You are just another NPC in the MMO of someone else's life. When you think of it this way, it sort of changes the tone.

I was talking to a kid at one of my outreach events in a, well let's say poor area, and a cop came over to talk to us. It was funny because we both straightened up and were very tense for that first 30-60 seconds of the encounter. The cop was cool and just wanted to look through the telescope and say "hello" but it is funny that this kid had nearly the same reaction I did. Once the cop was gone, he looked at me and half laughed said "Why are you all tense, you're white!" I replied along the lines of "Long story man, its all good now." How do you tell a kid that you grew up poor, Irish and Catholic in a part of the country that did not like Irish, or Catholics and really fucking hated poor people? That my friends and I mapped out the patrol routes and times so that we could go out and not have to deal with "cop shit?" That my friends got unlucky and had the shit beat out of them by a cop who admitted to the court that he hated the people who lived in my part of town? And how do you tell him that the bitterness and mistrust you have now will never really go away?

As human beings, our brains like to work in a framework that we are special, that nobody else can understand us. We are unique little snowflakes. But the reality is that we humans are herd animals, and many of us are going to have similar feelings, emotions and experiences. My family got out of poverty by luck, hard work and not giving up when by all rights we should have. How many others have been in the same boat? Thousands? 100,000's?

It’s crazy - poverty isn’t just a situation - it can be a long term learned behavior that spans generations.

I get in arguments when people I know with good intentions think that the solution to poverty is college. Like College loan debt is going to help the situation. The bad deal with poverty is that there is no single cause. The drug war and the prison industrial complex is making it worse. Drug use is really making it worse here in the rural areas. the lack of blue collar factory work. And for that matter the societal dismissal in many cases of non white-collar work. And we don't do big infrastructure projects any more like we used to to absorb some of the young and jobless while at the same time making things that will increase the value of communities which attracts investment, jobs, growth etc. Then you have bad parents, good parents who don't know any better themselves, single parent households, the awful state of daycare and child care for working parents, poor access to health care for kids (Sick kids do worse in school). And that is before we even tackle school funding that shafts poor areas of town.

There are always going to be poor people, and there is always going to be poverty. The way I look at the situation is how to be build ladders for people who want to work and save and strive to escape it? And wow I went off on a tangent to your post, didn't I?