Poverty

Poverty

I cannot say that 100% of the cases of poverty in our country are due to the same root cause. What I can say is that most of the cases are due to an embedded paradigm. The paradigm that things are just the way they are; so, If someone born in poverty then will die in poverty. There are different factors in Costa Rica enforcing that paradigm that are important to know about.

One of the top contributors to build this paradigm is the social believe of “pobrecito”. That term refer s to the common response to justify mediocrity.  When someone fails to do something we just say “pobrescito” and nothing more happens.  For example, we are currently modifying the transit law that regulates how people should behave while driving. Everybody complains about traffic jams, so the low is intended to put a fine for those who park on prohibit areas, but that law is not being approved because there are some legislators saying “pobresito” to those that can’t find a parking space and need to temporarily park in the middle of the street. So, why instead of forcing people to properly act, we are justifying a wrong behavior.  Same example applies for those who instead of looking for initiatives to change their economic y condition just enjoy the comfort of living in the “pobresito”stage and simply sit there waiting for some miracle to change their poverty conditions.

Other key item is education, or maybe the most important one. Education does not mean that all population needs to have a collage degree, but all needs to know the basics about exact sciences, economics, politics, philosophy and history. By having such knowledge individual will be able to use their imagination in order to identify development opportunities. Unfortunately even when we don’t have an army in Costa Rica and that money was supposed to go for building schools, reality is that most governments after the 80”s forgot how important education is and limited development chances to a big part of the population.

Finally I’ll mention a third factor building the paradigm, which is the mindset of minimum effort-maximum gain. Unfortunately this is one of the most common ways of acting by a big part of the population. There plenty of examples like the people who just want to get minimum money by selling grocery store items on the streets or those who build a house close by the rivers and just blame the government for their poor condition and even request the government for a new house instead of looking for opportunities to contribute to our society.

To sum up, poverty is mainly a consequence of our on acts and most of the cases can be solved by a change in our attitude toward braking paradigms. It is a mistake to wait for solutions coming from outsiders. There might be more factors like wars, epidemic, economic downturns but those are the less of the cases. Most of them can be change by braking the paradigms in life.

Edward Castillo, English 4.