poor people suck

Poor people suck. We know that. With their very existence they destroy everybody's happiness, and it's probably a good idea to get rid of them. Robin Hood was not the first to fight the poor by giving them money he had stolen from the rich, and President Obama won't be the last. Such attempts are heartwarming but doomed to fail eventually.

Oh, I don't mean that taking money from the rich is impossible. It works every time but it won't help. Trying to eliminate the poor is such a challenge. Apparently, these guys are a resilient pest and most likely matters are trickier than you may expect:

The poor are an evasive species. Kind of like Sasquatch. Try to find Sasquatch. Then give him money and he will disappear? He won't but that's what we hope the poor will do, don't we?

We want the poor to disappear, and we sheepishly believe that bribing them will support their vanishing act. If we don't try to manipulate the poor into going away there is something wrong with us, we think, and we feel mightily guilty.

My Sasquatch allegory is stupid and inappropriate? About six billion people on earth are poor and you don't need to 'find' them? Of course I am pretty dense but consider this: just as you can't put a finger on Big Foot's big toe, you cannot pick out one single poor person and transport her to life's greener pastures at will.

Looking for a poor individual you could depoorify may not be as easy as finding a needle in a haystack. Besides, there are a bunch of fun things to do in a haystack once you'll tire of the needle business. For centuries we have been eager to whack the poor out of their embarrassing existence, with the result that there are a few billion more of them today than at any time in the past.

We try to get rid of something unwanted, and the inevitable result will be its proliferation.

When I was a little girl, my mom told me I could catch rabbits by dropping salt on their bushy tails. I believed her, loaded up on salt, and went into the field to hunt rabbits. Alas, my dad took the salt away from me, believing it was a potentially dangerous substance (which it was, but only for rabbits). Hence I never caught a rabbit and they have been hastily procreating ever since.

For similar reasons we may never catch a hairy specimen of Big Foot. Does that mean he will never disappear? If we can't find poor people, will they go away? I know you are questioning my sanity, but who are 'the poor?' The homeless guy with a Facebook page, powering up his Dell laptop with a generator (Wall Street Journal, June 4th 2009)? More than a billion people who live on less than a dollar a day? That is some form of financial stability at least, isn't it?

I can hear the howling of the do-gooders from here. I am cruel, you say? Hey, you want to eliminate the poor, not I. Admittedly, from the perspective of the religion of poverty I am committing heresy. I deny the existence of the poor. True. But the nanny activists are denying the poor their existence. What is worse: denying God or making an attempt on his life?

What makes the poor poor? There are plenty of people with little money who refuse to be called 'poor.' Similarly, there are folks with enormous assets but they would rather bite off a chunk of their tongue before they'd admit to being 'rich.' Money doesn't make people rich, as lack of money can't make anybody poor.

Judgment creates both groups, the so-called rich and the allegedly poor. To be precise, it's commonly the judgment of other people. The existence of the poor and the rich is caused by discrimination.

Not even those we think must be poor are likely to call themselves poor. The rich and the poor live in our heads only. Not two individuals will agree on the dividing line between poor and rich. When does one cross that line? What will it take, exactly? If you knew that, it could be done perhaps. Alas, nobody seems to know.

The line between the rich and the poor is individual and imaginary. So is Sasquatch.

The poor are serving a public purpose. We don't talk about poverty out of compassion, we do it because political mileage is to be gained from being seen as helping the poor. Recently I did an unlikely thing--unlikely for me, that is: I volunteered, distributing food and household staples to families in dire need. The organizers were incredibly concerned about properly sucking up to the media. The compassionate journalists were fed with fine foods that could not be wasted on a poor person. The organizers wanted to be photographed with the unfortunate, but they were hardly willing to have any direct business with that unwashed unkempt crowd of trash.

We love this mythological creature: the poverty stricken peasant. We have a romance with our helper's syndrome and the more poor losers we can identify, the more heroic we will look eliminating them. Poor people are as much of a godsend to those fighting poverty as blind children in India were for Mother Teresa. Mother Teresa needed the poor at least as much as the poor needed her. She died with coffers full of charity millions. Collecting the money was important for her. Making it available to those in need who provided the purpose for its accumulation was apparently not that pressing an issue.

We love problems and we nourish them. Problems that we cannot solve give meaning to our otherwise empty lives. And we are suckers for meaning, aren't we? Obviously we need the poor and--thank God--there is a simple solution. Not easy, but simple enough to be executed. We simply invent more of them than we can handle!

