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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.
When the furnace dies in winter and you get to spend the day indoors with a coat on as your parents spend all day scrambling to find a fix.
When I was a kid growing up in Kailua, a few houses from the beach, back in the 50's, ALL of my time was spent "at the beach" and it was FREE. My parents were poor but it didn't matter because the beach was everything to all of the kids in the neighborhood. The beach is free.
When married, we lived in a 2 bedroom 1 bathroom house. The kids shared a bedroom.I loved our mornings together, I'd get them ready for school. They loved quinoa with almond milk, almonds and frozen blueberries. Helping them with homework after dinner is still a fond memory
We played a lot of Battleship too, at the kitchen table, and music was always playing. We'd rotate our picks all day on Sunday afternoons
My dad made about 250 a week .my mother could not work because of her health. They raised 3 kids and never took a dime from the government. We were poor but never went hungry .
I'm older but have a similar story. My and my brother's dad died when I was 9 mos old - mom remarried and stepdad was going to college working at a valve factory making $7.50 an hour. We lived in a 800 sq. ft. home with 1 bathroom till I was 9. Smart parents=happy ending! #USA
Cerno, that’s growing up poor in the USA. Still much better than grow up poor in, say, India, where your goal is simply to find the next meal to survive.
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