Backlash

Pos 60 question thrown at our group: How do we solve Poverty?

Now, a lot of people have asked, been asking, and in all probability will ask this question; young and old, rich and poor, you get it. Everyone. People have died asking this question, and people have died trying to answer it. Generations have preceded ours, encountering the same problem, the same wall they've been trying to tear down, go around, or go through. I stare at the question on the chalkboard, wondering how a handful of hotshot students could ever think of something as magnanimous as a solution to poverty, where so many have already failed.

What is poverty anyway?

It's not so much as lacking possessions, or adequate funds to provide one's self with basic needs. Poverty isn't really about living in the streets, or begging for money, or doing blue collar jobs that barely support your family of five. Poverty is something far more frightening that we create these materialistic definitions as facades to disillusion us from what poverty truly is.

Poverty is an Idea.

It is a way of thinking, a way of life, it is a principle. And the frightening thing about ideas is that they move things, they cause change, they affect the way human life operates. Poverty embeds in us this concept that life is something static, something that we cannot change, and that humanity is powerless to the system that it worships. Poverty, in its very existence, promotes the social disparity that it has condemned for so long. Poverty is a thorn in society's paw, a painful reminder of our exiguity to lift ourselves even from the most basic of problems. Poverty tells us there is a "scarcity of resources", when what really is happening is a "misappropriation of resources".

Poverty is a perspective, a way of viewing life as something fleeting, and that because humanity is powerless to change society, all he can do is tend to himself. Poverty promotes consumerism, it puts a price tag on everything, and where you stand in the system is grossly dictated by how much you can buy.

But poverty's persistence to exist lies in the one thing that it promises people; happiness. Poverty gives people an opportunity to escape their problems, a choice to forsake this world of all earthly attachments and hardships. Poverty gives people an excuse to be lazy, to be complacent of the status quo. Poverty ceases forms of questioning, using instead excuses normalcy or inadequacy of human ability, or the preponderance of the powers that be.

To be satisfied with what you have now, without even striving harder to achieve something far more greater is just simply inhuman.

But poverty does have its perks. In our country, it is the poverty that votes. Due to this form of thinking, they only ask you please them come election day for them to vote for you. In our country, it is the poverty that consumes the most. Television and Film mold and shape themselves into what we have today for television and film; a pathetic and grotesque window to our fractured society, devoid of any form of intelligence and integrity. In our country, products and businesses are reaping millions and millions of pesos from selling everything in lilliputian packagings, because poverty only asks you "buy enough for the day", and that "buying big costs too much". In our country, the youth is educated to be good employees, instead of being taught how to be good leaders.

In our country, it is better to read about Rizal than to live like him.

But what do we do about poverty?

I'll tell you what we ought to do. We think about it. We talk about it. We write about it. Because it is in the form of discourse that ideas are resolved. When it comes to poverty in our country, the one thing we should really do is discuss it, because there isn't enough we know about poverty for us to really solve it. Generations before us have done so much to achieve so little, would we make the same mistake? I'm not saying that the past generations never thought about what they did to solve poverty, but all I'm saying is that maybe we ought to stop giving them cash subsidies that last for a day and start giving them a way to make money for life. Because what we are fighting is not a scarcity of resources, or a lack of employment, or a weakening economy.

What we are fighting is a culture of apathy, a religion of complacency, a disgusting way of life.

written by:

Leiron Conrad T. Martija

cross-posted at:

Tinted Reflections