The View from a Drawbridge

For some reason, I’ve participated in more than one conversation about poverty of late. Perhaps it’s because Trump has turned our economy into a flaming bag of dog poo. Maybe it’s because a lot of the people I know are getting older and are beginning to reminisce about their childhoods. Regardless, the topic has come up, and when it does, within seconds, I can tell exactly who’s really been poor and who only thinks they’ve been poor.

Not that it’s some kind of competition, mind you. That’s one of the first ways to suss things out. If someone talks about poverty as a point of pride, they were never truly poor. When you’re poor, you’re too darned exhausted to be proud of it, and when you get out of it, you’re too darned relieved, and no matter how well-off you become, you always have this tiny anxiety burrowed deep in your brain that one false move could put you right back there again, so there’s no room for pride.

There shouldn’t be any shame, either. You survived or are surviving. It was (or is) what it was (or is). If you are a decent human being, you have compassion for those who are still there, and you do what you can to help lift them up, while experiencing your fair share of survivor’s guilt yourself. If you have truly been poor, then you know that poverty is a fact, just like the Rock of Gibraltar is a fact. It’s not something that can be ignored away. It’s not something that happens simply because someone is lazy or dumb, therefore there is no shame in it. There can be a lot of resentment, though, because a lot of poverty is systemic and extremely unjust. But that’s a topic for another day.

I don’t feel resentment toward those who only think they’ve been poor. It’s just that they have no idea what they’re talking about. They’re in good company. Most people have no idea. We hide the true experience well in this country. We catch glimpses of it on TV or when we drive nervously through certain neighborhoods, but if you haven’t lived it, you are clueless.

First of all, how many Americans live below the poverty line? There’s no easy answer for that. (All the statistics in the next two paragraphs come from this page, which I chose because it seemed to have been a fairly good summary of what I saw everywhere else I checked.) The poverty line itself is controversial.

The Federal Poverty line is a freakin’ joke. A family of four living at the poverty line has $2,679/month ($32,150/12) for ALL expenses — housing, food, transportation, healthcare, clothing, and everything else. You can’t even get a one bedroom apartment in Seattle for that.

A nice round number for poverty in general for Americans is 11%, but your odds of being poor varies greatly by state (Mississippi is the worst), Age (you definitely don’t want to be under age 6), Race/Ethnicity (the damage we’ve gone to the American Indians/Alaska Natives is  ongoing), and family types (single mothers are hit the hardest). And the fact that a full-time worker at federal minimum wage cannot lift a family of 2 above the poverty line tells me that every single member of congress needs to be thrown out and replaced by people who actually care about their constituents, because there’s just no excuse.

Anyway, if you’ve really been poor, honest-to-goodness poor, you’ll relate to at least 90% of the following:

• Every stick of furniture in your home, if you had one, came from either the side of the road or Goodwill, and at least some of it was repaired, most likely with duct tape or superglue, or was propped up with bricks.
• Yes, you stole milk crates from behind a grocery store.
• You went at least a year, usually much more, where all your clothes were hand-me-downs or came from thrift stores, or were sewn by your mother. Even your patches had patches.
• A family member gave you your hair cuts.
• You ate what was on sale, not what you craved, even if that meant two straight weeks of nothing but potatoes. And of course you used food stamps, until they ran out.
• If you had younger siblings, you raised them yourself. If you were an only child, you raised yourself.
• You hung out with friends in dirty back lots or parking lots because you had nothing to do and nowhere to go. You spent a lot of time drawing in the dirt with sticks.
• You were often told you were really mature for your age.
• You knew your neighborhood wasn’t particularly safe, and even though many of your neighbors were nice people, they still might steal things from you, because desperation can make you do things you never thought you’d do.
• If your parents had jobs they were never around, and if they didn’t, you wished they weren’t around.
• You were barefoot a lot, at first to preserve your shoes, and then because you were used to it. You got ringworm several times.
• You felt constantly, gnawingly hungry.
• You never felt safe.
• You have known women who have had to be sex workers to survive.
• Sometimes the things that mattered to other kids seemed really silly to you.
• A lot of adults assumed you were a hooligan even if you weren’t, and treated you accordingly.
• A lot of the people around you weren’t safe to be around, but others were inspirational despite being often overlooked by the wider world.
• If you could hang out in other, nicer places, you would. For the heat, or the air conditioning, or the lack of bugs. Libraries were good. So were community swimming pools.
• You saw people taking things for granted all the time that you couldn’t take for granted, ever.
• You encountered a lot of predators, but sometimes you’d discover people who were incredibly, miraculously kind, and you never forget them.
• Sometimes you got really, really angry and you didn’t know why.
• For some reason you never felt completely clean.
• You saw things that children shouldn’t see, and worried about things that children shouldn’t have to worry about.
• Everyone around you was always tired, and most of the time, you were, too.
• You understood how fragile everything was.
• People would disappear from your life and you’d never find out why.
• You always knew, down to the penny, how much cash you had in your pockets, and you worried you’d lose it.
• Any crisis, like a flat tire or a ticket, could mean doing without food or shelter.
• You tried not to draw attention to yourself, because you already had enough problems.
• You knew, without asking, which of your classmates were genuinely poor, and you can still spot someone who was genuinely poor to this day.

If much of the above resonates with you, namaste, fellow traveler. We’ve made it this far. What an achievement! What a gift.