I was reading through Metafilter this evening, listening to the rain, and came across this photostory of women living below the poverty line in Troy, NY.
The photos are pretty much what you would expect them to be, bleak little windows into a demeaning existance, hardscrabble women with hardscrabble faces staring off into an uncertain, unfocused distance while children clutch threadbare teddy bears to their chests. There’s even an obligitory picture of a gun and bullets on a bed.
The comments in the thread are about as expected as the pictures, intense internet cyber-feelers who are shocked and dismayed that this could be happening in an America so profoundly changed this morning by an Obama victory. Semi-eloquent pleas for the reenfranchisement of America’s poor. Some defence of Troy and a few claims that it’s not all as grim as these pictures make it out to be.
As I looked at the photos and read the comments, I really wanted to feel some sort of human connection. I did feel sorry for the children, forced to live in bleak conditions. I also couldn’t help but notice that…well, there were children; that parents who seemed incapable of taking care of themselves had children they clearly were able to take care of no better.
The commenters went on about the plight of the poor and how unhealthy they looked, as if life had just beat them down one too many times. The poor who sat around on their beds, playing video games, drinking Mountain Dew and smoking. I haven’t had a Mountain Dew in years. Not only does it taste like Satan’s Own Piss and gives me heart palpitations, but it’s a helluva lot more expensive than water.
I don’t agree with the gist of Reagan. Poverty is not a choice nor is it a mental illness. For too many in the most developed nation in the world, poverty is an inescapable fact, regardless of how they may attempt to climb out of it. That’s not to say, however, that I agree with the commenters or Brenda Ann Kenneally, that choice plays no part in poverty. Sometimes your skin is grey not because of the overwhelming ennui of the world, but because you smoke and drink things that eat the rust off a car battery.
I don’t know what the solution is, but I can’t help but think that photostories like these don’t help illustrate the problem any further and simply provide an opportunity for middle-class guilt-sufferers to pat themselves on the back at the quality and quantity of tears they shed for “political art”.
