If you want to feel really cheered up (not), the British Medical Journal has published a wonderful, raging, poignant vignette by a Glasgow GP of a section of the population which is marked out for lives of degradation and violence -- the 'poor young male'. You have to read the whole thing to get the full force of its passionate crescendo, but here's a flavour:

'If you're male and of the underclass in inner city Britain then watch out, because your life may well be poor, violent, and short. You will leave school at 15 with no qualifications. This in itself doesn't matter, because the real barrier is your complete lack of any life skills or social skills. You will be incapable of living independently and won't even have the basic ability to clean, cook, or pay bills. You will never understand how social systems work, and the height of achievement will be to get on "the sick"... Your lack of understanding and communications skills means that even when minor problems arise you resort to what you know: aggression and violence. You may have a girlfriend, but when the baby comes along it's all too apparent that you have no parenting skills and can't cope. Your frustration is expressed through taking drugs and beating the only person who actually loved you. You never see her or your daughter again, but her brothers give you a beating just for good measure... The years roll by, and you continue to steal, take drugs, and carry and use a blade. One Saturday night a younger version of you, aged 16, sticks a blade in your chest over an argument about football, the passion that is your only acceptable emotional outlet. One hour later the doctors walk away, having split your chest open but to no avail. "Just another dead ned," they all think. Thank Christ, anyway, because even though you're only 27, in all likelihood you would have strung yourself up in the next few weeks. Your attacker gets 10 years and a ride on the merry-go-round that you've just left. Nobody cares. This scenario is played out 24 hours a day, 365 days a year across the United Kingdom.'

Well I warned you it wasn't a laugh a minute. But it's true, so very true. And the poverty he's talking about is not just material -- it's spiritual.