.
Being poor is a sidewalk with lots of brown glass on it.
Being poor is people thinking they know something about you by the way you talk.
Being poor is needing that 35-cent raise.
Being poor is six dollars short on the utility bill and no way to close the gap.
Being poor is crying when you drop the mac and cheese on the floor.
Being poor is knowing you work as hard as anyone, anywhere.
Being poor is people surprised to discover you're not actually stupid.
Being poor is people surprised to discover you're not actually lazy.
Being poor is a six-hour wait in an emergency room with a sick child asleep on your lap.
Being poor is having to live with choices you didn't know you made when you were 14 years old.
Being poor is getting tired of people wanting you to be grateful.
Being poor is knowing you're being judged.
Being poor is deciding that it's all right to base a relationship on shelter.
Being poor is feeling helpless when your child makes the same mistakes you did, and won't listen to you beg them against doing so.
Being poor is a cough that doesn't go away.
Being poor is a $200 paycheck advance from a company that takes $250 when the paycheck comes in.
Being poor is four years of night classes for an Associates of Art degree.
Being poor is knowing where the shelter is.
Being poor is people who have never been poor wondering why you choose to be so.
Being poor is knowing how hard it is to stop being poor.
Being poor is seeing how few options you have.
Being poor is running in place.
Being poor is people wondering why you didn't leave.

[UB50]

Just from the comments, I can tell a lot of you didn't watch the show last night.

They focused on three kids -- one was a senior in high school who was also working everyday in a fast food place to help support his family (and was falling behind in school because he didn't have time to do the homework). He wanted so much to be the first person in his family to graduate from high school.

Another was a little boy about 4 who wanted to learn to read. His mother couldn't help him much because she dropped out of school and was almost illiterate. The family couldn't find a place to live. (With this family, the Grandmother was the drug addict -- not the 22 year old mother and her two kids.) Their church tried to help them but the church was poor too.

I felt sorry for the two kids above since they appeared to be trying the hardest to overcome the situation.

[andreabeth]

Being poor is knowing exactly how much everything costs....

Amen. We desperately need to find solutions to the problem of Americans living in poverty.

[mb919]

Originally Posted by YapCity

Those that know my history swear that I should be a drug addict, in jail, or dead by now. Obviously I'm not unless you count nicotine as a drug addiction.

I don't buy it. If you want to make things better for yourself, it can be done. Not having the will or intelligence to do it is no excuse. I've had people snort lines of coke in front of me, and offer it to me. Plenty of crack, marijuana, acid, etc. as well. I never felt the need to even try something that would lead me down a path of personal destruction (except cigarettes). I've embibed in some alcohol, mostly when I was younger before I even turned 21. I maybe drink two or three beers a YEAR now simply because I have no need for it.

You can do whatever it is you want to do in life. No, I don't even believe in religion or any "higher power". These are my own ideals, not something that was fed to me. If people stopped spending so much time thinking up good excuses for their bad behavior and started focusing on eliminating the behavior in the first place we might actually turn ourselves around as a nation someday.

-TT

The point I'm trying to make is that what you and I deem "better for ourselves" can be radically different from what the poor deem "better for ourselves", or that how to get that betterment is very different.

As an example- neither me, you, or the poor 18 year old guy who didn't get past 8th grade wants to live in a run-down slum where living in fear of one's life every day is a way of life. We would all agree that to not have to live in fear all the time, and to not have to live in poverty all the time are good things.

So to avoid such a reality, you and I would decide to finish our educations, work hard, and set ourselves on a career path that would lead to prosperity and the lifestyles that we want. Why would we do it that way- the honest way? We would probably go about it the same way we saw our friends and families do it growing up.

Why might the poor person go about getting his better lifestyle by committing crimes? Because he grew up seeing no one in his family getting ahead through law-abiding means (regardless of whose choices). The saps who that kid saw with an actual job only got paid $6 an hour, and what is $6 an hour going to get you anymore? Because he grew up seeing all these older gang members who chose to deal instead and getting nice cars, flashy jewelry, nice-looking women, guns, and power! So if you're that kid, what shaped your definition of "better life"? How are you going to go about getting it?

