Poverty The Poverty Of The Poor example essay topic

To understand our current sins of earth-savaging, over consuming, and overpopulating, we have to look at facts that are, like the sun, too painful for our direct gaze. Instinctively we look away. Poverty 'The poverty of the poor is their ruin,' says the Book of Proverbs. And the ruin is not just material.

Poverty rapes and kills the spirit of the poor. We underestimate its complexity and cruelty. There are four dimensions of poverty: (1) Material limit. Poverty does mean a lack of material necessities. For the one billion people in " absolute poverty,' the most basic essentials are critically lacking and death is fastening its grip on them. Note, too, that fewer than 3 billion people could eat as we eat, i.e. on a North American diet.

We are almost 3 billion beyond that now. Limits have already been passed. (2) Poverty strips the human spirit of its two indispensable prerequisites, the two things we cannot do without. They are, I submit, respect and hope. The opposite of respect is insult and, as Aristotle said, insult is the root of all rebellion.

Respect is the recognition that our humanity is valued at its worth, that others recognize that humanity is a shared glory and our possession of its acknowledged. Poverty turns the goodness of the world into a taunt for it denies the poor the ecstasy of life that is their birthright. It is galling and killing to be so disvalue d. Insult is treatment that implicitly denies that we matter.

African-Americans in the United States, for example, eat insult with their daily bread. As law professor Derrick Bell says, there is no white person in this country who at some level does not think blacks to be inferior, and there is no black person who does not know that and resent it. Given the persistent record, the same could be said for the often subterranean but ever active belief of men that women are inferior and that is the law of nature. Women have noticed this and felt the stigmatizing pain. The result is called feminism and its success is the last best hope for our bi-gendered species.

Hope is also best described by its opposite. Its opposite is paralysis. Only hope activates the human will. Only possible good motors our affections and stirs us to action. Without hope, we are catatonic. Even Sisyphus had to be hoping for something or he would have left that rock where he found it.

Poverty suffocates hope for it repeatedly shows possibility to be illusory. Infants reach for hope starting with their birth and the infants of the poor already show with their eyes that there is no hope for them. Hunger and pain have already told them that their humanity does not count. The stripping of respect and hope from the poor is well systematized. Capitalism from its start had poverty in its train. Serfs in the feudal, pre-capitalist system did often have a kind of paternalistic social security.

They were part of a unit that shared the essentials out of a kind of practical necessity. With the dawn of modern capitalism, the serfs were cast out to look for work and security. Capitalism had two choices from the beginning, either to correct its deficiencies and care for those who were cast out by the blind mechanisms of the market or to embark on the systematic vilification of the poor, implying that their plight was their own doing and not an indictment of the system. Capitalism embraced the second alternative with passion. The Statute of Laborers in 1349 in England made it a crime to give alms to the poor. In modern terms this meant cutting off welfare from these 'lazy drones' who opted freely for idleness.

This same spirit emerged in The Poor Law Reform Bill in England in 1834, which said explicitly that the main cause of poverty was the indiscriminate giving of aid which destroyed the desire to work. Again, there was nothing wrong with the system, only with those left out by the system. Of this 1834 bill Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli would say decades later, 'It made it a crime to be poor. ' In the United States, 19th century writers like Herbert Spencer said that poverty was the direct consequence of sloth and sinfulness. One writer said: 'Next to alcohol, and perhaps alongside it, the most pernicious fluid is indiscriminate soup. ' Cotton Mather had set the tone.

'For those who indulge themselves in idleness, the express command of God unto us is, that we should let them starve. ' (The current Republican Contract With America is all too continuous with this villainy.) Religion joined the attack on the poor in a big way. Drawing from Augustinian and Calvinistpredestinationist themes, it divided humanity into the saved and the damned. Wealth came to be seen as a sign of God's favor, and then, of course, in a double whammy, poverty came to be seen as a mark of God's disgust. Bishop Lawrence of Massachusetts intoned: 'In the long run, it is only to the man of morality that wealth comes...

Godliness is in league with riches. ' It is hard to get further from the Gospels that put God firmly in league with the poor: 'Blessed are the poor... of such is the kingdom of heaven. ' And of the rich? It would be easier to get a camel through the eye of a needle than to get them to take a God's eye view of their hypocrisies. Privileged classes, as Reinhold Niebuhr prophetically reminded us, have always been shamefully full of self praise.

