In this country I feel sorry for nobody who is poor AND able bodied!

[NJBest]

Originally Posted by Bostonian123

What about those who are poor because they decided to have 5 kids when they only make enough money to raise one child?

I feel sorry for the kids.

[desertdetroiter]

Originally Posted by Bostonian123

What about those who are poor because they decided to have 5 kids when they only make enough money to raise one child?

What about 'em?

Really, what do people get out of this "i don't feel sorry for so-an-so" stuff? It's amazing how so many people aren't happy unless they're looking down on someone else. In my whole damn life, i've never had a poor person come up to me asking for me to feel sorry for them. Most don't even want you to know that they're poor.

Anyway, enough of this nonsensical thread.

[NJBest]

I don't think it's the same for all peoples, but there are a good chunk of people who don't perform to their potential. In that group, there exists two sub-groups. Those who are lazy and those who don't recognize opportunities to perform to their potential. How many of each, is the question. And then you must realize that there are most likely all other sorts of groups out there.

[nimchimpsky]

Even with a disability, you don't necessarily have to resign yourself to poverty. Most disabled people can work. I had two jobs when I was totally deaf-blind. It's doable. It just takes a lot of patience and hard work. I was poor but that's cause I was spreading it across three people. If I was using it just for myself I would have had plenty of money to live on comfortably.

That said, easy to judge and hard to be judged. There are a million reasons someone could be resigning themselves to poverty and you and I just don't know what those reasons could be. So though they may appear able-bodied and able to make their own way, there may be something going on in their life that you and I simply don't know about that makes it impossible or near-impossible for them to climb up the ladder.

Another thing to keep in mind is that comparing people is not fair because people don't have a frame of reference experientially. We may know they have it worse in Afghanistan, for example, but we just don't know what it's actually like to live through those conditions, so we don't have the experiential frame of reference to understand what it's like and appreciate our conditions in the U.S.

It's like trying to compare a colorblind person to someone with regular sight. The colorblind person does not miss the color blue if they have never seen it and the person with regular sight would feel a loss if they were to become colorblind. Their frame of reference is different so their reaction to the same conditions will also be different.