Barriers to getting rich....
desert_born commented:
"It is certainly true that hard work will get you further along the road to riches than sitting and bitching will, but the implication of that statement is that hard work is the primary or only factor in acquiring wealth. But oftentimes, poverty has little to do with effort (similar fallacy: all poor people are lazy.) and much more to do with circumstance, environment, persistent health problems, lack of intelligence, lack of motivation, lack of language skills, lack of access to appropriate information, nutrition, health care, culture, etc."


The only underclass that I know enough about to say anything reliable is the underclass of poor rural colorless persons; it may be that for urban poor whites, and for poor people of color, nothing I'm about to say is relevant. But for poor rural whites, that long list of barriers to getting rich -- starting with "circumstance" and ending with "et cetera" -- is an interactive and interdependent list full of loops and knots. And I have come to believe that in this case the end of the string is in food and drink.

We know now that the human brain's plasticity doesn't end in the first few years of life as we once thought it did, but we also know that food and drink in the first two years (and during the months before birth) is critical to the normal development of the brain. Which is why it upsets me so much to see young parents in the rural coffeeshops and convenience stores and restaurants giving their babies a breakfast of Twinkies and Pepsi -- often Pepsi in a baby's bottle. These are hardworking devoted parents who are determined to do their very best for their children; they're not lazy, and they're not neglectful. If you were to suggest that the menu they're providing the little ones was flawed, and if you were able to find a way to suggest it that made them willing to answer you, you'd get one or both of the following responses: (a) that their parents had given them exactly that same menu, and it had never done them any harm; and/or (b) that Twinkies and Pepsi are the only things the child will _eat_ for breakfast. And they would be deeply hurt by your claim that they're not taking care of their children properly.

That kind of diet, plus enough pizza and hamburgers and fried chicken and biscuits-and-gravy and candy bars and "vegetables" cooked for hours with a chunk of ham, and ever-more-sugar-added canned and packaged food at the grocery store -- the standard diet for poor white pregnant women -- guarantees that the playing field won't be level for the child. And nothing on earth is harder than changing a culture's food-and-drink customs. Even if there were good solid nutrition classes at school (which "No Child Left Behind" leaves no room for in the curriculum), I'm not sure it would make any difference, because the information would be perceived as coming from city people, and "Look at the mess city people have made of their lives -- what do they know about anything?"

There's a desperate need for some Ozark equivalent to Oprah Winfrey, somebody who could get and hold people's attention and focus it on nutrition and make them willing to change this, a little at a time -- and no such charismatic figure has turned up yet. I don't think there's any hope for an end to the poor white underclass in the rural Ozarks until this nutritional problem is fixed, and I have no idea how to fix it. I don't know how to write a nutritional equivalent of The Gentle Art of Verbal Self-Defense; if I did, I'd have done it long ago.

There's plenty of wealth in the Ozarks; we have the Waltons, for heaven's sakes. But for far too large a percentage of ordinary people, the barriers to getting rich are set up before birth and in the first two years. It has absolutely nothing to do with being afraid of hard work.