I agree with this part:
my experience has been that middle class or even non-marginalized poor people have little real concept of what it is to live beyond the margins of society. So while there may be food and many places to find it, I have no basis on which to assume that the needy in all geographic locations, all have access to food pantries.
Also, it’s important that while food pantries provides and food distribution programs provide some needs, the quality of the food (I don’t mean “tastiness”) is sometimes greatly lacking, and in general the nutrition is insufficient, both for children and for adults. It beats total starvation, but it is not anything approaching a long-term solution. (Just like virtually everyone understands that Unemployment Benefits are not a way of life.) My county has both a food pantry and distribution programs, but the latter can be bureaucratic nightmares to navigate. (Again, you need to “prove” need, and the response time between inquiry and receipt is hardly instant. And those distribution locations and time frames are infrequent and not totally reliable.)
However, I must say that there’s a certain level of toxic (as in “intoxication”) attraction for those poor who are recent immigrants, especially those illegally here, who make assumptions both positive and negative. I have a neighbor, for example, who has become locally legendary for bad decisions. She is the mother in a family of 5 (3 kids). When one sees that she and husband struggle to pay the rent each month for the 3 years they have been renting locally, one would think it’s her very low level of skills which is responsible for that (meaning that there’s one lower-middle-class wage earner in the family – her husband, with a spouse who contributes minimally relative to the high cost of housing in my area, the fixed costs of utilities, registration fees, insurance). Several things are happening, though:
~She is living beyond her means. The family could never afford their apartment, ever, and they still can’t – as the kids grow and have increasing needs which children/teens have.
~She is constantly in a state of desperation, so she makes bad choices. Unable to afford engaging child care for her young son while she goes off to work at low-paying part-time jobs, she instead buys him expensive toys, not to mention junk food which he eats out of boredom (and he is now obese). I don’t know if this has affected their food budget (it doesn’t seem to), but clearly her frequent bad decisions have compromised other essentials of daily living (i.e., housing).
~She mirrors what happens to many poor people, including many poor immigrants, and is a phenomenon which is not new: the lure of materialism and the expectation that a signal of “success” and even a “path” to success is the purchase of optional items, whether those purchases are prudent or dangerous. “Having stuff” is a membership card, according to myth, into the middle class. Except that it isn’t. Solvency, living within one’s means, and possibly options to improve one’s finances, is a truer understanding of the practical (not the financial) definition of the middle class.
So what I’m really suggesting is that there is a connection in this country between materialism, as a cultural norm, and poverty. (That’s not the only effect of materialism! Just one.) The poor, the middle class, and the rich, can and do sometimes spend themselves into primary or aggravated poverty.
The sad footnote to this is that the woman I am referring to is selling the child’s expensive bikes – as well as completely unnecessary items like a treadmill which I can’t afford, lol, a flat screen TV, and various pieces of attractive furniture, so that she can maybe afford the rent next month.
