The hardest thing to the do in the U.S. is to escape poverty. Being poor is expensive; the more money you spend, the more money you save. You can spend more money for something that is quality and will last more in the long run, but when you’re struggling with poverty you don’t have luxury of thinking long term. You don’t have the funds to invest in a better life. Double this because the system we live in is not set up to help most people succeed, especially the poor; the system’s rules are built by the rich, who absolutely have no intention of sharing power, and those rules are generally created and changed to benefit them and only them. It leaves people at the bottom with little resources and even less options for leaving the situations they are in. People who have never experienced poverty are generally very out-of-touch with the concept, because they can’t imagine at all what it’s like; if you don’t believe me, ask most middle class people what they think the poor should do to climb up the social and financial ladder and watch them give all sorts of nonsensical responses (”well, work three jobs then; you’re just being lazy”; “start a savings account and put money away there every month, it’s not hard”; “well if you want to be paid better, then maybe you should find a better job, because you only have yourself to blame for being here.”).
There’s so little compassion and understanding, because the people in power have turned poverty from a situation of bad fortune and environmental pressures to one of morality. We are not taught to view the poor as being in difficult situations in a system that benefits from their poverty, we are taught to see them as morally defunct and to see their poverty as a character flaw. When we believe that, it makes it easier to disassociate ourselves from those who struggle, because if we believe that their poverty is a sign of their morality, then our own good fortune (which in reality is predicated on a number of factors and privileges that we have zero control over) means that we, the ones decently well off, are “special” and “morally upright.” Very few people are given the tools and mindset to accept that most of the opportunities they get or don’t get in life are heavily tied to our privileges; very few people are taught to look at the poor and feel sympathy; very few are taught to look at the poor and think “that could have been me, if I had been born in a different place at a different time, if I had been born with a different skin color in a society deeply embedded in institutionalized racism that handicaps certain groups, etc.”
We need to work on that.
Conversely, the easiest thing to do in the U.S. is to remain rich once you’re there. Power amasses power, and in a capitalist system, there is no greater power than capital. Once you have it, you have access to powers and privileges you did not before: better resources for you and your family, better education, little to no debt, better medical care, better investment opportunities, political influence on a much larger magnitude, etc.
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