Our world at times has an unfortunate tendency to confuse discomfort with poverty.
Absolute poverty – not just the paucity of things but the beggary of hope, and of egress – is stunting. The existence of children who through mere circumstance of birth are deprived of basic nourishments in body and in mind, is the tragedy of our time. That they live alongside you – in the developed world, being shamed for not being able to afford lunch, is calamitously absurd.
Real poverty is self-perpetuating in that it saps through physical and mental exhaustion any will to transcend and becomes cumulative. Ignorance, hopelessness, ill-health come in self-perpetuating cycles. Poverty in body begets poverty of imagination.
But poverty is not a scarcity in comfort.
An acquaintance recently remarked that poverty is the sin of the father. He as a father has the responsibility to make sure his daughter lives a materially abundant life. Pressing the question, he qualified it thus – that she should never feel deprived in life of general comfort.
In high school, I would run errands for my better-heeled classmates in exchange for lunch money. Their treasured lunch hour had finer uses than queuing in the cafeteria – football and Gameboys and snogging in the classroom and the like. So I offered delivery services, and received one euro in fees on top of a four euro order of soggy paninis and stale French fries. A good friend thought it was embarrassing and demeaning, but I called it capitalism. I was profiting off the laziness of entitled children.
It had never occurred to me that I was, relatively speaking, poor. I was born in the tailwinds of a planned economy when milk and meat was rationed and every child in my pre-school classroom wore hand-me-downs from friends or kin (siblings were animals of fiction back then). I have a vague memory of feeling self-conscious on my first day of school, hauling a flamboyant red backpack and carrying a pink pencil case – passed down from my cousin.
We were never ‘equally poor’ though. The state could nationalize scarcity and reproduction but not the urge to compare, and without material things with which to benchmark ourselves, a classroom order was established on a blend of parent profession, academic performance, teacher favouritism, and playground threats. There’s always some way of establishing a hierarchy of power, for children and bonobos a like.
I left the country soon after through a confluence of happenstances and for the first time became “poor”, but only by label and through being reduced to the object of comparison. Like a switch turning on, when school resumed around 9th grade, we returned to a world of names and places. Cars became BMWs and Benz and shirts Zara or Mango, and their snacks came from Belgium or Japan. But for some of us, things were just things, defined always by their functions and never the romance of a label. Those that moved onto a world of names and places then became “rich”, and those that stayed in the world of utility remained “poor”. The awareness came first, the divide later, when unfledged notion of values, political allegiances and national identities set in.
I had never gone on a school trip and would lie about all the places to which I had never been and sights I had never seen, and my families bought discount groceries in bulk. All of this bothered me just a little, and mostly in retrospect mourning a life I could only now visualise. More unfortunate was the chasm that suddenly divided my childhood friends and me, and my inability to partake in formative rituals of those first unsupervised trips away, during which lifelong bonds were forged. The switch that triggered in them an awareness of class had its counterpart in mine of a reality dividing. Or, as I had grown fond of saying from that point on, “we didn’t live in the same universe anymore.”
I nevertheless had the greatest wealth of all, and now in hindsight would not trade it for even the most indulgent of childhoods. I had books, and free reign in our school library. I vacationed in the fictional worlds of Philip Pullman, JK Rowling, Stephen King, Terry Brooks, Tad Williams and more, and while my life was bare, my mind held galaxies. The caged bird may have forgotten how to fly, but it could still contemplate the skies and dream of reaching.
And so I was never truly poor. It was first-world poverty at best, measured by a relative degree of discomfort. I lived, through good luck, a profusely ample intellectual life.
“Abundance” is a comparative measure. As is wealth and bodily comfort and this is a void that will never be satisfied. Circumstances rise and fall, and life is often beyond our control. Rather than ensuring riches – a moving scale – for our children, accustom them to discomfort, to scarcity, to resourcefulness, and give them the tools to cultivate an internal landscape, where the richness could be infinite.
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