Last updated on April 4th, 2024 at 02:26 pm
Poor and poverty humiliate the posh world and are an embarrassment to the very people who are running the economic affairs of the world by accumulating most of the wealth by depriving most of the people of the wealth and the right to survive.
Why the rich people are apathetic to and disgusted by poverty, the poor, and their lower living conditions as if seeing them naked strips their clothes of eyes and bereft of their sanity? The answer to the query is beyond my comprehension. But I know for sure that the right of the poor to exist is getting thinner every day due to the moneyed class’s encroachment.
The day may come when the poor will be condemned for being poor, and their right to live will be criminalised instead of what makes them poor and who is responsible for their impoverishment.
The lives of the poor are now at the mercy of the so-called high-born, privileged corrupt section of movers of the society.
The recent move of India in evicting and removing the poor people of the city ahead of its G-20 hosting speaks volumes about how desperate the country is to present itself as poor-free to the incoming world delegates.
The tears of the homeless poor city dwellers have no value while their long-lived abodes have been bulldozed along with their dreams. The policymakers and statemen’s attempt to conceal their failures to alleviate poverty by concealing the poor of the state reveals more than what it conceals. Joseph Estrada, former President of the Philippines, attempted the very thing of hiding poor slum dwellers by building a huge wall during the 2000s. instead of trying to eradicate poverty, he tried to hide it inside the wall.
The project aimed to build a wall around the slums of Manila to separate the impoverished communities from the rest of the city.
The project was completed amid criticism and protests in 2003.
The Wall of Shame of Lima, Peru, brought down this month, might have successfully concealed the poor from the luxurious estates for two decades but only to worsen the condition of the lot.
Instead of having been elevated the condition of living of the poor by the state, a state’s condition improves at the cost of the poor section of the people everywhere. They are the victims of nature, injustice, infrastructural development and economic expansion, as if they exist to honour the law the necessity of nature and the nurtured but shameless rich people. What Mahatma Gandhi said about poor and poverty, “There are people in the world so hungry, that God cannot appear to them except in the form of bread” reverberates in every corner of the globe.
The hungry people are friendless, hopeless, thoughtless, and rightless but not shameless. Shameless are those who have made or usually make their fortune from the backbreaking toils of unfortunate poor human beings and try not to pay debts by changing their fortune in turn. Franklin D. Roosevelt was right to say, “The test of our progress is not whether we add more to the abundance of those who have much; it is whether we provide enough for those who have too little.”
The tiny fraction of the rich could easily send the poverty in the museum, but they will not because love to keep them as their slaves.
Let us ponder Darwin’s thought on poverty, what he considered to be an institutional sin.
He wrote, “If the misery of the poor be caused not by the laws of nature, but by our institutions, great is our sin.”
Probin
7.9.2023
