Define poverty.
It is insulting. The entire Catholic Church is going tone-deaf at an astonishing rate.
Some of us have LIVED it. Trying to raise a family of four making $25K in a crappy job, etc. Most of us did not stay there.
1. Move away from any family and friends who are bad influences and want to borrow every dollar you make.
2. Rent a cheap place.
3. Don’t have babies.
4. Move near your job. Work 2 jobs or 1 job with lots of overtime. Take all the overtime offered and become indispensable. Learn a trade or go to community college.
5. Save all your money. Don’t buy anything flashy.
6. You won’t be in poverty long.
I’ll let you know when I become wealthy.................
I’m comfortably middle class, and I think the answer to the question, from my perspective is, yes, of course, since the reason that I’m comfortably middle-class is that I (and my wife) had the self-discipline and emotional maturity to arise from poverty into the middle class.
Another one:
1. Join the Army.
Then you'll know who can survive poverty and who is suited to rise and meet their full potential.
FWIW, I did that for three months in the Summer of 1968. And "way back then" it was different? Not really. Cities were burning, overwhelmed by anger and dissent.
I guess this one is for those not Hardy enough to do the sleep in a cardboard box homeless challenge which in San Antonio is usually scheduled in a big parking lot in winter.
The poorest people in the US are the most likely to be obese, something that has never happened before in all of human history. I see overweight homeless folks all the time. Part of that is the much of the cheapest foods are now the most fattening, but not the majority of it, in my opinion.
So I hope they gain a few pounds after the simulation, or it isn’t very true to form.
Freegards
At one point in my life I thought about participating in our parish St. Vincent de Paul Society. One of the members described what I would see in people’s homes. Huge TVs, junk food, cigarettes etc. I was told that I could not be judgemental.
That’s not me. I just couldn’t do it.
I survived a few years of poverty, and I did it without becoming morbidly obese like so many of our poor.
Being poor long-term is often the result of one’s own choices.
Finding a way to shuffle slowly forward is the essence of humanity - not to take from others, but to provide something that makes others want to give you value in return.
I gotta ax the question (didn’t see the answer in the article)....
How long will this magnificent Community Poverty Simulation last?
An hour?
The daylight hours of one day?
A whole day?
A week?
A month?
A year?
The rest of the participants’s lives?
Or maybe...one person doing it for 24 hours and then “passing” the simulation off to the next person so they can simulate it for the next 24 hours. Kinda like the famous & oh so wise actors did recently to protest PDJT’s immigrating policies?
Also gotta ax...will these kind folks be stimulating giving away their wealth and possessions? Will the receivers of said wealth and possessions simulate giving them back? What if the receiver simulates refusing to give back their goodies?
Then the parishioners can practice poverty in real-time.
How fitting.
Been there.
Done that.
Didn’t like it.
Trying to avoid it in the future.
Big Government is not helping that effort ...
Reminiscent of Martin Sheen kicking a homeless guy off his steam grate to spend a night as a homeless guy.
LOL. I think most people have “lived” poverty (not a simulation) at one point or another. That usually is strong motivation to get them earning money so they never would have to “live” poverty again.
But then there are these faux simulations. My favorite example, which I witnessed first hand, was when Martin Sheen decided to sleep in a subway entrance in the winter in Washington DC in the 1980s. He made a big production of it and had the news crews there. He talked about how the homeless were freezing to death in Washington because the government didn’t provide adequate shelters. He slept in a warm sleeping bag for an hour or two and then, when the cameras were gone, he left. That was my introduction to liberal hypocrisy.
I never even knew we were poor growing up as a kid.
I think my first realization as to how poor we were as a family didn’t occur until well after I was out on my own earning my own money.