I can’t describe how I felt reading the following. It was overwhelming.
John Scalzi shared in “Being Poor” a list describing what it is like. An instant community sprung up of folks who could relate, and shared points of their own, including myself. Here are a few (make sure to read his post and comments):
Being poor is having to keep buying $800 cars because they’re what you can afford, and then having the cars break down on you, because there’s not an $800 car in America that’s worth a damn.
Being poor is hoping the toothache goes away.
Being poor is knowing your kid goes to friends’ houses but never has friends over to yours.
Being poor is going to the restroom before you get in the school lunch line so your friends will be ahead of you and won’t hear you say “I get free lunch” when you get to the cashier.
Being poor is a heater in only one room of the house.
Being poor is feeling the glued soles tear off your supermarket shoes when you run around the playground.
Being poor is thinking $8 an hour is a really good deal.
Being poor is relying on people who don’t give a damn about you.
Being poor is an overnight shift under florescent lights.
Being poor is finding the letter your mom wrote to your dad, begging him for the child support.
Being poor is making lunch for your kid when a cockroach skitters over the bread, and you looking over to see if your kid saw.
Being poor is believing a GED actually makes a goddamned difference.
Being poor is people angry at you just for walking around in the mall.
Being poor is not taking the job because you can’t find someone you trust to watch your kids.
Being poor is the police busting into the apartment right next to yours.
Being poor is people thinking they know something about you by the way you talk.
Being poor is six dollars short on the utility bill and no way to close the gap.
Being poor is knowing you work as hard as anyone, anywhere.
Being poor is people surprised to discover you’re not actually stupid.
Being poor is people surprised to discover you’re not actually lazy.
Being poor is a six-hour wait in an emergency room with a sick child asleep on your lap.
Being poor is knowing you’re being judged.
Being poor is a $200 paycheck advance from a company that takes $250 when the paycheck comes in.
Being poor is four years of night classes for an Associates of Art degree.
Being poor is people who have never been poor wondering why you choose to be so.
Being poor is knowing how hard it is to stop being poor.
Being poor is seeing how few options you have.
Being poor is running in place.
Being poor is people wondering why you didn’t leave.
Here goes a few I contributed to the conversation:
Being poor is pausing to answer when someone asks, “what do you parents do for a living?”
Being poor is pausing to answer when someone asks, “where is your father?”
Being poor is waiting on Christmas morning for the Salvation Army Santa Claus to visit.
Being poor is believing that a happy, healthy family is a TV fantasy.
Being poor is thinking “I’m going to die before I’m 30 anyway”.
Being poor is finally getting a decent job, and it turns out it is in the burbs, which requires you to get a car, that you can’t pay for.
Being poor is finally getting a credit card, and it’s at 21% interest.
Being poor is finally getting a decent job, which requires dropping state insurance, which means your children will go uninsured.
Being poor means working a job 40 hours for 10 weeks and 36 hours for 2 – so that the employer can dodge paying full time benefits.
Being poor is having your nose broken, not having health insurance, and living with the cosmetic change the rest of your life.
I could answer affirmatively to many of those. Many of them come off as self-pitying portrait of victimization. Yeah, I was there. Alcoholic mother, violent father, both dead before I was 21. But I refused to fall victim. And after cleaning myself up from alcoholism and drug abuse, I refused to look back and I refused to pity myself. Many small choices, like delaying gratification, not getting involved in illegal activity, not having children out-of-wedlock…etc… and you move out of this. The percentage of couples who have a child, have worked at a job for over a year (even making minimum wage) and live in poverty is 1%. Sorry. I kind of went off there. I’m just getting fed up with all the damn doom and gloom and, ‘poor me, all those mean people won’t help me…’ victim, entitlement mentality. I’m not saying it is all by the bootstraps. In fact, I believe the greatest sin of the welfare state is that it has stripped from the general population any sense of obligation and altruism. Unwise decisions make up the vast majority of those in poverty.
Wow…. It’s rare for me to say this as karl knows, but i’m speechless. Well done John!
I can relate to 50% of that list and then some. Please allow me to add a few:
Being poor is getting hand me down clothes from your brothers because you can’t afford to go out and buy new clothes at the start of school year.
Being poor is waiting for the 1st of the month to come around so you can finally go food shopping.
Being poor is living a bad neighborhood when the phone company threatens to turn off your service, leaving you with no way to call the police when trouble starts.
Being poor is using the kitchen stove as a heater when you can’t afford to buy coal for your coal burning heater.
Being poor is like like the rape of your mind when kids make fun of you for bringing the same wish sandwich to school everyday (2 pieces of bread and butter or mayo)
We were always on the cusp, living from hand-to-mouth (I used to joke we were “upper poverty” because Reagan kept lowering the poverty line) – but I always knew there were many who were much worse off. My parents, too, made bad choices (the worst of which was staying in a middle class suburban neighborhood when we could have been a little more stable financially had we moved back into the city) – my brother and I learned from them. We both started earning money to pay for things like clothes and then college as soon as we could (and worked our way through college to pay for it – which, by the way, counts against you in financial aid packages).
