The Cruel Things Conservatives Say to Poor People

Whenever I tell my life story on a social networking website, a story about a conservative, two-parent married family dropping into poverty and getting trapped there due to my parents having serious mental disabilities, I get attacked. My friend, dulios, theorizes that this is because my life story directly contradicts the right-wing poverty ideology. My parents married, went to church, had all children in wedlock, worked, and yet everything fell apart in ways that the 1981 Des Moines Register article could only skim. On a previous blog, I have put my comments together so people can see what I was saying when the comments below were written. Spelling errors are left in:


1) Besides the sick, filthy, intolerant, materialist hate that you constantly propagate, you really seem to have a Stalinist attitude toward the opinions of the Right. How does one acquire such hate? You are a case study on the mental effects of the materialist mindset on an individual. Just transpose that to authoritarian rule, abracadabra....you have Hitler, Marx, Stalin, Mao. Not really a happy person, are you, Learning the Hard Blogger? (Blogger's Note: What I did to deserve this tirade was suggest we need to take better care of poor children)

2)tell em to go to work and stop drinking, lazy assholes.

3)you gotta take some responsibility for your life, and not lie on the streets and beg for money because you're drunk all the time and can't work. Most of them had the same chances as I did, as people are equal. If they preferred drinking / drugging instead of learning and hard working (they could always have some fun at the weekend :/) than I have no pity for them. Everyone has to take care of himself. (Blogger's Note: I've learned the hard way over time that Pro Life = Everyone Has to Take Care of Himself). So it seems that conservatives can to see babies be born to watch them take care of themselves from birth to death no matter how ugly things get).

4)Learning the Hard Way Blogger, You are certainly free to buy healthcare for as many children as you wish. Are you overburdened? Have you already bought all the health insurance for the needy that you can afford? Perhaps you could start an organization and raise funds for this purpose. However, I doubt you give to charity as Materialists seldom, if ever, do.

It would be a great thing if free citizens actually felt the duty to work together to help those in need by giving and changing hearts, rather than stealing form those that earned their income and have a right do with it what they please. (Blogger's Note: This person is trying to say that being require to give a portion of one's money to the common treasure to fund government efforts at reducing poverty, disease, illiteracy is stealing. Thus, he also suggests that foster children, disabled people, the ill, etc. are thieves.)

I think you are too intolerant and hateful to find it in your heart to give away 10-20% of your income, that is why you subsidize yur selfishness with your fake bleeding heart. By the way, are you tapped out too? I have some charities I can refer you to volunteer for, if you cannot financially support them. Please let me know. I know you really, really care about people. (Blogger's Note: If my full-time employment were not in itself a form of charity--I am discounting my expertise and time by some $30,000 to work for this helping poor people get college degrees, I am proud to also note that our charitable donations include between 12-20 organizations per year. I do two charity walks, and Meals on Wheels in addition to numerous other small volunteer activities).

5) considering those in poverty in the US are really NOT in poverty and, in fact, have it quite good, I think attention would best be focused toward those in nations where they do not have the good fortune of directing their own outcome. (Blogger's Note: Coming soon a posting of what poverty was really like for at least American family.)



6) Again, Learning the Hard Way, you reveal profund stupidity to suggest I think throwing money at the issue is the answer. It is the direct opposite of my view. TO HELP PEOPLE YOU MUST FIRST UNDERSTAND THE CONDITION OF MAN. Clearly, you do not.

7) This "poverty threshold" was recently adjusted, proving the "idea" of poverty to be a political game more than an objective standard. (Blogger's Note: I will be posting scads of evidence about just why there is not such thing as an objective standard. However, there are standards that have been established

Welfare programs are government prisons. I know this for a fact. It is part of my job to know these statistics and about this issue. So, to listen to ignorant neophytes regurgitate profound ignorance over and over is quite frustrating as it reveals the intent of an empty heart that chooses to continue the never-ending cycle for political purposes rather than doing good for fellow citezens.

8) Why do you use credit cards? Geez. Just bizarre. It is quite simple. If you do not like paying interest, then DO NOT ( let me repeat...DO NOT) use credit cards. Good grief, what lunacy! I'll bet you spend 50 bucks a week on lottery tickets too. ugh. (Blogger's note: I never buy lottery tickets, and the credit cards I did use in my life were to buy food and basic supplies for my brother and sister when I got custody of them in my early 20s, and was a graduate student. The debt is mostly paid down, but it sucks to be so poor you have to pay interest for years on food. Nice to be scorned this way though.)

9)Learning the Hard Way Blogger is a ruthless cad that would seem to want to send all conservatives to gas-chambers if she had her way. She has made abundantly clear her hatred for this country as well.

10)You and Learning the Hard Way Blogger are wallowing in your own hatred and creating division. You love your slum communities. They give you purpose. I despise them and want people to leave them and make something of themselves. That happens one individual at a time, by individuals and groups helping individuals. You and your government have a need for the impoverished to remain so. That is power and it is a gramsci tactic of fascist mobilization and division. Learning the Hard Way Blogger's hatred is the worst case scenario for this division. It is militant hatred and I have no respect for it. (Blogger's Note: This guy is patently insane, but like any street corner preacher a few people waste their time and stop to look)

11) Poor people vote Democrat because Democrats allow them to keep being leeches on society by giving them handouts paid for by honest wage earners. Why work when you can sit around on your ass all day and use the government's power of force to STEAL money from other high-achieving taxpayers? And don't give me this ***** about we kicked them off their land either. I feel bad for their ancestors, but that has ***** all to do with the Native Americans of today."

12)Most Americans can't deal with such frugality but that's their problem. Poor people don't have the right to wear nice clothing and eat out. They should be grateful enough that there's salvation army around the corner where they can pick up perfectly usable clothing. It isn't a rich person's problem or fault that the poor continue to make poor financial decisions. A more wealthier person should not have their wealth "stolen" from them at a higher rate to account for these poor financial decisions. The poor should be expect to live frugally and work to get themselves out of their situation.

13)not all rich people are trust fund babies who take their wealth for granted, just like not all poor people are thieves who will rob you blind when you turn your back. (Blogger's Note: Not all rich people are dishonest and greedy either).

14)But I still have to love how many welfare recipients I have seen with shoes expensive enough to provide everybody in my family with a new pair. Oh yeah those spinner hub-caps look real bitchin while they're driving to the local WIC office to pick up their food checks.

I just love working my fingers to the bone so my tax dollars can help them out!!! Wake up you young idiots...Some day you will have a family and you will work your ass off and you will wonder why you do without while others get a free ride...And then you will move from the left to the center of political issues.

15)Poverty is a symptom of a greater disease: Laziness. Sure, there's some circumstance involved, but someone born poor will remain poor unless he decides to do something about it.

16)***** the poor. It's their own fault.

17)The reality is that the hard working and smart are propping up the lazy and useless. It's time this stopped. (Blogger's Note: Yeah, woo, rah. Cheer the endorsement of letting these people just die, damn useless people with disabilities.)

18)It's like raising the minimum wage. It's ***** low for a reason, you're supposed to IMPROVE your own lot in life -- not wait for some lard ass in Washington to vote you a raise. (Blogger's note: see my entry on my dad, the Vietnam war enlistee, who developed schizophrenia and lived a life on minimum wage jobs. He deserves lifelong lowpay according to this lovely commenter).

