As you can well imagine, the vitriol and judgments are flowing from people who believe they know better than her. Comments from others preaching about what her choices should be are flowing thick and fast along with condemnation for not making those choices. I want to challenge that.

For one, that first sentence is clearly written by someone duping people into an angry reaction, and that last question needs to be ignored – it’s a terrible question. It’s asking if she’s right or if she lacks responsibility. The whole thing is set up for only one response. Naturally, people with means jump on it and point out, with venom spawned by our vast superiority, about how she’s not taking responsibility. This is seen all the time when questions of poverty in the developed world come up. We see letters to newspaper editors from people showing how they did it during financial hardship, Facebook comments trying to show how easy it is to do life on a limited budget, and so on. The response boils down to a simple premise – ‘those who struggle just need to make choices more like me.’ It assumes that everyone starts from exactly the same place with the same capacity. It’s an approach that looks at the problem through our own lens rather than the lens of those in the middle of the struggle and it assumes they should just be more like us. The approach reminds me of a little parable in the Bible in Luke 18:9-14. I’ll let you look it up.

I encountered this response recently. My wife and I took part in Live Below the Line – a challenge to cover our food and liquids on less than $2.25 each per day. To do it well I planned extensively, right down to the cent. I spent hours working on the computer with an Excel spreadsheet and the prices of the food we were going to use. I broke each item right down to its price per gram and ultimately came up with a daily food plan for each of us that kept us inside our budget while by and large providing us with good nutrition and a couple of luxuries (like coffee for me).

I had people using that as a way to say ‘see, those who struggle are just being irresponsible because they just need to do what you’ve done.’ They reduced the problem to a mere issue of making simple choices. What they didn’t notice was what went into coming up with that plan. I have a computer, I have a basic knowledge of Excel, I have the time and capacity to spend hours on it, I have the knowledge of how to do it, I have a family situation that gave me the space to do it, I have the drive and motivation to do it (because it was about raising money for a great cause and because I wanted to see if I could develop a tool that could be helpful to others), I have the belief that I could and that it was a meaningful thing to do because I would be making a difference – something I have a track record in. My whole, entire context set up me to be able to do it. It wasn’t simply about the choice to do it – my whole being is geared to see the choice first and then to be able to follow it through. I have the luxury to be able to do it. That’s the difference.

You see, before telling the women above that she’s silly for thinking she needs a gym membership and just needs to get outside and go for a walk, or play with her kids in the park, we need to be asking why she thinks she needs a gym membership. Rather than condemning her feeling of helplessness in the food choices where she believes junk-food is the cheapest option, we need to ask why she thinks that. Cultural messaging around us doesn’t help, but there is a whole psyche involved in just those two things. Self perception plays a huge role too – what we believe we are capable of. Many people feel helpless and give up, believing that there is no point in trying harder, or their whole life context has simply not given them the being and capacity needed to get through in a healthy and fulfilling way. Then the problem becomes self perpetuating with helplessness and depression feeding off themselves.

You see, people don’t love being poor and struggling, but many feel helpless, don’t know any other way, don’t see themselves as anything other, and lack the whole of being capacity needed for experiencing a better humanity. I know because it was, to an extent, me once upon a time. Thankfully I had plenty of people in different parts of my life early on that injected something other into my life that ultimately led me to being something other than a product of my immediate circumstances. Along that path of change I’ve also had nothing happen that has majorly disrupted my life and thrown me into survival mode – no big change in my circumstances that has pushed my head under the water. Simply chucking our arrogant assumptions about choices at those who struggle like we’re somehow better human beings doesn’t solve anything, it just perpetuates the barriers between those with the means and capacity and those without.

In my work with TEAR Fund I’ve had a chance to visit places in the world that embody extreme poverty in the global sense. In those communities I’ve visited we have amazing partner organisations that are doing phenomenal work. Often that sort of poverty is romanticised and we’re sold a picture of amazingly entrepreneurial people who just need a leg up to get them on the ladder and then they fly. But that’s not the reality – such communities are poor for a reason and that reason is often about context, systems, access, and power imbalances where those things have affected the whole being of those trapped within it. In order to properly address communal poverty we don’t just give a quick leg up and offer a bit of nice advice about better choices, we wrap around the whole context of a person, recognising that a deep transformation needs to take place both in the context around them, and in them. When you see men in a slum sitting together, eyes glazed over and drinking their home-made, potent alcohol, you know it’s about more than simple choices, but about something much deeper.

The same applies in a developed world context. Poverty involves the whole of a person’s being – hence why some can be happy and cope well in meager financial situations and get by quite well, while others truly struggle – it’s about more than money and simple choices.

Our responsibility if we want to make a difference, is not to pass judgment as if we’ve got it all together and they just need to be more like us, but to first empathise by asking a million why questions and not giving in to the superficial answers we think might be the solution.  From there let’s get in the ring WITH those who struggle, not as some holier than thou saviour, but as people on the journey WITH them, recognising that we have our own faults as well – seriously, how many of us make poor choices even when we know better and even when our context should enable us to make better choices? I know I do. None of us are complete saints in that area.

Let’s be less quick to judge and much quicker to get into the journey with people to set about the long path of real transformation. It’s not just about teaching someone how to fish, but about walking with them on a journey that moves them into being someone who fishes and who is free to do so – that involves more than just knowing how to fish, it involves their whole being and sense of identity and then having the tools and capacity to live out that identity.