A snippet from an article on Huffington Post about what it means to be working poor.
Pretty spot on…
I got into an argument today with someone who is a landlord, and they were outraged, outraged, to find that their evicted tenants owned an Xbox 360. Never mind that the console was ten years old and worth perhaps $50 on Craigslist, they were outraged that their evicted tenants did not sell it, along with the very clothes on their back, to pay their back rent. I tried to explain to him that when you are $1800 in back rent, $50 isn’t even a dent in that debt. Why bother? Why bother selling that $50 item if it isn’t going to get you any less evicted? If it’s not going to save you, you’ll hold on to it. Money becomes meaningless when you’ll never have enough to hold onto. You just let it flow like water through your hands. It’s all gone anyways, no matter what you do. It was gone before it ever touched you.
The other day I got very mad at someone because their justification of why a family didn’t deserve their council house was because they had decorated the front of their house with xmas lights. DO YOU REALLY KNOW WHAT ITS LIKE TO LIVE WITH NO SMALL PLEASURES AT ALL?!?!? DO YOU REALLY?!?!
This is one of the great end results of capitalism: we treat people as if the only thing they should care about are their mechanical needs but without things to nourish the soul or the capacity to talk about same, we fall apart.
We aren’t meant to be things which sit in blank boxes waiting to be used by our employers. Nothing in nature acts that way. Nothing’s meant to.
The source article: ”This Is Why Poor People’s Bad Decisions Make Perfect Sense”
#um this topic makes me fucking furious#i will do a murder immediately#don’t#not only are small pleasures necessary to keep from SPIRALING INTO DEPRESSION WHEN YOU ARE POOR but they are STATUS MARKERS#you NEED a fucking phone to get a job#you need a fucking SMARTPHONE to be accepted as a normal person#you need nice clothes to be treated like you’re worth something#especially if you’re a poor poc#everyone sit down#think about this if you haven’t before#smashes a vase#fuck capitalism
The need rich people have for poor people to constantly perform some sort of Dickensian display of abject poverty is so goddamn disgusting and proves that, yes, it is all about status markers. Rich people want visible proof that others are beneath them. It’s malicious and nauseating. And the kicker is that they’re usually too busy being impressed with their own wealth and sense of superiority to use their brains, because as already stated in the other comments, having technology or a couple of small pleasures is *not* a reliable indicator of income. This anti-poor people shit is revolting.
And it turns poor and working-class people against each other. Like I knew a guy who installed cable TV for a living and barely could make a living, and resented that some people who got cable TV were on welfare. I tried to explain that you actually have to spend a certain amount of money in order to qualify for such basic thing as Medicaid – if you save money you’ll get thrown off the system, even though you won’t magically be able to survive outside the system with the amount of money you have to save in order to be thrown off it. He didn’t care. He told me poor people should be given nothing more than food, clothing, and shelter. He grew up poorer than most poor people have ever been. All this combination of shit made me furious and still does. Not to mention the cultural ideals of being too proud to accept help of any kind and how people think this is a good thing even when it kills people.
The poorest people in the world forgo some amount of necessities for staying alive in order to have some money for recreation or things that connect them to the world. During the Depression, many people surveyed said they would rather give up their beds than their radios – radio being how people stayed connected to the outside world in the same way Internet does today. And does anyone need to bring up Rat Park again? Holy crap this stuff pisses me off.
(– Poor person who has Internet & Netflix & smartphone & other so-called luxuries. And does anyone really think the extra $100ish a month I’d get giving all that up would catapult me out of poverty and solve all my problems? Not to mention the Internet has literally saved my life before. As in, I was in the hospital being mistreated in a way that was life-threatening, and blogging allowed me and another poor person who was making decisions for me, to get other people to call the hospital and say “We’re watching you.” Other poor people get food and rent and etc. money by asking on the Internet and receiving food money through the Internet. Many people on disability supplement their income by selling art or small crafts online – how much you’re allowed to sell before they start cutting benefits depends on what part of the system you’re in, but it’s a common thing.)
