Systemic poverty is something we’re really not talking about…..

There has been a lot of talk recently about “systemic” issues that exist within our societies and are making life extremely difficult for whole lot of people in our world. Issues like racism and sexism appear rampant even in our so-called developed societies and are sort of forgotten in the developing world where there is struggle to even survive. And herein lies perhaps the greatest of the systemic issues we face on Planet Earth – and that would be something called “systemic poverty”…..because just as certainly as racism and sexism have become sort of woven into the fabric of our societies, the same can be said for poverty and that it is clearly a worldwide problem of significant magnitude.

Poverty on our planet is mostly an arbitrary thing. While some people in the developed world have some control over where they end up in life, most people in the developing world have few choices about their future outcome. Indeed, I remember well all the way back to high school, where I was constantly suggesting that it wasn’t a person’s fault or choice that they were born in a mud hut in some disadvantaged part of the world and had no real future in life. It’s true that some people seem to have the wherewithal to climb out of the muck no matter how much of it they’re confronted with, most people don’t have these special skills.

Even within our developed societies, there is a huge amount of “luck” at play in determining where you might end up in life. Likely the most important of these is the socio-economic strata you’re born into. Children of parents who are doing well in life have a really big advantage over kids whose parents are struggling. I heard an education professional on NPR one day suggest that having kids do something simple like homework disadvantages poorer children and kids whose home life is unstable. I couldn’t believe this at first because the education professional was saying there shouldn’t be homework for anyone and this would make the education system somehow fairer. I’ve always thought that homework is sort of a good thing for kids because it teaches them discipline and responsibility. But the lady in the interview argued that often kids in unstable home environments don’t even have a safe place to do their homework – so it often doesn’t get done – through no fault of the child’s…..

 I have argued again and again sort of ad nauseum that we need to do something fairly drastic to fix the massive financial inequity on the planet. Right now, you have no hope of improving your lot in life unless you have some type of commodity that the capitalists of the world want. And even then, it’s no guarantee. You can have all the resources in the world – and I mean all – and you’ll still be in trouble if you haven’t got some type of stable political and social framework to organize and share your resources. Which is something that’s happening all over the place right now.

Of course, the entire premise on which our economic system on Planet Earth is built is one monster piece of bullshit. It is, of course, the premise that the world economy and the economies of every single country in the world will continue to grow each year. And, of course, this is a complete and total impossibility….because if we continue to grow and grow the economy and devour more and more of the earth’s resources and we do it faster and faster, we’ll just reach the edge more quickly. And I’m not sure that’s what we want to do. Because when the resources really start to run out and we reach the “edge”, there’s nowhere to go but down. And the descent maybe a fairly rapid one. And I sort of hope I’m not here to see it.

There are ways to fix the massive inequity on the planet and make life more tolerable for more, but we don’t have the political will. Most of us in the developed world seem happy with our lives as long as can muddle forward, scratch out some sort of living and play the lottery for fun. It’s kind of a sad thing, but it’s the truth of the matter that most of us really don’t give a damn….there are a number of “systemic” issues we are dealing with in our societies right now – but the biggest one is systemic poverty….if we could get a handle on that one, we might have some small chance of tackling the others.