Bootstraps

I've been watching Cooking on a Bootstraps Jack Monroe on Youtube. I've seen some of the videos before and am looking through a different lens this time. The aspect about her I find most interesting at the moment is her Autism (she doesn't mind 'she', quite happy with 'Them/They '). She lived on €10 sterling worth of food at one stage due to having her son, becoming a single parent, not being unable to continue working at a fire station and having benefits delayed. She didn't tell her family or friends about much of what was going on. I do like her but she seems to attract an awful lot of vitriol because people can't pigeon-hole her. She tends to understandably emotional about what she speaks. She has also said things publically, which she has since apologised for, about David Cameron that even her biggest fans didn't agree with. So you can imagine the field day her opponents had. Here's her Ted Talk based on her 'Poverty Hurts' blog post that went viral. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ueew8giHXM4

It has since been used on a test in a GCE English paper. She wrote it from the heart with very little editing. At the time she was not in a good place and had very few readers. She's seems delighted it has turned up in schools but would love to edit a bit. I'm wondering if they even had to ask her to use it? Maybe not if it isn't copywrited .To be honest I don't really know enough about it but believe you are allowed to quote from others work without asking once you give them credit.

Now she's gone mad for the slow cooker. She has done cooking with a microwave and hotplate cooking for those living in bedsits previously so not sure why this seems to surprise me. She has 2 triple ones and a large which has been experimenting with. She does seem to get really focused on a particular way of cooking and how to get around issues with it before moving onto the next thing. I can be a bit that way but it tends to veer towards binge reading blogs I've found and not much action.

The 'pulling oneself up by one's bootstraps' analogy always seemed a bit strange to me. I mean what are you supposed to do, tie them onto something and pull yourself up? Up to what? Or tie yourself onto someone or thing that's more successful than you and get pulled up that way somehow? I don't really get the imaginary but I do understand the sentiment. The notion 'if you just worked harder had more ingenuity you wouldn't be poor'. But it doesn't work like that, unfortunately, some people start off poor and manage someway to make it, others do it illegally and yet others get rich off being inflammatory.

Speaking of inflammatory, Jack won a court case against Katie Hopkins. This has lead to Katie being very close to bankrupt.
 https://www.irishtimes.com/culture/tv-radio-web/is-it-too-much-to-hope-that-this-is-how-it-all-ends-for-katie-hopkins-1.3633160

Jack is glad that she won but still able to empathise with the financial fallout for Katie. She acknowledges she too has been nasty on the internet and paid for it for it, metaphorically and financially.
 https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2017/nov/28/katie-hopkins-mail-online-jack-monroe

It's all a bit cautionary. The tables can turn very fast in real anonymous life or have real-life consequences. If you put your head above the parapet you may be rewarded or get it blown off.