She described living on a farm in the late 1930s and in the 1940s in northern Minnesota. The farm had no electricity (until 1944). The farm house had no indoor water and they used an outhouse (she said that when indoor plumbing eventually became an option, her mother said, “No one’s going to take a crap in my house!”). The field was worked with horses (no gasoline machinery).

The routine work that had to be done just to survive was astounding. She said that every Wednesday and Saturday, they would take out the beds and run kerosene-soaked turkey feathers through each of the many metal springs in order to kill the bed bugs. Each week, one of her jobs was to clean out the soot from the kerosene lamps that lit the house. To conserve heat, she said that her upstairs bedroom was so cool in the winter that they would set jello in her room. Most of their clothes were hand-made and doing laundry (on Mondays) was a full-day’s work. They would walk 1.5 miles to school, regardless of weather or the amount of snow (except in the very deepest snow, when they would take a horse-drawn sleigh to school—which was very unusual). The idea of a “vacation” was a foreign concept—they worked on the farm seven days a week all year long (with some rest on most Sundays). The best gift she ever got was a wooden rocking chair—she prized and love it.

Listening to her talk about those days brought two questions to mind:

First, do we really need much of what we buy or want? So much of what we consume (or want to consume) is not only unnecessary but it doesn’t bring any substantive meaning or happiness to life.

quote:

---

First, do we really need much of what we buy or want? So much of what we consume (or want to consume) is not only unnecessary but it doesn’t bring any substantive meaning or happiness to life.

Second, what does it mean to be “poor”? Few of the “poor” living in the USA or Canada today live anywhere near the “poorness” of my mother’s childhood.

---

My mother grew up in rural Virginia in the 40s and 50s. Her father was an alcoholic and-- by all accounts-- a paranoid schizophrenic. He had trouble keeping a job (shocker, I know), and so the family depended on my grandmother's earnings as a truck-stop waitress.

They used to move alot, because they'd fall behind in the rent and get evicted. Some of the places they lived were little more than shacks-- some with dirt floors.

Eventually, her father's illness got completely out of control. He shot and killed a man. My mother was the eldest of four, and from the time she was 11 or so, she essentially raised her brother and sisters.

My mother's favorite movie was Gone With the Wind. From an early age, her battle cry was that of Scarlet O'Hara: 'As God is my witness, I'll never be poor again.' She more or less succeeded in that, but so doing she became hard, mean, grasping and was an unapologetic social climber.

In my better moments I can understand why and how it happened, but it was no less ugly.

As a result--and therein lies my point, I guess-- I find I'm quite unable to romanticize poverty and unrequited 'want.' I don't see any nobility in it; I just see what it can do to people.

[ 07 November 2005: Message edited by: Tape_342 ]

quote:

---

Originally posted by Tape_342:
My mother grew up in rural Virginia in the 40s and 50s. Her father was an alcoholic and-- by all accounts-- a paranoid schizophrenic. He had trouble keeping a job (shocker, I know), and so the family depended on my grandmother's earnings as a truck-stop waitress.

They used to move alot, because they'd fall behind in the rent and get evicted. Some of the places they lived were little more than shacks-- some with dirt floors.

Eventually, her father's illness got completely out of control. He shot and killed a man. My mother was the eldest of four, and from the time she was 11 or so, she essentially raised her brother and sisters.

My mother's favorite movie was Gone With the Wind. From an early age, her battle cry was that of Scarlet O'Hara: 'As God is my witness, I'll never be poor again.' She more or less succeeded in that, but so doing she became hard, mean, grasping and was an unapologetic social climber.

In my better moments I can understand why and how it happened, but it was no less ugly.

As a result--and therein lies my point, I guess-- I find I'm quite unable to romanticize poverty and unrequited 'want.' I don't see any nobility in it; I just see what it can do to people.

[ 07 November 2005: Message edited by: Tape_342 ]

---

I’m not “romanticizing poverty” but, rather, thinking about these questions: What does it mean to be “poor” and is that definition much different that it was as recently as fifty years ago?

I don’t think “poor” necessarily means having to take loans out to go to college.

I don’t think “poor” necessarily means making a choice between a buying some groceries for a week or paying the cable bill and purchasing cigarettes.

I don’t think “poor” necessarily means having to work more than forty-hour weeks.

I don’t think someone is necessarily “poor” if they can’t afford to go out to eat at a restaurant once or twice a week.

I don’t think “poor” necessarily means a family having to live in a house with only 1,000 square feet of living space. Although the average size dwelling space in the USA is about 1,700 square feet, the average size dwelling space in France and Germany is about 950 square feet, per Olaf Gersemann’s book “Cowboy Capitalism”.

I'm not sure how you could arrive at a suitably "poor" standard of living that could satisfy whatever social structure you're attempting to argue for though.

There's also the question of relative poverty. That the poverty you described in the post above took place on a more generalized level, and without daily reminders about the depths of the inequality that people suffered. And without the ubiquitous presence of high-pressure advertising. And there's the point that being poor means a lot of stress. Whatever material benefits we presently enjoy require a constant scrambling in a harsh urban post-industrial society.

Nobody should have to take out any kind of loan to go to university, though, education should be a social good in modern societies, as roads are.

