Spreading the poor around

I think historically it was with the rise of agriculture that we began to have distinctions between rich and poor. I think tools were generally shared among the tribe, not sure where I heard that. Heard last night on tv that the bronze age looked pretty good as far as poverty, but that was in Britain, it wouldn’t have held for Egypt or Mesopotamia.

I always think of that old time emperor thing when I am flying in a plane. Even Napoleon or the tsars never got to do that, look down from that high. And yet as I look around me on the plane hardly anybody is looking out the window, they are more obsessed with trying to open that little bag of peanuts, which are suddenly so important, but if someone had offered that to them while they were sitting in the airport, they probably would have refused it.

For a brief time there when I first started working in that office in Chicago, I thought maybe I should try to get ahead, because what else was there to do? I was no longer a hippie, all my friends were back in Champaign, might as well become a bigger bureaucrat, but everybody I worked with had been bureaucrats for years and knew the game and kicked me to the curb, which in retrospect was just fine.

When they first started putting in public housing the plan was that they would spread the poor around the city, but inasmuch as the poor were mostly black, the white people didn’t want them in their neighborhoods, so they just tore down the black neighborhoods and put up those awful high rises in the old black neighborhoods.

One thing you hear from time to time is that in the bad old days all the black people were confined to a little patch on the south side, but because of that, all the blacks that did get ahead, the doctors, the funeral directors, the preachers, etc, all lived cheek to jowl with the really poor, and that gave the kids something to look up to. But as soon as segregation weakened a little, all the rich black people moved out of the patch and then all the black kids had to see was other poor black people.

When they tore down Cabrini Green the progressive thought was that there would be mixed income communities. Rich and poor would live together in harmony in the same building, but that hasn’t worked out to well. The poor people tended to hang out in the common areas all day long, and leave their stuff around and stay up late and drink, and the rich people didn’t like that.

You know one of the problems is that the blacks tend to be poor and the whites rich. I think white people would be more likely to want to share with other white people, but not so much with black people.

That is one of the reasons Europe does better than the United States in things like infant mortality, and surprisingly enough, height, we used to be the tallest in the world, and many of us are, but there are those unhealthy poor bringing us down. Because France is full of Frenchmen, they are likely to help each other out, so their income is more even, they don’t have a huge class in poverty to bring them down. They do have some poor muslims who I think they treat shabbily, but not that many of them.

Poor people probably wouldn’t mind living with rich people, but it doesn’t work the other way around.