Poverty

Subject: Poverty.

What do we mean by poverty. What do we mean by being poor. Is being poor merely an indication of income or is it a measure of an inadequate cultural knowledge base where we don't recognise the dilemma we are in.
"Money makes the world go round" of course and we all wish we had more of it. But money does not produce happiness and we can be extremely poor in human love and respect irrespective of the car we drive. There is an argument to say that we are rich if we see ourselves as being successful, irrespective of how that success is measured. You could be poor economically but give and receive love within and from the family. It is difficult to imagine the sense of failure if your family, no matter how hard you work or the size of the pay cheque, disengage with you or show their disdain no matter what you do for them.
Poverty of emotion is on a par with actual poverty since 'actual poverty' is a created indices, measured by people who statistically create norms under or over which they declare their findings but which take little notice of the actual segment of society from which they lift their findings.
In the extremist case there are people who decline to live in society or accept societies norms and distinguish themselves by the abstinence of all those things which the cultural/economic statistician deems necessary. It has always been a feature of cultural life that women can often make a small amount go very far indeed. During  and after the war due to the imposition of rationing families were forced to cut back and use their own ingenuity to feed themselves. People have very happy memories often in their childhood when things were scarce, clothing passed down and "necessity was the mother of invention".
Of course we are not speaking of the starving people in North Africa. We are not describing true hunger which we see on our screens, of wild eyed children suffering emaciation through real and never ending hunger. These people fall outside the definition of being poor.
To be poor in England is different to being poor in South Africa but the common line which runs through is the definition and the personal interpretation of being poor.
Would I feel I was poor if I couldn't afford a large flat screened TV, some people do.
Would I feel poor if I couldn't afford a holiday, some people do. A trip to the pub or a night playing bingo, some people would convince themselves they were poor.
The poor are the people who can't find money in their purse for a meal, or money to buy their children shoes for school. They are the ones who in desperation scratch at the bottom of their purse to put money in the gas meter or the electric meter when it runs out. The poor are the ones who suffer the ignominy of failing to secure funds for their kids to go on a school trip.
Usually the poor are the people who fail to measure up to 'expectations', especially of their children. People who would willingly go without themselves and not bat an eyelid but as a failure in society, reading the opprobrium reigned down on them by certain of the tabloid press and feel oppressed by their failure cry buckets of tears when no one is looking.