Tag: poverty

If you’re poor, the only way you’re likely to injure someone is the old traditional way: artisanal violence, we could call it – by hands, by knife, by club, or maybe modern hands-on violence, by gun or by car.

But if you’re tremendously wealthy, you can practice industrial-scale violence without any manual labor on your own part. You can, say, build a sweatshop factory that will collapse in Bangladesh and kill more people than any hands-on mass murderer ever did, or you can calculate risk and benefit about putting poisons or unsafe machines into the world, as manufacturers do every day. If you’re the leader of a country, you can declare war and kill by the hundreds of thousands or millions. And the nuclear superpowers – the US and Russia – still hold the option of destroying quite a lot of life on Earth.
So do the carbon barons. But when we talk about violence, we almost always talk about violence from below, not above.
[…]

People revolt when their lives are unbearable. Sometimes material reality creates that unbearableness: droughts, plagues, storms, floods. But food and medical care, health and well-being, access to housing and education – these things are also governed by economic means and government policy.[…]

That’s a tired phrase, the destruction of the Earth, but translate it into the face of a starving child and a barren field – and then multiply that a few million times. Or just picture the tiny bivalves: scallops, oysters, Arctic sea snails that can’t form shells in acidifying oceans right now. Or another superstorm tearing apart another city. Climate change is global-scale violence, against places and species as well as against human beings. Once we call it by name, we can start having a real conversation about our priorities and values. Because the revolt against brutality begins with a revolt against the language that hides that brutality.

Call Climate Change What It Is: Violence, Rebecca Solnit.
(via kuanios)

We are often told that the poor are grateful for charity. Some of them are, no doubt, but the best amongst the poor are never grateful. They are ungrateful, discontented, disobedient, and rebellious. They are quite right to be so. Charity they feel to be a ridiculously inadequate mode of partial restitution, or a sentimental dole, usually accompanied by some impertinent attempt on the part of the sentimentalist to tyrannise over their private lives. Why should they be grateful for the crumbs that fall from the rich man’s table? They should be seated at the board, and are beginning to know it. As for being discontented, a man who would not be discontented with such surroundings and such a low mode of life would be a perfect brute. Disobedience, in the eyes of anyone who has read history, is man’s original virtue. It is through disobedience that progress has been made, through disobedience and through rebellion.

Oscar Wilde, The Soul of Man under Socialism (via prawnofsatan)

ignescent:

lokahjarta:

herlobster:

gowns:

lower-income people tend to be “hoarders” and richer people are able to do more “minimalist” living spaces. if u don’t have much, you will hold onto any little thing that comes across your way. you got a new tv, but you still keep the old tv because you know things can break. you keep extra boxes of macaroni and cheese lying around because there will be a week when you don’t have money for groceries. you hold onto your stacks of books and clothes for dear life. those are your assets. physical evidence of where your money’s gone. it’s hard to get rid of it. the bare wall is terrifying when you don’t have much.

Fuck. This makes so much sense and explains so much about me. I must have inherited this from my mum.

so I’d normally put this in the tags but it’s kind of a lot so just reblog this from OP to skip my commentary. But I dogsit for a family who is clearly LOADED. Their house is immaculate. High, vaulted ceilings, wood flooring, two chandeliers in one room. These things are fancy, right ?? I really don’t know, anything that isn’t tile or 30 year old carpet seems fancy to me. It also so… bare. Everything is organized perfectly, they have no excess. Their decor is extravagant and yet minimal – it is carefully and precisely executed. Nothing that doesn’t match the aesthetic sits in their living room. I tried to replicate some of it, but it’s just not possible. I have every book I’ve ever owned, my mom keeps papers upon papers, VHSs in a dresser, how do you just get rid of these things when you know you may not have the opportunity to buy them again? How must it feel to live in such orderly quarters where everything is replaceable?

This really locked into my brain when I was reading one of the declutter your space things and it suggested getting rid of duplicate highlighters and pens. /Pens/. It suggested that you needed one or two working pens, so if you had extra you should get rid of them. That was when I realized minimalist living was /innately/ tied to having spare money, because the idea was, of course you just went out and bought the single replacement thing whenever the first thing broke. You obv. Had the time and money to only ever hold what you needed that moment, because you could always buy more later.