No, it's great that they took me to do a cheap recreational activity.

This is why I responded to you, you obviously didn't understand the dynamic at work.

Us poor people weren't ALWAYS busy starving and surviving. Like other humans, we too had free time. And the local government subsidized both admission and lessons at the public pool. So because of good policy this was a cheap form of both recreation and physical education, as a result lots of us filthy poors in my neighborhood availed ourselves of it.

What I object to here is the othering of the working class. They're not creatures that need to be placed behind glass and alternately studied or pandered to. America had the formula figured out a long time ago: invest in public schools, public pools and public libraries that everyone can use, and that serve as community centers for rich and poor alike. When there need to be user fees, sure subsidize those for people in the lowest income brackets, that's a great idea. But the bedrock of a healthy society is good public institutions where everyone's treated pretty equally. We screwed this up when we started privatizing or just straight up shutting down all those things. Then the rich built their own, the rest increasingly went without and some people seem to have forgotten that the other way of doing things even existed.