Friday, January 19, 2007

I am way too lazy...

...to be poor.

Seriously. That myth about poor people being lazy. From watching the poor folks in our neighborhood, poor people are some of the hardest working people I know. Our handyman is currently homeless, living at the Salvation Army. He is always working at hard, manual labor. He digs trenches, mulched a 15 foot by 15 foot patch of our yard in 90 minutes, hauls junk all over town on his bicycle, and is always clean, neat and presentable. All while living in a homeless shelter.

I watch moms with little kids dragging their laundry five blocks uphill to the laundromat. I see people waiting to catch the bus, and then see them 2 hours later, just arriving at work. I see families waiting outside the pediatrician's office for their ride home.

Seriously, I could never be poor. Our washer broke last year. The dirty clothes sat until the repairman got there three days later. We were too lazy to even drive to the laundromat. When my car breaks down, there is no way I would get up two hours early to take the bus to school. I bitch about having to park at a remote parking lot and take the bus across campus.

I'm not sure where this myth about poor people being lazy came from. The poor folks I know work hard. Dyke Two's mother worked as a domestic her whole life. Again, we are far too lazy for work like that. We can't wait to hire a cleaning lady as soon as I am working again. Dyke Two made me promise that we'll hire a white woman...

(I'm not even going to try to explain the convoluted thought process that made this post relevant to anything. It had something to do with those embryos that were rescued from New Orleans while poor folks were still stranded and without food....)

2 Comments:

At 8:57 AM, Blogger Northwoods Baby said...

I think that people don't differentiate when they say "poor", but they mean to. Most people, when they speak of the lazy poor, are talking about the women you see on Maury who don't work and collect welfare checks every month.

Yeah. 'Cause that's what they're conditioned (trained? raised?) to think. But if they got off their asses and opened their eyes, they'd realize how wrong they are.

Okay, so I have no idea where I'm going in response to the post that you don't know why you wrote it (oh my god was that even a sentence?!).

I blame Sommer.

 
At 7:26 AM, Anonymous Anonymous said...

Northwoods - but people can not sit home and collect welfare. TANF only lasts for a very limited amount of time, and other forms of aide (day care subsidies, rental assistance) are all dependant on a person having a job. Any job. No matter how crappy or low paying, so the myth of the welfare mom is a myth. They do not exist anymore (whether they actually did in the first place is another conversation entirely), thanks to welfare reform in the 1990s.

 

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