An Open Letter to the Comically Horrid

Tons of media coverage of poverty during the current economic downturn, over the past year, has been like this – highlighting the “plight” of the newly “poor” or poorer. Personally I’m much more interested in hearing how people who were already scraping by are doing at the moment. It’s sad…I guess…that so-and-so had to give up their second car, but what about the people who are affected by losing their only home (some shitty apartment) and are now on the street…or who were already on the street. I get that economic hardship affects all classes of people, but almost every single mainstream article I read about the effects of this hardship involves upper middle class people having to give up their trip to Disneyland or their weekly manicures. Maybe the media thinks that more people can relate to these “hardships” than to the situation of a homeless person, or maybe they think the economic pain is worse for middle-class people because somehow the really poor people were already accustomed to being poor and therefore it’s only a shift in increments for them. I don’t know.

I get that they were trying to gather viewpoints from Nova Scotians in various cirumstances, but yes, it was very boring. I read it and thought “Well there’s two minutes I’ll never get back.”