When you hear someone say “Poverty is a state of mind,” does it make you feel better? Don’t you find it more convenient to use the term “financially challenged” to describe the poor?

“Beautiful” words and phrases can be used to hide the truth, which in this instance is the “ugly” reality of abject poverty. Of course, words become “beautiful” to some only if they are either highfalutin and therefore hard to understand or provide a message that is “positively acceptable” to the powers-that-be even if it is “totally unbelievable” to the majority.

Putting all these “beautiful” words and phrases together, one can construct a reality far different from the actual.

A discerning reader can only be in utter disbelief of these esoteric explanations:

• Poverty is simply a psychosomatic problem and is mainly personal, not political.
• Being marginalized does not automatically make a person poor. Billionaires, after all, are marginalized in the sense that they are in the minority, yet they are not poor!
• The poor have no one to blame but themselves because the root cause of poverty is a person’s insolence.

I’m sure you know that a picture may not be able to provide ample explanation of the reality being portrayed. A scenic view of the countryside, for example, can hide the poverty being experienced by the residents there. Analyze this picture I took in 2001.

A person cannot be blamed if he or she is overwhelmed by the pristine greenery of Baranggay Dapiwak in Zamboanga del Sur. But the Subanon (an indigenous group in Mindanao) live in abject poverty there. They are deprived of basic services like water and electricity. Going to this place entails a very long travel on foot. (Read my article published in 2003 for details.)

Governments can also hide the truth through official statistics. Analyzing the 2006 Philippine Poverty Statistics of the National Statistical Coordination Board (NSCB), one realizes that in the Philippines, a person is not considered poor by the government if he or she has PhP41.25 (US$0.87) daily or PhP1,254.75 ($26.35) monthly. This is the standard used by the Philippine government in concluding that only 27 percent of families are poor.

But is this really the case? While alternative socioeconomic indicators can provide factual bases for a reality far different from what government claims (and I’ve written extensively on it in the past), one only needs to look around to see the deprivation and suffering that majority of Filipinos go through.

Blogging about poverty indeed helps in making it a pressing issue. But it is also important for bloggers to see themselves as concerned citizens who should act to effect change in their respective societies.

The only way to change reality is not to detach ourselves from it and consequently become indifferent. As an old saying goes, all of us should be part of the growing movement for meaningful change.