I can't believe that I'm going to post this. I struggled with the idea of writing this because some of it is embarrassing while other parts aren't anyone else's business. However, I felt I might be able to help with some misconceptions and that is what overrode my apprehensions. I hope a few people will read it.

I grew up poor, the kind of poor that the blogger wrote about in the article linked in the post that started this alternate thread. My mother worked about 50 to 60 hours a week and my father worked even longer. Because both of my parents worked full time my sisters and I where what people today would call latchkey kids. In any case, I respect both of my parents because it wasn't a lack of effort that kept us poor. They worked very hard to make us feel anything but poor. Still, that's what we were, poor.

I managed to make it into a small regional college where I worked hard, made the Dean's List every semester and was able to then attend a fairly prestigious school; a school that was beyond my means. Several times during my years in that school several other students and I lived together in houses where we couldn't afford heating oil in the dead of a New England winter. There were times when I had eat Ramen every day if I ate and worse when I had to dumpster dive for something to eat. There were nights I turned in "overnight forms" for various classes and labs so that I could sleep in a warm school building instead of an old drafty below freezing house. In the end I couldn't keep up with the curriculum, do the expected out of class work, work a more than full time job, and live in one of the most expensive cities on the east coast. I ended up having to leave before I got a degree. That was my excursion with "living beyond my means", the dream that I could have ever afforded the college I attended.

After college I worked hard for 20 years, never living beyond my means, but never making enough to secure any kind of long term existence should things get bad. I've only ever had a loan for a car and that has been paid off. I only ever had one credit card that I charged $200 on, payed off and then dropped. I made plans, worked hard to accomplish goals and tried to climb the ladder of success over those years with varying successes and failures. Then things got really bad when the economy crashed. The crash took my business with it. I managed to get work here and there and was able to delay the inevitable as my savings dwindled over the course of the last few years. During those years I freelanced while trying to find a full time job in my field. When I failed to do so, I tried to find a job anywhere that would at least allow me to work even though it most likely wouldn't be enough to live on.

Before I secured a job I became sick. I thought I had contracted the the flu. Information on the hospital website informed the general public not to come in to the emergency room if anyone thought they had the flu because they were swamped. Heeding this advice I stayed at home. After being sick for at least a week with a temperature that progressively got higher, finally reaching 104º, and at a point where I fell in and out of wild hallucinations I thought in a moment of lucidity that I should go to the ER. It turned out that I had gotten a staph infection and had to spend days in ICU while they monitored me and pumped me full of heavy antibiotics. They later removed more than 2 liters of puss from my back in two bedside surgeries and more in an operating room surgery.

I'm poor again.

Currently I live with family, and if not for them I'd be on the street there is no doubt.

I'm working hard again to change my situation. Maybe it will work and maybe it won't.

Neither my family nor I have ever taken any form of public assistance as a matter of pride. However, I must admit that I recently had to go to a mission clinic just to get a doctor to write me some prescriptions. I hope that none of you never know how devastating it is to pride and ego to be in such a place.

I'm not sharing this story for any kind of pity for myself. Life happens, and that's just what happened in my life. I can't say that I've got it worse than everyone else in the world by any stretch of the imagination. I'm only sharing a brief history so that you may get the idea that I know a little of what I'm talking about when I share the following thoughts.

At three different times in my life I've been the level of poor that the writer described in that blog post from the original thread, not had brushes with that level, but lived it. In my youth it was in the country, in college it was in one large city and in the latest adventure in another. In each of these instances I've known good people who were in similar situations if not worse, people that were working as hard as a human possibly could just to survive, to keep families alive and trying to better their situations. A few of them were able to improve their lives through hard work, but others haven't managed no matter how hard they tried. Beyond these people I've known others that were mentally ill who were unable to find a normal steady job for obvious reasons. I also have to admit that during those times I also met the lazy and the scammers. They are out there, inhabiting the worst parts of town and the highest offices, but the thing that you should know is that these vile people were far outnumbered by good hardworking folks. The numbers weren't even close.

I guess that what I am saying is that while it's easy to hold the ideal that hard work always results in success, in reality equal amounts of hard work don't result in equal amounts of success. If it did, I know a lot of people who would be millionaires by the effort they've given and a few millionaires who would be destitute by the same measure. Even so, sometimes life just happens and all of the reward for effort can be gone in an instant if it ever came in the first place. From what I've seen, there's no vast conspiracy of scammers out there trying to get everything for nothing and I've lived in some of the worst areas imaginable. There's not a huge number of people out there trying to take what people who are better off have, just people trying to do the best that they can in circumstances that aren't always capable of being fixed by pulling on bootstraps. I'm just asking that you take it easy on your fellow human beings.

The harshest thing I'm going to say in this thread is that this country would crumble if the hardworking poor decided the effort wasn't worth their lot. The social safety nets currently in place would fail if so much as half of the people who were eligible to take full advantage of them decided to do so. This country would crash in days if all those people walked away from their pride, misplaced or not.

That's just my view from what I've witnessed, I could be wrong.