0 Poverty! I choose you!

So we are reading All Souls by Michael MacDonald which is a fascinating and tragic book abut his life growing up in South Boston. It centers around his family of 9 children and his single mother living in poverty and the result of that and his circumstances and the environment that they live in. Throughout the book (I finished it. I cried several times. I can't stand child death of mourning. The last few Harry Potter books killed me and continue to do so whenever I reread them), the family goes between being plagued by their poverty and reveling in it. Several people (the mother, mostly) makes questionable decisions that may have been the cause to their poverty.

This brings up the question of whether or not poverty is a choice. In the apparatus I'm typing this on, poverty is defined as the state of being extremely poor; or the state of being inferior in quality or insufficient in amount.

There is the aged belief that poverty and bad situations are all choices and laziness. Those who still subscribe to that belief think that it is up to that person to pull themselves up by their bootstraps and work hard, that the only reason you are where you are is because the effort you have put out. These are the same people who still believe in the American Dream.

I believe poverty is something more. I believe that it may be a pit trap, a place where, once you've fallen in, the walls are high and slippery and there's no a to get a grip and climb out. It's a way of thinking that you can't escape even in your dreams. Poverty is a state of being. Regardless of the choices made in the book, as wrong as some of the decisions were, a life of poverty was so engrained in them that it was all they knew and all they could go off of. Of course their choices kept them impoverished because it was all they knew. It's like a virus, or poor dictionary for your spell check. Once you misspell once and you save it into the dictionary once, you'll always spell it wrong because that's the only way you know how to spell it.

In terms of background, I come from a middle class family where we've always had enough to sleep and a bed to sleep in and amenities I probably take for granted. I've never been poor so I'm speaking with the little I know, none from experience.

The question remains that even if poverty is a trap, how does one get themselves trapped in it. I can't answer that question because its different for everyone and I don't have experience with it. The most I can assume is that it's like how I get stuck with homework assignments. You procrastinate once and then again and its fun and you joke about it with friends and then you do it again and it becomes the only thing you know and can do until your grades are in the trash and there's no more light in your life. But I'm just guessing.