No Money, No Time
The thing that frustrates me the most about this situation is the waste of human capital this represents for society. Now, I'm a firm believer that society is advanced mostly by a small minority of highly talented individuals - the intelligent, creative, charismatic, and hardworking few change the game for everyone else.Now, what happens when those rare talents are born into the cycle of poverty? What lessons do they learn? Too often, their talents just get them into trouble. They find themselves caught up in crime, addiction, and the other short-term thinking failures of poverty, and thus unable to express their talent. Worse, society simply expects nothing of them. They have no role models, and they have no external motivations to be and do better.Even those who can do better often simply escape, leaving the culture of their birth behind. Frankly, I did that. I was raised about one step above what southerners call "white trash". My father, a tremendously intelligent and charismatic man, was constantly lured by petty crime and get-rich-quick ideas, and wasted his life. His interactions with the wealthy men he worked for generated feelings not of admiration and example, but contempt. To this day, when I'm not sure what to do about a situation, I think of what he would have done, and do the opposite. And he took a big step up himself - I remember visiting my grandfather's farm in rural Kentucky as a child. I didn't notice the lack of electricity or running water at the time. I notice it now. My father escaped sharecropping, but he never escaped his own demons.I see the effects of those escapes now in my sister's life. She loves living in the rural south, but is constantly brought down by the ignorance and awful habits of her neighbors. Everyone in her area (southern Virginia) who has any brains simply moves away. What's left are the addicts, the fools, and the spiteful. Sure, it's beautiful there, but I don't see how she can stand living around people with so little ambition. I do, however, see how she suffers in poverty and hopelessness.Me, I got up and left. I made a good career for myself, living in a nice safe neighborhood in a beautiful city, making a good income in a safe field, raising my kids safe from the things that got me as a child. I can't imagine going back to that life.But oh, so many lost souls. So much talent put to waste in jail or in the grave. This is what we allow poverty to do to our society.