Sickness
Rich: Sickness is a normal part of life, acceptable, tolerable. Sickness is met with compassion, care, attention, and medicine–whatever is necessary for recovery. You have health care, you have access to doctors, you have knowledge of health. People want you to live.
Poor: You are not allowed to get sick. You are paid per hour or per job, and every day you are sick, you are missing income. This may cause you to become homeless because you are working paycheck to paycheck. Sickness is met with punishment, cruelty, capitalism (bills don’t care, creditors don’t care, your boss doesn’t care, teachers will not stop the curriculum for you), you feel deep shame to burden your family with your sickness, if you’re even lucky enough to have family members who don’t tell you to shut up and deal with it like everyone else does. With each passing day, your debt grows while your income remains zero. You’re digging a hole in what is already the deep hole of your life. Capitalism wants you to die–you are a plague upon society, as are all social welfare cases, a burden for the rich and powerful, for the system: a leech. There are too many mouths to feed, not enough money to pay for your life. [Ironic since we have enough food to feed everyone, but I’ll write a separate article for social commentary]
Health
Rich: Life is about being healthy. Your quality of life is higher, your idea of health is better than that of a poor person.
Poor: Life is about survival. If you’re not dead, you’re healthy. Shut up and deal with it–whatever pain and suffering you have, you can adapt, you can endure it, you must, or you die. You think because you survived it once, you can survive it again (starvation hunger dehydration exhaustion). If you haven’t died yet, you must be healthy. It’s a question of survival, not of how healthy you are: the fact that you are alive, puts you ahead of those who are dead. Because you have experienced a much wider range of health, you are less scared of variations in your health than a rich person whose health stays within a stable range. Whatever sickness symptoms would sound off alarms to a person accustomed to good health, to a poor person means nothing: you’ve lived through it before and survived. If it hasn’t killed you before, it is survivable: deal with it. What matters is surviving at all: health is for when you’re successful and deserve it, for the rich people.
Read more about articles in the Rich vs. Poor Series here.
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