Is Poverty A Choice?

I've never known poverty in my life and I likely never will. I don't come from poverty for at least two generations and am blessed with education and enough money to live comfortably. Any view of poverty from an outside perspective will be skewed by a primitive understanding of that world. Reading "All Souls" is confirming the ideas of existentialism that we read about early in the year. What happens to an individual is a result of choices made by either the individual or factors around the individual dependent on choices made by other people. Poverty is always a result of choices made by someone. There appears to be a common misconception in the minds of the well-off and the impoverished alike, that poverty can just happen to someone as if caused by some great universal force. No one can make blanket statements about poverty as it is in one generation, one lifetime. Poverty, when it happens, can come from factors outside of the individual's control. As an illustrative example: a mother has multiple kids with a man who had a steady enough job to support the kids. The man leaves because he didn't want to be a father and realized he didn't want to support the family anymore. The mother now has to support the kids on her own, but she loses her job because the company she worked for is going out of business. She then goes looking for a job that can support her kids, but she can't find any because all around her the businesses are struggling. The family slips into poverty based on choices made by people outside of the family (the family being now the mother and the kids). The mother and the kids now have a choice to do everything they can to get out of poverty or life for the time being and live relatively comfortably in poverty. Whether or not to stay in poverty is a choice.

In "All Souls" the mother is not making choices to help the family get out of poverty. She is not saving money, no one in Southie is. This is her most obvious fault as a mother because she is not herself making the tough choice to give her kids the best chance in life. She can't afford to send her kids to better schools than the apparently awful public schools in Southie. She also hasn't instilled in her kids a desire to get out of Southie or a desire to go to school. As hard as it is to go to school in Southie, Ma made no attempt to get her kids to see that education is the only way to break the cycle of poverty.

Staying in poverty is a choice because poverty is a cycle. Families stay in poverty because of an inability to see the way out. The people in Southie became such a tight-knit community that they had a collective mindset about poverty. Southie became a dysfunctional family, kept together by their collective denial of their poverty. They all subscribe to band-aid solutions that satiate only their material desire to be greater than the black people they see in Roxbury. Any challenge in life can only be overcome when it is accepted. Denial is a repeating cycle that buries people in their own lies. No one in Southie commits to making the neighborhood better, they just want it to not be black because that is a barometer for how bad, how poor, a neighborhood can be. No one has ever gotten out of poverty by spending excess amounts of money on clothes when cheap clothes can be bought. At one point Michael Patrick Macdonald relates a time that his mother could have bough all the kids sneakers for $1.49, but the kids made her buy the better brands for more. The mother should have made the kids wear the ugly, cheap, sensible sneakers because that's what a good parent does: they make the difficult decisions that their children are not mature enough to make on their own. Instead, the mother acted immaturely in her own right by succumbing to the peer-pressure of her children. She wanted to be accepted by her kids instead of doing what is best for them. That attitude permeated Southie and is the reason the residents couldn't break the cycle of poverty.