Mon 25 Sep 2006
Since I started this website, I have received a number of emails from interested readers. To those who have written, I would like to say thank you for the feedback. I read all my emails, and I respond to essentially all them. I would like to share some comments from an email I received back in mid-August, as well as some of my thoughts in response to this email.
Bill, from Birmingham, AL, wrote in mid-August to express interest and moral support. In his email he wrote: “I like the pics of the food, but when you’re out on a yacht by the Golden Gate Bridge and then you get back to land and you’ve got a big meal in front of you, it’s hard to see how you’re doing this trip for poverty.”
In addition to raising questions about poverty, Bill also shared some insights into needs for survival equipment and communications equipment while I am out in the less-populated parts of the hemisphere. Thank you Bill for your email. I believe that my recent posts about meeting with members of the ONE Campaign should help shed some light on how my website relates to poverty.
Painting an accurate portait of poverty is tricky. This is because in some cases poverty is directly caused by exploitation from the upper class, but in other cases, poverty is caused by cultural stagnation, lack of education, and poor work ethic. In most cases, poverty is linked to a complex array of causes, including the factors just mentioned and others.
Some factors contributing to poverty are purely circumstantial. For example, geography is a strong determinant of poverty. Essentially all landlocked countries experience higher poverty rates than surrounding countries. Bolivia and the Congo are classic examples of impoverished, landlocked countries.
This website was created in order to show the relationships between education, demographics, social class, politics, and poverty. In order for the rising generation to effectively deal with extreme poverty in the world, we will have to replace existing stereotypes about poverty with concrete facts.
Here is a long-standing, inaccurate stereotype: “In order to help with the world poverty situation, you must have an appearance and lifestyle that reflect poverty.”
In actuality, the most effective way to help with the world poverty situation is to rally behind local awareness initiatives, and to supplement those activities with informed voting and lobbying efforts.
Let me say that again:
The most effective way to help with the world poverty situation is to rally behind local awareness initiatives, and to supplement those activitites with informed voting and lobbying efforts.
So the measure of your resolve in the War on Poverty is not whether you are willing to live in a tent in Africa. The measure of your resolve is whether you are actively invovled in your city’s ONE Group, or another local poverty-related effort.
Another reader posed a question in a comment after seeing my photos of poor people in San Francisco. Yoshi, from Salt Lake City, Utah, asked: “What was the cause of hardship for most people you met in SF?”
The answer to this question is simple: drugs. Most of the homeless people I have met clearly have addiction problems.
Of course, there are many factors, including poverty, which contribute to drug problems. So I guess in a way you could say that these people are victims of their circumstances.
But I don’t have a tremendous amount of sympathy for people who live on the streets in order to support a drug habit. I have a lot more sympathy for people who are living with their families, working together to try to overcome their problems.
As I am traveling around the Americas, I will be doing my best to get to know the families who are affected by poverty. I am especially interested in meeting poor people who have worked hard all their lives to change their circumstances. These are the kinds of people I will be seeking out in my travels.
September 26th, 2006 at 7:13 pm
Good post, Matt. I would add another cause of hardship for many homeless people – mental illness, which is sometimes related to drug use (either a cause or an effect of the mental illness). It is sad to me that so many mentally ill people are on the streets, and living in poverty, without needed treatment.
October 6th, 2006 at 11:32 am
I think this is really great what you’re doing Matt. It is really great that you are able to travel so many places, so many people wish they could do the same thing but they probably can’t leave their jobs or don’t have an adequite savings to do it. I think it’s kind of ironic, that your lack of the poverty attitude is what’s allowing you to travel all around the world and the homeless’s lack of a rich attitude is what allows them to live free of work and under a bridge. If you think about it you and them are one in the same on two different extremes. When you are done can you write a book called “how to travel America”? Write it geared towards someone of the opposite spectrum (the homeless) and teach them how to be free and a functioning member of society.
I aggree with Kathy about mental health. I’m from the bay area and a lot of people talk about how most homeless in San Jose (and this would apply to San Francisco too) have various mental health problems such as schizophrenia, depression, blabla the list goes on. You could argue that those mental disorders are symptoms of drug abuse or that the drug abuse is the symptom of those disorders or you could argue both (or none). Most of the homeless I see seem to be the age of my parents generation when drug abuse was popular in their youth (especially drugs that effect the brain like LSD).
There is also the idea that many of the homeless in the bay area were at one time in mental institutions but were released in the late 60’s and early 70’s when Reagan was governor of California and closed the mental institutions.
Either way drug abuse and mental “illness” go hand and hand. I put illness in quotes because I believe that if these people were put in a different society they would succeed. I think that class differences and poverty, and mental illness, and criminal behavior, most of the time (not all) are a clash between a person’s personal system and the system of the society. If you think that education will help, you’ll have to be very clever about how you go about it, because it’s hard to re-train someone to change their way of thought, and in reality who’s to say that one way is better than another. Haha I think it’d be really interesting if the roles were reversed and the homeless were put in leadership. If they were given the oportunity to teach society how they think things should work, I wonder what society could learn. (granted they’d have to cut their drug habbits enough to be able to have coherant conversations)