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Something I've noticed about developing countries, people never attribute poverty to a character failure. People in developing countries come face to face with
by bodas 8y ago
Something I've noticed about developing countries, people never attribute poverty to a character failure. People in developing countries come face to face with poverty every day, they have poor friends and poor family members, so the idea that poor people are unintelligent or not hard-working, never occurs.
When countries become rich (it's not just America), people lose their connection with poverty and start to blame poor people for being poor. This lets them justify voting against social security programmes because they believe "it will never happen to me, I'm not the kind of person who becomes poor".
- TomMarius 8y agoNot all social security programmes are good. Some of them are unrealistic, some of them are unfair to other people, etc. Voting against a particular social programme doesn't imply the person doesn't feel solidarity in general. Maybe they're voting against it because while they're not poor, they still don't have more than enough - you can solve that by funding it through a progressive tax, but that makes it unfair in the views of many people.
- giggles_giggles 8y agoIs saying that many of the homeless in America are mentally ill blaming them? It's our health system that can't handle them, for a plethora of reasons. It's not the homeless peoples' fault for having schizophrenia or PTSD or whatever mental illness, which many of them do.
- thatcat 8y agoPoverty isn't caused by mental illness though it may be correlated with it. How many were mentally ill before becoming homeless? At what rate would wealthy people develop mental illness if you force them into the same situation?
- bodas 8y agoHomelessness can't be fixed "at source". People become homeless simply by losing their job and defaulting on their mortgage. Walking around San Francisco you would get the impression that most homeless people are mentally ill, but you'd be missing all the people sleeping away from busy streets, in tents, in their cars, squatting in unused buildings, couch surfing between friends, etc.
- atmosx 8y agoFunny thing though: if you default on your mortgage bank gets your home, you become homeless. What happens when bank defaults? You become homeless! It’s a win-win (for the bank). On a more serious note: a society which has homeless ppl, in 2018, cannot be considered “civilized”.
- emodendroket 8y agoIn a lot of ways America is undergoing a "Caribbeanization" where there are two strata of society who rarely interact with each other except in contexts like buying something from a store and so have little concept of the other's way of living.