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Can we talk? What do you say when the person asking is a right-winger?

I’m glad you liked it.

I was musing with some other people I know with poverty backgrounds (and I must recommend here the powerful book Without a Net: The Female Experience of Growing Up Working Class (Live Girls) edited by
Michelle Tea, through which I met Fran Varian online) how little people seem to know about our lives directly. Liberals and conservatives talk a lot about us but few seem to actually know many of us. Nor do we know much about rich people’s lives although I stumbled upon a book once where rich people were writing about how guilty they felt for being born into wealth and having luxuries and how at a loss they felt to really be effective at alleviating poverty. It occurred to me that a series of discussions between people from various levels of the socioeconomic strata would be incredibly valuable right now.

One of my FB friends posted about how we need another War on Poverty along with a link about the dramatic increase in poverty right now. (Sure it’s just a coincidence that jobs are nowhere to be found since us poor people never want to work–although many poor people are working full time for poverty wages.) I wrote the following:

I think that so far, there hasn’t been sufficient understanding of the root causes of poverty (lack of a good education being one important one, nutrition coming second, and learned helplessness and despair when surrounded by poverty being a third of a long list) and the function poor people serve in our society (endless supply of cheap labor).

As long as some powerful interests profit from there being poverty we won’t make any progress, we’ll just nibble at the edges of it and a few lucky people like me will escape–leading people to conclude that everyone can if they just want to. [The fact that I grew up with books and a decent school system in a small town where rich kids went to the same school, had better nutrition when I was very young and a slightly higher than normal IQ is disregarded.] Can we start by getting the minimum wage to be something above poverty level?
—

I try not to give in to the burning rage I feel when people talk about poor people like we are animals, the same rage that has fueled riots. How can anyone going to an inner city school without working toilets, sufficient up-to-date textbooks, good teachers (one principal says he’s just lucky to get someone breathing), decent sports/gym facilities or a safe atmosphere and watching tv shows of beautiful schools with healthy, well fed students and not be filled with rage? They start out young and full of hope but by the teen years are sufficiently aware to be bitter at being thrown away. It’s hard to value yourself when society makes it so very clear how little it values you.

***I know that I have white privilege and that my poverty could have been much, much worse.***

As to this person’s assertion that the government help should never be resorted to, well, I chose to feed and house my children. I could not have afforded housing if I were working for minimum wage at the time and trying to pay for childcare which would have been nearly all of my pay.

I was reading “The Glass Castle” and their parents did refuse to apply even for school lunches. The children were starving. The author resorted to going through the trash for discards of other students’ lunches. I’d rather swallow my pride and make sure my children had decent nutrition. I’d rather contribute to Social Security and not have our elderly people on the streets. [I was happy to pay taxes and always envisioned my check feeding some kids somewhere.]

As you can see, wind me up on this topic and let me go. The more Republicans whip up class resentments aimed at poor people the angrier I get.

I probably will write something here but I want to take my time and put in research.

» Posted By labyris13 On September 13, 2011 @ 8:01 pm

I probably will, though my time is divided between a few different writing venues already. I have been serializing a part of my memoir for No Longer Quivering (although I wasn’t in the Quiverfull movement but a group very like it based on Eastern religion) and I contribute to Synchronized Chaos as well as continue to run my own blog at Livejournal and work on my memoir. My memoir does go into more depth about a lot of these issues.

» Posted By labyris13 On September 13, 2011 @ 6:54 pm

Someone was posting on FB about the Republican debate and this issue of how they see poor people in general. I think my reply is applicable here:

I love how they rail at lazy poor people but lazy rich people who don’t do anything are just fine, even when their money came from mommy and daddy. Actually, being poor was hard work. When I was in poverty with my kids I cooked everything from scratch, had no car so walked and carried groceries with a stroller and one kid on my back, often washed diapers and clothes by hand*, and cooked without the various fancy tools and machines foodnetwork seems to think is necessary. I’ve never worked harder in my life. I was happy to later go to work and sit at a desk all day.

*when we didn’t have funds for the laundromat and later, when someone stole my diapers out of an apartment laundry facility and I had to just constantly wash the few I had left. Gosh, those were the days. Gee I wish I could be carefree and on welfare again–NOT. Even now that we’re down to one middle class salary from my disability–my second husband’s, bless his heart–we are light years better off than any welfare family and have three times the income.

