A Christmas carol

I felt sorry for the woman wearing the bulky holiday sweater.

My friend and I were returning from a satisfying Target run, and I was content with my new granola bars and the world at large – until I glimpsed out the window and saw her. The decorative seasonal sweater she donned exerted a serious negative externality for everyone forced to behold it.

“Perhaps she can’t afford any other coat,” my friend suggested.
She was right, and I felt guilty.

But my response was more than simply being struck at how ugly my joke had been.

I also felt bad because I knew the woman wasn’t alone. The most recent figures suggest that 37.3 million Americans live below the poverty line. That’s 12.5 percent of the population – 12.5 percent of our fellow Americans who might not be able to afford even gaudy-looking protection from the cold this winter.

To solve this problem, we often ask undergraduates to volunteer their time or money to make a difference in the world. It’s true that if we singularly dedicated ourselves to eradicating poverty, we could probably accomplish the task.

But it can also seem like a meanly ironic thing to ask. I think it’s safe to suggest that the majority of students themselves have incomes lower than the poverty line. And most of us don’t like to be asked to solve other people’s problems when we have enough of our own.

But are students really living in poverty?

Perhaps we meet the government’s definition of being impoverished, but how many of us have gone hungry or woken up with frostbite after a night’s sleep on a concrete surface exposed to the cold?

No, our situation is substantially different. It’s true that we might not have a lot of disposable income, but I think it’s false to suggest we are excused from caring about those without a home this holiday season.

The sort of poverty students face is radically different than the experience of being truly impoverished. Much of the distinction lies in the non-monetary opportunities we have at our disposal.

We will soon have the social mobility to get the sort of jobs we want – jobs that provide for health care coverage and don’t leave us physically exhausted at the end of the day, no less. After four years living in Bloomington, most of us know that organic groceries exist and that we have alternatives to purchasing hormone-enhanced or processed food that will give us cancer.

Regardless of our income, we’re more likely to live long, and we won’t face the sort of stigmatization that keeps the less-educated from accessing basic public services.

This holiday season is the time to reject the idea that we have no obligation to those who really do have fewer opportunities than us. Life is about more than net income.

Celebrate everything good about your life that doesn’t involve money this year: share the holiday cheer of being a student.