Poor Blog Action Day 2008

Poverty—Blog Action Day Focus—October 2008

Lots of folks invite other folks to eliminate poverty in lots of ways. Here’s a quick sample right from site.blogactionday.org (there’s 78 more ideas):

1. Eat meatless meals 2x a week. Donate that grocery money to a local food bank. - TarotByArwen
2. Be homeless for a day/night. - Lex
3. Stop putting off adopting a child through an organization like Compassion International (or adopt another one). - Lex
4. Make a loan on Kiva, or buy a couple gift certificates and give them away to friends. - Lex
5. Get a group together to go door-to-door collecting canned foods for your local soup kitchen/shelter. - Lex
6. Take a homeless person to dinner and actually sit/talk with him. - Lex
7. Stop being lazy. Find a way to do your job better so that you can save an hour a day, or be that much more productive. - Alex Shalman
8. Stop buying junk to make yourself look pretty and donate it to homeless people and hungry people. - Craigsnede
9. Make flyers to stick in the local library. - Craigsnede
10. If you have a musical instrument you no longer use, donate to the still-struggling musicians and students in New Orleans, who are still recovering from Hurricane Katrina. A few great organizations that will accepts musical instruments are Tipitina’s Foundation (www.tipitinasfoundation.org) and The New Orleans Musicians Relief Fund (www.nomrf.org/donations.html).

Nice ideas. Folks have nice ideas.

Here’s Mine: Re-Define.

Example: hot. What does it mean? Sexy? Really warm? Ridiculously warm? Very attractive? Definitions of all words never exist in a vacuum. Definitions depend on context. The context of hot changes depending on which context one refers: attractiveness or temperature.

So it is with poverty…

The context that we—if you’re reading this on the internet then we fits—typically refer to is a capital-based, ownership-style of wealth. In this context, everyone is or eventually becomes poor, except that one really, super rich Guy (it’s an inherently sexist economic and political context). Even that Guy might believe that there’s another richer Guy. So in our world, in our context, dear Computer User, everyone tastes, experiences, and, to some degree, knows poverty.

In the context of a Global Economy, rich (read: poor in Spirit) people drive the whole world toward poverty. You saw it in the Bailouts! Poor, poverty-stricken, sick bastards, those faux leaders! So let’s beat them.

Each item above is easy. Try them out; be homeless for a day. Re-Define Wealth: that’s a difficult task, worthy of a hardy warrior. In a different context, you cannot never be homeless. In a different context, each of the 10 tasks above (or 88 tasks) are both infinitely easier (to do) and unfathomably harder (you’ll never really live in a context that let’s you do the task).

Wealth need not be defined by cash flow or number of computers. Wealth is not buckets of books or fancy cars. What is it? Hmm? How do we redefine this thing called wealth?! Tell me what you think.