Editorial
A Poor Editorial on Poverty
But what about the black woman who was 6 months pregnant and had to sleep on the street towards the shelter our friend Ryan stayed in? Well – first, that pregnancy had real life consequences because a woman who could not even afford to feed herself was going to bring a child she could not afford to take care of. Is there a chance that the system in America would absorb the little mouth to feed? Yes. Does this solve the problem? No. Because she is on the street and because she is poor, that woman could as easily get pregnant and become the proverbial burden to the system. In simple terms, unless something drastic happens, this woman is spiraling further and further from a poverty cycle to a cyclone!
And that starts the second similarity between the poor in the West and those in the Third World: While the poor in the West are driven to the ground and even go through the safety net and keep digging till they are just a statistic, the poor in Africa dig for life and live to dig.
Many are subsistence farmers. However, these poor African subsistence farmers are much better off than their compadres in the West: They at least, have a factor of production – their land. Their fate is, however, sealed when many lose their access to the soil.
The massive rural urban migrations in African and Caribbean countries have made things worse for the poor. Unlike the safety net that caught my friend Ryan and would probably find respite for that pregnant woman – however ephemeral – are no existent or severely inadequate in the Third World.
The poor in Africa are considered the destitute. They are on the street. They are begging not just on the street corners but in the traffic and around the shops and around the mosques and churches.
They are everywhere.
On the other hand, because there are so many solutions to poverty and none really living up to their solutions potential, the cynics have resorted to looking out for themselves through corruption; the think tanks and the altruistic continue to wring their hands in helplessness; and those battle pressed black people in the West smile secretly to themselves and each other when they see a white man or woman begging on the street.
Dennis Matanda
Editor – [email protected]
Note: This editorial intentionally did not define the vicious cycle of poverty and neither were the different attributes of this cycle specifically highlighted.
