When you are poor you are a prisoner of your neighborhood, the horrible public transportation systems and crime. However, there are all sorts of freedoms that lie underneath. Little is expected of you. Poor people, for the most part, llive and let live and most don't pry into one's affairs. Prying into others affairs can be unhealthy. At the same time, poverty is a sort of shared adversity that unites people together. However, those who live clean fairly soon know each the other and are more likely to befriend each the other in the often brutally harsh and dangerous environment. Prejudice exists, but it is generally surpressed to the point of invisibility. The prostitutes get beaten up occasionally by their johns, drug dealing never sleeps and one sets ones bed up so that stray shots have a harder time reaching one because gunfire is as normal as dogs barking or cat fights in suburbia. No more beds near the window.

The rich are prisoners of money and their possessions. They are the prisoners of expectations. Being poor means you don't have three semi-trucks worth of possessions to haul around if you need to move. You can just load up a box or two and be gone. Being rich means you float on the surface. Your cars, homes and money act as barriers. Like surface tension on the water, you can't mingle with others easily, you can't talk as freely and you can't pay in change without being viewed as a skinflint cheapskate. Being rich means an almost instant enmity with the poor and, to an only slightly lesser degree, the middle class. This is no small thing. If you drive a very expensive car or wear very fashionable clothes you generate a small ball of resentment around you everytime you leave the "rich" neighborhoods. And in the rich neighborhoods such possessions merely become weapons. Clubs to announce one's station and superiority, since physical communication - actual talking - often doesn't exist. No one's keeping up with the Joneses on skid row. A $350,000 car is often just as unreliable as a $500 beater - sometimes moreso. And it carries a price that can't be measured in dollars. Few will help you push it if it stalls, what's more you can't even ask your neighbors or passersby for assistance you are just as alone and must pay for things others would not have to. And the rich live in fear too, fear of losing all they have acquired, fear of losing their homes, their vehicles, clothes, jewelry and collections. Yes, the rich are playing a role they can't ever dispense with - often like being part of a play that drags on day after day, week after week and year after year. You say they don't struggle with survival - but they do. It's a struggle to even live life happily with wealth. When you can pay all your bills, buy any new toy and derive almost no satisfaction at owning things, suddenly you find yourself as depressed as the person with nothing - and the person with nothing is more likely to have more friends and have MANY more small moments of unscripted joy. The rich get to get lots of anti-depressants and the accompanying health side-effects. They embrace escapism just as fervently as the poor, perhaps moreso. Seeing movies, watching television, playing games - anything to escape their own life for as many hours as they can is the order of the day.

Yes, poverty and wealth both can imprison one. Once one has lived without it's hard to go back. One can't enjoy the things one used to. The lifestyles are NOT interchangeable. The collections, the cars and homes no longer provide satisfaction - merely entertainment. One appreciates the relative security of a wealthy neighborhood - less gunfire, less screaming and less drug addicts walking around - but one is even less likely to really know one's neighbors and in many ways feels far more alone and disconnected.

So what does one do? One gives much of it up. One sells many of the cars and the mansions and moves to the suburbs to join the middle class. Most of the smarter rich do this. In suburbia one can talk to one's neighbors. There is keeping up with the Joneses, but it is mild and possessions reacquire their actual purposes. There is a cameradie that exists and unlike skid row or mansion hill, there is also a pride in the neighborhood. People, to some degree, look out for each other in suburbia once you befriend your neighbors. Suburbia is more free of fear. Xenophobia exists, but only against those who threaten the community. Suburbia is about families and this means drug dealers and prostitutes are not welcome. In many ways the middle class is more isolated from these folks than either the rich or the poor. The poor know them because they are their neighbors and many of the rich know them because they are their customers. Only the middle class and suburbia hold these elements in the strongest disdain.

But the middle class struggle and have more to lose than the poor. Living from week to week, running high credit debt and being a prisoner to credit card companies and stretching existing dollars is just the way of life for many. They worry, and talk about money, far more than do the rich or the poor. Poverty is a stalker always seemingly only a few minutes run behind them and this makes them run harder and often fail to enjoy what they have - and they have a lot. They just often don't know it or can even appreciate it.

No, hating the rich or poor is for the rubes. They haven't walked a mile (or ten) in the other person's shoes or seen the black & white prison garments worn underneath their designer clothes or gang colors.