Poor People vs Poverty

In the months since completing graduate school I and much of my peer group have struggled to find full-time positions (thank you economic crisis!). Some have taken on Americorps positions which place them solidly in the poverty class, while others are juggling some variation of temp and restaurant work, also making them technically poor. Yet, if you were to ask them if they considered themselves poor, they'd tell you adamantly, unabashedly, no.

Why not?

Because to be defined as poor is to be about more than not having enough money, but rather a state which in much of the world has either pitied or vilified.

When we talk about waging a war on poverty, or needing to end poverty, we often by proxy vilify those who exist within that state. Nobody, after all, talks about rescuing the obscenely wealthy even though the consolidation of wealth has deep repercussions on poverty (and some might argue causes entrenched poverty) and is as undesirable in many ways as poverty is too a society.

I am not naive to the realities of what it means to be poor. As Harry Potter author J.K. Rowling eloquently stated in her 2008 commencement speech to Harvard's graduating class:

…it [poverty] is not an ennobling experience. Poverty entails fear, and stress, and sometimes depression; it means a thousand petty humiliations and hardships. Climbing out of poverty by your own efforts, that is indeed something on which to pride yourself, but poverty itself is romanticized only by fools.

Poverty is not a pleasant experience. It means struggling to keep a belly filled with food, a roof over one's head etc. But the language with which we choose to talk about poverty only serves to dehumanize those who are poor, and as long as we continue to say we want to help the people in one breath that we vilify in another, ending systemic poverty will be difficult.

A poor person is still a person and he or she would like a say in his or her own destiny.