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I guess you could say I grew up in the burbs. Actually a small town population was just over 5,000. Yet I sound just like your poverty child. My Dad worked two full time jobs, my mom worked a full time job, We never ate healthy, everything was processed foods. We set our own bedtimes, never did our home work, ran the streets.

Fast forward 15 years many of the people I went to school went to college got an education moved away and got good paying jobs. LPN's office managers, operations managers, Software Engineers, Aerospace Engineers, Chemists. I went to work in a coal mine, was married one year after High School. I stayed in a poor, depressed area in Appalachia. Yet I made more money than 90 percent of people in this country do. Now if my uneducated, slow minded, rude, crude, ignorant ass could do that so can anybody else. So I have to disagree with you that growing up in poverty is an excuse to not succeed.

Yeah, I think our posting history shows we've disagreed more than we've agreed... having said that, I do appreciate the even keeled reply. And I too have often typed out bunches of posts, only to delete them for basically the same reason... why put all the effort when someone is going to summarily dismiss your view point?

The problem I have with this discussion on this site is that a lot of stuff posted disregards any kind of context, or things are written in a way that misconstrues. For example: your last reply to me compared the struggles kids in poor places experience vs. the suburban kids in regards to their education.

I wouldn't disagree with any of your points. So how should I interpret that post? Do you believe that I either dismisses those factors as being real, or that they don't matter? Because there is literally nothing I've ever posted that says or suggests such a thing.

Now having stated that I don't disagree with your post, I will say that I have 1 singular problem with it: you don't go deep enough on your points.

Let's take the nutrition aspect of it. Yes, poor kids will eat less healthy than the suburban kids. But it's not enough to just point that out and conclude "that's not fair". We have to start digging in to the details and asking WHY those kids eat less healthy.

-Do the parents (well, likely parent) have time between jobs to prepare meals (your point about fast food)?

-If a parent does have time, do they know how to prepare a healthy meal or what constitutes a healthy meal?

-For those on public assistance, are there enough viable healthy options that can be bought with food stamps? When I see convenience stores with big signs saying you can buy your Rockstar Energy drink with your EBT card, I have to think to myself WTH (And I've seen this firsthand)?

Being healthy IS a problem for poor kids. Are we just going to point it out and say it's not fair, or are we going to explore ways to educate and provide better access?

I'll touch on crime for a moment: I've said a number of times I think there needs to be revisions and reforms in things like crime classifications (misdmeanors/felonies). When it comes to disparities in sentencing, IMO I think you guys sometimes have a habit of not taking consideration things like recidivism and overall criminal histories as being factors. But that aside, let's just say I agree with you guys 100% that the disparity is based on race. It doesn't change the fact that those guys are still committing a crime. Whether the law is stupid, or not liked, or should be decriminalized, or whatever... it still doesn't change the fact that people are choosing to commit the crime in the first place.

So someone like me has to wonder: if the system is skewed against a certain population of people, why do members of that population continue to do things that ultimately subject them to that very system? The vast majority of people in this country, including black people, will never get locked up because they don't commit crimes.

This is why I harp so much on crime being a choice, and while I'm not saying it absolves or justifies disparity in the system, the reasons for a person's participation is IMO a very important consideration.

I often get accused of over simplifying things. I'm not naïve enough to think things are so simple. But I do think it's important not to over complicate them when you don't need to, and maybe it's just the investigator in me, but I often find it productive to ask basic questions, especially when the answers are generally accepted as obvious.

When I was a kid, and my father took off, we were on food stamps for a while.

We didn't have many prepared meals. We rarely had pop. (maybe on a birthday or holiday, but that was it) My mom worked, but all of us kids could put together a meal.

I look at how people today waste their food stamp benefits, and it is amazing. If I go to the convenience store up the street from my old house, inevitably there will be someone buying $12 subs, and potato chips, dip, pop, and other junk. I have seen people spending $60 or $70 on one meal like this. If a person is on food stamps, then this is not the kind of choices they should be making. This is not the best allocation of resources. Unfortunately, many people on food stamps today are young people, whose mothers were young and unwed, whose mothers were young and unwed ..... and the whole story repeats back for 5, 5, or more generations.

We need to give people receiving food stamps a nutrition education, and we need to limit the choices available to those receiving food stamps to cost efficient and nutritional options. We need to help those receiving food stamps make better choices with their food dollars, as opposed to just throwing more money at them with which to continue to make poor choices.

Weird, my wife and I both work 10+ hours a day and still find time to cook, help with homework, teach values etc etc...That doesn't leave us much time for sitcoms and video games, but hey...that's part of raising children

There is nothing wrong with disagreeing, I value your response even if we don’t agree, I may not agree with you but I respect that you are posting your view. Please don’t think that I am not learning from your perspective just because I don’t I agree.

I believe that people are stubborn and don’t think other peoples opinions matter when it goes against their opinion.
For example, I only buy organic or hormone free milk from health stores. People will have this attitude of “I grew up drinking regular milk from a regular store so it’s stupid to drink organic milk” This type of thinking is counterproductive and completely dismisses my concerns on why I feel that buying organic milk is important. I have arguments on why I should buy my organic milk (, humans shouldn’t drink cows milk, cows are injected with all types of hormones that is passed into our milk that is passed onto us causing young girls to develop faster, ect….. ) but who really cares people are going to argue just to agrue and pick it apart.