19)The Dems are basically taxing people who worked hard for their wealth, so that poor people who contribute nothing to society can buy more clothes and sideckickv3's. Im not even lying...(Blogger's note: see multiple previous blog entries with regards to our daily lives in poverty)

20)Survival of the Fittest, I say. (Blogger's note: Cool, so if a zygote can't convince its mother to to keep it, it was unfit.)

the Poverty Experts

I was a doctoral student, studying the links between poverty and mental health. I worked at a center where dozens of professors, post-doctorate scholars, and graduate students research poverty and mental illness. Yet, I could not breathe normally within the walls of the poverty research center. After I spent time there, I drove home barely able to keep my foot steady on the accelerator; my foot, as the rest of me, was usually shaking badly. The anxiety was not related to the stresses of graduate school or research. It’s just that I suspect any poor person would feel uncomfortable in the middle class surroundings of the poverty center. Some of the other workers with hidden poverty in their backgrounds have vocalized the same feelings. I found this situation ironic.

The people who work at the poverty center are very professional. There’s nothing wrong with being professional, but such customs as dressing formally are difficult for someone from a low-income background. It was subtle, but I have noticed that my less-than-spiffy clothing draws disdainful glances. I wanted to explain that along with growing up on welfare, I have accumulated school debt and personal debt that dissuade me from buying clothes. Money is tight on a graduate student’s budget, and I also had custody of my younger brother and sister. Most of my coworkers did not know the reasons I cannot afford to wear expensive clothes. I wondered if they have ever considered the source of the differences between us.

Apart from the superficial differences between myself and my coworkers, there are mannerisms and social mores that I tried, often unsuccessfully, to emulate. I lived in fear that my customary style of speech, sense of familiarity with strangers, and my brand of humor will slip through my facade. For example, my younger brother was awaiting sentencing for drug dealing. When my mother and I created his birthday greeting, we enclosed a Monopoly© “Get out of jail free” card. When I shared what I considered to be a clever idea with colleagues, they appeared mortified. It was clear that they did not understand our sarcasm, and they expected the poor to be humorless about their adversities.

When I did show a behavior more common to someone with a disadvantaged background, the tension in the room rises. For instance, there is a norm in scientific research centers to discount personal experience as a source of knowledge. Most of the people I know from my background value the personal account as a means of understanding. So, when someone in a seminar mentioned a “fact” about Head Start that was not true in my own Head Start experience, I voiced my dissenting thoughts. Because my comment was based on my own experience, and not on a statistic I had memorized, there was a moment of silence in the room. The conversation moved on with no further mention.

A poverty research center with an atmosphere that is jarring to a poor person’s sense of safety is a cause for concern. I strongly feel that social workers—in research or in the field—should make every attempt to create safe environments for people with different backgrounds. Furthermore, I question whether the knowledge of poverty my coworkers had gathered through books and journal articles was any more valid than the first-hand knowledge I had gained. Although I was new to feminist theories, it was my understanding that one school of feminist thought has come to value the “ways of knowing” that come from personal experience. I do not ask to dominate the knowledge base concerning economic disadvantage, because I understand that my experience cannot be generalized to others. On the other hand, it is my conviction that my insights could add to the conversation.

I have never been asked to be an expert speaker for a class studying poverty.
The longer I stayed in graduate school, the more convinced I became that I will never be asked to speak on poverty. Was I qualified to give such a talk? I think so. I do not remember a time when my family was not utilizing public income assistance, at least through food stamps. Actually, this isn’t quite true. During my fifth grade year, my family became ineligible for public welfare when aid to two-parent families was cut. As a result, we did not have heat in the house or regular meals. The Department of Social Services took custody of myself and my four younger siblings, because my parents were judged incapable of providing basic needs. Our foster families were paid a subsidy to care for us--financial assistance that far exceeded the monthly allotment once given as welfare to two-parent families.

Recently, speculation ran high in one of my classes on poverty. They were debating what will happen to families following welfare reform; I believed the discussion could be informed by my own life account. Unfortunately, I chose not to share anything personal, because I then understood the disinterest this type of contribution will face. Instead, I did speak up about the statistics I had heard or the theory I had read. This type of comment was accepted with nods of agreement; I guess everyone is on familiar territory when social work academics remain in the world of cold facts.

There are other sketches of poverty I could offer. I have spent a fair share of time in homeless shelters with my family. Some of the correlates of poverty, including divorce, domestic violence, mental illness, or substance abuse, have been regular occurrences in my background. Furthermore, I could speak to the toll of poverty on one’s mental health. I am pleased that data analysts show interest in the statistics about poor people. It is heartening for me to see many social workers go to areas of economic disadvantage to provide services. However, social work researchers and practitioners need to be conscious that a short-term brush with the poor is not equal to understanding their experiences. It is problematic when social workers begin to speak “on behalf” of the poor, without being inclusive of the people themselves.

During my junior year of college, I was interviewed in a focus group of people raised poor. Although some statistics indicate that a childhood spent in poverty is overcome once a person enters college—and thus the middle class—I can tell you there was terror in that focus group. We all recognized lasting effects of worrying about food or shelter. Our sense of self was impacted, because many of the group members mentioned feeling isolated from other college students, and inferior to people in general. Everyone in the group was unable to shop in standard shopping malls; we each felt as though the store help could recognize us as poor people, and thus they would suspect us of stealing. The list of similarities in our anxieties, and our diminished sense of self, was not coincidental. We all knew that poverty had taken its toll on our mental health. As yet, I have not found a single senior researcher interested in collaborating to investigate this phenomenon. Maybe this type of investigation into poverty is based too strongly in daily experience. In the course of day-to-day living, poor people encounter prejudice, discrimination, and pity. This type of experience is emotional in nature, and emotional reactions to poverty are not of interest to researchers. Poverty researchers study observable behaviors of the poor, such as teen pregnancy, joblessness, and criminal activity.

I cannot speak for all poor people, be they currently poor or living with a history of poverty, but I believe we should be given a voice with regard to our life experience. I have been in social work classes where a student dominated the conversation by giving a lengthy description of their personal circumstances; sometimes, these students seemed to be seeking a brief in-class therapy session, or they wanted to show their superior understanding of a topic. There are many ways to use life experience, and like any contribution, there may be abuses. Nonetheless, if research or in-class training included more information about the daily lives of poor people, middle class social workers might feel more comfortable interacting with us in class, in therapy sessions, or at poverty research centers. Poor people like myself could begin to feel less like objects, and more like contributing members of the academic world. How do thoughtful people who have not been poor best relate to those who have had such experience? They could begin by looking at their personal and professional relationships.

Poverty Lingers On and On

Today I am celebrating my 32nd birthday. I look 22. I have been asked to produce proof of age for purchasing alcohol as recently as a few months ago. Lucky me. However, I feel 52. No one can tell my background by looking. Not-so-lucky me. Mostly, I bear invisible signs of being broken down. I have had back surgery, heel spurs, arthritis, major depression, anxiety, and endocrine problems. An untreated ear infection during my youth has left me with impaired hearing. Poor nutrition has led to more visible signs of a broken body--bouts with obesity and broken strands of poorly nourished hair. Then there are the prescriptions I need for my peace of mind: an anti-depressant and an anti-anxiety.

1980

My 4th grade class voted in a mock election. I voted for Ronald Reagan. In the real election, my parents voted for him as well. At the time, my father worked full time as a maintenance man, and my mother worked part time as a substitute K-12 teacher. By 1981, my father was laid off from his job. Once his unemployment benefits ran out, we survived on my mother’s work. As the unemployment rate climbed and competition for jobs rose, my mother was called less and less frequently to teach. My parents were not too worried at first. They were confident that the new president would change the economic tide with his trickle down strategies. As time passed, and our economic situation became more ominous, my mother called the welfare office to see if our family could receive assistance. The answer was no. Government policy was that welfare only be given to single parents. In fact, what aid had been available was being cut under Reagan’s economic plan.