I’ll shut up now; I do realize I’m being long-winded. Who knows why the people she observed had no power or water and no trash removal. Dire poverty and depression is my guess. 🙁

» Posted By labyris13 On September 13, 2011 @ 6:25 pm

Thanks.

I use my name all over the internet, though. I do try to be careful not to give exact location away after I got some internet threats. But googling my real name brings up a lot of things with my political point of view and life story (I’m sharing excerpts of my memoir at my website) and I am presently disabled so am not worried about future employers.

» Posted By labyris13 On September 13, 2011 @ 6:09 pm

Thanks. I joined just so I could comment. I’ve had these kinds of discussions with old classmates on Facebook. I had one lady who always posted anti-illegal immigrant stuff and if I posted anything positive or contrary on my own status would try to have long debates.

My two grandsons are half Mexican and yes, their dad came here illegally, so I’m hardly objective about the issue. I finally had to tell her that my posts on the issue weren’t for her and if she couldn’t agree to disagree, I’d be forced to unfriend her. She was really crossing the line of civility in her comments. She finally dropped it.

I didn’t know about PlanetPOV before today so I’m glad I stumbled upon it. 🙂

» Posted By labyris13 On September 13, 2011 @ 6:05 pm

I was one of those inter-generational welfare moms she is writing about. I stumbled on this page doing a search to track down the source of the B Lester quote about hoarding money. 🙂

My mom worked most of her life as a single parent. I often stayed with family during the summer when school was out and before I was school aged. She was lucky to have a large extended family who could offer free room and board like that.

Later on she became severely depressed following her hysterectomy. I don’t know if the trigger was psychological, physical, or both. She became immobilized by depression in a way that I could not understand, being a teenager at the time. No one explained clinical depression to me. We went on welfare. This was in the early 70s and we got $139. a month and foodstamps that did not last us until the end of the month. I recall the final ten days of each month we lived on some form of starch–rice, potatoes, etc. But when my mom was so depressed that she couldn’t cook at all, I lived on school lunches and ketchup-and-pickle sandwiches. I was trying to lose weight anyway so I considered this a good incentive.

She finally began to lighten up out of her depression with therapy and a round of different drugs and went to school to become a nurse. We eventually got off welfare.

I ended up leaving home early, however, as her depression took its toll on our relationship. I tried to invoke social services but there were no foster homes available. As a result, I married too early and when abuse forced me to end that marriage I also resorted to welfare and went back to school. This was before welfare reform. (I find that a lot of right wing people don’t know about welfare reform and still believe there are lifelong welfare recipients.) While on welfare I and my two children lived on amounts ranging from 7K to 11K in the mid-to-late 80s. The only way to really make foodstamps work was to make nearly everything from scratch. That takes a lot of time.

Also love the phrase “poor by design.” I don’t know anyone who ever decided to be poor. There are people who feel defeated by poverty and have given up trying to escape it. But no one who had any money or a decent paying job ever said one day, “You know what? Working and having a middle class lifestyle sucks. I think I’ll become poor and try to get money from the government instead.” I suspect that people who argue this think that welfare provides a decent standard of living.

I once saw a flyer being circulated (found it on a bus) that claimed welfare recipients got everything given to them and listed things like TVs. TVs? Really? No, if you are on welfare you scrape together your meager funds and find a used tv or get caught in one of those rent-to-own high interest but low monthly payment scams. There are a lot of vultures lined up to pick the bones of poor people.

Poverty is stressful. It’s depressing. It weighs on you and crushes your spirit. There are so many obstacles in the way of getting out of poverty it is amazing that anyone ever escapes it. If you have little or no education (don’t get me started on inner city schools vs. schools in the suburbs) and nothing to put on your resume, no decent clothes for job interviews and no marketable skills, you won’t get out of poverty. You’ll simply get to do hard labor all day and STILL be in poverty. Next to that, welfare looks pretty good. Poor people on welfare aren’t choosing between a good paying middle class job and welfare. They are choosing between a low wage job that won’t pay for childcare and welfare. Give them better choices.

I got my college degree and I make it a point to write and try to educate people about what poverty is like. As long as we are nameless and faceless people are free to project their fears and ignorance onto us. They think they would make better choices because they have no idea what choices we were offered and what resources we had to make those choices.

If any of this is useful feel free to quote me.

» Posted By labyris13 On September 13, 2011 @ 5:36 pm