Dancing in the dust of poverty….

Poverty; the state of being extremely poor.

Poverty to me has been dictated as that big ball of exaggeration by many, made so unrealistic by its reality. We are unable to stomach the actual devastation which is poverty hence many write about it as if it’s a mythical creature that stays in a cave up a tall hill, yet that monstrosity is the pet we keep in our back yard and train to bite our neighbors. It’s a human inflicted disease and growing affection that many refuses to see but yet if you show me someone immune to poverty, I will show you a pig.

The world is silent and ignores the prominent war that never allows you to die with dignity. this I derived from the thoughts of Gandhi who stated that ‘poverty is the worst form of violence.’ It causes the explosive and dehumanizing push in one’s lifetime yet we all chose to ignore it and indulge in our comfortability like parasites in a host.

We refuse to see the crown fitting to our overgrown heads, pompous as those that hold our crowns eat and dance in the dust of poverty yet we glorify ourselves in this disgusting sight. Learning to give only when given and to act only when threatened yet not all can rise to denounce this ravaging monster poverty. The French, the slave, and the Japanese knew this, they did not let themselves choke on the gathering dust but rather stopped dancing to the dirty tunes. I truly believe that everyone is responsible for the next. Your actions cause a chain reaction in the woven books of destiny, where yours can interlude and collide into another’s and due to our selfish humanness steal theirs.

Poverty is a human-created bomb that was woven on the principles of greed, laziness, and inadequacy. Nelson Mandela once said ‘Overcoming poverty is not a gesture of charity, it is an act of justice.’ I pondered on this phase before I wrote this piece trying to figure out what he meant. I noticed that no one chooses to be poor but is born a millionaire and that money wastes away not only because of one’s independent decisions but also because someone is high jacking your choice to stay rich and the choice on what to do with your million.

I once watched a young girl carry her sibling on her back her boney frame bracing the small figure that she held like gold and I saw the pain that screamed from both of their eyes they were together but inadequate to have each other or care for one another. She braced the child as if her life depended on it. This haunted me when I walked, talked and ate, I thought to myself ‘if poverty was a man, I would have slain him’ these being the word of Ali Ibn Talib.

 When you look directly in the eyes of poverty you forget and feel the guilt that comes with the realization that it isn’t solved by a donation or feeding a child today because tomorrow, they will still be hungry. It is more than that it is in the way you think whilst you are alone in your room under clean sheets and on a bed that your roll in with no constraints about the uncertainties tomorrow brings in every second (the freedom).

I have seen myself and been surrounded by people that have become so absorbed and drown in privilege that their mentality is forged of having and anything that doesn’t have is qualified as incapable or undeserving. This yet again becomes a different kind of poverty the was expressed by mother Theresa the poverty of emotions. The inability to cap emotion, have sympathy and see no need for change. This poverty is the one that tackles those that feed of others and create the undermining endless chain of pain and suffering. Whilst they gallop in the dust of poverty and step on the feet of those that brand the ground with their feet bare.

‘Poverty is the greatest enemy to human happiness; it certainly destroys liberty, and it makes some virtues impracticable and other extremely difficult’ Samuel Johnson

This not only creates the disruptive world we live in where for one to get to the top they have to milk another and feed off the souls of the weak like a hell condemned succubus. Erasing the harmony that was so much seeked by Karl Max’s (his long living vision of equality).