Effects of Poverty in Society
July 13, 2012 | Society
To suffer poverty one is living in a permanent state of need or destitution. Any person who does not know the feeling experienced by not knowing where your next meal is coming from, or having a daily struggle to scratch around to feed crying, hungry children does not know anything about poverty.
Poverty and hunger go hand in glove, and the effects of poverty in society can be quite profound, that is if the people who take three square- meals a day for granted have any understanding of the word!
Any casual visitor to areas where poverty is rampant will shake his or her head and wonder how poverty can exist. Frequently these well dressed, well fed people will wonder how in the year 2011 that such conditions can exist.
Within western society there are relatively few poor people. But poverty and hunger, even to the point of starving children is a fact of life in many third world countries, where people are forced to live in houses of cardboard, have no running potable water, no source of income, and are continually vulnerable to disease.
Again in western countries, the wealth of the country is relatively evenly distributed in a general sense. A commonality in many third world countries is that very small minorities of the population directly controls the majority of the countries wealth, and only pay lip service to the poverty which surrounds most of their fellow countrymen.
The effects of poverty, hunger, lack of health facilities and education are not only an immediate problem in society, but have serious ramifications for the future. In these days of easy mass communication, conditions in other countries are readily spread by word of mouth, and it is inevitable that much social upset will occur, as the poor demand a better lifestyle. The seeds of such unrest can be observed by viewing what is happening in some Middle Eastern countries today.
If governments to not face up squarely to the effect poverty will have in society, then for the future, instead of allowing the third world rich to become richer at the expense of the poor, then the poor will surely face up squarely to the governments.