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THE level of underdevelopment has made it easy for poverty to be glorified and for hard work to be poorly defined, as a result of this very same underdevelopment in poor countries poverty has been made a social tag to be proud of.

In today’s world there is a bitter lineage of thought that stems from gate keeping poverty like it is a good thing or something to be proud of. It is the shaming of privilege in order to uphold struggle like a medal, and in my line of thinking – as I mashed up the laces of this phenomenon, I concluded that poverty is merely a construct, because even though it is a reality that everyone in society is fighting actively against, many people in the same length want to hoard it.

A person goes to a model C primary school and high school, they have a driver picking them from home to school and vice versa every day. They get into a good university and their parents pay for their fees, they participate in extra curriculum to stand better chances at getting a job and this scenario is the perfect bait, because for one man it reflects poorly on the narrative that they choose to see it as a means to disregard hard work.

Rather the other lenses of this scope has been to insinuate that hard work is only the result of the man who walked to school without shoes and learned in a classroom with broken windows and a gap year because of an unfair system that prevents many underprivileged people from getting a scholarship and those that do, is after attempting several times.

Privilege

This scenario portrays the reality that society hates privilege but wants privilege, and secondly that we are a society that correlates hard work with struggle. The truth of the matter is that both people in the scenario know what hard work is and are both products of hard work because hard work can exist independent of poverty. The learner who went to a model C school and the learner who learnt in a classroom with broken windows are very much measurable equally on hard work, because they both need to apply the same amount of dedication and both have to equally work for their marks in order to make it. The only difference is that one is working hard with support while the other is working hard without support and the access to support does not change the amount of time and labour the individual has to invest in order to pass – this is because privilege does not get one free marks, and so does poverty.

However the argument on poverty is to expose how the obsession with struggling has been made a badge of honour in order to shame those who did not have to struggle. Should the privileged feel bad for having families and parents that are able to financially support them? We want to eradicate poverty and yet we are also the very people who hate to see children benefit from the rewards of their parents’ hard work and have the privilege of support.

BEnEfits

This brings forth the mentality that privilege is okay only when it benefits a person and shamed when it benefits someone else, which is questionable. The idea that people need to struggle and flank in the pool of poverty in order for their hard work to be acknowledged is barbaric and only shows that poverty is the benchmark from hard work and that in order for people’s efforts and hard work to be recognised then it must stem for a place of struggle and the inability of it to be so means we must resent those who have broken from the chains of poverty for their families.

If anything, instead of gate keeping hard work as a product of poverty and resenting privilege, it is necessary that privilege be used as a motivating tag for many, as something admirable, to see people achieve greatness and work hard with support. It should push others to want the same for their children, to work against poverty and ensure that the hard work of the next generation is filled with as much support and comfort as possible, that the next generation of young people should not have to be poor in order to work hard, but rather be in a position to enjoy the privileges of their parents hard work.