Slowly, our family began to curtail spending on things like clothing, heat, water, and finally food. I got my first job in 4th grade. I was nine years old when I became a Des Moines Register newspaper carrier for half of the town of Denver, Iowa. The paper delivery business had been okay in the summer, but as the air grew steadily colder I began what would become my lifelong fear of winter. I’d bundle up in several layers of sweaters, put on heavy boots, and pull on a parka. Each day, I walked about two miles to deliver all of the papers. The exertion from lugging pounds of newspaper taxed my lungs as I struggled to breathe bitterly cold air. The warm, exhaled moisture in my breath made my scarf damp, which in turn, led it to freeze. My mittens never kept my fingers from freezing, and my multiple layers of socks did not save my toes.

When it was extra cold, my eyelashes froze together. Sometimes, I would need to pull my eyelashes apart just to be able to see. Whenever this happened, I became scared. A Des Moines Register paper carrier had recently been kidnapped. I felt safe believing I could fight off any attacker if I could just see him. It was not easy to maintain this bravado being a young girl walking alone in the dark before sunrise. However, I was keenly aware that my contribution to our family’s income was critical.

1981

My younger brother and I got off the school bus at the end of the day on December 18th to find a police officer. He put us in the back seat of his car and told us he was taking us to the hospital without explaining why. During the 12-mile drive, I remember clearly being convinced that my parents and my preschool siblings must have died in an awful car crash. I squeezed my brother’s hand and whispered that I would take care of him. Inside, I was petrified.

Fortunately, I had been wrong. My entire family was alive. They just were not going home together. Child welfare workers were responding to reports that my siblings and I were being “neglected.” When they arrived, the temperature in our house was 38º, except in one room where we all lived around a wood burning stove. The water pipes had frozen at some point. They found our food supply consisted only of canned vegetables taken from our garden that previous summer.

“Mr. and Mrs. Bad Parents, we need to talk to your daughter privately. The officer outside will bring you to the lobby area.”

My parents were not recognizable, because they behaved like obedient children. I was unaccustomed to seeing my parents taking orders. The bearded man told me to take the seat my mother had vacated. He settled across from me with a clipboard. The female police officer sat in a corner of the room.

“Did you eat breakfast today?” he asked quickly.

What a weird question, I thought. I was getting warm in my winter clothes, but my feet were wet and cold. I curled my toes tightly together as I considered his question. But past experience told me that I should answer yes. Grandma and grandpa would also ask this question whenever I went to stay with them. Mama and dad told me to always answer affirmatively.

“Yes, I had cereal, and eggs, and bacon,” I lied.

“Does your family have a refrigerator?”

“It stopped working. We keep things outside to keep them cool.”

“Where do you sleep?”

“I have a mattress in the basement. Why are you asking me these questions?”

“Your parents left your sister and brothers alone at home. They can’t do that. I want you to tell me honestly about how they take care of you.”

I did not like this man with a complete mane of hair around his face. He scared me, and I resented how he talked about my mama and dad.

“Okay, you said you had bacon and eggs this morning. How did your mama cook these for you?”

“We have a hot plate. It’s like a mini stove.”

“Hmm, well, your house does not have any electricity, so how did the food get hot?”
I could only glare in response. At that point, a man wearing a white-coat opened the door. He was obviously a doctor. “I can examine her now,” he told the hairy man.

He held my hands in his, carefully looking at my fingertips for signs of frostbite. He then asked me to remove my boots and socks. I did so unhappily, because I was concerned about my toes never warming up.

1982

I did not like living in the city. Waterloo, Iowa sounds small. It is, but for a rural state, it is the big city. My parents moved there, into government housing and in exchange, the State returned my brothers and sister and me. Eventually, when my parents divorced, the courts calculated my father could afford to pay $75 a month in child support. My father never missed making his child support payments. I delivered my morning newspapers on a new route. It was the city, so it seemed scarier. Now when my eyelashes froze together, I would panic and feel like screaming. Still I told no one of that old fear of being kidnapped. We needed the money.

It was time to go shopping for school clothes. I lowered my head, so my chin touched my chest. Hugging the storefront window as I walked toward the entrance of the second hand clothing store, I allowed my mother to serve as a barrier so that I would not be seen.

“I hate coming here. Someone will see me, and they will tell everyone in school,” I hissed to my mother. “This is going to be my first year in middle school, and I don’t want it to be ruined.”

“Anyone who sees you here must need to shop here as well,” she reasoned.

“But that won’t stop them from driving by and seeing us here.” I slipped into the door, relieved to be off the street. Although I did not want to shop in a secondhand store, the excitement of potentially finding fashionable clothing became the focus of my attention. I left my mother in the shelves dedicated to outfitting young boys, and headed for the girl’s clothing. At the circular racks of clothing, I pulled apart two shirts to allow a full view of an eye-catching red shirt. There was a large stain on the lower right side of this otherwise stylish shirt. In disappointment, I moved onto the next few items. Critiquing each shirt, I passed over most of the selections. There were two shirts and a dress that looked like they would fit in with what my classmates were wearing. In particular, there was a long-sleeved, pastel yellow t-shirt with rainbow colors on the sleeves, like a baseball jersey. This was a rare find, because shirts like these were considered quite popular.

At the changing room, I found that the shirts stretched tightly around my chest. Frustration built as I realized these items did not fit. Revisiting the clothing racks, I spent over an hour looking for other decent clothes. My mom and I left after spending $4 for a skirt and two shirts for me, and a few dollars for my brothers’ clothing.

The next day, I adorned myself with a pale green shirt with small flowers. I put on my new skirt, an ivory fabric with large yellow flowers. I was excited about having new clothes, and I had just gotten new white tennis shoes to top off the outfit. My clothing may not have been name brand, but I felt more confidence from my feminine look. To up the ante, I added sky blue eye shadow and plum blush to my face. It was 1982.

In Mr. Lincoln’s classroom, I spent every afternoon learning social studies and English.

“You look nice today, Deborah” said Mr. Lincoln. I felt a rush of pride. The fact that this nice teacher had noticed my appearance made me feel attractive.

During our lunchtime recess, several girls who were considered popular approached me. For a second, I was exhilarated; obviously, they were coming to include me in their clique, because I had new clothes.

“Where did you get that outfit?” Dawn sneered. “It is so ugly, and it does not match.” She was wearing expensive jeans with a pink polo shirt. Her light blonde hair was feathered back from her face. Like Farrah Fawcett.

Dana chimed in to say, “You need to tell your mom to buy you a bra, because you are totally drooping.”

Finally, another member of the group pointed to my shoes. I don’t remember who she was, because I could not lift my eyes to their faces. She declared, “Those came from a secondhand store.”

“They did not. My mom bought them at JC Penney’s,” I protested.
“You liar. I think my mom donated them last week,” she responded.

Dawn, the undisputed leader of this girl group, concluded their sentiments by saying, “You always smell bad. It sucks that my locker is right next to yours. I doubt you will ever have a boyfriend.”

I didn’t bother to respond, because of the lump in my throat. I spent the rest of the day staring at the ground, not sustaining enough energy to keep my head lifted. On the way home from school, Dawn and her friend Dana followed behind me.
“You’re a loser, and we are going to kick your butt.” Despite my fear, I told them to leave me alone. Another girl was walking down the grass on the other side of the road. She called out, “Is everything all right?” She hastily crossed the street, and stood beside me. I recognized her as the girl who belonged to a strange religion. She was required to wear a dress or a skirt every day, and she could not cut her hair.

Dawn and Dana whispered about both of us, making snide evaluations in audible undertones. Nonetheless, they walked away, leaving me with my savior.

1983

We moved out of government housing. We moved to a new school district. Again. It was 8th grade. We were evicted quickly for inability to pay rent. The night of the eviction, my mother took my siblings and myself to an all night diner. By the morning, the manager, or maybe the waitress, had called the police. They escorted our little weary family to the homeless shelter. The sun was coming up. but I was ready for sleep.

