General Discussion
In reply to the discussion: Who among us wore bread bags on our shoes while growing up? [View all]quaker bill
(8,224 posts)but we were not poor. I had snap up black goulashes. It would have been fairly dangerous to get your feet wet in winter as I walked to school on any day that the snow was less than 6" deep, and frost bite would have been a concern.
That said I served the poor as a kid (early teens) in a migrant farm worker camp. These people were poor like little I have seen before or since. We brought food, provided free daycare, some recreation and education for the older kids.
While their poverty was grinding beyond belief, they were generally happy folks who worked extremely hard but got by. I would never have called them "proud".
All that aside, there was nothing about their poverty that made them "noble" or "special". Their kids did not get much education because they were migrant, once the crop was picked, the work was gone and they moved on to the next area. They were generally only in one place for 6 or 8 weeks.
There was a lot about ending their poverty that would have made things better.
The fact that people find inventive ways to survive poverty does not mean that keeping people poor is desirable, or that poverty itself "builds character". That is RW Bulls**t.