Differences between life when you're poor and life when you're middle class

boing
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My dad had all sorts of issues with his illness (or rather my step-mother did and last I heard from her, still is) in dealing with Tri-Care, trying to get them to help with the bills. My step-father has also had lots of issues with medical bills. I think military folks probably have a better time of things, as far as that goes, but I think too many vets are falling by the wayside, and it pisses me off. Privatizing any aspect of the military is a shitty idea, if you ask me.

Also, hindsight is always 20/20. If I had known better, I would have gone directly out of school, too. But I didn’t. I’m wiser in my studies, but lots of things are harder…

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She’s not on any assistance. Guess they didn’t read that part.

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Oh, yeah, I knew that, I was addressing his specific complaint that at one time she got WIC and Medicaid while she was pregnant (she mentioned that in the comments). Clearly, the guy we’re both replying to buys into the whole “welfare queen” stereotype - ignoring the fact that these programs pay out a pittance anyway. I guess I was addressing his general tone.

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Gardening takes time. If you’ll read her piece, she literally has no time. Crock pots are the least time consuming option for cooking, but maybe she can’t put aside a little for that.

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LOL, the Yan (the Wok With Yan guy) rice cooker. 20 bucks from Dominick’s grocery when I lived in Chicago.

Here’s what I find strange. My mom had always been an excellent cook. Now that the kids are all moved out and she lives alone, she only eats microwave meals, and won’t let me cook for her instead. She prefers it.
I just don’t get that.

Oh, just the whole corporate servitude thing…subsistence wages, pushing subservience to the credit industry, aggressive marketing of shoddy products that are cheap to manufacture (with an extra helping of chemicals), mandatory arbitration and non-disclosure agreements, corporate personhood, etc…just the general idea that we need Big Corporate for America/Earth to survive.

As if the world couldn’t survive if we went back to small businesses and the barter system.

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Thanks for responding :slight_smile:
You addressed my points quite clearly yet I still go back to what you call white privilege and what I call hidden assumptions.

For example:
We already know that we cannot get every kid into the best school, if we have 10 schools, then we’ve just excluded 90% of the population.
if we have 3 good schools, then we’ve only excluded 70% of the population from what is considered a good education.

First round of questions: Why are there only three good schools? Are they better funded? Is it because of where they are located?
From this we already know that if early education is important, we’ve doomed 70% of the population. If we are funding some schools because they have smart students then we are saying that the other kids deserve to be in a bad school. We may not mean to say it, but that is what we are doing.

Now, all these schools cant be equally terrible, if we have 3 schools that are better than the rest, then lets posit 4 schools that are just good, nothing special, you go there, you learn enough to go to the next level.

Second round of questions: Are kids that go to a "regular"school being done a disservice because the did not get into the best school? what’s the difference between a good school and a great school in the same district? How many “rich” kids go to these “regular” schools?
I’m guessing here, but I’m pretty sure that the “better” schools have all the rich kids in them, draw your own conclusions here. But if we grant that not sending your kid to the best school, and not sending him/her to the worst school either is a good compromise for parents that are poor then we’ve only doomed 30% of kids to bad schools, ergo, to failure.

And if all the rich kids are in the better schools, (which isn’t hard to imagine, you even grant that yourself since they have options), then it could be said, that in a way, rich people are limiting how many poor kids can get a leg up on education in the first place, so saying that “There are definitely poor people who send their kids to the wealthier schools. It’s not like the wealthier schools have exclusively wealthy populations” hides the false assumption that poor kids would fill 95% of the best school if only they would apply for it.

The hard truth is that you don’t need to assume that people are not trying to get out of poverty to explain why they don’t.
In fact, if we had a way of knowing how many jobs there are, and how much those jobs pay, we would know who’s poor and who isn’t, because the last hidden assumption made here is that not every kid can grow up to be a CEO, and not every kid can grow up to be a teacher, and not every kid can grow up to be a manager, or a janitor, we only require so many.
In this way, we require a certain amount of people to be poor. Think about that.