Apropos 'execution.' The Nazis knew how handy the Jews could be and sure enough, they loved them to death. Of course the Germans didn't invent the Jews per se. But the Nazis painstakingly invented how the Jews were perceived by a population that quietly permitted--and actively participated in--the bizarre joys of government issued murder.

Artificially altered public perception was powerful enough to turn the population of several countries into willing exterminators. And sleight of hand is what makes people appear as poor as needed. It's not about the lack of money. The sentimental value of emotions you can trigger is what counts. The sap quotient is key. No money is just no money and that experience is not exclusively owned by 'the poor.'

Naturally, nobody wants to kill the poor. We just want to get rid of them, for their own sake and for the common good. It'll be good for them to be gone. Not even the poor need the poor. To be exact, we don't really want to get rid of the poor. We just want to be seen as the ones working on such a sacred task.

Nobody gains brownie points from the absence of poverty and the poor. May they never go away completely. See, that's were the parallel between Sasquatch and the poor is undeniable. We are eager to curb their existence but we cannot afford to kill them off.

Now, are there any real poor people or not? I am not so sure. Agreed, there are several billion people with very little or no money as well as you can find folks who have plenty of assets and decent piles of cash.

I won't deny the existence of people with empty bank accounts and pockets, but the imaginary line we evoke to separate the so-called poor from the so-called rich is nonsense. Politicians gain from that mind game, the so-called poor sure won't.

I will go an inch further: the poor don't exist! The poor are a myth, and so are the rich. You can't get rid of either mythical group, for the same reasons you won't purge the world of Big Foot. Give up the fight, and drop the sick idea that the world would be better off without the poor. Contrary to popular opinion, the world is a great place and Sasquatch doesn't have to become extinct.

A play of perceptions. We have learned nothing about the poor besides myriads of colorful perceptions packaged in sappy stories. The idea of poverty helps journalists sell copy. New age geezers drove their human environment up the walls with poverty thinking and prosperity thinking. Poverty has been used to instigate revolution, to murder Czars, and to control societies. In other words, hardly anything is as valuable as poverty. It offers a wealth of opportunities. What would we do without the poor?

We can't afford to lose the poor and therefore we shall never eliminate poverty. Too many of us want the poor out of our sight AND to stay right where they are, simultaneously. The Jews were a temporary asset for the short sighted Nazis. For our society, the poor are a gift that keeps on giving--a cash cow to be exact.

Talking about racism: conversations about the rich and the poor are as ignorant and derogatory as disparaging talk about different "races." Meanwhile, we have figured out there is only one human race. Duh. But the fascist in us craves the fun of judging. Hence both the poor and the rich have become immortalized, as projections of the unwanted.

'The poor' are not other people. The poor are us. Our ideas of despair have been formed along the lines of nonsense that comes to our mushy mind when we think about poverty with a Hollywood perspective. We are utterly selfish when we evoke the image of poverty. We love thinking about the poor poor as an exercise in secondhand self-pity. The poor have done more for you than you will ever do for them. They give you reason to whine between beers.

It is not intelligent to parrot vague terms ad nauseam. Dividing the population into poor and rich people is separatism. We may choose to continue at our peril. If you really don't enjoy looking at someone's dire circumstances, write her a $500 check. But we'll do more for a vibrant economy when we stop milking each other's moral code under the pretense of doing good. As a species we are too creepy to ever do the right thing. Let's not even try.

If we truly cared about the poor we would have eliminated Malaria by now. We know we can, simply because we have done it in other regions. But we don't give a rat's ass. And that is o.k. as long as we don't pretend otherwise.

Arrogance permits us to address other people's poverty. In our hubris we think we have something to offer. Do we, really? We have adjusted the term 'Third World Country' to the politically more correct 'Developing World,' while we have advanced to becoming the 'Developed World.'

You mean it's a sign of development that more than 90% of our society works in lifelong dependency and despises every day of work? We should export our brilliant accomplishments? We would feel so much better about ourselves if we butchered the individuals and their potential also in the developing world on a grand scale, so they may live in voluntary slavery like we do?

If I were poor I would hide from the nannies who want to save me. But fortunately there are no poor people. Only individuals with differing amounts of cash in their pockets. And then, there are some things that mysteriously unite us all: the right and the freedom to have as much as we have.

Last but not least, we share a great equalizer: the fun of trying to make another buck.

Egbert Sukop

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