Not at all. What's naive is presuming that people in poverty are just as driven and equipped to make good decisions as you are.
Whether poverty causes ignorance and complacency or the relationship is reversed (it probably goes both ways and depends on the person) there's no question that a sizable minority, if not the majority, of people in poverty are quite content to live off of the government and spend their days idle. Partly because of the mentioned lack of guidance, partly because of ignorance, and partly because not all people have ambitions beyond having their basic needs met.
You have to put yourself into the shoes of someone who did not pay any attention in school, if they attended. Has no real grasp of the utility of math or science or knowledge in general. No intrinsic thirst for learning or accomplishment. Take food, cigarettes, maybe other drugs (alcohol included) as funds permit, cheap entertainment (TV, Facebook, Instagram), and sex, and you have a recipe for millions of content lives which are a net cost to greater society.
And what's worse is that the children of these types of people grow up in a similar environment and pick up the same fundamentally rotten culture. Sorry to be harsh but this is the reality - no amount of funds will fix broken culture.
It's really amazing to see the mental gymnastics going on here to try and paint the people born into poverty as those with a broken culture, no ambition and being a net drain on society.
I was one of those people born into poverty. Your post is remarkably ignorant of the circumstances we faced and dealt with, and why cheap entertainment is used as an escape from the crushing levels of bullshit we had to deal with on a daily basis.
For someone who says to put yourself into the shoes of the poor, you could do with a reality check yourself.
I don't think your response is fair. Rather, I think you are focused on the feeling of offense and resentment for what you see as a condescending attitude from the parent commenter. But, if as you say, you came from poverty and broke away, surely you can look at the situation objectively and acknowledge that escapism often leads to negative feedback loops in and of itself, and that their commentary on culture is accurate for a significant minority if not a majority of those in poverty.
It's easy to interpret an emotional context in the parent's comment that may not be present. It could absolutely be read as a condescending comment which looks down upon poor people as less than. However, a charitable reading which takes a step back should be able to acknowledge the uncomfortable truth in their statements.
Nobody is saying that the circumstances of poverty are not absolutely soul crushing, it's rather a statement on how people react to those circumstances lead them farther down a dark path rather than into the light, and as poverty becomes generational it forms its own culture. There is absolutely a culture of poverty (technically multiple cultures of poverty) in the US, at the very least.
I think my response is plenty fair, considering one of the core aspects of his argument in paragraph 3 is equating people in poverty to those without drive, ambition, people that sink into escapism which is the reason why they're in poverty (hence the rotten culture).
It's the exact same 'those dirty poors are poor because they're lazy' nonsense I've heard over and over again just dressed up slightly. The emotional context is that he's outright calling those people a drain on society.
And when I look back on poverty and escapism, for a lot of people it's the one thing giving them a temporary out from the crushing depression of realizing that you're trapped in a situation that you'll likely never escape. I refuse to accept their commentary as any sort of objective analysis because it reeks of someone passing judgment on something they have never experienced.
I agree with your analysis of the grandparent to some extent, but I think you're seeing condescension that may not be there or even if it is there isn't really the point. It's absolutely true that poverty has negative impacts on mental health including crushing depression. That defeatist mentality definitely drives the seeking of simple pleasures when they become available. Over generations (and poverty is generational in the US), that becomes cultural. Culture isn't some amorphous concept, it's the set of things which are socially acceptable within the surrounding peer group you find yourself in. It's something you get inculcated into by your parents and your friends.
But that is also not the way out, not from a rational perspective. We have to wrangle with the fact that the rationally best actions someone in poverty can take with what little money they have, especially large lump sums like tax returns, is not the way most people behave because human beings are emotional creatures. I don't think it requires looking down upon the poor to acknowledge that their choices are driven by internal factors (mental health, despair) as well as external cultural factors (consumerism, social status among the poor being driven by luxury brands, et al).
I'm just as guilty of practicing escapism as anyone else when I was in poor circumstances, it was just a random chance my escapism was into books which in turn helped increase my knowledge and ability to converse intelligently, rather than into lottery tickets, junk food, and entertainment. But it was still a form of escapism, and it was driven by many of the same factors. Books were more valuable in the long-term (knowledge, skills), and they were less costly in the short-term (used market, libraries), and in the end it helped provide me a way out.
While my family wasn't wealthy and after leaving home I was even more poor for awhile, I came out of a culture that emphasized reading, literacy, and learning and used the television only for public broadcasting/documentaries. That's just as cultural as other families who emphasize social hierarchies/machismo, strength/being hard, and taking what you want, and uses television for escapism and entertainment. Saying something is cultural isn't an insult, it's an observation. Whether it started that way is irrelevant, it's cultural now that generations have gone by.
I'd much rather see a conversation that tries to understand how we can break the cycle of poverty by helping people make better more rational choices and using forms of escapism that lead to positive outcomes instead of those that reinforce negative feedback loops. I think offense-taking and trying to find the worst possible interpretation of someone making a relevant observation isn't going to solve the problem.
Maybe it's a touchy point of its own with me, but it seems so many of the really serious problems of our modern life can't be discussed in anything approaching an objective manner because there's always someone who wants to use it as an opportunity to take offense, rather than to understand and empathize, and return with something that changes the perspective of the person by creating empathy for themselves. Offense-taking doesn't build empathy, it just shuts down conversation.
Whether poverty causes ignorance and complacency or the relationship is reversed (it probably goes both ways and depends on the person) there's no question that a sizable minority, if not the majority, of people in poverty are quite content to live off of the government and spend their days idle. Partly because of the mentioned lack of guidance, partly because of ignorance, and partly because not all people have ambitions beyond having their basic needs met.
You have to put yourself into the shoes of someone who did not pay any attention in school, if they attended. Has no real grasp of the utility of math or science or knowledge in general. No intrinsic thirst for learning or accomplishment. Take food, cigarettes, maybe other drugs (alcohol included) as funds permit, cheap entertainment (TV, Facebook, Instagram), and sex, and you have a recipe for millions of content lives which are a net cost to greater society.
And what's worse is that the children of these types of people grow up in a similar environment and pick up the same fundamentally rotten culture. Sorry to be harsh but this is the reality - no amount of funds will fix broken culture.