Why Some People “Fail At Life”

Erick Erickson, whose ridiculous statement that “life doesn’t deal you cards” I examined in Who Really Fails at Life, turns out to be the founder of an influential conservative website call RedState, and as I’ll write in another post, more thoughtful than his comment on the Rush Limbaugh show suggests.

He turns out also to be a serious Christian whose Christianity alienates some of his supporters because it requires for him political commitments they don’t like. And good for  him.

Beginning with his admirably open Christian commitment: If you accept Jesus’ demand that you do unto others as you would have them do unto you, you will try to understand their lives and not sweep away the specific realities of their experience with an ideological slogan. That is what you would have others do for you. And you will think, when trying to understand what they deal with, “There but for the grace of God go I.” That also you would have others do for you. Jesus said that to whom much is given, from him much is required, and one thing required of him is empathy, and empathy often takes some effort.

Here is one description of the life of the working poor. The writer, Linda Turado, explains:

I make a lot of poor financial decisions. None of them matter, in the long term. I will never not be poor, so what does it matter if I don’t pay a thing and a half this week instead of just one thing? It’s not like the sacrifice will result in improved circumstances; the thing holding me back isn’t that I blow five bucks at Wendy’s. It’s that now that I have proven that I am a Poor Person that is all that I am or ever will be. It is not worth it to me to live a bleak life devoid of small pleasures so that one day I can make a single large purchase. I will never have large pleasures to hold on to.

There’s a certain pull to live what bits of life you can while there’s money in your pocket, because no matter how responsible you are you will be broke in three days anyway. When you never have enough money it ceases to have meaning. I imagine having a lot of it is the same thing.

The journalist Barbara Ehrenreich spent a year living, as much as a successful intellectual can, the lives of the working poor, taking different jobs for a month in different parts of the country. Her book Nickle and Dimed: On (Not) Getting by in America tells the story of these jobs and explains how the working poor get trapped into lives and decisions for which the more fortunate tend to blame them. If I have time I’ll write up a couple of examples, but for now Turado’s article offers some insight into a life few of us reading Patheos will ever know.

My thanks to Michael Liccione for the link.