Chapter 9: Why Our Lifestyles Hurt the Poor More Than Ourselves
(This is Chapter 9 of "Up and Out," a book condensing my long experience about how to best help poor people. I pledged earlier to get it up online as soon as possible, so it would be available for free to everyone trying to cope with the Katrina evacuees.)
(These are not things that need to be done during the first part of this emergency. Rather, this is for the time after that, when Katrina evacuees will be moving from getting immediate emergency assistance to trying to normalize their lives. That is when good programs to help them "up and out" of their situation need to kick in. The following is for that time.)
(For other chapters, look under "Categories" at the left, and click on the chapter you want.)
"UP AND OUT: A GUIDE TO TRUE COMPASSION FOR THE POOR"
PART I: THE AMERICAN POVERTY TRAP
Chapter 9: Why Our Lifestyles Hurt the Poor More Than Ourselves
The previous chapters outlined how the lifestyles brought about by the Sexual Revolution harm society, and bring less than promised to those individuals who practice them.
The same generation who brought us the Sexual Revolution has also been very concerned about the poor. They have focused, however, on the things previously thought to be the major causes of poverty, such as fighting racism, poor education, poor child care, slums and lack of employment opportunities.
While all these things are important, it has turned out that none of them, not even all of them together, are the basic cause of most poverty. Rather, it is massive fatherlessness, which is at least twice as common (based on rates of out-of-wedlock births) among the poor as other groups. The mass fatherlessness, in turn, is caused by the epidemic of sex outside marriage. And that epidemic, in turn, came out of the Sexual Revolution and is still driven by it.
What is less well understood is that the Sexual Revolution hits the poor much harder than the middle class. The middle class is merely harmed by it. The poor are ruined by it.
And what the middle class also needs to understand is that, to whatever degree they practice Sexual Revolution values, the poor will always do so more. The poor imitate the middle class and the rich. But what they do, as they imitate, is more extreme, less nuanced and less protected.
The better-educated middle class has more background for judging the outcomes of their behavior than the poor. They feel less rejected, more confident than the poor, so are more comfortable about not choosing dominant styles and trends.
The poor are much more worried about rejection. They suffer rejection more often than the non-poor. They are less willing to risk rejection. So they feel much greater compulsions to conform.
They are also much more anxious to be accepted. They cannot compete very well in money, clothing, cars or houses. So they are more likely to fall back on being more daring, showing they have the courage to be more extreme. They feel a greater need to be more on the edge, pushing it further than anyone. In short, they are more tempted to be noticed by taking a style or trend beyond previous boundaries.
They also have less ability to resist styles and trends. They are less well-educated, with less information to fall back on.
They may suffer from severe feelings of inferiority. Their families are often weak. They are less likely to get affirmation at home. There may not be much to build their confidence. So they are likely to try harder to impress, to be accepted. And they get the constant message from the mainstream culture that sex, and being sexually desirable, brings acceptance.
The more the mainstream culture shows that sex brings admiration and acceptance, the more pressure the poor feel. They have little resistance to a culture permeated with sex.
That is true, by the way, not only of the poor, but of middle class children. While they are still too young to have much discernment, they are immersed in the same sex-soaked culture. They also accept its blandishments as the standard for normal behavior.
So our children, more every year, have accepted sex without marriage. That has helped drive the rate of cohabitation to an all-time high, and the rate of marriage down to its lowest point ever.
Yet the poor are even more impacted than middle class children.
Middle class people who care about the poor should by all means give all the help they can to help those who are already poor. Later chapters in this book aim at giving them the practical help them will need for that.
But if they want to prevent more poverty, not just try to patch up the walking wounded who are already poor, they need to look at their own behavior. Poverty prevention will not get very far as long as the majority culture is practicing the values of the Sexual Revolution.