So, we moved again. To the African-American side of town. A few days after moving in, a light-skinned girl approached me as I hung our family’s laundry on the backyard clothesline.

“Hi, my name is Gayle. My next door neighbor Brenda told me you just moved into the neighborhood. Where did you live before?”

Somewhat guardedly, I responded, “I lived in public housing on the West side, over by the high school.” I skipped telling her about the 3-month stay in a rental house. Rather than looking at her, I continued to keep my gaze on the clothespins.

“I know someone who lived over there. Those are nice places…how come you moved to the East side?” Gayle was continuing the conversation, a surprising development. I was unaccustomed to having truthfulness about my background met with acceptance.

“My mom did not like the monthly inspections of our apartment. The managers yelled at her for storing pots and pans in the oven. She wanted to get our own place, before they found a reason to kick us out.”

“Well, are you going to be done with the laundry soon? I want to introduce you to my friend. How come you have to do the clothes washing anyway? By the way, your house has bats.”

Before I went to talk with Gayle and meet her friend, I examined my appearance in the panel of mirrors across our living room wall. A wave of anxiety passed over me as I realized my potential new friend had seen me in red polyester shorts with a see-through blue cotton shirt. My hair had been uncombed, and old eyeliner blackened the area under my eyes. I quickly changed into a denim mini skirt, and a polo shirt. I made sure I put the collar of the shirt up, because I wanted to show that I had fashion sense. Running a comb through my hair, and using tissue to rub away the eye makeup, I felt I looked presentably. Gayle and a heavyset black girl sat on the concrete steps leading to Gayle’s front porch. I took in her glistening Geri curl hair style.

“She has no ass, and she ain’t gonna have much luck getting a man,” the unfamiliar darker skinned girl told Gayle immediately. She made no effort to keep her comment from my ears. Turning directly forward, I swallowed, and blinked away tears. These girls would be no different than the girls who taunted me at the last school. I used my hands to cover my backside, ashamed of my flat bottom.

“But ya know, she got good legs, and big boobs,” she continued. I stopped short, and with shakiness in my words, said, “Why don’t you like me?”

“Aww, girl. I can’t say yet about liking you. I’m just telling’ what I see. I got a few boys in mind for you. A couple of cousins.” We were thirteen years old. A few months later, she went with me to get birth control pills from the free clinic. We were being responsible, but the nurses lectured us. They didn’t understand that we could not risk getting pregnant. It could make us stay poor.

1985

Gayle went away for the summer last year and left me to work. Not this year, though. I was going to go with her to Luther College for the summer, taking classes, meeting other kids like me, and maybe making friends. I was accepted to Upward Bound, a government program that assists low-income high school students with attending college by providing college prep experiences. This program was going to save my life. I met friends, began to crack the armor surrounding me. Old notes I read from my file say, “She is really coming out of her shell.”

The Upward Bound summer was supposed to last for six weeks. My family desperately needed money, and the middle weeks of July offered the promise of jobs working in the cornfields. For two to three weeks each summer, people earn minimum wage helping to create hybrid corn. With the opportunity to earn money, I left Upward Bound for two weeks, regretting intensely my need to leave. With my field work money, I bought my family its first car in four years—a 10-year old bright yellow, but very rusty, station wagon. It was an investment that would allow for more employment.

American Classism has Its Privileged

When teaching about multiculturalism, instructors often ask members of oppressed groups to offer one or two examples of statements they never want to hear again about their social group. Growing up in what some call, “the White underclass,” (Hartigan, 1997), I have accumulated a substantial list of poverty stereotypes that I would love to ban. However, opinions about poor people, unlike those spoken about other groups, are considered a matter of political belief--and derogatory comments are merely seen as free speech. The radio and television airwaves are presently dominated by rhetoric against poor people, but such talk goes largely unchallenged. The taboos against speaking about American classism are difficult to overcome. There is little language to discuss what classism is, and many do not know how it is institutionalized in our schools, churches, government, workplaces, and attitudes.

Lott (2002) defines classism as discriminatory institutional and interpersonal responses to poor people and poverty by those who are not poor. Like racism or sexism, classism is based on devaluation, exclusion, stereotyping, and prejudice, with the target being poor people (p. 100). Individuals from middle and upper class backgrounds have power, defined here as “access to resources paired with the ability to set social rules” (Lott, 2002, p.101). Like racism, where White people by virtue of their ethnic features, have access to resources and the ability to define social structures, classism confers social and economic advantages to people with resources.
In this thesis, I attempt to provide examples of classism while also discussing the personal cost to individuals and society when classism goes unacknowledged and unchallenged. I will also explore how the structure of higher education plays a role in perpetuating classism, as well as social and economic inequality.

A Personal History of Harm by Classism

I come from the White underclass, estimated to include just fewer than 2 million people, mostly children, in the United States. Various scholars have defined us differently, but some features of the White underclass are: 1) concentrated neighborhood poverty, 2) high rates of family dissolution or single parenthood, and 3) long-term use of welfare (Murray, 1986). I have been a foster child, something that occurs for only about a half a million children a year. I have also been homeless—twice. Conservative policy makers like Charles Murray, a man with an established history of romantizing poverty (see his 1988 essay, “What’s so bad about being poor?”), sounded the alarm in the mid-1990s that the white underclass was a looming threat.

My hometown neighborhood was identified in U.S. News and World Report as the 7th largest white ghetto (Whitman & Friedman, 1994). Relative to others in the lowest income quartile, our family, with an annual income totaling approximately 30-50% of the poverty line, was considerably poorer than most. It is difficult to understand the poverty line without a reference and even more difficult to summarize the economics of a family over the span of many years. So the best way to explain our family income is to say that throughout most of my childhood, my two parents and their six children on average lived on approximately $5000-8000 per year or $400-$650 per month (in 2004 dollars). Paying rent usually took 75% of the cash our family had, leaving about $12.50 per person per month for all other expenses aside from housing. We had no assets whatsoever, but rather carried a constant rolling debt with creditors who gauged poor people with usurious interest rates.

Seven percent of people in the lowest income quartile in the United States get a Bachelor’s degree by the age of 24 (Mortensen, 2001). Statistics on the number of Ph.D.s given to people from the lowest quartile are not readily available, but poor people are scarce among professors (Oldfield & Conant, 2001). Needless to say, a tiny percentage of people from my background are university educators.

Getting an Education
No one suspected I was heading for doctoral studies during my childhood. My first and second grade teachers from a small town in Iowa identified me as “slow,” because of irregular gaps that appeared in my early basic skills education. My early schooling had been quite chaotic, so despite participating in Head Start, I was still behind. Economics had led my parents to move more than 100 miles in pursuit of jobs—not once, but three times—in the late 1970s, during my kindergarten and first grade years. These teachers who labeled me as slow also expressed disapproval of the way my parents were raising me. At one point we were all ashamed when they figured out that an ear infection had caused some hearing loss because my parents had not been able to afford medical care for me. Their disdain was made obvious in their verbal comments about the threadbare nature of my clothing, my disheveled appearance, or other types of derogatory remarks they made on my report cards.

My third grade teacher reversed my prior intellectual assessment and labeled me as, “talented and gifted,” which opened new doors to me in terms of classroom and educational experience. Through this program, I learned a few skills on an Apple computer during a time when most elementary students were not introduced to computers at all. During 4th and 5th grade, I escaped from the stressors of school and work—yes, work—by reading constantly: in the bathtub, on the way to school, in the sliver of light under the door after bedtime. Beginning when I was age 8, I had a job each morning at 5 AM delivering Des Moines Register papers to half of our small town. I worked outside the home consistently in some form of employment from that age onward.

