My Experience of Poverty @we-tolerate-hate - Tumblr Blog

If you’ve never taken the bus as your primary mode of transportation you should know that a ten minute drive is like a one hour bus ride.

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And sometimes something just isn’t near a bus stop so you’ve gotta take the closest one to it and walk for 20 minutes.

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Just something to keep in mind, I guess. Especially if you live in a big sprawling metropolis. There’s people all around you taking five times as long to get anywhere because they can’t or won’t drive for whatever reason.

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Peter Joseph on structural violence, from this video.

ebonykalokoh

Brilliant

unapologeticexistence

Spot on. Like Coretta Scott King said, I must remind you that starving a child is violence. Neglecting school children is violence. Punishing a mother and her family is violence. Discrimination against a working man is violence. Ghetto housing is violence. Ignoring medical need is violence. Contempt for poverty is violence.

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“It makes me angry sometimes, it’s a visceral thing–how you come to despise your own words in your ears not because they aren’t genuine, but because they are; because you’ve said them so many times, your ‘principles,’ your ‘ideals’–and so damned little in the world has changed because of them.” - Joyce Carol Oates, Black Water

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Brave // Sara Bareilles

Generational Wealth

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Sorry, I could never be a capitalist, I suffer from “wanting humans to have their basic needs met” disorder, where I care about people who aren’t me.

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Someone once asked me if, assuming we got universal healthcare, I would be okay with the rise in “healthcare tourism” where people who are sick come to our country to get their medical bills taken care of and life-saving medical treatment cheaper than in their home countries. I was just like, yeah thats fine, I’d actually prefer it if 0 people died from preventable causes kept behind a paywall for no reason.

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“even the addicts?” yeah dude did i fucking stutter

kimmywithay

“but surely not the criminals!” YES even them!

fem-fatalist

There’s something noxious in American culture where people are obsessed with being judge, jury & executioner. That people should somehow earn the inherent “right” to live.

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We were, for hundreds of years, a slave society. In such a culture, things like having rights and freedoms, rather than being assumed, are explicitly virtues of being a member of the overseer group. In America, that’s white people, and especially wealthy white people.

This is why all of our public services that assist the poor are “means-tested” and punitive. This is why many people prattle on about the “deserving poor” versus “leeches”. And, it’s also why so much of our political discourse is centered around “protecting our freedom”: because in a slave society, freedom is a mark of privileged status, not a base level of human needs that society must provide for all.