That was an interesting observation that you made about poor people: "Everything is harder for them". I don't believe that I've ever looked at it that way but, now that I have, I tend to agree with you. Do you think that everything is harder for them because they're poor, or do you think that they are poor because everything is harder for them? Of course, correlation does not prove cause and effect, but it does make me wonder about it.
We kind of agreed before that we couldn't eliminate poverty by just taking money from the rich people and giving it to the poor people. Eventually, they would spend it all and still be poor, and now the formerly rich people would also be poor and unable to help with future anti-poverty efforts. I don't know if the experts have thought of this, but maybe we should be looking for the reasons why poverty exists in the first place. One thing about poverty is that it tends to run in families, if your parents are poor, you are more likely to end up poor yourself. Although being born to rich parents doesn't guarantee that you will end up rich yourself, it certainly improves your chances. It's the same with neighborhoods, poor people tend to live next door to other poor people. If you grow up in a poor neighborhood, it increases the chances that you will remain poor all your life but, of course, it doesn't guarantee it. Then there's kind of a cultural aspect to it. Kids who grow up with poverty are often discouraged by their families and friends from trying to improve their situation. I call it "The Who do you think you are? syndrome".
Speaking of cultural stuff, I don't know if all those cultural rituals that you disparage are intended to teach you something, or just to make you feel good, or maybe it's a little of both. Take funerals for example. Maybe the ancient Egyptians believed that it was important to give the dead pharaoh a big send off so that the gods would accept him into Pharaoh Heaven, but I don't think that's why we do it today. Most of us would agree that we can't do anything for the dead guy, the purpose of a funeral is to provide some kind of comfort for the survivors. I always used to be a little envious of the Catholics because they had something to do at wakes and funerals. Us Protestants would just stand around the coffin trying to think of something reasonable to say, but the Catholics would kneel down, make the sign of the Cross, recite a couple of well rehearsed prayers, and they were done. I think that it helps people to deal with events of great joy or sorrow if they have something concrete to say or do, something that they have rehearsed often enough that they can do it automatically without thinking too much about it.
You're missing the point about paying kids to do chores. You're not paying them to be good, they should do that for free. You're paying them to do useful work that somebody else would have to do if they didn't. I remember the summer that we paid our daughter to paint the house. We paid her $2.00 an hour, which was below minimum wage, but that's what they had paid her at Kentucky Fried the previous summer, and she wasn't thrilled about going back there. We told her that she could work as many hours as she wanted to, and not to worry if she didn't finish it, because it was a big job and any part that she did was that much less that we would have to do later. She ended up doing all the scraping and chipping, two coats on the trim, and one coat on the main walls. All we had to do was put one more coat on the walls, which was the easy part. When we got into a spell of really hot weather, she would paint in the morning and then go to the beach in the afternoon. One day I came home from work at 3:00PM to find her painting while sitting in a washbasin full of ice water. (I'm not making this up!) When I finished laughing, I asked her why she wasn't at the beach by now. She told me that she just had a little bit to go on that one wall, and she wanted to finish it today. Nobody told her that she had to do that, she just took it on herself. Now that's what's called a "work ethic"!
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