Comment 39999

By moylek (registered) - website | Posted April 21, 2010 at 08:06:46

My dear Miss Roots - every time you shake the karma stick at someone and wish them ill because they say things you don't like you undermine the effectiveness of your arguments. Really. Plus, it's mean.

Anyhow, we are discussing here not specifically people on welfare stripped of every asset but the downtown poor in general. I also go to these downtown grocery stores and boggle at what evidently poor people are buying, and I see people smoking on their porches on Barton under a thicket of satellite dishes. Choices are being made by many of the poor.

There simply must be a difference between the poverty of, for example, new immigrants - certainly my family was direly short of money when we first came to Canada when I was a child - and the poverty we're discussing. And that difference is far more than simply money. What is it? How does it relate to money? To services? To hope? I don't know. But I want to.

A response such as Wigan Pier's above makes me think twice about my condemnation of the questionable way that some poor people spend their time and money. But a flat denial that the victims of poverty discussed in the Spec series are in any way responsible for their own woes just hardens my complacent, suburban heart.

Do you want to understand and sway the indifference of the petty-bourgeois (and self-reliant poor) frowners? Or do you just want to condemn their wickedness and wish them a fall into miserable misfortune? I ask this more-or-less seriously.

Comment edited by moylek on 2010-04-21 07:08:43

-- Kenneth Moyle Hamilton, Ontario

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