ANDERSON — Americans’ attitudes toward the poor vary widely and have much to do with personal backgrounds, according to local sociologists and social-service providers.

“I think there is a lot of ambivalence when it comes to poverty, particularly because in the United States we come from a foundation of influences that makes it difficult for us to understand how someone could be living in poverty,” said Lolly Bargerstock-Oyler, professor of social work at Anderson University.

“We are influenced by the American attitude of ‘rugged individualism’ that says if you work hard you can make it, without recognizing that some people have many more barriers.”

Joy Plummer, executive director of Operation Love Ministries, says those barriers are very real for the area’s needy.

“I think many people are unaware of what impoverished people are experiencing,” she said. “They don’t know that many people are living in abandoned buildings or out in the woods. I have worked with an entire family that was living in their car. Kids should not be living in a car. 

“People are living in ways that shouldn’t be OK here. You shouldn’t have to pick through Dumpsters for food.”

Plummer said that some people actually prefer such a lifestyle, but she noted that these are rare exceptions to the rule — most people in poverty wish they weren’t.

And she insisted that people who look down on poor people need to change their attitudes.

“A lot has to change about the mindset in our community,” she said. “We have to begin to think about the issues that create the poverty. Everybody needs to start thinking about how they can make this community better from wherever they’re at. We need to generate hope.”

‘Balance of life lessons’

Dr. Bruce MacMurray, professor of sociology and criminal justice at Anderson University, argues that attitudes toward poverty are grounded in how people are socialized.

“Our attitude is a balance of life lessons we learn from parents and life experience,” he said. “These create a sense of fundamental values or a lens through which we view the social world. The frustration of that is that those views are not often justified in terms of social science or in terms of any objective viewpoint.”

MacMurray believes that American attitudes toward the poor are grounded in the national’s early frontier mentality, at the core of which is the “rugged individualism” concept — the idea that you sink or swim based on your own efforts.

Oyler also cites the “Protestant work ethic” that carried over from Great Britain into the United States — the Calvinist idea that if you were poor, it meant that you had character flaws, and if you prospered, it meant you were in God’s favor.

“Although many no longer believe that,” she said, “we still have a legacy of that.”