Many of my elementary school teachers made negative assumptions about my low-income parents including the belief that they were “druggies.” Their opinions became apparent during my 5th grade year when the State of Iowa conducted a child neglect investigation after they found our farmhouse was 38 degrees Fahrenheit. My teachers went on record to share their guesses as to the sources of my parents’ lack of resources, and substance abuse topped their list of stereotypes about what led to our poverty. In reality, neither of my parents ever touched a drug or drank alcohol. The difference between the assessment provided in the 35+ pages of the child neglect report and the reality of our family life is so striking that one immediately sees why child welfare agencies have such degraded reputations.

Instead of being “potheads”, both of my parents suffered from major mental illnesses (e.g., schizophrenia and bipolar disorder) where their symptoms were expressed as zealous pursuit of religious enlightenment. This actual situation of an exceedingly religious milieu was never described in the child neglect report or noted by the investigator. When I look back at this report, and think about the social services employee who failed to even come close to accurately evaluating our family, I wonder about the extent to which his classism was to blame. He saw poverty and assumed substance abuse. He built a case around a myth.

In any event, my youth was characterized by interactions with strict religious sects and conservative Christians rather than any sort of hippie drug culture. I was the child never allowed to watch TV, participate in Halloween, or play with even mildly rebellious children. My mother had to be convinced by repeated displays of desperate pleading to allow me to attend school. She preferred the idea of home schooling where she could maintain the Godliness of our learning environment. She would hate to hear this, but that type of Godly atmosphere had its significant drawbacks including terrifying her small children whenever there was added talk of demons and Satan. Still, we were a very close family with strong bonds of love built on a foundation of Biblical teaching.

Based on the interventions for poverty and unemployment selected by the State in 1981, my family life changed entirely. Their choices included 1) placing my siblings and myself in foster care to protect us, 2) securing public housing for our family to relocate to an urban area, and 3) finding my father a minimum wage job in the same blighted urban area. The State selected these interventions based on established social policy, and social policy is determined largely by the values of the people. Rather than offering a temporary cash payment to my parents in the form of welfare, the State was only willing to address our poverty by splitting up our family and paying foster families over $1200 per month (in 1981 dollars) for the care of the children. We never would receive such monetary support for keeping our family united.

Assumptions about sinfulness, poverty, the Puritan work ethic, and other American traditions had led to miserly social policy that left almost nothing of a safety net during a period of high unemployment in the early 1980s. During that same time period, the invisible nature of mental illness in the national consciousness, and the lack of services to families affected by it, meant that the root of our poverty was never actually addressed. There were no mental health policies to assist parents with major mental illnesses in parenting or securing income for their families. I would later learn during graduate school that President Reagan’s policy changes directly led to reductions in the types of interventions available to the State of Iowa at that time. Realizing that my family was split apart by poor social policy, I was drawn to studying policy analysis from that point on.

Prior to the government’s intervention, my life was dominated by family activities such as tending the three gardens on our farmland—because they were our sole source of food—involvement in family Bible study, and performing family community service such as cleaning up litter in public parks as a substitution for monetary tithing. My parents could not afford to tithe, but they wanted us to do our part. Perhaps the best evidence for the strength of my parents’ love and attention comes from the Iowa Tests of Basic Skills administered yearly to youth across the country. Each year, 5 of 6 Megivern children received letters from the superintendent of schools congratulating us for scoring in the top 3% in the country.

After the Government “Helped”

By and large, before the government stepped in to help with our poverty, I was a healthy, developmentally appropriate child with a high sense of security despite long-term familial bouts with unemployment. After the government’s 1981 intervention, my parents’ ability to function deteriorated and became inconsistent. The stability they had always provided, even within the confines of poverty and mental illness, was now dissolved. Both parents became paranoid, fearful of the State and its power to take away their children, fearful of the economy that could leave them unemployed for such long bouts, and finally, fearful that God had abandoned them. The structure that had previously characterized our lives was replaced with an unpredictable schedule and limited parental interaction. I babysat for my siblings while my parents worked different shifts at minimum wage jobs. Bringing together the full family unit was never again easily done. My youngest sibling, representing 1 out of 6 Megivern children, was born into this post-intervention environment, and he never scored above the 35th percentile on the Iowa Tests of Basic Skills.

A particularly dark memory from the period around my 12th birthday haunts me and helps to maintain my deep fear of the Police. My parents were working a great deal, and I was babysitting on a constant basis. My ten-year-old brother David was being beaten in another part of our public housing units by a small group of boys. I left my younger siblings with my next oldest brother and went to try and rescue David. Shortly thereafter the police arrived, and in sorting out who did what, a malicious officer—who liberally utilized social class slurs—filed a child neglect report on me. After all, I had left my siblings in the care of an 8 year old. The State found me guilty of child neglect when I was 12 years old without listening to my story and without providing me with any representation. In retrospect, the knowledge that a middle or upper class child would never have been treated in this manner deeply angers me; more so, because I was made to feel ashamed about a situation that should instead be a source of shame to society.

To this day, I keep and archive several inches of documentation on the involvement of child welfare and social services in our family. Some of the assessments they made were so ludicrous, they deserve to be scrutinized by the government as a means for improving services. For example, the documents following an inpatient psychiatric evaluation of my brother Daniel when he was 14 years old include predictions that he would “only become a future master criminal.” Currently, he is a law-abiding electrician for Quaker Oats in Cedar Rapids, Iowa. To be poor and distressed meant being labeled dysfunctional in a menacing manner even when demonstrating behaviors that would be considered normative in any child under severe stress. Poor children are not like other children, almost as if they are bad seed.

As a highly parentified child after my father and mother divorced, I was controlling the finances for my family by the time I was 14 years old, and I knew that we were in dire circumstances. In 1987, when I was 16, my mother attempted suicide. To prevent the State from learning that we were unsupervised, I quietly called on extended family for help and missed school to care for the preschoolers. Luckily, the social programs that were effective for me—such as a government educational program called Upward Bound—had staff members that never treated me using “professionalism.” They took midnight phone calls for help, provided personal assistance well beyond the end of the program, and intervened even when policy tied their hands.

One of the ways that middle and upper class people exercise their authority and “help” without really helping is through codes of “professionalism.” The professional person dresses in a business uniform, keeps small talk superficial, and never politicizes their personal experience or that of their clients. Among many poor people, “professionalism” is actually a simile for upper class. Keeping low-income children with a history of adversity and trauma, “at arm’s length,” is easily a contributing factor to the ongoing distance between helping professionals and the poor. A professional assists or studies poor people “at a distance.” A professional does not really care about you, but is paid to intervene in your life.

Upward Bound was not a social services intervention in the traditional sense. It was a holistic setting where youth could grow and heal. Among poor people who have gone through the Upward Bound program, there is wide agreement that this type of educational and supportive intervention would truly start to help children rise from poverty through education, but it is available to less than 10% of poor youth.

Going to College to Escape Poverty
My duties in helping my mother to raise my younger siblings were so unambiguous to me that I nearly did not attend college. I enrolled at Luther College, a Lutheran liberal arts school in Decorah, Iowa, because of, Project Upward Bound. I also ended up making it through college with the help of this federally funded antipoverty program.

During my first year of college in 1989, my interest in learning about how poverty affected identity and mental health led me to research psychological databases using the keywords poverty, inequality, and identity. In particular, I wanted to learn how to feel less marginalized among other college students, and somehow less bitter about their significant unacknowledged privileges of safety, security, free time, and childhood. There were no articles, book chapters, or edited volumes on the topic. Repeated literature searches each year since then have resulted in a smattering of articles from across many academic disciplines. As an 18-yr old, I remember thinking that the percentage of poor people in America must be low, or else someone would have thought to write about poverty from the psychological perspective. What I did not realize was that one in five American children is poor, but talking about social class and poverty is largely forbidden in America, unless you were complaining about how high taxes had become due to welfare queens.

