Poverty can dehumanise people. It restricts access to healthy food and to shelter. It ravages families and makes them vulnerable to all type of abuse from the violent and the spitefu and the shrewdl. Poverty bruises self esteem.It has a vicious way of murdering the ability to be aspirational.
Working with long term unemployed people and in very ordinary suburbs, there was nothing romantic or poetic or noble about the poverty. Life is brutal and unhealthy and short and full of violent things.
Riches can create an entitlement and arrogance especially where it can buy absolutely anything or anybody it desires. The schooled rich keep their contempt hidden and keep their rules of engagement with the world and people around them secreted away. The newly acquired rich flaunt it like a designer tattoo or gold throat chain..
Working with individuals with unimaginable wealth is to work with very unhappy and joyless people who have no peace -despite their riches. Their children invariably become their clones or escape them or ignore them.
