@grimloki: Do you really have to show up in multiple threads about poverty to say that you do not think poor people should be allowed to have children? I have seen you say that poor people should not be having sex unless they can do it safely, which basically means that poor women should be allowed to have sex since it is impossible to be 100% protected against the chance of pregnancy. And please do not start talking about how as a guy, you know how easy it is for a woman to take a birth control pill correctly/consistently and how it is cheap/easy to get.
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Ah, yes. Another armchair ubermensch. Theyâre never in short supply.
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I was thinking a lot about where this conversation has gone. I think one of the real issues with trying to build safety nets is the underlying idea that people who are broken can be fixed, instead of approaching people in a more humane way. Some people are not broken, but will need assistance all of their lives, and they will never become well, but we can create environments where they can function better and we are all better because of that.
I see on TV shows all the time where someone is an addict, they get confronted or they go to AA, and then they are well from there on out. For some people that happens - they go through a phase of being addicted when they are young and then they figure out that isnât a good way to live and shape up. For other people, drugs or alcohol become a way to cope with a mental illness that they never admit to. They mean well but they never really put themselves together. Sometimes they are sober but still not functioning well, other times they are just indulging and feeling guilty. Thereâs an awful lot of addict out there who maybe never will kick their habit, but because we insist on believing that it is possible for them to become well, we canât find ways to provide the ongoing support that would help them to have more good days.
Similarly, mental health problems. I remember one time when I was involved in getting my stepson to a mental health hospital for a short stay - we knew heâd only be in three days and theyâd probably screw up his meds while he was in there but we had no other options - and they told us sometimes the value of having a person in the mental hospital is just to give the family a break, so that the people involved in the ongoing challenge can get refreshed to continue. Well, how come we donât recognize that this is the reality of mental illness, that most people do not find some magic medicine that makes them not sick. That people with mental illnesses do better and worse but very rarely get on top of their lives all together - why donât we focus on providing help to the families all the time instead of only in crisis?
Or, assuming that poor people will be able to âget out of poverty,â instead of maybe that people might never get out but that their lives can be made better with help, and that they might need ongoing help that we could provide without stigma and shaming.
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Not blowing $5 at Wendyâs might not make much difference this week, but it can mean the difference between getting crap clothes thatâll wear out in a hurry, and slightly better clothes thatâll last longer.
Not blowing $5 at Wendyâs doesnât make any difference this week, and it doesnât make any difference next week because the timing chain is going to blow. At which point the âdifferenceâ is whether youâre going to be unable to pay the impound lot fee so the car gets seized by the cops, or unable to pay the towing fee so the car gets seized by the towing company. If youâve been really good and saved up for longer, you might have enough money to pay both fees, but not have enough to get the car towed OUT so more impound fees rack up until they take the car that way. You canât even get a total before you start paying; the cops donât tell you about the towing company, the towing company doesnât tell you about their no-hauling-out-your-own-wreck policy.
You can swap out âcar broke horriblyâ for any of several dozen other disasters, if you like. There are a TON of things in this world that will happily chew a thousand dollars off of you, and if you donât have a thousand dollars (remember, at $5/week, thatâs four YEARS) theyâll take whatever youâve got, but they canât take what you donât have.
The choice is between eating $5 worth of Wendyâs food now, or putting the $5 away so it can get ripped away from you later.
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Exactly. Well said.
Perhaps you could learn a thing about reading the full piece before commenting. Or possibly paying attention to it if you did read it. But I do not like it when people ignore what I said and distort it to suit their own knee-jerk assumptions.
So before you wander away happy in the knowledge that another poor person simply deserves their lot, let me clarify a few things:
I had an apartment. It flooded. We had to stay in a motel for a while. I happened to be pregnant at the time. As we had just lost everything we owned, we didnât have anything to spare. But even if I had been abject when I got pregnant, you are skirting some sticky territory with that bit of opinion.
My teeth went to hell when I was hit by a drunk driver and cracked a bunch of them. On my way to work, if that makes it more palatable for you. Insurance didnât cover dental. You canât fix cracked molars with Crest no matter how much you use, trust me. But thanks for assuming that I am capable of using multisyllabic words, but not figuring out how to use toothpaste. Itâs very rational of you.
I really, really donât get why everyone is assuming I smoke name-brand cigarettes. I buy generics, on the reservation. Not that itâs anyoneâs business, but theyâre actually quite cheap tax-free.
Dude. I cook for a living. That is how I make my money. That is why I know how expensive meat is and how time consuming non-meat protein is, none of which has anything to do with the fact that sometimes, I just like to eat something that for once I havenât cooked. I think it stands to reason.
I think maybe you have a super-unique definition of living within oneâs means, because while I struggle and patchwork, I do not depend on anyone but myself. In fact, I support more than just my little family. So please rethink your assumption that I am somehow irresponsible simply because I donât have much to be responsible with.
Perhaps instead of worrying about whether someone who says that she has made mistakes (in the title, no less!) has in fact made mistakes, you could try not equating someone who is poor with someone who is stupid, feckless, and willfully ignorant.