They have traditionally heaped moral upon themselves, dubbing themselves 'nobles' and even, in that most classical of misnomers, 'gentlemen. ' So the poor must not only be stripped and starved. They must also be insulted and blamed for their poverty and painted as too lazy to go out and get those mythical decent jobs that are not even there! (3) It is an insight of the Jewish and Christian scriptures that poverty and wealth are correlative. As Elisabeth Schuss ler Fiorenza says: 'In Israel poverty was understood as injustice. ' Guilt was assigned to the system, not to the poor.

The temple of prejudicial economic deals had to be attacked, and the prophets from Jeremiah to Jesus undertook that mission with gusto. (4) Poverty is genocidal and the malignant indifference and masked barbarity that underlie upper class virtue are complicit in the quiet slaughter of the poor. Poverty kills with an efficiency that could only be matched by all-out nuclear war. The wars that we have had are pikers in inflicting death compared to poverty. What war could kill 40,000 infants a day and do so with silent efficiency that allows the poly saturated guilty to sleep comfortably in their beds, consciences fully anesthetized, with no rumble of distant guns to disturb their rest.

What is extreme poverty? Life is multidimensional, and so is extreme poverty. Extreme poverty exists when a person is denied the opportunity to lead a long, healthy and productive life. Extreme poverty is about a lack of opportunities. People living in extreme poverty cannot achieve their full potential because they lack things that most of us take for granted.

These include safe child delivery, vaccination, health care, a caring family, education, and the ability to find a good job. Money by itself cannot get rid of poverty. The richest landlord in a mountain village in South America may be quite helpless if there are no health services available in the village. And girls and women in some parts of the world are denied the opportunity to attend school regardless of whether their families are rich or poor. Why do people remain poor? Much progress has been made in recent years, but much more needs to be done.

To be successful in the long run, poverty alleviation efforts must address the roots of poverty, and not just immediate needs. People remain poor when they are denied access to basic opportunities for human development. A man who suffers from chronic disease, such as diarrhea from unclean water, cannot reach his potential. Nor can a young girl who is unable to go to school because of chores, or who attends a school where the teacher shows up only twice a week and there are no textbooks. The reasons behind this lack of opportunities are not always simple. They can be linked to any number of factors, from geographic isolation to ignorance of the causes of disease.

But one thing is certain: no one wants to be sick, poor or uneducated. The problem lies not with the poor themselves, but with their lack of opportunities. Tragically, extreme poverty is too often passed from one generation to the next. In many poor communities, schools are overcrowded and teachers are under qualified or even illiterate. If children in these schools are not learning, their parents might pull them out of school to work instead, drastically reducing their opportunities later in life. In doing so, they are likely reproducing the cycle of poverty for at least another generation.

What needs to be done? Efforts must be made to work with people, governments, development agencies and world leaders to raise awareness of the roots of extreme poverty and to help expand opportunities for the poor. If a variety of factors contributes to the persistence of extreme poverty, then a variety of actions is needed to break the cycle. These actions include: Expanding access to health education and care so that people do not die of easily preventable diseases; Making education and adequate nutrition a priority so that children can grow up to lead healthy and productive lives; Providing skills training and support for small entrepreneurs to increase opportunities for employment and income generation; Protecting the environment, to ensure that natural resources are conserved and renewed for future generations; Addressing gender inequality, to increase opportunities for women and to ensure that they have a say in decisions that affect the lives of themselves and their children; Strengthening the role and capacity of local organizations, to make communities more self-sufficient; and Improving the situation of the most vulnerable members of society, including children, women, ethnic minorities, families affected by HIV / AIDS, street children, and the disabled. THE WORLD NEEDS YOU. Some of the statistics about the state of the world can be overwhelming.

One-fifth of the world's population survives on $1 a day. More than 50 million people have been forcibly displaced from their homes. Seven million children die each year because the poorest countries spend more money on debt than on health or education. Fourth million people die each year from hunger alone. That's the bad news. PEOPLE MAKE A DIFFERENCE The good news is that in every part of the world, individuals and organizations are finding ways to fight, and win, the battle against these daunting problems.

