Perspectives on Poverty, Poor Choices, and Doing the Right Thing

One in five renters faces eviction, one in fifteen homeowners faces foreclosure, and fifteen percent of the population lives below the poverty line. For people living on the razor’s edge of financial solvency, as much as eighty percent of their income goes towards housing costs leaving them with as little as two dollars a day to feed themselves and their families. Purchasing household necessities such as toilet paper is not even on the radar for families living in such dire financial straits. Poverty is an endless cycle of soul crushing degradation, poor choices lead to poverty more often than people are willing to admit, and commitment to compassion and doing the right thing has the power to conquer the viciousness of poverty once and for all.

Poverty is a cup of instant coffee and a cigarette for breakfast; poverty is eight people in a two-bedroom apartment infested with vermin and less than five hundred square feet of living space; poverty is eking out an unstable living one day at a time in which the simple pursuit of one’s next meal consumes any energy that might be applied towards upward social mobility. Seventy percent of children born into poverty remain poor for the rest of their lives, and eventually they bring children into the world whose prospects are no better. The longer a person lives in a desperate state of poverty…