Apologies to Marocharim, but the poor generally turn to the compassionate not out of some great appreciation for “christian values” but out of a mercenary realization that the compassionate are easier targets for puppy dog eyes and open sores.
- “The Poor Vote”
March 16, Smoke.ph
My motto in whatever passes for “social analysis” is simple: when confronted with a problem, fuck things up. It’s not that overwrought explanations are more accurate or more impressive; it’s just that there’s no such thing as a simple social problem. Like poverty, for example. Last time, I wrote about the middle class, which was kinda interesting enough to make me stop translating Linkin Park lyrics for one day. So to make me stop making lyrics translations, the mind-fuck is sorta necessary.
Rom makes a very interesting point in her entry yesterday regarding the differences between rural and urban poverty. The generalization may be a bit hasty, but not completely wrong either; if anything, personal responsibility may have a lot to do with financial security. Bleeding-heart that I am, I think that her statement on the “mercenary realization” becomes a mind-fuck.
So instead of making my heart bleed, let me make my nose bleed.
There’s always an interplay between agents and structures, and values make up a great part of things we value. How we create those values – and how we are created by those values – has a lot to do with the context by which those values take place (the magic word: “context”). I think that in the dichotomy of rural and urban poverty, there are two things that should be kept in mind:
- “Rural areas” in general are defined by “production.”
- “Urban areas” in general are defined by “consumption.”
Hmmm… this is interesting. OK, this is quite long.