Lets talk about child nutrition. (I will break it down further)

No access to healthy food, no grocery stores near them. (so if you have food stamps or money, your food is crap)

Food at corner stores / convenience stores are expensive, and fresh food is usually very old and wilted

Parents might not have reliable transportation which means, if the closest grocery store is 2-3 miles away it will be very hard to get there on bus.

How many bags can a person walking 4-5 blocks carry from the store to their house?

That same parent is working 10-12 hours a day (50-60 per week) they might not have the time to prepare that healthy meal. (if you have young children you have to prepare for the next the day, and if you work 10-2 hours day with no transportation you will more than likely have to get up really early to drop kids off at daycare then to work, so quick hamburger helper is the way to go)

After working all day they might be exhausted and simply don’t have the energy to cook baked ziti with green beans. So, boiling some hot dogs with potato chips will feed them and make them happy. (what kid is going to turn that down?)
Parents might not be exposed to healthy food themselves and don’t know to prepare food, (I never knew how awesome roasted carrots and parsnips would be and we eat them 2 times a week. My mother never cooked carrots.)

Also we have to look at the behaviours of people just being people, would I rather eat Oreo cookies, or melon? I will take the Oreos everyday and twice on Sunday.


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With that being said, I am not always talking to you specifically when I post, I am also talking to the other lurkers out there who are reading these posts. Hopefully they can underatand my perspective and they can learn from it.

On one hand, I agree with you that some of those things might be legitimate problems for some people.. on the other hand it looks like a whole lot of excuses.

If childhood nutritional issues/obesity was limited to just those who can't overcome the problems you listed above, we would have about 1/10th the problem that we have..

Why aren't there grocery stores in the areas you are talking about? I don't disagree with you about the importance of nutrition-- I'm just curious about your take on what is causing that logistical issue.

FWIW this topic interests me a lot more from the food angle than it does the poverty angle. Quality nutrition is very important for everybody. Surely you are right about the situation being worse in poor neighborhoods but I would add that it is an societal thing as well. Many people have really horrible diets and this includes suburbanites. The obesity epidemic and skyrocketing rates of various diseases are evidence of this (there are also other factors of course).

Last year we had one or two grocery stores that were located in our poorer neigborhoods closed down. This left many people in the very position Lurker was just talking about. The owners said they couldn't afford to stay in business. Now whether that was because of poor business model or management, lack of sales, or a high amount of cost going toward covering shoplifting, I don't know.

The big question now is what do you do to replace it? How do you convince someone to invest and build a store in that community? It is a high crime area. How do you convince someone to put up that kind of money, and who is willing to subject their employees to that? You generally won't see large retail chains bothering to make that investment OR some communities simply aren't big enough to support something like a Walmart Super Center. The only ones left are your Mom and Pop type people, many immigrants, who do, but then being a small business, they are only able to carry the less expensive items... which goes back to Lurkers point about gas stations only offering crap and being the only types of stores they have access to.

Devil.... my friend, I already covered that subject.

The posts I'm recalling came from Vers' thread entitled: "The Implications of Racism." I remember it very clearly, because you and I conversed directly about it in that thread. In that thread, I talked extensively about 'Urban Food Deserts'... why they exist, what they mean to America's Urban Underclass, and what might be done to address the problem.

https://www.dawgtalkers.net/ubbthreads.php/topics/945639/1

In that thread, I talked about a company called 'Spartan Stores,' who made their bones by initially providing stores and services to the U.S. Military (Spartan/Nash, Inc.). They made a conscious choice (on the corporate level) to locate their retail stores in urban environs. They took the risk many years ago, and to this date, the stores I've seen in Toledo that opened in the early 2000's are still open- ALL OF THEM.

They've served as 'anchor stores' to resident strip malls, encouraging the appearance of locally-owned ethnic food stores (Kim's Korean), barber shops, nail salons, beauty parlors, etc ...which keep local money circulating locally. They provide fresh produce/meats (year-round) to a population that would otherwise have to find their 'proper nutrition' 6-8 bus stops away.

Today, I had to travel to an Elementary School, to do a 'youth outreach' demo/lecture. From my house to that school, I passed 2 local 'Spartan centers.' along the way. Biz was happening at BOTH parking lots. BOTH centers were hopping- at 9:00AM. Both were still hopping at 11:00AM when I drove back to the Symph offices.


This thing you describe may be happening in your neighborhoods... but their antithesis been happening in mine for as long as as I've lived in this zip code. My own local route as an 'Itinerant Ambassador for the Arts' shows me so.


The things you ask about CAN be done. These things HAVE been done. Right under my nose.

I wish that they had happened on your watch. It's a pretty cool thing to see.
Maybe, your locale hasn't yet reached the 'stage of desperation' that mine did- 25 years ago.

Maybe there's a 'Spartan in your future'


just saying,
Clem......





There is no 'can't' where will is employed.

Where I grew up our small local stores got robbed about once a week. The cashier stayed behind one of those glass walls and only 2 students were allowed in the store at a time...Im betting that may be part of the reason they close.