Tag: poverty
Sci, are Clint’s issues with food and childhood hunger canon in Marvel? Because they are such a prominent theme in many many fics (I have used it myself) so just curious if they are part of the comics. Also, does Rhodey know that Tony asked Clint to take care of DJ if he and Steve are gone?
I honestly don’t remember it being explicitly covered in the comics. But there are things that are:
-Clint’s father was physically and emotionally abusive
-Like half of the fathers in the Marvel universe, he was also an alcoholic who hit his wife
-They were very definitely poor
-His parents died in a car accident
-He and his brother ran away, joined the circus, and fell under the thrall of yet another abusive father figure.This equals hunger. So why DON’T I remember this being focused on?
Because everything I’ve ever read about hunger, non-fiction or fiction, has been written by women, or PoC. Guess who almost never, ever gets to write white, male lead character superheroes for the big two publishers? Women. And PoC.
So the things that are written about Clint and his difficult childhood (or Tony and his difficult childhood, or Bruce and his difficult childhood, and hell, I think they retconned Steve’s merely dead dad to be, you guessed it, alcoholic and abusive!, so him and his difficult childhood) are written through a white, male lens. And white men, in general, are more comfortable writing about certain types of abuse (physical and verbal) than others (sexual and emotional).
Because certain types of suffering are ‘manly.’ Are ‘acceptable’ in the backstory of a hyper masculine character. Look at the same tired tropes trotted out over and over and over. The suffering heaped on heroic male characters tends to follow a very easy, very comfortable path, where the writer doesn’t have to think too hard, where the character can be sympathetic, but still ‘strong.’ Still ‘tough.’ Still ‘heroic.’ Still ‘masculine.’
Violence is masculine. Starvation is not. Poverty is not.
Being poor is the worst sin in the United States. It is, and anyone who tells you differently is selling something.
I did my student teaching in an inner city middle school in a not-very-good part of a solidly working class city. And I remember the principal walking around at lunch, surreptitiously handing out lunch cards. These were supposed to go to kids who had forgotten their lunch money that day, to entitle them to a free lunch. But on lunch duty, I soon figured out, she was giving them to the same kids, every day.
I asked her why, and she said, these were kids who would’ve qualified for the free lunch program, she knew it, they knew it, the cafeteria ladies knew it. But the paperwork was never filled out. Hell, the paperwork probably never made it home. Because when they were approved for the free lunch program, the card they were given was a different color than the card for the kids who were paying. And they knew it. Their peers knew it. So they didn’t bring the paperwork home.
To repeat: Twelve year old children, children who had NO PART in their family’s financial standing, NO ABILITY to change that standing, NO CHANCE to do anything other than do their best to get by, preferred going hungry rather than deal with the shame of being visibly identified as coming from a family below the poverty line.
And for some of these kids, the free breakfast and lunch provided by schools was probably the most stable nutrition they got.
Hunger never leaves you. Not ever. But it is a feminine suffering, a thing spoken of condescendingly by late night “Feed the Children” ads showing starving (brown) children in some far off, unfortunate land, and written about by women who can’t figure out how to stretch what little they have to cover the heating bill and the grocery bill. Hunger is food deserts in inner cities and canned food because you can’t afford the time or the bus fare to go to the grocery store several times a month for fresh, and so everything has to last. It is food pantries where you’re given the allotment of rice and beans and maybe, if you’re damn lucky, a can of horrible pineapple chunks as a ‘treat.’
Hunger is not heroic. And that’s why it’s glossed over in comics.
(Also, yes, totally Rhodey knows. 8) )
Poorer people buy “lots of junk food” you say?
You mean foods with…
- Typically very low prices?
- Strong, comforting flavors?
- No precious time or energy required to prepare?
- Long-ass shelf lives?
- Fats and oils that fill you up quicker and longer?
You’re gonna shame people for eating what they can get the most mileage out of with the same money you say they aren’t managing intelligently enough??
Motherfuckers out there want you to eat nothing but rice and chicken for the rest of your life. Fuck that. Survive however you need.
There's a Mirror on the Wall 