That is why Net Aid will focus on what works - innovative programs that are effective organizers that offer people a hand-up with along-term investment in a better world. TODAY'S FOCUS We " re focusing on eight areas for today: saving the environment, human security, economic security, human rights, education, governance, health and nutrition and internet and poverty. A child's early years are crucial to proper development By the Executive Director of Unicef, Carol Bellamy It's deeply troubling that despite widespread concern about the lack of sustainable development in numerous countries, government leaders, policy makers and development agents seem blinded to one investment opportunity with almost guaranteed returns - ensuring children a good start to life. Whether it is ignorance, apathy or deliberate neglect, many have failed to grasp certain essential facts about human development, choosing instead to squander their countries' human potential, their peoples' collective trust and hope, and their children's future. Wasteful policies, avoidable wars and outright theft of national resources take precedence over the compelling need for health, education, food, water and sanitation for their citizens, especially the very young. By neglecting or stealing from children now, leaders plunder their countries' future and entrench vice and poverty.

These leaders and other development agents should know what has been confirmed by a growing body of knowledge - that the most critical period of a child's development is the very early years, when brain connections multiply and the motor that will fire the child's thinking and behaviour patterns for the rest of his life is formed. As children are learning to speak, sense, walk and reason, the value system against which they will judge good and bad, fair and unfair is also being formed. This is the most vulnerable time in a person's life and one that demands careful attention from society in both the industrialized world and developing countries, who need support in their efforts to care for their young children. Early childhood development is the central theme of Unicef's annual flagship publication, The State of the World Children 2001. The Challenges Ahead Nearly 11 million children die every year from preventable diseases 170 million children are malnourished One third of births are not registered One in five children in developing countries do not attend primary school 20 million children became refugees in 1999 More than 10 million children under 15 have lost their mother to AIDS This year's edition, released today, argues that ensuring a child's rights is a process that must begin very early, even before the child is born. Investing early in a child's health, education and nutrition is an efficient and effective way of guaranteeing positive future returns through savings on health and other social services.

Such investment should be community based and owned: each family needs support and resources to help its infants develop. The report says that early childhood should merit the highest priority attention of any responsible government in terms of law, policies, programmes and resource allocation. But it also recognises that tragically, for both children and nations, these are the years that receive the least. The State of the World's Children 2001 also includes essays and statistical tables detailing basic quality of life indicators, like health and education, for children in every country, and is available online. We encourage you to read it and related material found throughout our website. And when you hear about a new plan for breaking the inter generational cycle of poverty and despair that ensnares so many people around the world, ask yourself if it focuses on the very young.

For investment in them is an investment for us all. Early childhood What happens during the very earliest years of a child's life, from birth to age 3, influences how the rest of childhood and adolescence unfolds. Yet, this critical time is usually neglected in the policies, programmes and budgets of countries. Drawing on reports from the world over, The State of the World's Children 2001 details the daily lives of parents and other caregivers who are striving - in the face of war, poverty and the HIV / AIDS epidemic - to protect the rights and meet the needs of these young children.

In today's world of the new welfare law, few choose to remember that for three decades (and for good reason) Congress and successive administrations struggled to establish minimum national standards for Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC). The reason: to promote equal opportunity. All American children should be guaranteed the minimum benefits necessary for their growth and development. An irony of the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act of 1996 is that this successor to AFDC has finally succeeded in legislating national standards - regrettably not for minimum children's benefits, but for the mandatory removal of these benefits. For every parent excluded from federally funded benefits by the 1996 act, one or more children are equally deprived.

This includes children of parents whose five-year lifetime eligibility runs out, children of parents who cannot or will not find work in two years, and children of teenage mothers who cannot or will not live at home. What is required to achieve equal opportunity has evolved over the course of history, as have many of our other ideals - due process and freedom of speech, for example. One might once have argued, following John Locke and some of the Founding Fathers, that a sufficient condition was the elimination of all government restrictions on who might participate in the economic race. However, this minimalist version of equal opportunity is no longer adequate, either as a description of contemporary beliefs or as a goal. Because of our evolving views on what is required for children to develop to their full potential, we have, as a society, abolished child labor, required free public education, and progressively extended national programs to prevent all kinds of childhood deprivation.