And I don't think either cable, easily available, or cigarettes should be viewed as "luxuries" (I don't smoke, and don't have cable - I never watch TV, but then, I work on a computer all day). Someone who has to choose between food and such small pleasures - and smoking, of course, is an addiction before it is a pleasure - is poor in an industrialised society.

The reasons European houses are smaller than US ones is not a lower standard of living in Western Europe - houses there tend to be built to better standards and returning to North America, one is always struck by the shabbiness and cheapness of everything, but because there is less space for sprawl.

quote:

---

Originally posted by Sven:

I’m not “romanticizing poverty” but, rather, thinking about these questions: What does it mean to be “poor” and is that definition much different that it was as recently as fifty years ago?

I don’t think “poor” necessarily means having to take loans out to go to college.

I don’t think “poor” necessarily means making a choice between a buying some groceries for a week or paying the cable bill and purchasing cigarettes.

I don’t think “poor” necessarily means having to work more than forty-hour weeks.

I don’t think someone is necessarily “poor” if they can’t afford to go out to eat at a restaurant once or twice a week.

I don’t think “poor” necessarily means a family having to live in a house with only 1,000 square feet of living space. Although the average size dwelling space in the USA is about 1,700 square feet, the average size dwelling space in France and Germany is about 950 square feet, per Olaf Gersemann’s book “Cowboy Capitalism”.

I don’t think “poor” means not having a mobile phone.

---

I don't think you actually realize what poverty is in our country.

Poor is none of those things above - none of the poor people I work with can afford any of them.

Poor is trying to buy groceries, rent, utilities, clothing and other necessities with $525/month. Poor is a mother skipping meals so her kids can eat. Poor is a kid skipping meals because there isn't any food. Poor is not being able to afford even a bus ticket to go to the doctor. Poor is not being able to go out, ever, for anything, because you lack the money to do it.

Poor is vulnerable, degraded and marginalized. For some reason, people who are not poor often confuse the term with their own experiences - which would better be described as 'occasionally strapped for cash.' Poor is real, mean, painful and degrading.

Although Canadians generally were not so well off in the fifties and sixties as they are now, still Canadian society itself felt expansive at the time. It was much easier for anyone with the marks to go to university, eg -- nothing like the current culture of student debt hung over us as depressingly as it seems to over almost everyone but the rich now.

Living in a contracting, resentful, pinched culture is hard on us all. All the consumer baubles don't look like compensation enough to me.

[ 07 November 2005: Message edited by: skdadl ]

It is a ridiculous premise to look at consumer products as having any real meaning other than what they do for you; some of them are necessities, some of them are luxuries and...and this is where I'm having real concerns lately...some have no discernible purpose at all, except that they need to be paid for and consummed (ring-tones are my favourite, these days). These are the vast majority of products aimed at younger people who retain their tastes for these products as they grow up in an increasingly infantilised and banal culture.

[ 07 November 2005: Message edited by: Hinterland ]

[ 07 November 2005: Message edited by: Makwa ]

quote:

---

They would walk 1.5 miles to school, regardless of weather or the amount of snow

---

Didn't everyone? I certainly did. Uphill both ways, too.

quote:

---

And I don't think either cable, easily available, or cigarettes should be viewed as "luxuries" (I don't smoke, and don't have cable - I never watch TV, but then, I work on a computer all day). Someone who has to choose between food and such small pleasures - and smoking, of course, is an addiction before it is a pleasure - is poor in an industrialised society.

---

I don't know what cable costs where you are, but here you're looking at about $20-40, and another $20-40 for internet if you want it. So at $240-960 a year, I'm not sure it's such a "little" pleasure.

Also, in any different context, would we argue that television has some particular merit that would be denied someone who couldn't pay? For example, if Ted Rogers generously decided to give free cable television to classrooms, would we see this as a good thing? If not, why would being unable to watch cable television be a problem? Is it good? Or not? It can't be a necessary service (when someone can't afford it) and a horrible blight on our society (whenever kids watch too much, whenever someone puts a television in a bar or waiting room, whenever there's a violent movie, etc., etc.)

quote:

---

and smoking, of course, is an addiction before it is a pleasure

---

As near as I can tell my dad and mom grew up in identical situations - a small house (physically small, certainly not the size of the houses I lived in as I grew up), and with a background that was clearly working-class. There was food on the table, a few luxuries, but nothing like the ability to just take off and have a vacation anywhere.

I think I would have to go back to when my grandmother and grandfather grew up, which was during the Depression and then the war, to really get to conditions of what, today, would be considered abject poverty.

[ 07 November 2005: Message edited by: DrConway ]

-- that the experience of poverty is relative. Very relative. Other people on TV, other people in your country, other people on your street, and especially other people in your occupation, profession, or workplace. People FEEL resentful and desperate according to the options in front of them.

-- that increased wealth does not correlate with reported happiness. Not over time among the same people, and not across space among different people. (What does correlate with happiness is increased wealth relative to people near to you.)

-- Neither of those applies to the level of poverty at which you honestly aren't sure how your family is going to eat next week.

quote:

---

Originally posted by Sven:
She described living on a farm in the late 1930s and in the 1940s in northern Minnesota. The farm had no electricity (until 1944). The farm house had no indoor water and they used an outhouse (she said that when indoor plumbing eventually became an option, her mother said, “No one’s going to take a crap in my house!”). The field was worked with horses (no gasoline machinery).

---