Stupid & Poor

Stupid & Poor

It’s not the nice thing to admit, but some (if not many) of the poor are poor because they’re stupid.

I’ve known them directly. I’ve been an insider. The abjectly poor with their idiotic pipe dreams of winning millions in the lottery. Impoverished with their fantasies of women and yachts and private islands and other luxuries they wouldn’t know what the fuck to do with.

The common thread with this species of the poor is their stupidity. A stupidity which has surely been a constant beacon for their misfortune.

Too stupid to understand if they’re the one winning the lottery, they’re also the one losing it in no time at all.

Too stupid to understand their own stupidity as others understand it. Others, some like vultures, ready to pick them clean, all the way down to the bone. Vultures, understanding their victims for the stupid, easy marks they are.

The stupid and poor have dreams about wealth. What they ought to dream of is being different people than the fundamental fools they are. It’s a foolishness that transcends either rich or poor. A foolishness – an idiocy – like an anchor, necessary weighing them down to poverty. A stupidity – like an albatross – that no amount of wealth will ever allay.

One of them tells me, if he wins the lottery, he’d spend a few million to fuck the world’s most beautiful women. I tell him a hundred thousand would be enough to get some pretty good looking woman.

He says with all the wealth from winning the lottery, the difference between a million and a hundred thousand wouldn’t be anything. He says a million would be a drop in the bucket if he won anything close to half a billion.

I want to tell him, if he gave a woman a million dollars to fuck him, if she had any sense, she’d use that money to hire a million dollar lawyer to fuck him out of the rest of his millions.

I’m pretty sure that’s how it would go. Granted, I’m stupid too. But not so stupid as to not understand how it would all go down.

He tells me off all the things he’ll do if he wins the lottery. He tells me time and time again – with enough money – all his problems would be solved.

He’s said dozens of times, “They say money can’t buy happiness. But give me a few million and I’ll show them exactly what happiness looks like.”

Sometimes he sprinkles in a bit of the religious stuff too.

So I ask him, “Doesn’t the Bible say things against worshiping money?”

“It’s not money I worship,” he says. “It’s the happiness it’ll bring. That’s what I worship – happiness, not money.”

“That’s some pretty thin hair you’re trying to split,” I say.

Like I said, sometimes there’s no saving the poor – or anybody else for that matter – from the own stupidity.

I pretend to ponder in order to ask, “Would it be better to be born with brains, discipline, morals and worth ethic or a few million bucks?”

He looks at me as if I’d just grown tits for ears.

“The millions of bucks?” I say.

“Of course,” he says. “What’s the matter with you? Are you stupid?”

“You’d give up any common sense you’ve got? Your morality? Your sense of right and wrong? Any desire to achieve anything? You’d trade that all in for the hedonism that a few million bucks would afford?”

“Sure,” he says. “But I’d give some to charities for kids with cancer. And animal shelters. I’m not that selfish.”

I explained all this to someone recently. Someone who’s not poor.

She said, “Maybe when you’re poor, you’re left with nothing but your fantasies.”

That made perfect sense.