Poverty Does Not Make Every Pauper Kind

I had spent ten years with poor people, full of Illusions about them and out of pity and rage ready to forgive them almost everything. Their sense of involvement with life, their capacity to endure through endless periods of deprivation and catastrophe were qualities I found heroic. But now for the first time I was plunged into the reality of a poverty that couldn't be disguised by Ramones presents to intervene for my protection or to explain in a softer way certain irrationality and brutalities. I had come over to this further side wondering if I could handle the jungle, never suspecting that it was the people, not the forest, that would fill me with despair. On one side of me lived a group of drunken louts who, if they had had the courage, would have killed me; on the other side, my friends, the ones who came to my house in the late afternoons - to visit me when I was there or to rob me when I was gone."

- Moritz Thomsen. The Saddest Pleasure