One of the most damaging socioeconomic experiences was attending school with privileged students—who appeared more intelligent, educated, and superior because they had more access to resources— talk as though they had worked hard to get where they were. I worked 30+ hours a week off campus and 10 hours a week on campus throughout college (1989-1992) with the exception of a semester where I was privileged to study in Germany due to the generous donations of the college. My work shifts were difficult, because I ended up typing all of my papers on a typewriter between the hours of midnight and 6 am. I had no choice but to use a typewriter in the computer age, because the campus computer lab closed before I got off work. Worse than the disconnection from others socially was the feeling of resentment over my decaying health and mental health as a price of extreme adversity while I watched wealthy sorority and fraternity youth vomit hundreds of dollars a week in alcohol on Thursday-Saturday festivities. Well, I did not just watch, but rather I served them.

Studying poor people
I went to graduate school to study how poverty affects individual development. I soon realized that poverty research is done in a very specific manner that I felt objectified those from poverty communities. In addition, the focus was not on the people, unless it is about their pathology. Typically, the focus of poverty research is on large social trends or specific African American communities.

I was a child of the 1980s, turning 30 in the 21st century. The poverty we experienced was eclipsed by the glaring wealth, excess, and widening inequality of that era. We are not represented in the media, in research, in the literature, or in the minds of the American people. Only about 1.7% of white children is extremely poor for greater than 10 years, but that means there are approximately 2 million of us, rivaling rates of schizophrenia in the American population (about which there are multiple journals, let alone articles). Where are we represented in scholarly investigation?

It has felt as though if I would suffocate if I could not find my voice, a voice for poor people, including those of us who are white, in the sanitized academic environment. I began writing about poverty and classism in a short piece called “The Poverty Experts” in a student journal, Social Work Perspectives, where I told about the lack of acceptance of poor people evident in poverty research. I almost dropped out of graduate school, feeling very isolated and different. Most of the researchers are middle class and they would feel uncomfortable around poor people. They were always a bit nervous with me. This amuses me, because I am fairly good at not being too stereotypically underclass in my behavior. Plus, I am widely regarded by poor people as warm, friendly, and easy to be around.

Crawling Across the Ph.D. Finish Line

Throughout most of graduate school, I raised my two adolescent siblings: taking out high educational loans, charging food to credit cards, and working as a teacher’s assistant, research assistant, and a gas station attendant to support our small nontraditional family. My adolescent sister had two suicide attempts and two psychiatric hospitalizations while my youngest brother dropped out of high school despite many interventions I attempted. They were both more highly affected by the trauma of foster care and its aftermath on our family unit, perhaps because they were small children when the most chaotic experiences occurred. My next oldest brother David committed suicide in 1997 by hooking a vacuum hose to his car exhaust and winding it back into the car. He had attempted college, but returned after a semester significantly depressed. Our whole family knows he died because of his socioeconomic life experiences and classism.

I completed my dissertation with a herniated disk in my back that can be traced to the paper route I had from age 8-12. The heavy bag of papers was always slung to my right side, pulling my back out of place. The price is paid so much later; I did not know how my work would hurt me as I aged. I still have chronic cold hands and feet from the frostbite I sustained during the winter months of paper delivery. None of these life experiences is particularly extraordinary until you compare my life with that of my classmates in college and graduate school. Others in their early 30s could not fathom the kinds of experiences children have in “the Other America.” Hopefully, the strain of my socioeconomic ascent becomes easier to contemplate for privileged individuals when they can take an insider’s perspective on psychological and emotional reactions of poor people to encountering others taking a blind eye to their own advantaged background.

Immediately after defending my dissertation in June 2001, I began my postdoctoral training in a condition of coping fatigue. I was drained from dealing with years of chronically high stress, but I needed to complete my dissertation and meet the demands of a research center, so there was little time to recuperate. Unfortunately, the effects of poverty do not take a holiday just because I was solidly middle class as a doctoral research professional.

During my postdoctoral years, my father began a two-year saga with an open head wound that still has not healed in 2004. There is a website with pictures for those interested:


Consequences of Lack of Health Insurance

They have taken skin grafts from his thigh to try and heal him, but it has been too late. Years without health insurance meant that his severe and untreated diabetes created a chronic distressing health situation. It was painful to me when he was unable to travel to my wedding in 2003, because of a health problem that may not have occurred had he had access to health care earlier in life. I have an endocrine disorder related to diabetes, and I had hoped to focus on this aspect of my health through concentrating on my physical fitness during my postdoctoral training, but instead I needed to take additional time to recuperate from back surgery. At least, I could finally afford to have my back fixed, because I had health coverage.

I cringe to realize I still pay the price for growing up poor through suffering current psychological burdens that affect my productivity and competitiveness. I am a middle-class professional, but I cannot afford to help him or others in my family. Low-income students do not educate their way out of poverty, but rather they buy their way out of poverty by taking out high educational debt to earn access to the American labor market through credentials. It is not supposed to matter to me that other children are simply given these advantages. The helplessness I feel in trying to help my father financially is deeply detrimental to my well-being.

Higher education replicates inequality

I was privileged to barely gain access to my current academic position because I came from the University of Michigan, the top graduate school for social work in the country. Once you have access to privileges like the stellar education provided at a top school, other doors open for you. The best school leads to the best jobs. Few people would recognize what a coup my presence in an elite university really is. The assumption that merit rises to the top is easy to apply after the fact, but it falls down under close scrutiny. With my mediocre Graduate Record Examination scores (Note: The GRE is known to be class-biased), my informal writing style, and naïve understanding of academia, I was not immediately accepted to graduate school. Approximately one month later than most students are notified of acceptance, I received my acceptance letter. Another person, a brighter star, the school had accepted turned down the offer, and the University of Michigan gave me “the waitlist” break. I did not realize how lucky I was at the time.

Later when I would become involved in admissions decisions for both masters and doctoral level graduate studies, I witnessed how gender, ethnicity, and disability status were given some consideration in admissions decisions, but socioeconomic status or social class only served as a liability when assessing the quality of an applicant. The applicants from lower classes were like me: they tended to write more informally; they attended less prestigious universities or colleges; and their scores were lower on standardized admissions tests. Sometimes reviewers would mention social class sympathetically, but overall the impact of social status on the perceived quality of an application was negative. The reviewers did not appreciate that they held any bias whatsoever. Yet, the applicants to receive the most disdain based on poorly written (i.e., colloquial) statements and weak credentials were easily identifiable as working or poverty class. These applicants had no idea how unrefined they appeared next to their more privileged counterparts from elite families and schools. This is how what some call merit is identified by others like myself as privilege. This type of dynamic also helps explain why lower class individuals are rarely academics (Oldfield & Conant, 2001).

Privilege

I am very fortunate and privileged to be a new faculty member in a nationally recognized school of social work. However, it has been while working in elite social work education that I have come to settle on a single sentiment I never want to hear again from students about poverty or welfare or social class. I never again want to hear privileged students who are learning about societal oppression suggest that such a curriculum is oppressive to them. It sickens me, and deepens the psychological wounds that poverty and class oppression have inflicted. These naïve young people—never having dedicated time to critically thinking about social stratification or inequality—have inherited resources and a stock portfolio, but sincerely believe that they have a better understanding of how to help poor people than poor people themselves.

