I don't deny the reality of poverty, but this discussion leaves a bad taste in my mouth.

The world is full of pain and nastiness, but this particular list accentuates and celebrates it. Can you imagine a similar piece writing about the woes of Terminal Cancer or Business Failure or Having An Autistic Child?

Everyone's got problems, but people who are actually suffering don't write this way. Nobody defines themselves by their problems; ask a poor person if he's poor, and he'll probably say, "Oh no, I'm not that poor, I have an X." Or maybe, "Oh, I'm poor all right, but I'm not unhappy." Or perhaps even, "Yeah, I'm poor, and it is kind of miserable, but X makes it okay."

What you won't get is, "Oh, I'm so poor and miserable, and you have no idea what poverty is like, let me list the ways I suffer, and let me drive home how very impossible it is for you, from your life of privelege, to ever comprehend how much I suffer every minute."

Well, unless you ask an angsty teenager. ;)

Just about everybody has problems, but nobody defines themselves by their troubles. Everyone thinks of himself as a complex person, with some miseries and some joys, some problems and some opportunities, some strengths and some weaknesses.

Think over your own life; you could almost certainly write a piece like this about some problem you've had. Something has been miserable and unjust for you, in a way people who haven't been there would have a hard time identifying with.

But do you define yourself by it? Neither do The Poor.

That gets at the heart of what I find troubling about this piece.

This is not about a particular person's or a particular community's experience of poverty. This is about The Poor, as a monolithic, mythical entity. And anytime you see someone cast a community of people, who are inherently diverse and complex by virtue of being people, as a simple, mythical stereotype, you're seeing intellectual dishonesty in action. Leftists are socialists, Christians are stupid or evil, Hacker News readers are well off, Iraqis approve the occupation, Americans are arrogant. These things can only be said from a distance; those who have spent time with these communities up close and personal would be hard pressed to say anything was true of all of them. People are diverse.

Let me call these sentiments what they are: bigotry. They divide the population into "us" and "them", and say we are this way, and they are that way.

(That's not to say you can't make useful generalizations. You can. But an honest generalization acknowledges that it is a simplification of a complex reality, and welcomes statistics and counterexamples that heighten the clarity of the image. Bigotry says reality is simple, and don't argue with me, dammit.)

Step back a moment and you know that poverty is complex, and poverty is relative. There are transient homeless and chronic homeless. There are ambitious immigrants without a dollar to their names, there are musicians living the bohemian life, there are barely-profitable-but-proud startup founders living on ramen, there are third generation prostitutes who will never know their fathers, there are children sold into sexual slavery before they're even teens, there are women trapped in polygamous, fundamentalist Mormon communities, there are parents who helplessly watch their children starve to death. So what "is poverty"? By what authority does this author say, "Poverty is..."?

This is not a rational attempt to characterize poverty. This is not a reference to studies which say "67% of households in XX neighborhood in 2008 had to go without a meal at least once a week for lack of funds." This is a series of emotional statements. This says, "Poverty is having to hunt squirrels in the park for food and being so hungry that you'll even eat the nasty bits."

And if someone comes back and says, "Actually, poverty isn't that bad," is their diverse viewpoint into a complex problem welcomed? No, the response is, "Clearly you've never experienced true poverty, you insensitive bastard."

What's going on here?

Emotional, self-serving bigotry. These are not poor people talking about contemporary problems, looking for practical solutions. These are people who know what Poverty Is one-upping those who Don't Know What Poverty Is with their superior Social Awareness. It's a race to see who can be the most heartbroken by this emotional Reality of Poverty, criticizing nothing, adding to the tales of woe, acknowledging that yes, by God, it's true, it's all true.

I have no doubt that the anecdotes are true, that they have roots in real experience. People really do suffer despair, hunger, and degrading treatment. But an emotional characterization without any roots in reason, a construction of a mythology of The Poor as objects of pity? I think that's actually destructive.

Impersonal pity is degrading and infuriating. You see it in some of the experiences recounted in the original post and comments. People would anonymously leave us food or presents, one commenter says, and even though we needed them it provoked us to white-hot rage. We were not that poor.

Kindness and compassion are encouraging and uplifting, whether you are going out to lunch with a poor friend or complimenting a rich friend on his poetry. It doesn't matter how miserable or happy a person is; he can be made happier by love, by personal kindness. But depersonalized pity is always degrading. If you do not think of yourself as The Poor, how insulting is it that your neighbor does, that he thinks your life is so unbearable that you would rather have a few crumbs from his table than keep your sense of dignity?

There is a subtle art to being kind. It's all about treating people with dignity, respecting their personhood.

Kindness is your friend, the rich professor, treating you to an extravagent dinner at the best club in town as a thank you for your hard work helping him grade papers. Pity is an anonymous millionaire giving you $200 for the same dinner just so you can "feel like a human being for a night." Kindness is your neighbor, the fit, poor, stay at home mom, offering to help her elderly and disabled neighbor with some chores after chatting over lunch. Pity is $50 in an envelope taped to your door with a note that says, "I can see your living room from the street and feel sorry for you; this is to hire a housekeeper for a day."

The original post provokes pity, and I find that degrading. Here, for comparison, is what compassion sounds like:

http://jmchoul.spaces.live.com/Blog/cns!F04579021E6249A3!143...
http://www.delanceystreetfoundation.org/grads.php

Poverty is real, complex, and generally miserable, but even the poor are human. Treat them with human dignity and kindness, not with self-righteous pity.