I have an obsession that increases with years. How do you dismantle the poverty in someone’s life? How, beyond the stats, the plans, the support, do you get someone on their feet and moving?
To me poverty is the biggest problem in the world, out of which spurts, like leaky pipes, all the other troubles that beset the world. Holding poverty in your life does your head in, and the fear of poverty gets mankind doing the strangest of things.
Poverty is a kind of death. You live outside of life in poverty. You do not live in democracy. It deadens and cheapens your being and should be dismantled ASAP.
I recently re-met ‘Bill the Print’, a fishing, poet friend of mine who kind of understands my increasing obsession with how do you dismantle poverty: not just make the poor comfortable but get people out of stagnation, and moving. Moving, doing, learning and hopefully earning.
The fear of poverty gets mankind doing the strangest of things
Bill the Print in one of his poems describes one answer for one boy.
Bill, like most fishermen operate on a ‘catch and release’ philosophy and this is how he taught the young boy who he helped grow to a man. And shook off the ‘slough of despond’ that would have had him caught in poverty. Caught in inactivity and caught in defeat.