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Her rational for continuing to smoke is flawed. She should quit for a number of reasons, money being one of them. (Please note who these sin taxes actually effect.) But other than that I can mostly relate. I grew up on gov. cheese and was out of work for over a year. I was able to get just barely enough money to pay the bills and lived on cereal or bean burritos. You just have to resist temptation and skip that meal at Wendy’s. That $5 adds up quick - and hell most fast food places are more like $7.

There are some people who just have fucked up priorities. I had a friend at a hair salon and a lady was getting a $50 thing done to her, and she was bitching about affording gifts for her kids at Christmas. It was also very eye opening delivering turkey dinners for Thanksgiving one year.

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Yes, it does. I did read her piece, and this is my main problem with the issue (not her)…that we are now putting more time into working for less return on investment of our time (i.e. necessary items, not just creature comforts).
IMHO, I think we’re getting close to the tipping point that gardening might be a better investment in ourselves than working for The Man.

As I have been pointing out, I’m upset with our current situation, not the blogger herself.

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We GET IT. You love your rice cooker. A lot. Enough to mention it, what, at least half a dozen times so far?

You’ve mentioned your (NOT FREE) rice cooker so many times you would think it was an actual solution to a really great big, complex problem. News flash: It really isn’t, and your obsession is starting to make it clear to me how naive you really are on the subject of poverty and food.

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Cory, I’m responding to you, because I know Beth on another board and she asked me to post this in response to some of the commenter here. From Beth:

Okay, so here is the thing. I didn’t write this to be anything like a full picture. I wrote it to answer a very specific question, and people have found value there and made it bigger than that. It’s a good thing.

But I would like it to be clear that while yes, I was on WIC that one time after my apartment flooded and we had to move into a motel while we waited for a new unit to open up, I do not appreciate the assumption that I am open for judgement because people think they are paying my way. They are not. That is why I have so many hours to work, you see. And even if I were on food stamps or cash benefits or Medicaid, I am a taxpayer like everyone else. The benefits that I might take from the system are those I have earned by being a participating cog in the economy. Any judgment made about that system is naught to do with me, and I suggest you take your complaints to your local legislator. That’s how we change the rules here in America.

In the meantime, is the argument that I am not allowed to speak because I lack an education? Sure, okay. Tell you what -you explain to me which English class you took that equated a short, narrowly defined essay to a fully researched book on policy and history and how they were really meant to be the same thing. I have never taken college English; it’s totally possible that one exists. I might not have heard of it. I would be interested to read the lectures on that particular idea.

I can appreciate that you do not want to see yourself as the sort of person who holds everyone around you to impossible standards and is kind of a condescending ass. That doesn’t negate the fact that your argument is essentially that if someone is not already perfect, they should probably not ever assert anything. I am not certain who you think is qualified to speak about what it is like to experience being poor in America if not someone who is actually poor in America. I would be interested to hear your version of what you think I think. I am interested in your theory that I should only speak about the things that I do have, the luck that I have experienced, and not about anything that isn’t fun or uplifting. I’m interested in your opinion that I give two shits what my neighbors do or do not have. I am not certain where you came up with that one, as it’s demonstrably false.

But then, it’s easy to build yourself a whole picture of a person and their life out of a thousand-word grouping of thoughts, isn’t it? It’s almost like if you admit you are poor, people automatically assume you are short-sighted and a bit slow or something. Weird, huh?

Editted to add: She’s down below in the comments now, commenting under KillerMartini.

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Are you willing to buy her a rice cooker? I actually have one, but I find I don’t like it much. It doesn’t create much in the way of variety and taste, particularly if you’re not that talented with spices (or don’t have many available to you), or have a somewhat picky palate (I don’t, but others might, and that can’t always be helped).

Unlike you, I’ve never mastered the ability to make awesome food in my tiny rice cooker, and I find what I do make to be rather boring and sort of one-note. Rice and veggies, every day! Yay! Snore.

But hey! Poor people should be okay with boring, right?

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Aw, I don’t think thats fair! He’s trying to be helpful and you’re yelling at him about his rice cooker? He’s had lots of good comments and insight and he never said a rice cooker would fix things, but it may help, I know it did me.