Is this kid right to follow a life of crime? No. In an ideal world, you'd like him to be able to see beyond, and realize that there's a better way to live, but the odds don't support that possibility in such a scenario that I described above. Most of us are products of our environments, and it's only the person with something special inside that can rise above whatever our environments were. You can't ask thousands and thousands of kids to grow up in places like Camden and expect them to have good old-fashioned middle class American values. It'd be nice if more of them did, sure, but it's not realistic to expect it.

[mb919]

Originally Posted by UB50

Just from the comments, I can tell a lot of you didn't watch the show last night.

No, I did not, but the direction of the thread turned to the notion that the poor are to blame for their own predicaments, which is really at the core of this growing division between classes and between political persuasions. I was responding to that.

What in particular from this show stood out for you, good, bad, or indifferent?

[fishmonger]

The poor are not to blame for their own predicaments.

The call for people to "stay in school, don't get pregnant, etc." sounds good, but it's unreasonable to expect a majority of people to take paths that their culture doesn't encourage or display the benefits of. Think about it from the perspective of someone living in an inner city... none of your relatives have gone to college, your friends are more interested in other things, crime is rampant (and apparently profitable)... there are so many cultural and monetary barriers placed before people who grow up in poverty that it's unreasonable to expect most of them to rise up above their circumstances on their own. Schools are underfunded and resources are diverted to needier students, with less emphasis on "gifted" programs, parents don't have the money to help kids pay their way through college, and most of the people with jobs in the community are working in low-wage labor that doesn't require an extensive education, so it seems to many that it is in their own self-interest to go ahead and drop out and get a job, especially if they make a mistake in their teen years (something not unforgivable) and end up with a family to support...

It's self righteous to think that all poor people could stop being poor if they didn't want to be poor. Nobody wants to live in the projects, but for many people alternative options don't appear to be accessible, whether or not they are in reality.

For conservatives, the solution to this is to remove social services and let social darwinism take its course, weeding out the "less productive citizens" and, somehow, in the process, encouraging people to stop being poor once it becomes harder to be so (as if it isn't hard enough as it is...). Besides the cold-heartedness of this view, however, it has little basis in reality. There's less upward mobility in our newly right-winged society than there was back in the Great Society days. Social democracies in Europe have higher upward mobility among the poor than what we have here. The Gilded Age days of the late 1800's with their non-regulated economy and minimal (or non-existent) social services were chacterized by robber barons, wage slaves, and tenant farmers. The Great Depression occured while we had a system like this. Extensive and well-implemented safety nets work in practice in many countries to reduce poverty and give more low-income individuals the tools necessary to rise above their situation. Counter-intuitive? Maybe, but it works. Not so much in America because we don't try hard enough (America's one of the most right wing countries in the civilized world) and we don't implement social services as well as other countries. It's pathetic that the world's wealthiest country also has one of the highest poverty rates (absolute poverty, measured against the U.S. poverty line) in the industrialized world.

[mb919]

Originally Posted by fishmonger

The poor are not to blame for their own predicaments... ...Think about it from the perspective of someone living in an inner city...

That pretty much sums up my point right there. As long as we try to address the problem from our perspective and refuse to look at any others', nothing constructive will be done about it.

[UB50]

The show was okay, but I thought it could have been better. I wondered what others thought of it.

On the topic some of you touched above: Working your way out of poverty -- I think it is so much harder than a lot of you think.

Look at the high school senior in the documentary (that most of you didn't see). He really wanted to get his high school diploma. His family was desperately poor, going without electricity and food a lot of the time. They had no heat in the house. Since he was over 16, he could have dropped out of school to work to help his father support the family (and, a lot of poor families would have forced him to do exactly that). Instead, he stuck with a very rough, basically non-stop work life (going from 6 a.m. to 11 p.m., then starting it all over again the next day). His father was a big supporter of him getting his diploma and I think that helped a lot.

There are things that a lot of us take for granted that poor people can't take for granted. In the situation above, the kids had to finish their homework before dark because there was no electricity for light.

Anyway... The show was okay but I think it could have been better.

