Let them read Beckett

The ranks of the poor continue to grow, in the United States and around the world.

There are more and more poor people, notwithstanding efforts to demonstrate they really aren’t all that poor (because, for example, some of them own TVs and drive cars). And even though they’ve been shown time and again that it’s necessary to adopt the proper attitudes and behaviors (such as “marriage, industriousness, community and faith”) or, alternatively, that they can’t really be blamed for their plight (because the appropriate number of jobs have not been created).

Either way, as their numbers grow, poor people disgust us. As Suzanne Moore makes clear, “instead of being disgusted by poverty, we are disgusted by poor people themselves.” And rightly so. They’re poor, they’re all around us, and there are more of them every day.

Perhaps the only solution, then, is to encourage the poor to read Samuel Beckett: “No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better.”