If you want food tips for a rice cooker I can help you. Yes, rice and veggies most nights, but add a single fried egg and drown it in sesame oil and rooster sauce and I’m there! (I add a little butter and salt to the rice too, but I’m a salt fiend). Also, check out chinatown and buy some blackbeanchili sauce, Lee Kum Kee is the best. Also the ginger sauce is just ginger and salt, super salty but oh so gingery!

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Seriously, unfair. If you read all his comments you’ll know he understands poverty from a first hand POV. He made a suggestion based on what works for him, stop yelling at him for it!

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Except, I think if she stopped working, she wouldn’t all of a sudden find herself on a solid piece of land which she could farm/garden. People who are able to garden now a days, small scale like, are the people who have the resources and time to do so. At this point, the ability to do so is a privilege, not

I think you’re probably right, overall, and I realize that you’re not necessarily criticizing her particularly, but the system. But I’d argue going back to more subsistence farming is not a light switch. The fact is, we as a country are largely urban/suburban in an industrial/post-industrial economy, and trying to go back to an agrarian economy is not an easy solution. It makes sense, but the how is the problem. Once we started to replace small holding with industrial farming (think sugar plantations in the Caribbean or cotton farming in the south), small free hold farmers became an endangered species. And industrial farming fed mass production and industrialization, and that further fed industrialized farming. I don’t think it’s just that easy of a choice at this point. It may be right and ideal, but that doesn’t mean we can just all decide to go farm and garden one day, and hang the world.

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I’ve only referred to it in response to direct remarks about it.

Now you’re just driving trollies, aren’t you?

I’m merely stating that there are alternatives to the McDonald’s/Wendy’s trap, and that it only makes it worse when we support corporations that give back less in wages or product (which is often quite boring) than what we give them in labor and purchase price.
As the John Cheese article stated, poor people like myself are often stuck in a mode of thought due to our circumstance that is quite like a rut. Also, as the Appalachian article shows, people are able to survive on little, yet still be proud. It seems like there are many who would like to shame that pride right out of them.

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Mentioning the rice cooker once: Possibly helpful, although he still assumes it’s some really great idea no one has ever thought of before, or that everyone has access to, or that it’s … well, a helpful idea anyway in the grand scheme of things when it comes to the broader implications of poverty, which is what this entire blog entry was about. Not how to help this woman, who really doesn’t need random internet strangers telling her (over and over and over again, mind) that a rice cooker might be hellpful.

But they didn’t just mention it once. They harped on it over and over, as if is actually helpful.

Really, it wasn’t all that helpful, and it continued to get even less helpful as they went along.

Interestingly, it wasn’t until several (several!) repeats of their rice cooker mantra that they even mentioned the cost, as if $20 was no big deal, which is another really great indicator that this person really doesn’t get it. That should have been more than just an after-thought.

I don’t really care about tips and recipes. THAT IS NOT THE POINT OF MY COMMENT, nor was the woman who wrote this article looking for “helpful” tips and recipes. Talk about missing the point.

Rice cookers are fantastic, awesome, thanks for the “helpful” recipe that I never asked for. You can pat yourself on the back now for being so very helpful and adding much to the COMPLEX discussion of food and poverty.

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It’s weird; I always assume everyone in comments is a guy unless they have a name like “pinksparklefairy.” I’m starting to realize that I am just messed up that way, trying to make my responses not assuming a male sex. Hi, also a girl!

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You complained about rice and veggies every day, I tried to help.
But please feel free to continue to yell, it adds so much to the discourse.

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Or you can imagine that adults who had promise and had limited options just might be open to learning how to help their children have a better life, and maybe recognize that some of our education dollars need to go into programs to help adults.

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I read every comment they left.

Great, we get it, everyone should get a rice cooker! After a certain point it becomes pretty mind-boggling that someone would put that much importance on a freakin’ rice cooker.

A not-free rice cooker at that.

One person’s experience of poverty is not going to be someone else’s. Great, they love their rice cooker. I’m not sure why it’s oh so important to the discussion of poverty that it needs to be mentioned over and over and over again.

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