"Caught in the Cycle of Poverty"
LA Times Caught in Cycle of Poverty
May 24, 2012
The painting this week in my National Gallery desk calendar has "Rubens Peale with a Geranium" by his brother, Rembrandt Peale. Young Rubens has clean, fluffy hair--I'm thinking no easy feat in 1800s---and is wearing a nice coat and an off white neck-scarf around his neck. Two other things he's wearing stand out--spectacles and an intelligent, calm expression.
Today's LA Times has a front page article on poverty. The protagonist in the piece is a Ms. Cole--27 years old, unemployed, high school dropout with four chilldren. She never married the children's fathers ( plural ). Ms. Cole couldn't bring herself to retake the food safety test she flunked when trying to get a job at a pizza place, and she chose not to write out a resume to apply to be a janitor at a nearby school. She lives on a thousand dollars a month, so naturally housing is a continual crisis. One child was diagnosed with asthma, thus increasing the public assistance somewhat.
In short, the article was poverty porn wherein housed and well- fed commenters could get their jollies by revelling in Ms. Cole's bad choices.
(And she obliged, coming up with some bad choices one wouldn't even think possible, like ignoring health concerns so as to avoid "more bad news". She has diabetes, high blood pressure and possibly depression.)
Rubens' brother Rembrandt lived to be in his eighties. Before penicillin.
Most commenters treated the article like a popcorn movie; one could almost hear the crunching and the slurping of soda pop while reading the remarks. The word "breeding" came up often, as in, How could taxpayers afford to let someone like that keep on breeding?
While a handful of commenters professed some begrudging, nose-turned-up compassion for Ms. Cole's children, a smaller number had compassion for Ms. Cole herself. The most insightful of these deserves quoting:
The hardest thing for regular middle class people to get is the belief in helplessnes and hopelessness that poor people have inside their heads. They've never seen any success, they've never known any success, they have had no examples around them - most of us middle class and above had that all our lives and never even had to think about how much it did for us to somehow KNOW that we could succeed if we tried. If you were surrounded by "You can't, you're stupid, you'll fail, you don't get it" your whole life, your optimism and ability to grab opportunity would be seriously diminished. Really try to put yourself in the shoes of someone who was NEVER taught she had options or that she COULD succeed even when the going was hard. That's the environment of hopelessness that perpetuates poverty, and it's very difficult for a person raised in a supportive and encouraging world to understand. (Emphasis added.)
And this, I'm certain, is what Ms. Cole is up against. If one's life has been a continual beat-down then, no, you don't bounce back and say, "I'm coming back tomorrow and by golly, I'm gonna ace that food safety exam!
Rubens Peale, and his brother the celebrated artist. Talented, cared-for white males in a new, there for the taking country.
Ms. Cole, left slashed and bloodied on the Los Angeles Times comments section floor. No one cared enough to figure out how to get her a nice warm coat. No yearly trips to the optometrist to check if she needed glasses. No one was able to provide a stable home life that allowed her a calm expression. No school was able to overcome all of the hurdles that determined that her intelligence would never be developed. She said her grandmother struggled, her mother struggled, and now she herself is struggling. This awful hopelessness is woven into the fabric of multi generational poverty.
Not a mind-set conducive to noticing the loveliness of a geranium plant.
