You can probably tell that I'm responding to the "are poor people even human" thread which is circulating right now, which indeed I am. I'm an investment banker, but I'd like to tell a few stories which are near and dear to my heart.
My great-grandparents
Great-Grandfather A: Poor subsistence farmer who grew one cash crop, made poorer still by the fact that his father, who was expected to be the breadwinner, had what we would now consider rheumatoid arthritis which was so severe that his entire body was drawn up and all he could do was sit in a chair or lie in bed. This left my Great-Grandfather especially destitute in an already poor community. When my Great-Grandfather's father died, they buried him in a box that was taller than it was long, because he was so drawn up that he wouldn't fit in a regular coffin; they would have had to have broken his back and his legs to get him to fit and they weren't willing to do that. My Great-Grandfather lived a very meager life, but he always prided himself on how much harder he was working than his neighbors.
Great-Grandfather B: Crushed to death in an industrial accident in his 30s, leaving his wife destitute and forcing her to rely on handouts from family members and pass her children around from relative to relative, dependent on the kindnesses of distant aunts and uncles for a few weeks at a time before being uprooted to go to the next one.
Great Grandmother C: Her mother died in childbirth delivering her, and her family was very poor. Growing up, they had so little to eat that they made "stone soup." It was made with whatever vegetables they had at the time, and every once in a blue moon, they would have some meat which would add flavor to things. Whenever they had meat, they would keep a porous stone in the stew to absorb some small portion of the savory meaty flavor. That way, for all the 8 out of 10 times they didn't have any meat to eat at all, they could stick the stone back in the pot to impart that savory flavor from last week to what they were eating for the day.
My grandparents
Grandfather A: Poor cash crop farmer for the first part of his adult life, but later found success in running a small general store that became the center of his community. He saved up enough money to put his two children through school to be healthcare professionals.
Grandfather B: Middle-management with a steel factory, saved up enough money to put 4 of his 5 children through school to be healthcare professionals. The 5th, the smartest of them all, was taken by alcoholism.
My parents
Healthcare professionals who did everything they could for me.
Me
An investment banker who writes long-form pieces on a financial forum on the internet, an internet that his great-grandparents never knew, and his grandparents didn't know until adulthood, and an internet that to this day, some of his neighbors from his hometown still can't access by virtue of poverty and geographic isolation.
I write all of these things to show that I wouldn't be where I am today without the continual heroism of generations of people who toiled through squalor. They were proud people and proud of the things they accomplished. They were human. They had hopes, dreams, ambitions, plans. Some were thwarted and delayed in their own time by circumstance. Others they saw and accomplished in their own day. Still others they saw bear fruit through the accomplishments of their own children.
99% of people who have ever lived on this planet were/are so poor that the people of America today would be scarcely able to fathom it. Most of those 99% were far poorer than any of my ancestors whose stories I've tried to convey to you. They had ambitions too. They were human.
This is an elite place. The people here are generally very smart people. I write to you because I trust that you, of all people, will find a way through your intelligence to know and understand that there is great dignity in being human, even if that means eking out a living that is far more meager than the latest sign-on bonus at the elite boutiques.
This is what I say. My grandparents were all peasants in Italy/Ireland and my parents both became successful after being blessed to low middle class nyc lifestyles from their parents grinding. The immigrant stories make me want to be rich because no one in my family until my parents generation had any money.
My grandparents dropped out of middle school to work on vegetable farms in SE Asia, then they worked so hard after founding a successful timber business and gave themselves permanent back issues so that they could send my mom overseas for college, then my mom immigrated to the US where she didn't speak the language to have me. I could never match up to them.
My grandparents came to america from Auschwitz and being Polish, no one gave a fuck because we aren’t a protected class. They worked their asses off and here I am decades later rubbing shoulders with people who essentially print their own money. It’s glaringly obvious that legacy wealth DESPISES their employees and new money like myself are acutely aware that the average worker knows they’d be better off putting the wealthy to the guillotine…but here we are in a sclerotic civilization where folks are ‘happy’ as long as they can scapegoat some group or another that’s different than them. So what to do? My only ambition at this point is to hit my number and bounce, probably to Europe, maybe to the Caribbean. I couldn’t give a shit less of the rich or the poor ever work out their differences, there won’t be any meaningful change in my lifetime
Society’s ills are at this point entirely man made and in my personal opinion, the human race can go fuck itself
Same bro it's my dream to move to Europe at some point. My grandparents are Portuguese so I'm gonna try to get EU citizenship through them and dip once I've saved up a good amount here. It seems like the quality of life there on average is a lot better unless you're extremely rich here.
Consequatur velit perspiciatis sed. Sapiente occaecati aliquid sit consequatur mollitia. Consectetur libero odit assumenda molestiae et sequi maiores.
See All Comments - 100% Free
WSO depends on everyone being able to pitch in when they know something. Unlock with your email and get bonus: 6 financial modeling lessons free ($199 value)
or Unlock with your social account...