21780: Kathleen: Re: 21768: Hess: Re: 21765: Walton: RE: 21746: erasmus: Re: 21738: anonymous: Re: 21730: ... (fwd)

[Bob Corbett <corbetre@webster.edu>]

From: Kathleen <kathleenmb@adelphia.net>

"poverty, after all, is what forced them to leave the countryside and flood
the city's slums" - actually, historical accounts of Papa Doc's bus-ing in
the peasants from the countryside to vote for him, and then not providing a
means back, accounts for a great number of the ancestors of today's slum
dwellers, into their third and fourth (multiplied) generations.

"The very old and unoriginal idea that the poor are responsible for their
situation" has been replaced by many (well-off) demagogues with the idea
that the poor are somehow morally superior to those who, no matter how they
started out, are no longer poor.

A far more accurate position, brought out by studies on backgrounds of
criminals and sadists, is that the bad and the good are pretty evenly
distributed among the classes; i.e., you can't judge a person's morals by
how much money or property he or she has.  To suggest otherwise is simply
using the poor in yet another distasteful way, to fulfill one's one ego and
agenda.  kb
----- Original Message -----
From: "Bob Corbett" <corbetre@webster.edu>
To: "Haiti mailing list" <haiti@lists.webster.edu>
Sent: Sunday, May 09, 2004 8:45 AM
Subject: 21768: Hess: Re: 21765: Walton: RE: 21746: erasmus: Re: 21738:
anonymous: Re: 21730: ... (fwd)


>
> From: DougRHess@aol.com
>
> Bob Walton wrote:
> "If neighbors join the effort, though they remain poor, they will not need
to
> live like pigs.  People make slums.. and can un-make them."
>
> What are you talking about? Many people in Haiti make enormous efforts and
> take great risk to improve their situation.  Plus, people do have to spend
time
> trying to pull together some money for living each day. Poverty, after
all, is
> what forced them to leave the countryside and flood the city's slums.
>
> If people didn't work to improve their situation, it would be worse and
you'd
> make the same point. If they worked three times as hard, the situation
would
> still be horrible and you'd still say they don't do enough to not live
"like
> pigs." The very old and unoriginal idea that the poor are responsible for
their
> situation, as opposed to able to make certain efforts to change it (which
> many Haitians do), is easily disproved. In the US, for instance, one just
needs
> to look up data on income mobility.
>
> Doug Hess
> Ph.D. Student,
> School of Public Policy & Administration,
> George Washington University
>
> Home address:
> 2114 N St., NW Apt. 23
> Washington, DC 20037
> 202-955-5869
> (cell 202-276-4807)
>