FILIPINOS usually commemorate Labor Day with labor strikes. Labor unions take this day as an opportunity to air out issues on wages and working conditions that are deemed to be the causes of so much poverty across the country.
I used to teach social sciences in a university. One of the most debated upon by my students every time I talk about poverty is the contention that poor people are deprived of things because they are not helping themselves. Almost always my students would insist that they, the poor people, had their misery coming and that there are no others to blame for such plight other than themselves.
My students would always substantiate it by citing beggars on the streets, those that are physically able to work but chose not to. They would also add that their parents were once poor but were able to rise up from poverty and are now living quite decent lives because of hard work. For them, there is just no valid excuse for being underprivileged.
While I like how my students strongly own the effort to alleviate their economic status, they failed to see how the cycle of poverty chains the marginalized to become poor for the rest of their lives and are therefore but victims of their situations. And while it is true that they can get out of such chain, what my students missed is that the poor can only be freed from the claws of poverty if most of the efforts come from us who are outside of such constraint.
Allow me to illustrate to you why it should come from us.
Poverty is a cycle that starts with deprivation. The deprivation could be a result of almost anything, but the one cause that's very hard to remedy is the lack of access to resources. This situation would always result to frustration which would lead to a domino effect of uncontrolled liabilities. As their liabilities grow higher and higher, they do not only chain themselves in poverty but their children as well as their children's children.
When people's liabilities are impossible to upset, it results to a state of helplessness. Helplessness would then result to hopelessness where the poor have somehow submitted themselves to the misery that they are in already. The submission will then be characterized with the distorted sense of passivity. They become passive on things, they no longer care whether they get better or not, and so this leads to a high level of apathy.
And when a person reaches the level of apathy, he begins to develop a handicapping attitude of dependence. And then the cycle continues.
This is what our beggars on the streets and our poorer population are handicapped of. They are crippled on the highest form. They have lost their capability to dream and to hope. They end up just surviving and at a later point, even that instinct to survive ceases from them. What makes it almost impossible to remedy is that they are already blinded by such defect.
It is therefore very clear, that the burden of freeing our poorer population from their chains of dearth lies on us; the government and the private sector. First is to equip them with skills, then provide them access to resources through jobs and then rehabilitate them from their sense of dependency. It is not enough to just provide them jobs, in a lot of cases where they don't get other support they get fired in a very short time for either lack of skills or work ethics.
And why should we help them? The eradication of poverty has a domino effect. It lessens criminality making our businesses prosper, and we get to improve our human resources that will again make us richer in more ways than one. And of course, what better reason there is to help the poor other than that which comes out of pure compassion.