[KewGee]

I watched part of it and fell asleep during the middle of it not because it wasn't a good show but because I was exhausted from a trying week.

Anyway, it broke my heart. I can't imagine having to live listening to gun shots every night (makes me nervous when fools dove and deer hunt within my hearing), walking to school and seeing thugs getting busted for dealing drugs right on the neighborhood corner, and that precious little boy watching while his older brother was handcuffed. The bewildered and frightened look on his face was too much.

I really just don't get why there are areas in our country, the greatest on Earth, in this shape. I guess I'm naive, but if we can spend zillions of dollars elsewhere, why isn't it done in our own country first?

Some celebrities and their grant a wish money could be spent better in many cases. I remember one story about twin girls who couldn't go to a private university in Texas and it was their dream to be there as it is known as quite prestigious. Why couldn't they go? They didn't want to work for their dream. Hmmm! Their dad and mom were not poor buy any stretch of the imagination; you should have seen their house. Anyway, they couldn't imagine selling their home and downsizing to allow the girls to go to the university and all the money the parents had ever saved would be depleted. Their wish was granted and they received full tuition and board from a well-known celebrity. If I remember correctly, they were also given vehicles and everything needed to be set for college. It made me utterly ill.

Duh!! Did anyone ever hear of the girls working their way through the college of their choice? Heavens, no. They might miss out on all the funsies of college and no time to join a sorority. If the parents didn't want the spoiled brats to work, they should have taken on an extra job or two. Pleeeezzzz!!

A girl I love who is very dear to me had a dream, and she made it come true by working her head off. Would you believe the university she attended is the very one in which they were given a free ride? Wow!

Sorry, but if someone wants to dish out his or her millions, use it where it's needed. Don't enable the lazies. What will that teach them?

[YapCity]

Originally Posted by mb919

The point I'm trying to make is that what you and I deem "better for ourselves" can be radically different from what the poor deem "better for ourselves", or that how to get that betterment is very different.

As an example- neither me, you, or the poor 18 year old guy who didn't get past 8th grade wants to live in a run-down slum where living in fear of one's life every day is a way of life. We would all agree that to not have to live in fear all the time, and to not have to live in poverty all the time are good things.

So to avoid such a reality, you and I would decide to finish our educations, work hard, and set ourselves on a career path that would lead to prosperity and the lifestyles that we want. Why would we do it that way- the honest way? We would probably go about it the same way we saw our friends and families do it growing up.

Why might the poor person go about getting his better lifestyle by committing crimes? Because he grew up seeing no one in his family getting ahead through law-abiding means (regardless of whose choices). The saps who that kid saw with an actual job only got paid $6 an hour, and what is $6 an hour going to get you anymore? Because he grew up seeing all these older gang members who chose to deal instead and getting nice cars, flashy jewelry, nice-looking women, guns, and power! So if you're that kid, what shaped your definition of "better life"? How are you going to go about getting it?

Is this kid right to follow a life of crime? No. In an ideal world, you'd like him to be able to see beyond, and realize that there's a better way to live, but the odds don't support that possibility in such a scenario that I described above. Most of us are products of our environments, and it's only the person with something special inside that can rise above whatever our environments were. You can't ask thousands and thousands of kids to grow up in places like Camden and expect them to have good old-fashioned middle class American values. It'd be nice if more of them did, sure, but it's not realistic to expect it.

Ok, you presume to know my situation.

I grew up in an area that was greater than 50% black. I went to a school that was more than 60% black. My mother was single and on welfare until I was 9. You just have no idea what you're talking about when it comes to me personally.

I could go on, but I hope you get the picture by now. Please don't sit there and tell me I had different opportunities, and better influences. I didn't. I just played the hand I was dealt a little better than most of the bozos out there today.

As for the kids in Camden, they've probably got more local opportunities than *I* had. Sorry, the sob story doesn't wash with me. Everybody has choices to make. I could have easily slinged a little rock when I was a kid. I chose not to because I weighed the risks and found that there was too much money to be made elsewhere, without the legal headaches.

There is no excuse for what some of these kids are doing, no matter what the bleeding heart left thinks.

-TT