The WIC program for prenatal health, Head Start, school lunches, food stamps, and AFDC are but a few examples. Some were established as entitlements, others were not, but all were aimed at barriers to equal opportunity. As a nation, we can't afford the probable direct costs of the Personal Responsibility Act in terms of child poverty and health. A study by the Urban Institute predicts that, nationwide, the act will force an additional 1.1 million children into poverty - a 12 percent increase. Further, recent findings on the impact of initial state efforts to terminate welfare benefits are ominous. A new study by the General Accounting Office (GAO) shows that in 1996, even before the provisions of the act were fully implemented, more than 18,000 families nationwide had their AFDC benefits terminated.

Any hope that the well-being of the children of these families might be protected by special state efforts is belied by a number of findings in the GAO report: Although food stamp and Medicaid benefits were not supposed to be affected, the percentage of households receiving these benefits after termination dropped precipitously. Moreover, in Iowa, the only state where efforts were made to follow up on all families whose benefits were terminated, fewer than half of the families could even be located. THE passage of the Personal Responsibility Act has thus set the stage for a further tarnishing of America's record on equal opportunity that even now is far from our ideal. To cite only a few salient facts: In child health, the US now stands 22nd in the world in its mortality rate for children under five years old - a rate equal to Greece and Cuba, higher than any other highly developed country, and twice as high as leaders Finland and Sweden. Also, careful cross-country comparisons reported by UNICEF show that, even before the passage of the act, the US had by far the weakest children's safety net of any developed country: In 1991, 22 percent of American children remained in poverty, even after the inclusion of government transfers.

No other country had a rate exceeding 14 percent, and the leading countries had a rate one-seventh that of the US. No one can fault the framers of the new welfare law for emphasizing the goals of work and personal responsibility for parents. But in failing to distinguish between recalcitrant parents and their innocent children, the Personal Responsibility Act will widen an already painful gap between our bedrock ideal and our actual record on equal opportunity. The cost of this retreat, if it endures, will be measured by children's lives lost and stunted -but equally, by the embarrassed silence that someday will be our only response to the question: Where does America stand on equal opportunity? Map 1. The early years Click on the colours and icons in the table below to highlight regions on the map.

Click below to view the respective areas on the map. Immunization Percentage of 1-year-olds immunized against measles 90% and over 80% - 89%50% - 79%Less than 50%No data Artificial feeding Less than 30% of infants are exclusively breastfed for the first four months Access to sanitation Less than 70% of the population have access to adequate sanitation Use of iodized salt Less than 50% of households consume iodized salt... Sources: Immunization and access to sanitation: UNICEF / WHO; artificial feeding and the use salt: UNICEF. This map does not reflect a position by UNICEF on the legal status of any country or territory or the delimitation of any frontiers. Dotted line represents approximately the Line of Control in Jammu and Kashmir agreed upon by India and Pakistan. The final status of Jammu and Kashmirhas not yet been agreed upon by the parties.

Most causes of death in children are easily prevented, yet almost 11 million children under five die each year. Over the last three decades, the world's population of children under 15 increased from about 1.4 billion to 1.8 billion. Improved breastfeeding practices and reduction of artificial feeding could save an estimated 1.5 million children a year. Measles accounts for more than 7% of all deaths of children under five around the world, half of them among infants under the age of one. Adequate sanitation is crucial to reducing under-five mortality and morbidity rates, yet 2.4 billion people lack access. Iodized salt is the best way to combat iodine deficiency disorders, the world's leading cause of preventable mental impairment.

Map 2. Women's status = children's status Click on the colours and icons in the table below to highlight regions on the map. Education of mothers Women's literacy rates 90% and over 60% - 89%30% - 59%Under 30%No data Attended births Fewer than 50% of births have a skilled attendant present Malnourished girls More than 25% of girls under 5 years old are underweight... Sources: UNESCO; UNICEF. Women's status and children's status are inextricably linked. Women's literacy rates - a proxy for their empowerment and advancement - are key to improving the health, nutrition and education of families and children.

Malnourished girls often grow into undernourished mothers, in turn more likely to give birth to low- birth weight infants. Approximately 15 million girls aged 15-19 give birth every year, accounting for more than 10%of all babies born worldwide. The risk of death from pregnancy-related causes is four times higher in this age group than for women older than 20. Skilled prenatal and delivery care plays a major role in reducing maternal mortality and morbidity.

Violence against women is often equivalent to violence against children.