Yes, Scott, unwise decisions may have started the ball rolling for most but many are born into it and do not have the resources to get out (many poor children are actually discouraged in school or told to aim lower). More recently, thanks to Reagan-Bush/Bush, those who always thought they’d have stability by working hard have found that’s a crock these days as they lose all (inlcuding their safety net) due to F-you attitude corporate america has towards its employees and the lack of affordable healthcare (which means a minor illness can become a major one impacting one’s ability to work very easily). I hate the victim/entitlement mentality as much as anyone else, but I do think we have an obligation to help people help themselves (and when they won’t, not to further penalize their children which only ensures they fall into the same rut).
oh yeah – being poor also means buying less healthier food items at the grocery store because they are cheaper and more filling than the healthier fare.
Your posts have become incredible. In the past, I’ve checked in to see what Karl is reading and working on. Lately, it’s more of what Karl is feeling and has been through, much more personal. I know it’s something you haven’t been comfortable doing in the past and that a lot of this is coming out as a reaction to Katrina. Thank you for putting it all out there.
thank you ol cranky, you hit the nail on the head. (on all counts).
Lest we forget
I’m having a hard time not feeling cynical right now. The situation in NOLA has illuminated some of the greatest problems in the United States, and those are poverty and classism. I can’t help but fear that, much like the All-American pa…
Hear me now
Like a lot of people, I grew up poor. I didn't actually realize it at the time, because my mother never really vocalized it to us as kids and my grandparents lived next door to us until I was ten [they helped]. The only time it was obvious to m…
thanks everyone for commenting – it is a little scary for me to talk about any of this. Scott, while I understand, I think cranky pretty much spoke for me here.
Philly showing some love
Well don’t I feel like a dork (& a lazy one at that).
Jeff from No Ma’am, this IS my job asked for more info on how to help out in the effort to the Katrina evacuees who are being relocated to Philly. I’d posted links to Project Brotherly Love, bu…
Karl,
It’s good to remember where we’re from sometimes. Too often, people who grow up poor and manage to get off that horrible treadmill become self-righteous and start thinking “if I can do it, everyone can do it,” somehow missing the point that every single one of us has had different circumstances to deal with.
I’ll echo Albert’s appreciation — thanks for sharing.
Being poor is the same in Canada. I live in a rich tourist city where everyone drives Hummers or the newest cars off the car lot. Here I am wearing worn, second hand clothes and driving a van that is worth less than my yearly insurance. I guess I should be thankful that I have a job. It’s hard to make it from pay day to pay day when my income is barely enough to support a single person and I have a family of four. I never chose this lifestyle, I was born into it, no silver spoon for me. I also never made any bad choices in life to condemn me to this heavy laden life; it’s not fair, every cell in my body hates being poor, it sucks! and there is no way out. Even when you think you’re slowly getting out of the hole, someone has to come along and push you back in dumping more crap into your already pennyless and stressed out situation. It probably wouldn’t be so bad if I were single, but I have children who have to deal with the everyday problems at school due to the lack of healthy food,clothes and the ridicule of being a so called second class citizen. The upper class people should be kissing our over worked, under payed, low income working class feet for making their lives easier because it’s us who have the hard labor jobs(I certainly don’t sit in any cushy office to earn my wage). In closing;I like to say that I’m saddened of the thought that many families live in poverty due to society’s way of thinking, the lack of caring for your fellow man. We the poor should stick together and help each other because nobody else will.
Being poor is the same in Canada. I live in a rich tourist city where everyone drives Hummers or the newest cars off the car lot. Here I am wearing worn, second hand clothes and driving a van that is worth less than my yearly insurance. I guess I should be thankful that I have a job. It’s hard to make it from pay day to pay day when my income is barely enough to support a single person and I have a family of four. I never chose this lifestyle, I was born into it, no silver spoon for me. I also never made any bad choices in life to condemn me to this heavy laden life; it’s not fair, every cell in my body hates being poor, it sucks! and there is no way out. Even when you think you’re slowly getting out of the hole, someone has to come along and push you back in dumping more crap into your already pennyless and stressed out situation. It probably wouldn’t be so bad if I were single, but I have children who have to deal with the everyday problems at school due to the lack of healthy food,clothes and the ridicule of being a so called second class citizen. The upper class people should be kissing our over worked, under payed, low income working class feet for making their lives easier because it’s us who have the hard labor jobs(I certainly don’t sit in any cushy office to earn my wage). In closing;I like to say that I’m saddened of the thought that many families live in poverty due to society’s way of thinking, the lack of caring for your fellow man. We the poor should stick together and help each other because nobody else will.
People from other countries wouldn’t believe how is to be poor in my country, ARGENTINE, here, poor people have no opportunities at all. IF you are born poor you’ll die poor. Government and society do nothing to help you. Opportunities are forbidden, because you have no money. You all talk of “having a car” and the problems you have with your old-fashion ones, but here we can’t have even old cars, they are like a “priviledge”, you know. I’m a teacher ( I teach English) and I’m all the time thinking if
I will have enough money to reach the end of the month, because teachers here are not taken into account, we are the professional ( I THINK “THEY” DO NOT CONSIDER AS SUCH)who are paid the least. But, going on with POOR PEOPLE, here our government accept people from other countries like PERU, PARAGUAY, who, poor they,work for nothing, so they have jobs which could bedone for our people, but they charge nothing for their work, and Argentine people lost their jobs. I think that my country has the poorest people all over the world,considering the population. People in the north die of hunger, and the government does nothing, and we ( I include myself )do nothing, we do not know what to do. We only can watch the T.V and watch how they are suffering