|
We Who are Poor, A Meditation on Poverty by Raven Taylor
|
| Poverty leaves us standing around the periphery of power Renders us perpetually looking in from the outside From the Other world, beyond borders, behind fences, outside in the cold, Looking in through guns, bars, chain links, plexiglass, from the street Locked out from a system that demands our slavery but not our voice It is colonization and enslavement in the name of money It is occupation of life by the invisible fist of the market It is knowing that without money you could be abandoned by humanity Left to suffer alone, kicked for falling out of the handcuffs of wage slavery It is having people spit in your face both literally and figuratively not because the system is flawed but because we are somehow responsible for making it look bad Poverty is, not knowing from where our next rent check, meal, or place to rest will come It is uncertainty, insecurity and destruction Poverty is watching our kids go without food, get sick and sometimes die No matter how hard we fight Poverty leaves scars on our children, our women, our men, our elders, our earth Poverty is having hunger and being forbidden to eat while others are eating in front of us Poverty is being told that water is essential to life on earth as a corporation buys our communities’ water supply, as our waters are polluted and traded globally, as yet one more person discards the remnants of a plastic water bottle into a stream while we thirst, our children have thirst, our crops thirst and we are told we must rely on the ever evaporating dollar to quench our every need. Poverty is being deprived of sleep, rest, relaxation and time to just be Poverty is finding we are under siege by surveillance, security, police, paramilitary and military occupation, not because we are dangerous but because we are poor and because our potential desperation is perceived as a threat to other peoples’ security & sensibilities Poverty is finding all or most of our friends in jail, the guards are white and we are not Poverty is knowing we are going to have to sell our bodies, our strength, our minds, our will, and possibly sell out those of others, to survive Poverty keeps us so busy trying to survive we neglect and degrade our health and the health of the animals and ecosystems that are so important to our future Poverty is losing hope in the face of a world that tries maximally, to use, abuse and kill some of us Poverty is a veil behind which the privilege of others is hidden Poverty is not a symptom, side-affect, or temporary ailment curable with time and tinkering; it is a result, a structure, an emblem of class Poverty jades our minds It crushes the ribs of our hope, making it hard to keep breathing It poisons, it destroys, it kills But poverty can also inspire Change our perspectives, our goals our hopes our dreams Can make us humble Makes us see our common humanity Living in poverty requires the constant building of hope, takes strength to endure Makes us innovative, creative, less willing to dismiss each other Makes us realize that capitalist individualism is something that only privilege and wealth can buy and that without each other we are lonely, bankrupt and truly impoverished creatures Poverty can be a lens through which we see that the empire has no clothes That the system is perpetuating incredible violence, and taking ours lives to sustain itself That it is through the exploitation of our lives and labour and the rape of our earth that keeps this capitalist machine running all over this planet That our participation and continued legitimation of the system is what allows it to hurt us so Poverty can be the lens through which we see that other worlds are possible It can and is the motivation to organize ourselves, our families our neighborhoods for our survival and in resistance And indeed it is in spaces of deprivation and exclusion that we have space to create, experiment, reinvent, rebuild, include and resist ~in honor and dedication to struggling peoples everywhere~ ______________________________ raven taylor is happy to be alive. angry about more things than there are words in the colonial english language, feisty as fuck and yet too nice to hurt anyone. She lives in Vancouver.
|