Tuesday, November 27, 2012

False sense of poverty

I'm a social worker in a jail. Today one of the inmates showed an untrained but intricate drawing to my colleague.

"This is amazing," she said. "Do you ever go to galleries to look at art?"

"I never had no money for that kind of stuff," he told her.

Later she vented her frustration: "There are so many free galleries he could have been going to! There are passes from the public library. If only he had known! But poor people just don't find out about these things."

I love museums, and I almost never pay to go inside them. I love books, and I can have almost any book for free through the library request system. There are more free events in this city than I could possibly attend.

These are some of the things that make my life rich. Even on a small budget, you needn't have an impoverished life.

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