Wednesday, March 08, 2006

nope. no poverty post, yet.

i'm scrambling to get out of town to see my sister and dad (ha! my flight leaves so early on sunday i'll have to skip church services) and i'll just have to wait until i'm in los angeles. it'll be perfect, actually.

staying with my sister in sanitary santa monica will piss me off so much, haranguing against a culture of consumption and classism will be no problem.

7 comments:

Anonymous said...

am i supposed to be saying something about poverty? should i wax eloquent and talk about the poverty of soul vs. physical poverty? which one is worse, etc?

as christians we have a responsibility help the poor, needy, down and out etc. if i am to understand from this nyt article, giving an illegal alien food from our food shelf would be considered *aiding and abetting*? i find that to be ignorant and foolish.

i haven't done enough research to determine where i stand on illegal immigration, but a needy person is a needy person - i don't recall christ asking someone if they met all the gov't requirements before he showed them mercy.

it seems as there's an absence of physical poverty, there's plenty of *soul* poverty to make up for it. unfortunately, that type of poverty is often hidden under fancy clothes.

Delia Christina said...

i totally agree with everything you say. personally, i don't think we talk about poverty enough in our culture.

i remember coverage of the katrina disaster and there was a lot of shock that people lived in such extreme lack. just a couple of hours outside of chicago (i daresay just a couple of miles away from my own apartment) people live in conditions we associate with 'other' places, other countries.

and my stay in los angeles made me realize that we don't talk about poverty a whole lot and a lot of our 'hot button' issues can be seen through this lens.

Anonymous said...

What if you could wave a magic wand and stop the world turning, give everyone in the U.S. an equal portion of cash and goods, then restart the world. You would find that within 10 years (generally) then same people will be on the top and the same people would be on the bottom. Poverty is a self inflicted wound.

Delia Christina said...

huh.
and how do people inflict poverty on themselves?

Anonymous said...

personal choices and personal responsibility is my guess.

Delia Christina said...

let's start a list of things we do to deliberately be poor.

i think that would be interesting.
who wants to go first?

Anonymous said...

okay - i'll go first. there is no good reason to purposely choose poverty (unless you're mother teresa). But(but monkey!)there are those who find themselves in physical poverty because of poor decisions - financial and otherwise. and of course there are those who find themselves in a state of poverty due to circumstances out of their control. and. . i think if you were to compare the two individuals, you might find dissimilar decision making tendancies; attitudes re responsibility, etc.