(Originally posted 05/14/15. Reblogged 09/12/24.))
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Poor children have smaller brains
Tag Archives: Chaos
* Chaos overwhelms the poor
(Originally posted 08/06/14. Reblogged 08/15/24.)
Some weeks ago, I stood in line awaiting check-in at the shelter. This place charges $3 a night. I was holding my money in my hand, and someone playfully tugged at it. I snapped. I said, “You don’t value your life much, do you?”
Minutes later, I explained this to someone else. I said, “Don’t take a man’s last dollar.” “Why not?” he asked. I said, ” ‘Cause that’s the one he’ll die for. That’s the one he’ll kill for.”
Don’t take my last dollar. That’s the one I’ll kill for.
I’ve been on hard times since 2004. If I lose, or am robbed or cheated, of $20 or $50, that’s a pretty significant amount. But it doesn’t hurt all that much if I have more, and know more is coming. However, if I lose, or someone robs or cheats me of my last $1 — that’s the one that really hurts. That’s the one I’ll kill for.
These memories came to me as I reflected on Maggie Fox’s 08/29/2013 article, “Poor people aren’t stupid; bad decisions are from being overwhelmed, study finds.”
Continue reading * Chaos overwhelms the poor
* “Every thought is a prayer.”
The seductiveness of turmoil.
Thursday, August 25, 2016
My foremost task for today is to keep myself focused on the practical things I need to do to improve my lot in life.
They can be seen as boring, mundane, dreary, tedious, and so on — if I fail to love myself enough to actually want to do them.
Accordingly, this morning I was reading through various news articles, and on one page, at the end, the links to “related” articles included this:
I didn’t read the article, but boy, just that headline really got my engines going. I can’t remember the last time I was in a setting where someone might have been told, “Check your privilege.” Normally this is addressed to a white person, and, as I’ve noted before, in my world there aren’t enough white people to matter.
* For us
A grassy lot inspires a vision of what can be when a community cares for itself.
When I take the bus to church in the morning, I normally get off at the closest stop, walk three blocks north and one block east. At the corner where I turn is a vacant lot. I don’t know who owns it. In months past, it has typically been heavily littered.
One morning not long ago, as I approached that lot, I saw that it had been cleaned. I saw this from fifty feet away. The way things are around here, that little bit of beauty nearly knocked me down. It took my breath away. It lifted my spirits.
A tiny bit of beauty can powerfully affect one’s mood. A mere glimpse of a pretty face can make one’s whole day.
I reflected: harmony is the essence of beauty, exemplified in the orderliness of the clean lot as contrasted with the chaos of its previous litter. I reflected on the relatednesses among light, love, harmony, order and prosperity, on the one hand; and darkness, strife, chaos and need, on the other. What does it take to begin to establish harmony? I concluded that perhaps love, or self-love, is the beginning of creation.
What if the whole community cared for itself as someone cared for that lot? Continue reading * For us
* The disappearance of the Lyon sisters
* A landmark study
Stress in low-income families can affect children’s learning
I am very excited about this.
This is, as far as I know, the first study to attempt to measure the degree of chaos in the home.
The researchers in an earlier-mentioned study (Related: Poor children have smaller brains) speculated that “poor families tend to live more chaotic lives, and that stress could inhibit healthy brain development.” The current study seems to indicate that it is directly so.
As of this writing, my hypothesis has become as follows: the chaos of a growing child’s environment causes comparatively more resources to be devoted to the limbic system and less to the cerebral cortex, resulting in a body with reduced capacity to learn.
Related: A MUST-READ CONCERNING JUSTICE AND POVERTY
Related: Chaos overwhelms the poor
Related: Wisdom teaching in poor black homes
(Reblogged 10/13/16, 11/18/21.)
* Poor children have smaller brains
* A case on point about choosing thoughts, feelings
From my diary for Friday 2015-05-01:
Ta-Nehisi Coates has had two “provocative” HuffPost columns in two days. Wednesday she decried calls for calm in Baltimore. Yesterday she used the incident of Toya Graham’s confrontation of her son, to blame white people for every incident of violence among blacks. [P.S. 12:00. Correction: The latter was by Stacey Patton.] I may yet respond to the latter, but it’s best I not do so today. I need to direct my thoughts and choose my feelings, and I feel immeasurably better when I focus on my own affairs than when I allow myself to get engaged with her turmoil. Today’s task is to prepare materials for the prayer course; and it will be no excuse if I tell my students I came unprepared because she distracted me.
Reblogged 2021-08-12.
* “How municipalities in St. Louis County, Mo., profit from poverty”
“[T]he uprising in Ferguson was an inevitable reaction to the institutional racism coursing through the area for decades.” — Jack Kirkland
I’m homeless. At this writing, I’ve been homeless for exactly 3½ years.
When you meet a homeless man for the first time, you won’t notice his skin color. Not first. You’ll notice the condition he’s in. You’ll notice his clothes, his grooming, his conduct. Skin color is so far down the list, it might as well be left off completely.
Some disagree. They seem to think race is the only factor in poverty.
Continue reading * “How municipalities in St. Louis County, Mo., profit from poverty”
The Homeless Blogger 