Of course I wasn’t. Thanks for being able to understand the context.
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I should have realized! My bad.
Maybe you’re right, but I think marilove felt he was harping on it… Again, sorry to keep talking for other people.
I just was back in Alabama visiting a good friend. Her little brother really did get married with he was 13 and he now has 5 kids ranging up to age 18 - one with some very serious health issues. Anyway, he and his wife are a hot mess and though my friend and her parents have done what they can for his children, all it has really done is drag the grandparents down in their attempt to help. Right now my friend is not having contact with her brother, which means that her children have no contact with their cousins. It’s really heartbreaking in every way. Economics is just one part of what is happening with this brother whose family is so affected by his wife’s behavior - she is the one who grew up super super poor. My friend is doing pretty well, and her parents both had good blue collar jobs and were so responsible with their money. No one really wants to turn their back on the children involved. I have no real solution for them, no easy answer, but just because the solution isn’t easy doesn’t me we shouldn’t fight for it.
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LOL - what else are we supposed to do on a bbs other than harp on about things? 
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I don’t have so much of a problem with frozen (but do fruits really need food coloring?) or canned, it’s the items that are so processed that they no longer resemble the real thing or provide adequate nutrition that gets me.
The ABC report may have been false, but it did spur some action on the part of some food producers.
edit: I do think it speaks to the economic situation that you would more likely find this product in a Kroger’s than a Trader Joe’s. Sort of like having more payday loan offices in a poor neighborhood than a rich one.
Please don’t misconstrue my post as an endorsement of such strategies; but I was replying to that specific part of your post, which emphasized the effects of people who are pretty much the opposite of ‘adults who had promise and had limited options’. 'That was the aspect of your description that seemed most salient: a cultural structure where the presence of fuckups (certainly aided and abetted by our crush-the-poor policies) travelled unrestrained through everyone nearby.
I have absolutely nothing against aiming assistance at adults, nor do I like the idea of civilizin’ the poor people indian-missionary-school-style; but you seem to have shifted pretty drastically from the people you are talking about in the post I replied to and the people you are talking about in your reply to my post.
Unless you think that the ‘biggest fuckups’ themselves are fixable (sometimes true; but even the biggest fuckups in wealthy families can achieve no success at all in the face of unlimited access to psych help, enough money to paper over any problems with being a functional human being, and enough lawyers to avoid a criminal record, much less a felony rap), what you explicitly described is an overtly toxic culture, where the most pernicious aspects of the most pernicious people are what gets amplified and imposed. That’s a problem sufficiently intractable that you start to feel the temptation to send the kids to the lifeboats and stop frantically bailing out the ship.
It would be very nice if we didn’t have to be our own safety nets. I think that’s the thing. Situations like that aren’t uncommon, but they are uniformly heartbreaking to see.
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It’s a circular argument because there really is no logical argument. It’s like when people argue to severely depressed people to snap out of it, or they enumerate all the things they think would make the depressed person feel better. It comes down to the fact that the only thing that would make it better would be the person no longer being severely depressed; then they could do all the good things and they would actually feel good.
Poverty is the same way. The very best ‘cure’ for getting better is to no longer being desperately poor. Then you grab a bit of rest, get a bit of hope and sanity back, make wiser decisions and better planning… Of course, it makes no sense and it’s circular, but that’s why poverty is such a terrible and forbidding situation (and why so many cannot get out of the spiral).
I’ve experienced both depression and poverty. Fortunately, both were non-permanent and I benefited from MANY innate privileges (youth, Canadian health care, good health in general, reasonably ‘marketable’ looks according to culture, loving and stable upbringing…) and amazing serendipity. So even though I’ve had moments of despair, I never reached the point of it overwhelming all systems. But the fleeting moments of darkness sure were scary. I can understand how people who happen to fall all the way in are pretty much beyond an event horizon of sorts. The reality there is utterly not the same as on the other side.
