The writings of Oddpoet

The Cen­sus bureau defines poverty for a fam­ily of four to be $21,200.00, This, of course, means if you make $21,201.00 you bet­ter not cry poor because you will get your ass kicked. Add or sub­tract about $3500.00 per child and you can fig­ure the rest out your­self.



How did they come up with this ridicu­lous cal­cu­la­tion? Civil ser­vants! They assigned two guys to fig­ure it out and they were prob­a­bly pissed about some­thing (civil ser­vants are always pissed) Maybe they didn’t get over­time the week before so they say “frig it” (civil Ser­vants are always say­ing “Frig it”) so they get out the old dart board and throw the darts and BAM! $21,200.00 was the magic num­ber. By the way, all Gov­ern­ment pol­icy is decided by the dart board method, do you think they are actu­ally ana­lyz­ing this stuff? Please! I was a civil ser­vant and I know!



You guys do not remem­ber the dark ages when the Gov­ern­ment decided that peo­ple had 2.4 chil­dren per house­hold. Well as Amer­i­cans we could not tol­er­ate any­one hav­ing more than us so Uncle Sam was forced to chop up babies and hand out a .4 baby to every fam­ily with two chil­dren. It was heart wrench­ing. I lead the fight that stopped this bar­barous prac­tice and rea­soned with the peo­ple that instead of chop­ping every fourth baby up we could all keep two kids and send the odd num­ber over­seas where they could work eigh­teen hours a day in sweat shops mak­ing cloth­ing so Wal-Mart can sell us Amer­i­cans real cheap clothes. Yea, always felt good about that.



How do you think we defeated the Evil Empire dur­ing the cold war? Sim­ple, we found out they had more mis­siles than us and being Amer­i­cans that was intol­er­a­ble so we built ten bil­lion of the suck­ers and forced the Soviet Union into bank­ruptcy. The rest is, as they say, his­tory



Back to poverty.



Defin­ing this dire and heart break­ing “con­di­tion” as “poverty” does not speak ade­quately to the prob­lem. I pro­pose the Odd­poet chart; I believe it speaks more elo­quently to the issue. Here goes:



$21200——–Poor Fucks

$16000——–Really Poor Fucks

$12000——–Destitute

$10000——–Totally Fucked

There!



Every­thing in life is a con­tin­uüm and we as a soci­ety need to address the degrees of poverty, I sub­mit:



“Jim, how’s it going man?”

“Not good Odd­poet I am a poor fuck.”

“Stop cry­ing man, I am totally fucked.”

See…big dif­fer­ence.



The prob­lem with the typ­i­cal American’s view of poverty is: IT’S THEIR FAULT! You know it’s true, never try to bull­shit the Quas. It is not that we are bad peo­ple; it is the bull­shit that was incul­cated into our brains since birth. The Amer­i­can Dream, work hard and you will suc­ceed. Maybe I was pre­co­cious because I never bought into that bull­shit. Sure there are Bill Gates, War­ren Buf­fett and a whole bunch of self made very wealthy peo­ple. How­ever, the over­whelm­ing major­ity of global wealth is inher­ited. Yea, peo­ple are born into it, which takes a lot of hard work.



If poverty was a cho­sen con­di­tion it would require the fol­low­ing mind­set:



“Honey, I was think­ing, who really needs a car, nice house, vaca­tions, ade­quate heath care, edu­ca­tion for our kids. Babe, that shit is over rated, I think we should shoot for being Des­ti­tute.”



If you believe it’s their fault you can not run from that logic. Sure you see poor peo­ple on the street cor­ner drink­ing and it appears they do not want to par­take of the Amer­i­can Dream, but it is only that they have had their hearts ripped out of their chests, and they sim­ply no longer give a shit.



Briefly, world hunger:



Ever see those poor beyond poverty peo­ple from third world Coun­tries wait­ing in line for hours for a frig­gin bag of rice and the frig­gers are grate­ful! If I was hun­gry and had to wait in line for two hours and some dude handed me a bag of rice, I would say:



“What the frig am I sup­pose to do with this?

“Go to a wedding?”

“Give me a burger and a bev­er­age of my choice or I will kick your ass!”

Well, I am an Amer­i­can.



I never do this but I will step out of char­ac­ter.



THE BIGGEST CRIME OF THE LAST ONE HUNDRED YEARS IS NOT THE HOLOCAUST, NOT THE LACK OF CONCERN ABOUT THE AIDS PANDEMIC, IT IS THAT AS A GLOBAL COMMUNITY WE ALLOW ANOTHER HUMAN BEING TO GO TO SLEEP AT NIGHT HUNGRY. IN THIS TIME OF THE UNPRESEDENTED ONCENTRATION OF HUMAN WEALTH AND TECHNOLOGICAL ADVANCEMENT WE ALLOW THAT CRIME TO GO UNFOUGHT DEFINES ME AS A PIECE OF SHIT! YOU DECIDE FOR YOURSELF. I GUESS WHEN WE DECIDE TO LOOK AT ONE ANOTHER AS TRUE BROTHERS AND SISTERS, MAYBE THEN WE WILL RISE AS ONE AND SAY NO MORE!



Till then, fuck you and give me a burger and a bev­er­age of my choice.