The learning that “privileged” students protest as being oppressive to them actually focuses on critiquing the structural foundations of inequality. It does not contain personal assaults on them or their socioeconomic group, but some privileged students find ways to take critiques of laissez-faire capitalism as a private attack. They have no concept of what it looks like to see professors truly teach in oppressive ways. For example, when I was a student in political science and economics courses in college, I was bombarded with personally degrading poverty stereotypes in my required readings and in the comments of my classmates. As a case in point, I was forced to read Charles Murray, coauthor of The Bell Curve, as though he were truly a scholar. This was harmful to my already overtaxed emotional well-being, and nearly led me to withdraw from college.

My academic experiences left me feeling alienated, because I was dealing with the great unspoken foe of classism, and few people could understand the nature of the climate that pained me. I was not in the best position to combat classism or to prevent internalizing the negative beliefs of others, because I had very little social support among the middle class college students. I was fatigued from a lifetime of enormous economic stress. I sat in classes learning about the alleged beneficial nature of social services while bearing the overwhelming weight of the knowledge that the “State” can be desperately misguided. I sat in my classes terrorized still from a young age by the realization that freedom and democracy are not evenly applied in America. I have feared the Police since I was ten years old when they took us from our parents and then later when they stigmatized me as a child neglecter.

Compared to my deeply oppressive undergraduate education as a social work major, our current social work curriculum is not laden with stereotypes, but rather focuses on statistics demonstrating the consequences of social and economic inequalities in society. The privileged students hear only the structural theories of poverty and discrimination, but they personalize the critique and turn learning about oppression into a burden.

As I struggle to gain my footing as a new academic, I see little awareness in my academic peer group that an infinitesimal few of us may never have a chance to save for retirement or buy a single stock. Furthermore, we deal with stressors our peers cannot imagine. For example, my youngest brother turned 19 in 2003, and desperate for income, enlisted in the Army in the middle of the Iraqi conflict. While my fellow academics were condemning the war on principle, I was personally frightened that the boy I had helped to raise was headed for a war zone, because he lacked the education and skills for other employment options. Problems such as these remain unresolved.

It appears that people I interact with in academia are comfortable with the assumption that lower class academics have the same chance as others to succeed. They do not know the whole story. They do not know how the road is made ever more difficult with emotionally draining exposure to privileged young adults. I stand before these students, worn down from years of coping with chronic poverty, laden with heavy debt from borrowing my way out of poverty, and I endure their vehement defense of simplistic social policy offered to counter my “liberally-biased” view. But, we never talk about classism.



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Essay on the Experience of Poverty-Anonymous Author

You ask me what is poverty? Listen to me. Here I am, dirty, smelly, and with no "proper" underwear on and with the stench of my rotting teeth near you. I will tell you. Listen to me. Listen without pity. I cannot use your pity. Listen with understanding. Put yourself in my dirty, worn out, ill-fitting shoes, and hear me.

Poverty is getting up every morning from a dirt- and illness-stained mattress. The sheets have long since been used for diapers. Poverty is living in a smell that never leaves. This is a smell of urine, sour milk, and spoiling food sometimes joined with the strong smell of long-cooked
onions. Onions are cheap. If you have smelled this smell, you did not know how it came. It is the smell of the outdoor privy. It is the smell of young children who cannot walk the long dark way in the night. It is the smell of the mattresses where years of "accidents" have happened. It is the smell of the milk which has gone sour because the refrigerator long has not worked, and it costs money to get it fixed. It is the smell of rotting garbage. I could bury it, but where is the shovel? Shovels cost money.

Poverty is being tired. I have always been tired. They told me at the hospital when the last baby came that I had chronic anemia caused from poor diet, a bad case of worms, and that I needed a corrective operation. I listened politely - the poor are always polite. The poor always listen. They don't say that there is no money for iron pills, or better food, or worm medicine. The idea of an operation is frightening and costs so much that, if I had dared, I would have laughed. Who takes care of my children? Recovery from an operation takes a long time. I have three children. When I left them with "Granny" the last time I had a job, I came home to find the baby covered with fly specks, and a diaper that had not been changed since I left. When the dried diaper came off, bits of my baby's flesh came with it. My other child was playing with a sharp bit of broken glass, and my oldest was playing alone at the edge of a lake. I made twenty-two dollars a week,
and a good nursery school costs twenty dollars a week for three children. I quit my job.

Poverty is dirt. You can say in your clean clothes coming from your clean house, "Anybody can be clean." Let me explain about housekeeping with no money. For breakfast I give my children grits with no oleo or cornbread without eggs and oleo. This does not use up many dishes. What dishes there are, I wash in cold water and with no soap. Even the cheapest soap has to be
saved for the baby's diapers. Look at my hands, so cracked and red. Once I saved for two months to buy a jar of Vaseline for my hands and the baby's diaper rash. When I had saved enough, I went to buy it and the price had gone up two cents. The baby and I suffered on. I have to decide every day if I can bear to put my cracked sore hands into the cold water and strong soap. But you ask, why not hot water? Fuel costs money. If you have a wood fire it costs money. If you burn electricity, it costs money. Hot water is a luxury. I do not have luxuries. I know you will be surprised when I tell you how young I am. I look so much older. My back has been bent over the wash tubs every day for so long, I cannot remember when I ever did anything else. Every night I wash every stitch my school age child has on and just hope her clothes will be dry by morning.

Poverty is staying up all night on' cold nights to watch the fire knowing one spark on the newspaper covering the walls means your sleeping child dies in flames. In summer poverty is watching gnats and flies devour your baby's tears when he cries. The screens are torn and you pay so little rent you know they will never be fixed. Poverty means insects in your food, in your
nose, in your eyes, and crawling over you when you sleep. Poverty is hoping it never rains because diapers won't dry when it rains and soon you are using newspapers. Poverty is seeing your children forever with runny noses. Paper handkerchiefs cost money and all your rags you need for other things. Even more costly are antihistamines. Poverty is cooking without food and
cleaning without soap.

Poverty is asking for help. Have you ever had to ask for help, knowing 6 your children will suffer unless you get it? Think about asking for a loan from a relative, if this is the only way you can imagine asking for help. I will tell you how it feels. You find out where the office is that you are
supposed to visit. You circle that block four or five times. Thinking of your children, you go in. Everyone is very busy. Finally, someone comes out and you tell her that you need help. That never is the person you need to see. You go see another person, and after spilling the whole shame of your poverty all over the desk between you, you find that this isn't the right office after all-you must repeat the whole process, and it never is any easier at the next place.

You have asked for help, and after all it has a cost. You are again told to wait. You are told why, but you don't really hear because of the red cloud of shame and the rising cloud of despair.

Poverty is remembering. It is remembering quitting school in junior high because "nice" children had been so cruel about my clothes and my smell. The attendance officer came. My mother told him I was pregnant. I wasn't, but she thought that I could get a job and help out. I had jobs off and on, but never long enough to learn anything. Mostly I remember being married. I was so young then. I am still young. For a time, we had all the things you have. There was a little house in another town, with hot water and everything. Then my husband lost his job. There was unemployment insurance for a while and what few jobs I could get. Soon, all our nice things were repossessed and we moved back here. I was pregnant then. This house didn't look so bad
when we first moved in. Every week it gets worse. Nothing is ever fixed. We now had no money. There were a few odd jobs for my husband, but everything went for food then, as it does now. I don't know how we lived through three years and three babies, but we did. I'll tell you something, after the last baby I destroyed my marriage. It had been a good one, but could you keep on bringing children in this dirt? Did you ever think how much it costs for any
kind of birth control? I knew my husband was leaving the day he left, but there were no goodbye between us. I hope he has been able to climb out of this mess somewhere. He never could hope with us to drag him down.

