Dont Blame Poverty On The Poor Analysis

Don’t blame poverty on the poor – Analysis

Our lives are, to some point, based on luck. You can be lucky to have successful parents with a lot of fortune or unlucky to be born in a poor neighborhood where you’re struggling with rob-bery and drive-by shooting. Eusebius McKaiser writes about the good and bad luck he has been dealing with through life, in the article “Don’t blame poverty on the poor” in the Mail&Guardian newspaper. A lot of people make the mistake to blame people for their own failures, and perhaps they could have done something differently, in order to be more suc-cessful. But they might not have had the same opportunities, as a wealthy upper-class man by virtue of genetics, neighborhood and the luck they have been given.

“I have experienced lots of luck. I could not have chosen my luck. I have an above-average IQ that has enabled me to do well at school and uni-versity. I have a capacity for grasping concepts and logic quickly, which has, with some effort, helped to develop some decent skills such as my debating prowess” [P.2 L. 1] These examples do also give the reader a relation to McKaiser. You get to know him and he seems trustworthy in his arguments later on. Very early in the text, he states that he did not choose his luck, which indicates he knows, that no one chooses their own luck, therefore you can’t blame pov-erty on the poor because if you were put in their place, you might have ended up just like them – the poor. He emphasizes that he does not only have good luck, but also bad genetic luck. “I struggle with my weight. [P. 2 L. 6] There is a potent gene for obesity in my family that is an irritating menace. I was also born into a relatively poor or working-class family, depend-ing on your baseline of poverty.” This is a comparison to the people living in poverty. They have been given some genetic tools to work with as they have been given a bad environment, a bad school or whatever bad luck they might have been given to be unable to break the bad luck of poverty. It’s not their fault. At the end McKaiser uses one of his callers, Vuyelwa, as an example: “Vuyelwa has long convinced herself that the difference between a poor cleaner at a gym and a banker in Sandton is that the one decided to be poor and the other decided to be a banker. There is a refusal here to acknowledge the ways in which factors we did not choose, such as the genes we are born with and the families and communities we are born into, de-termine our lot in life” [P. 3 L. 19] At last he gives an example of a person who thinks like the majority of people who are not living