“I can’t make you love me if you don’t.”-Bonnie Raitt

Eradicating poverty, as with all cultural shifts, needs to take place in our hearts for real change to occur. Policies are the 10 Commandments, ABC’s and 1,2,3’s of giving a shit about your neighbor. Civil Rights are a law and yet they haven’t eradicated racism. Women’s Rights are a law and yet crimes against women persist.

Poverty is a byproduct of toxic capitalism, classism, greed, fear, inherited expectations of exploitation, colonization and learned helplessness. Individual freedom from poverty happens when we awaken to reality and make a conscious choice to get out in spite of a system designed to keep us stuck. No yea buts. But, yes. Both, and. 

Collective freedom from poverty happens when we enter into consciousness together and insist on the creation of a new paradigm; one that accounts for our past, Who threw the first punch? while meeting the needs of the present Would you like punch with your lunch? in such a way that results in a future free from harm and oppression for all living beings, Pull your punch. I vote for keeping indoor plumbing but everything else is negotiable.

xo

18 thoughts on “We the Free”

  3. I think it depends on what your are referring to as poverty and where. To get out of poverty requires assistance from others it is true but it also requires hard work and effort from the recipient of the help. There are many people who are happy to live on government grants and not work and try to improve themselves so there are two sides to the coin.

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    • You’re right Robbie. There are two sides to this coin. Having grown up in poverty and been homeless twice I saw many around me living on government assistance not because of laziness but because of learned helplessness, ptsd, depression, illness, anger or fear. Many children raise in poverty are instructed to start having children young so they can begin contributing to the family income. So sad. The complex trick is breaking two dysfunctional cycles, the individual’s and the system’s. Until that day of utopia I believe we have power as an individual to break the cycle in us. It’s taken me 20 years of merciless hard work to get up and out but it can be done. And I think small changes to the system could make it less brutal for the next generation.

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