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I am with you on that. As far as I’m concerned, things should be labeled with “food” or “edible substances.” I could care less if something had pesticides on it at one point or was bred for hardiness, but there’s a freaking line. I think I probably actually feel less guilty about the fresh food because I am a cook and so at least know to read the ingredients. I might be more concerned if I didn’t know how to tell whether something had any real nutritional value. We have snacks, but they are of the grape-and-crackers variety. Still, I know people who do not realize that Cheez isn’t exactly healthy for toddlers. Because, you see, it is sold in the food section.
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I have been enjoying the opportunity to reference Swift. You never really get to do that, but I have discovered that talking about being poor and also a parent has given me ample chance.
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You made me think of dead fishes! (Excellent read! Allie Brosh is the boss!)
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Yeah, and like I said in another comment, there’s a difference between country poor and city poor, though it’s somewhat heartening to hear about the phenomenon of urban gardening in places like Detroit.
Some of this isn’t specifically targeted at you, and I think from context you’ll figure out what I’m getting at.
I know a guy who’s going through this right now. He’s got a schedule similar to Killer Martini’s, despite his kids being grown and being in his mid-50s. He gets up at 5-6 a.m., works on his small-scale family farm, and after spending a good chunk of the day with livestock, drives an hour to work then drives several more hours transporting patients on a multistate route. He gets between two and three hours sleep. After his last checkup (which he’s required to get regularly for this hospital gig) he found out he’s basically going to have to quit because he’s diabetic and his heart just can’t take the strain anymore. He can’t afford to, of course.
Being a country boy, and being as multitalented as he is, he’s just resigned himself to the fact that he’s going to have to cut way back on things and live off the land. He’s a strong advocate for it, too, pointing out how much of our lives we spend making ourselves miserable.
Now…is that old country boy a shithead for advocating that other people live the simplified country life, when that’s not an option to everyone?
Right now I’m unemployed and broke partially by choice (though it was this or die of a heart attack.) Some of what you said makes me think of my days of chasing dimes for the kind of hours people do for dollars, and all I got in return was high blood pressure and high cholesterol.
And now that my toddler has transitioned to being a preschooler (it’s horrible that I think one of my biggest mistakes was pulling her out of daycare rather than concentrating on starting a home business first), because my kids’ school schedules are such that my options are to either work from home or get a night job, and knowing what getting no sleep does to my HBP, I’m working on getting work from home. I’m getting encouragement from a person who lives in a poorer part of the state than me, who is getting all kinds of freelance writing gigs despite having such poor health that she’s on an organ donor list. And with her, not only does she advocate that kind of work, she also advocates homeschooling. Now, is she a shitty person for advocating something that’s not an option for everyone?
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Yeah, and then there’s the problem of when Food Nazis get hooked on a particular product and throw everything out of balance, like the current problem of the acid-whey surplus because everyone now can only eat Greek yogurt with their gluten-free danish.
I just want to know where it came from and that there’s no unnecessary stuff in it.
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I get it. I think it’s a matter of doing what you can when/where you can.
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I get what you’re saying there. But I think maybe you missed my point. It’s that I don’t buy clothes at all, and if I do it’s at the thrift store on fifty cent day. That store is where I got my crockpot, actually. I wasn’t saying fast food in particular, I was simply trying to point out that if you live the sort of life in which there is always a financial crisis like a medical bill or a car repair because you have never been able to get a nice car, five dollars one way or another once every couple of weeks isn’t going to drag you into a higher asset bracket. Being poor isn’t a matter of simply not spending money, it’s a matter of having enough money to avoid the hidden expenses. I have never been able to set aside five grand. So instead, I bought a car for five hundred and have, in bits and pieces, spent nearly seven grand keeping it running. Which is why I can’t save enough to buy a car that won’t need constant work. Does that make more sense?
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My husband comes from a family of subsistence farmers. Nothing makes them laugh harder than pretty uniform-looking produce with an “organic” label on it.
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Yep, it was. I enjoy joking about these things, it’s how I stay sane. Really, I am Bill Gates’s secret daughter, and I spend my days pretending to be poor for the lulz.
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Some become President…
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Right, it’s that tenuous balance of surviving in our present day economy while exercising one’s right to have a life.
…all wrapped in plastic, too. Kind of defeats the purpose, I think.
