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People who grew up working class have more stories than a canned line like, "My mom scrubbed toilets." I'll tell ya what it's like actually going up poor in America. First, you're ashamed to have friends come over to your house. Shame is a theme of growing up poor...
We never travelled more than an hour from our house, because even if we could afford vacations (we couldn't), there was a good chance the car would break down on the road. YEARS after having a car, as an adult I still had had flashbackers wondering, "Will my car start?"
Not knowing if your car will start is a feeling everyone who grew up poor in flyover area (no public transportation) knows well. There's a sound a car makes when you pop the key in and move the ignition, and your car doesn't start.
Poverty is associated with a lot of problems, luckily for me my dad was a Christian. He never drank or smoked. Most of my friends weren't this fortunate. I'd go over to friends houses, and hear their moms and dads screaming at night, especially after their dad had a few beers.
I had two pairs of pants to last an entire school year. If you ripped them... Ripped jeans are cool now. It was not the case when I was a kid. Ripped jeans were a class signal. *This person is poor.*
Speaking of "scrubbing toilets with her mom," (she's lying about this), I actually scrubbed toilets with my grandma at a factory. During junior high after school, I'd commute with my grandma. $5 a day. That was a massive amount of money for me.
I realized that we were POOR when reading a copy of Parade magazine. It was one of those "insert" magazines from newspapers. They mentioned that earning $12,000 a year for a family of 4 was below the poverty line. I saw my dad's pay stubs - $200 after taxes. A family of 6.
Four kids and two adults in one house with one bathroom.....My dad made $8.50 an hour at a trailer assembly plant. He had been making $12.50 an hour at a factor. "The factory closed." If you don't deeply feel what those words mean, you didn't grow up poor in flyover land.
Our small town had a local pedophile. He never touched me or my friends, but he got away with a lot. (Though poor, most of my friends and I had intact families.) In a small town, a little money can be thrown around in a lot of ways.
The town pedophile would donate money for parks and even to schools. The he would "volunteer" to watch children in the locker room. He'd hand them towels. Everyone in a position of power knew he was a pedophile, and no one every did anything. This was pre-Internet.
When you grow up poor, you FEEL the elite's mistakes before anyone. My dad aced all of the tests for the Illinois State Police. He was denied a job due to racial discrimination. Our lives would have been fundamentally different if he had got this job.https://www.chicagotribune.com/news/ct-xpm-1997-10-02-9710020230-story.html …
The worst part about growing up poor is other poor people. You leave your bike out, it might get stolen. Your windows might be broken. You might get jumped. There are a thousand annoyances like this, large and small.
When you grow up poor, you don't glamorize it. These new socialists, mostly spoiled white kids, claim to feel solidarity or some shit. It sucks. But poor people aren't bad. The problem is being poor damages your entire body and mind. Sapolsky is right:https://news.stanford.edu/news/2007/march7/sapolskysr-030707.html …
When you're poor, you're stressed. On edge. Life sets you off. Physiological level stuff. Multiply that across a neighborhood and you have a lot of street fights, domestic violence, drinking, smoking. That was when I grew up. Then people turned to meth and now opiods.
The thing about being poor....Everyone gets is wrong. My dad was high IQ, but there weren’t any jobs. Start a business! Selling to whom? Everyone was broke. These are complicated issues, I have an education, I lived in poverty. And the answers? I legit don’t know.
I do know that my life would have been different without Christianity. Poor people have the same problems, but poor Christians avoided the vices like drinking and smoking, and philandering. They had hope. Probably that’s why I’m such a pro-Christian...who is not a believer.
Marx called religion the opiate of the masses (though there is more context to what he meant). Poor people lost religion and found....opioids. Religion offered hope of another life. We can empirically see what post-Christian America looks like. A stadium of overdoes a year.
Factories closed. Towns fell. You know what saved a lot of small towns? Prisons. Small towns began competing to become the home of a new prison. (One reason decriminalization arguments don’t land is because crimes are prisons are jobs.)
Whenever you talk about poverty, people jump in to remind you it’s worse elsewhere. Why? Because poverty isn’t something we’re supposed to notice in America. It’s the forbidden topic.
Part 2 is incoming. First, a response to a few thematic comments. - "I didn't know I was poor growing up." THEN YOU WERE NOT POOR. If you had grown up poor, you classmates and even teachers would have reminded you of this. Kids are cruel, as are adults.
Whenever we talk about American poverty, people say, WHAT ABOUT THESE OTHER PARTS OF THE WORLD. This shows how uncomfortable it is for the average American to consider poverty. It's an issue we can't discuss, which is why the conversation switched to culture war issues.
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