Perhaps being poor has its advantage.
Sunday, February 1st, 2009The recession that the world is facing at the moment is something that everybody is worried about. Well nearly everybody. Perhaps not the poor.
I had a conversation with my father in law the other day, while he was preparing me lunch, about the current economy downturn. Especially about our worries of losing our jobs. I told him the Lupoe murder suicide case. It was really a sad thing to know that someone would conclude in doing such a thing thinking that it was the only way out.
My father in law told there isn’t a really justified reason why anyone would even kill himself, little more just because he or she lost a job and have 5 kids. When some gypsies here who have far more children live in poverty and no jobs and yet they live on happily with their lives. Their policy is, there’s a job you work, no job you stay at home. As for my father in law, he was poor all his childhood life. Never had a real winter coat or boots until he was 18. What’s more he said he just not worried about the recession. So what if he becomes poor? Life just goes on even when you have money or you don’t. Listening to him, I remembered a Hebrew saying – “This too shall pass”. Even this recession. Maybe not tomorrow, or the next year or even the next. But it will eventually end.
I am not really sure what was playing in the mind of Lupoe or the Ohio guy who also did the same to himself and family weeks after Lupoe’s incident. But due to this, made me believe that being poor and having nothing has an advantage too. When you are already poor nearly all your life and accepted that life is hard, you are not afraid of being poorer or homeless on account of the recession. Perhaps for people who has many things in their lives, realizing that they will lose everything is unthinkable. They could not imagine having to build everything back from scratch.
When you are poor and have nothing, you simply have nothing more to lose, but just to try to survive and move forward.
