by M. L. Larzelere

Created on: January 22, 2010   Last Updated: January 31, 2010

We are masters of our own fate.  We reap what is sown. We get out of life what we put into it. Life is full of choices. Those who believe poor people are responsible for their own poverty would have us believe the poor had a choice either be poor not be poor.  After all, we all have choices. While ultimately choice always comes down to two options, the pool of choices may or may not be in favor of the chooser. I submit that most poor people no more strive to live in poverty, than a snowman yearns for a warm sun.

To claim poor people are responsible for their own poverty places the choices down to two options; a person can be either poor or not poor. The people, who believe the poor choose poverty so choose because it is the mindset people in poverty, live by. While this may be true, people who live in poverty have a mindset that perpetuates the condition it does not conclude such mindset is by choice.

History has long shown that poverty is not so much a choice as it is a condition of life. One can look at just about any historical society and observe the haves and the haves not. People lucky enough to be born into an Egyptian Dynasty never had to worry about their next meal, but their slaves did. “Legal rights, responsibilities, and status were divided along class lines rather than gender lines.”  Those not born into favorable conditions may have spent their time in do menial work for little pay poverty. Consequently, few people ever had the means to escape the poverty level.  Another example is the Ancient Greeks. The Greeks had a society that instilled very specific roles for men, women, and children. Most Greeks were farmers and many Greek families had slaves. The better to do the Greek, the more slaves he had.   The Romans had a two-tiered society, the upper class called Patricians and the lower class called Plebeians. The Romans also had slaves.

While my research was not completely exhaustive, I found no written record from these ancient cultures that demonstrate  the poor chose this way of life. I must also add, I found no records of the upper class society stating they did not want to be poor. In many of these ancient societies, the people believed one’s station in life was the will of the gods.

Moving ahead a thousand years, society still consists of those who have and those who do not. People who lived under the realm of the King and Queen, fared much better than those outside the influence of the

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