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Yes. I am lucky, I have tools and resources and know how to handle the luck I have had this week. All I needed was someone to let me get to level ground, and I will be fine, because most of my woes are directly related to my finances. But most of my neighbors arenât so lucky. Most of them have more things to fight than I do.
I stopped to give a homeless guy a smoke in Salt Lake a couple of days ago. He said that heâd probably seen a thousand people walk by, and maybe twenty of them had looked at him the whole time. How do you fix that?
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yes, that is exactly it. I hadnât figured out how to say it yet.
Thatâs equally true. Itâs basically a giant crapshoot.
from the article
" Nobody likes poor people procreating, but they judge abortion even harder. "
they use a debate topic best suited for teenagers to get political support.
from the article
" âLow-costâ and âsliding scaleâ sounds like âmoney you have to spendâ to me, and they canât actually help you anyway. "
college medical care is atrocious. the board does not make a profit there.
from the article
âUpdate: The response to this piece is overwhelming. I have had a lot of people ask to use my work. Please do. Share it with the world if you found value in it. Please link back if you can. If you are teaching, I am happy to discuss this with or clarify for you, and you can freely use this piece in your classes. Please do let me know where you teach. You can reach me on Twitter, @killermartinis.â
The choice is between eating $5 worth of Wendyâs food now, or putting the $5 away so it can get ripped away from you later.
I feel like youâre making a point for me, except your phrasing seems to be saying, âitâs okay to spend money now that I might need to save for later.â
OTOH, having been in the situation where Iâve taken a risk on spending money now to regret it immediately afterwardâŚ
Hereâs a write up on the study if anyone is interested: http://www.theatlanticcities.com/jobs-and-economy/2013/08/how-poverty-taxes-brain/6716/
In a series of experiments run by researchers at Princeton, Harvard, and the University of Warwick, low-income people who were primed to think about financial problems performed poorly on a series of cognition tests, saddled with a mental load that was the equivalent of losing an entire nightâs sleep. Put another way, the condition of poverty imposed a mental burden akin to losing 13 IQ points, or comparable to the cognitive difference thatâs been observed between chronic alcoholics and normal adults.
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::Internet high-five:: for the grimloki teardown.
And thank you for joining the conversation here.
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I suddenly have this opportunity to talk to people about things that we never really get to. Itâs freaking awesome. And for some reason I have found that people are shocked that Iâm doing that, as though that werenât the whole point to begin with, that i wanted to talk about it with people.
If I have to answer a critic or two, and theyâre going to make it that easy, well, I do love the Internet. Theyâre actually doing me a service, letting me be slightly publicly frustrated. The thing about going viral is that you have to be incredibly patient, I am learning.
Yes, true. But the point that you are missing is that it seems completely and utterly futile. Itâs somewhat equivalent to being really thirsty and not drinking water out of some âshould doâ ideal, when there is a giant pitcher on the table in front of you, because you might be thirsty later too. What you seem to be advocating is that people in straitened circumstances should be able to muster superhuman self-control, constantly. And what I am saying is that sometimes you crack and you just have to give in on something, and that the five bucks is the thing you have to crack with. You just take the tiniest mouthful of the water, because your mouth is just so fucking dry. Doesnât change the level of the pitcher, but you are right that it is wiser to wait. Make more sense?
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We have unprecedented access to anonymous strangers these days. In some ways, it makes it easier to bare your soul. It can make having honest conversation about âtabooâ subjects easier. Unfortunately, ignorant and bigoted talking points can be freely put on offer, too.
Iâm not poor anymore, but I grew up poor and was poor as a young adult. I lived in housemate situations until I was over 30. I could easily be poor again, and Iâm extremely conscious of how quickly it can happen. Poverty is something most of us were brought up to hide or be ashamed about. How can we be ashamed today, when 150 million of us live with it? We have to talk about it, we have to be honest about it, and we need to collectively fight to end the cycle for the sake our countryâs future. I thank you for your frankness, and your approachable writing style.
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I appreciate that. I didnât even write this on a blog per se, it was part of a larger discussion and this tiny bit of it got picked up. I will deal with the privacy and invasion and explanation because I have become Internet famous for admitting my faults and most dire thoughts. So itâs not like I am living in fear of being found out as a person who doesnât have her shit together, and I imagine that I would be freaking out if I had to worry about that too!
But it has been fascinating to see what it is like to be a person that people think is made-up, until I talk to them. Itâs been kind of awesome, actually. Because I would like to know if there are things holding me back that I donât even know about, and the angry critics have been telling me what those things are. Itâs helpful.
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I feel like youâre making a point for me, except your phrasing seems to be saying, âitâs okay to spend money now that I might need to save for later.â
That is exactly what Iâm saying. When youâre going through life, you have to expect three or four medium-sized shits to happen in an average year. If you canât save fast enough to cope with the level of shit you can expect, youâre better off spending what you have in hand, because running into a problem with half of what itâs going to cost to fix it doesnât get you a better outcome than showing up with nothing.
Saving is a risk. For middle-class people, itâs not an unreasonable risk-- you might get cancer and get cleaned out, but usually, you wonât. For the poor, the risk is bad enough that itâs not worth it in the long run.
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