“Education is a modern day sharecropping. A BA is worthless, so you gotta keep getting/spending more, deferring family…I support poverty, poor people know how to live. They probably have much less stress than those of us who think we’ve excelled and more time to be with those they love.”
This quote provided for your enjoyment by Call2Arms. Yeah, the same one who brought us the much used ‘borderline barren’ phrase. Give her a round of applause. We can always count on C2A to give us something out the box and thought provoking. With that, here’s what I got to say about her comment.
When I think of education being important in rising out of poverty, I think more in terms of what education exposes a person to. Not just the books and classes. When I think of education, I think of O’s Boys who’d never rode an esculator, I think of exposure!!! Does one have to go in debt to get education?? Not always. But so what if you do!!!
As most know, I have a couple degrees. It’s always shocking to people when I readily share that I got the first because I wanted to get out of Detroit but I knew I couldn’t up and move with no purpose and no loot. Enter college. Plus, in the schools I went to, college was a no-brainer. I got the second degree because I didn’t want a real job. So at 23 I had two degrees and looked like a real go-getter. I looked like somewhere in my youth, I’d mapped my life out and getting these two degrees was all apart of my grand scheme. Suckers!!!
While I was in school, I knew there were people out there my age working. I also knew that those years they spent working might mean that when I did eventually enter the work place, they might be making as much as me. Did I care?? No. I wouldn’t trade the experience of college for the world. For me, all that fancy book leanring was just a vehicle to learn about so much else. I’m not saying that learning couldn’t have been gotten elsewhere, but I think it would have been harder. In college, learning about self and other people, from day-to-day interactions, was encouraged. At least at HU it was.
Did my education defer me getting married and having babies?? Nope. And here’s why. I’m from Detroit. The mindset of people in my generation was pro- getting knocked up but anti-marriage. So sure, I could have laid around breeding babies. But how would I support them?? It’s not like any of the boys/young men had been taught to be responsible and care for the children they made. It’s just not that way in Detroit. So not getting educated, getting married, and staffing up the homestead was not an option for me.
Believe it or not, I have been poor. I have been around poor. And while it’s true that they do not have the same issues we have, they have an even bigger one: day-to-day survival. They might not be worried about paying their visa bill or making sure their child gets into the right pre-school, but just because their issues are different, it doesn’t make them happier than the not-so-poor or the educated. Poverty is no joke. If we just focused just on the health issues affecting the poor, any statistic you read will show that poverty is just bad for your health!!!!!!!
I think it’s a hugely incorrect assumption that they have less stress. How many poor people live in dangerous neighborhoods? You think every mother doesn’t worry about her kids crossing the street and getting shot by a stray bullet?? You think she doesn’t worry that rats might bite her children as they sleep?? You think she doesn’t worry that after 60 months of welfare, she’s getting thrown off?? And the only thing she knows is that she’s not prepared. She’s affraid of what might happen if her boyfriend, who may or may not be a drug dealer, decides to sponsor another family after she loses her food stamps and Section 8 housing. sure she sits back and pretends she has it all figured out. But she doesn’t.
And what about the working poor?? Their lives are stressful as hell. They have to worry about not getting sick because they don’t have health insurance. Most of these people really do want more. Who really wants to live check-to-check?? They might pretend to look like they’re sure of themselves. But they aren’t.
And what about the husslers?? They have stress because of the violence that goes along with what they do. They have stress because they’re constantly trying not to get caught. constantly trying to think of new ways to ‘come up’ while keeping with their current ‘grind’. Sure they live a flossy lifestyle but they spend a considerable amout of time trying to work the kink of out their necks, from all that looking over their shoulder.
Stress if part of life. And depending on who you are, what you do, where you are, your stress may be different. But it’s stress nonetheless.
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