Having been exceptionally poor most of my childhood, I can completely relate to this. You can't absolve personal responsibility but poverty is a vindictive cycl

Having been exceptionally poor most of my childhood, I can completely relate to this. You can't absolve personal responsibility but poverty is a vindictive cycle for a reason. It's simple things like vehicle emissions testing -- if you have money you don't think about it -- but if you drive an older car you fail emissions -- and it costs way too much to get it fixed -- so you drive without registration -- and end up in court. Worrying about things like the environment or organic food is a luxury only the gilded class an afford. "Sophisticated" people love to shit on the big bad wal-mart empire as they happily truck into target to buy shit from the martha stewart collection-- as if there is any difference. The only difference is that poor people happen to really love wal-mart-- so you can take your sociology degree and shove it. The poor do get exploited, but Michael Moore style class warfare isn't the answer either. The truth is that the poor exploit each other even more than the wealthy do. Poor people are poor because they don't have the social capital to get out of poverty. Most social programs do nothing to deal with social capital so they don't create long term solutions. Those people throw indulgence money at poor people all day so they can absolve themselves of their materialism. Or they take vacations to Africa so they can post self-righteous photos on facebook that shows how socially chic they are. Is that a save darfur bumper sticker on your prius? But ask those people to spend their TIME actually building into people's lives and befriending people in a sacrificial way and you can forget it. When you're poor nobody wants to be your friend. And by those people I mean me. I was poor, so I should know better, right? But MY time is too valuable. I would rather start a website to help the poor or raise a couple hundred bucks for some suburban 5k fun run to support some inner city whatever. This has to scale damnit! But be an actual friend? Take someone to a job interview? Have them over for dinner? Let them hang out with my cool friends? Don't bet on it, because I'm the problem.