I am right at my fucking limit for judgemental shitstainery today. I just. I fucking CANNOT with these assholes.
Firstly, POVERTY IS NOT A FUCKING BINARY STATE. You aren’t either “poor” or “not-poor”, with absolutely zero middle ground between. Ceasing to be poor isn’t like a fucking Pokemon evolution - you don’t just shed that shit like a snakeskin and turn into a whole new being in seconds. Ceasing to be poor, especially in the face of severe social and economic pressure, is hard fucking yakka, and it happens slowly, in increments, over time, without sudden lottery-style explosions of new money but frequently featuring disappointing setbacks, and that means small things can improve before the big things do - like, for instance, being able to afford a shiny new phone to replace the dying one you’ve been stuck with for the past two years before you can afford to go off welfare. This sort of logic also ignores the idea that you can BECOME poor and still have around you the trappings of previous better-offness, like quality appliances. As convenient as it would be for the kind of troglodyte who likes to judge by appearances, becoming poor doesn’t mean you have to go hand in all your cool shit at the pawnshop, not least because a lot of that stuff - like functioning fridges and dryers, for instance - will SAVE YOU MONEY when you really need it later.
Secondly, anyone who thinks that poor people are fundamentally undeserving of luxury or treats or pleasure-buying or anything else that might alleviate the enormous fucking strain of being poor - because any departure from subsistence-level living means you’re an Eebil Welfare Slobqueen! - can go FALL IN A WELL AND DIE. I am fucking serious: if you, financially secure douchebag, have EVER gone and bought yourself a treat in order to make yourself feel better after a shitty day - if you’ve picked up some feelgood chocolate, or a new game, or a pricey bag, or a toy, or even something as simple as a taxi ride rather than a bus ticket because it was raining and you couldn’t face the queue - then you can SHUT THE FUCK UP FOREVER about the immortality if feelgood purchasing by people with less money than you. Because what you’re saying, when you sit down and police what people can and cannot buy, and the circumstances under which they buy it - what you’re saying is that poor people ARE NOT ENTITLED TO EMOTIONAL SECURITY; ARE NOT ENTITLED TO COMFORT; ARE NOT ENTITLED TO JOY, because they should be too busy scraping by with every fucking penny they have to notice that scraping by is utterly fucking soul-destroying.
Thirdly, a lot of the things you’re deeming “luxury” items? ARE FUCKING NECESSARY FOR GETTING ONESELF OUT OF POVERTY. Let’s see you try to jobhunt without a working phone or internet access. Let’s see you try to grocery shop on a budget for a family of four with no car and a freezer that’s just big enough for a couple of ice cube trays. Let’s see you keep yourself looking professionally presentable and your children schoolready when you’re handwashing all your clothes in the bath and hanging them out to dry on the radiator you can’t afford to turn on half the time, because your tiny income means choosing between warmth and medication.
What you’re doing, OP - you and other privileged assholes like you - is assuming that poverty is somehow EASY; that there’s no emotional, psychological toll to it that might ever need to be alleviated - not for adults, and especially not for children, because the children of poor people don’t deserve happy childhoods; presumably, they should just get jobs and work for their toys, as though this were Dickensian fucking England. You see objects, but not the sacrifice behind obtaining them; to you, objects have no context, no significance beyond their cost and status value, because THAT’S ALL THEY MEAN TO YOU. I used to work for a government department in Australia that provided free fridges and washing machines to people on welfare whose own had broken, and which they couldn’t afford to replace. I rang one woman to tell her that her fridge request had been approved, and she was literally fighting back tears of relief - not only had she been spending extra money she couldn’t afford buying groceries day to day, because all the food was spoiling without anywhere to keep it cool, but she’d been having to keep her young kids from realising just how bad things were, too - she’d told them they were having Ramadan early, fasting early, to explain why there was no food all of a sudden, and she didn’t know how much longer she could keep it up. I approved a washing machine for a single father who was struggling to keep his children out of foster homes after their mother, who had been their primary caregiver, was arrested; he needed one for the social workers to let him keep his kids, but was between jobs and didn’t have enough cash to replace the one that broke.
tl;dr: THERE IS NO ‘RIGHT’ WAY TO BE POOR, BECAUSE THERE IS NOTHING RIGHT ABOUT POVERTY. STOP POLICING POVERTY WITH YOUR MADE-UP FUCKING CHECKLIST OF RULES, AS THOUGH IT’S SOME COVETED, ADVANTAGE-CONFERRING CLUB THAT LAZY PEOPLE ARE TRYING TO SNEAK INTO INSTEAD OF A DIFFICULT, HEARTBREAKING, LIFE-THREATENING SITUATION. YOU DUMBASS.