Poverty And Impoverishment

By Arjuna Seneviratne -September 24, 2013

Arjuna Seneviratne

A medicant lives on just four requisites. Scraps of discarded cloth dyed in the boiled juices of tree bark to cover his body, scraps of food begged from here and there to feed him, a tree to provide him with shelter from the elements and cow’s urine as medicine. The common denominator for all of these is a) they cost nothing and b) they are abundantly available. They provide him with all his material requisites.

Now, the question that comes to mind is this: Is a medicant poor? On the surface it would seem so. However, if he were asked he would probably respond with the German proverb “A poor person isn’t he who has little but he who needs a lot” Indeed!

The keyword here is “need”. Need, not lack of accumulation or lack of wealth or lack of position or lack of power, determines who is poor and who is not.  So, if one were to minimize need, one would minimize poverty. Eradicate need and one eradicates poverty.

OMG! Is this really true? But of course!  And yet, “come come” I hear you say “…everyone has needs so everyone is poor at some level or other”.  Brilliant. “True. Glad you acknowledge that you are poverty stricken pal” I retort. “No! I didn’t mean to say that. That’s not what I meant!” comes the outraged counter from you. “Ah! Pal, who are we kidding? Regardless of what you wanted to say, what you’d really want is words such as ‘poor’ and ‘poverty’ redacted from any measure of your ‘worth’, right? Having those in there implies a negative balance to your idea of your own wealth, mm?  Rather, you would want a positive spin put on it and instead of counting the things you need, you’d rather count the things you have right?”

Therein lies the problem with the world. You see, what a person has or doesn’t have has not the slightest bearing on how poor that person is. From her dream man, to his dream boat, to her dream home, to his dream position, it is what one dreams of having but cant that truly causes people to suffer that mind bending pain and desperation commonly associated  with paucity.Read More