That's when I asked for help. When I got it, you know how much it was? It was, and is, seventy-eight dollars a month for the four of us; that is all I ever can get. Now you know why there is no soap, no needles and thread, no hot water, no aspirin, no worm medicine, no hand cream, no shampoo. None of these things forever and ever and ever. So that you can see clearly, I pay twenty dollars a month rent, and most of the rest goes for food. For grits and cornmeal, and rice and milk and beans. I try my best to use only the minimum electricity. If I use more, there is that much less for food.

Poverty is looking into a dark future. Your children won't play with my boys. They will turn to other boys who steal to get what they want. I can already see them behind the bars of their prison instead of behind the bars of my poverty. Or they will turn to the freedom of alcohol or drugs, and find themselves enslaved. And my daughter? At best, there is for her a life like mine.

But you say to me, there are schools. Yes, there are schools. My children have no extra books, no magazines, no extra pencils, or crayons, or paper and most important of all, they do not have health. They have worms, they have infections, they have pink-eye all summer. They do not sleep well on the floor, or with me in my one bed. They do not suffer from hunger, my seventy-eight dollars keeps us alive, but they do suffer from malnutrition. Oh yes, I do remember what I was taught about health in school. It doesn't do much good.

In some places there is a surplus commodities program. Not here. The country said it cost too much. There is a school lunch program. But I have two children who will already be damaged by the time they get to school.

But, you say to me, there are health clinics. Yes, there are health clinics and they are in the towns. I live out here eight miles from town. I can walk that far (even if it is sixteen miles both ways), but can my little children? My neighbor will take me when he goes; but he expects to get paid, one way or another. I bet you know my neighbor. He is that large man who spends his time at the gas station, the barbershop, and the corner store complaining about the government spending money on the immoral mothers of illegitimate children.

Poverty is an acid that drips on pride until all pride is worn away. Poverty is a chisel that chips on honor until honor is worn away. Some of you say that you would do something in my situation, and maybe you would, for the first week or the first month, but for year after year after year?

Even the poor can dream. A dream of a time when there is money. Money for the right kinds of food, for worm medicine, for iron pills, for toothbrushes, for hand cream, for a hammer and nails and a bit of screening, for a shovel, for a bit of paint, for some sheeting, for needles and thread.
Money to pay in money for a trip to town. And, oh, money for hot water and money for soap. A dream of when asking for help does not eat away the last bit of pride. When the office you visit is as nice as the offices of other governmental agencies, when there are enough workers to help you quickly, when workers do not quit in defeat and despair. When you have to tell your
story to only one person, and that person can send you for other help and you don't have to prove your poverty over and over and over again.

I have come out of my despair to tell you this. Remember I did not come from another place or another time. Others like me are all around you. Look at us with an angry heart...

The Heritage Foundation Are Evil Liars

Imagine that you have personally dealt with hearing loss due to an untreated ear infection--since your family had no health insurance. Imagine that you have been in foster care, because your home did not have sufficient heat. Imagine being an American, surrounded by SUVs, HDTVs, and unspeakable wealth, but you rely on lunches at the Salvation Army. Good days are when you get *two* small milk cartons.


Unless you have been through these experiences, you probably cannot accurately imagine any of these things. Yet, people like Charles Murray (he co-authored, the Bell Curve) and Robert Rector from the Heritage Foundation, write constantly about the alleged romantic experience of poverty. They do everything in their considerable power to tell Americans and the rest of the world that poverty is bliss. They have--without conscience--lied to the American public by saying that welfare creates poverty.

Poverty is evil. It tears apart families, it stunts lives, and it lingers as anger in its victims. I have written letters to both the Heritage Foundation and Charles Murray. They know that there are people being hurt by their distortions, but they continue to launch a war on poor people.

Robert Rector thinks that since the poor people in the U.S. have a limited number of material goods, they are rich. In his September 24, 1998, Wall Street Journal article entitled, "America Has the World's Richest Poor People," Mr. Rector had the nerve to say that the trauma of American poverty was not destitution. He does not understand anything about relative poverty or the pain that it can inflict. He seems to think that poor people should walk around America imagining that they live in Romania, Kenya, or other nations, so they can feel rich. No matter that they have only the U.S. as a frame of reference.

He claims the poor have plenty of living space. As you can see by the picture, our house was wonderful. Six children with three bedrooms. Plenty of space. Rector claims a lot of poor people own their home. My mom bought our family home for $13,000 in the late 1980s. I guess he is right about vast home ownership among the poor.
Rector stated, "Two-­thirds of poor households have air­- conditioning." Sure, they do. We never knew anyone with air, or else we would have hung out at their place.




Rector is actually uneducated enough to believe that obesity is a sign of being over-nourished, when most reputable doctors will tell you that high starch, low protein diets are what packs on the pounds. He claims that poor children get lots of meat and they are super-nourished. Ha! We didn't have meat unless it was through school lunch, but Rector likely wants to cut that program. As the picture shows, the kids in our family were obviously spoiled and "super nourished."

Rector also wants us to believe that the poor are better off than in the past, and the rich are barely holding ground. As he wrote, "For decades, both conventional wisdom and the Census Bureau have told us that "the rich get richer and the poor get poorer." Most "poor" Americans today are better housed and better fed and own more personal property than average Americans throughout much of this century."

Poverty from Up Close and Personal

Written in December 1997 by a 16 year old white girl. It is a good response to Ruby Payne's book on Understanding Poverty, because it is actually written by a poor person:

I was born to a poverty-stricken, large family in a small town in Iowa called Denver. I was the fifth of six, and although my mother was already thirty-five, she insisted on giving birth to me at home, in the tiny apartment in which we lived, rather than at a hospital. My parents had been paranoid of the government, and felt that it had too much control over people's decisions. They planned to keep my birth, and entire existence, a secret. My brothers and sister were told to keep quiet about it all. It worked for quite a long time, but things eventually had to change. It must have been hard times then. I'm not sure why, but a few months later, my mother and father both lost their jobs, and the lease on the apartment would soon be up.

The only income was the bi-weekly paycheck of my nine-year-old sister Deborah's paper-route. My grandfather owned a small house in the outskirts of the tiny town. He offered it to my parents, without rental expenses. They eagerly accepted, moving out just days before actually being evicted anyway. I was eight months old, and it was November. With winter coming and no heating in the house, my still-unemployed parents sought the help of the government. When the county checked into my information, they discovered, oddly enough, that I was never registered; didn't exist. Without proper papers, life could be difficult. The county insisted that I be registered, and so it happened... nine months after I was born. After finally having the birth certificate, we all moved into the temporary foster families a few dayslater.

My parents did the best they could. My father found a job as a janitor, and my mother as a substitute teacher. After six months, with a little money saved up, they began the process of getting us back from foster care. The county, however, refused. They demanded a few more months, and my parents, though devastated, got a lawyer (paid for by the county itself), and eventually got us back, one year after the initial decision. I was over a year old when we returned. Deb was about eleven,Dave nine, Daniel six, and John was three. My mother noticed something odd. John had a bunch of bruises all over his body, and she kneeled down on her knees and asked him if he had been hit. Yes, he replied with broken baby-talk, and not only that, but I had been, too. Our foster parents had beaten us, and our ages added together barely summed five. But she noticed much more than just that. All of her children seemed to have changed. On the surface they had grown a little, their hair had gotten a few inches longer, their clothes a little bitsmaller. But it was the personalities themselves that had been altered. Deb was now a perfectionist, doing everything for the family.

David had spent his foster-care time emotionally abused by his foster parents. He was often "set up" by the natural son, and blamed for any problem or fight with the son. Daniel had spent his foster-care time hiding under tables and crying for his mother. His only impression was that his big brother was being treated as the whipping boy, who had done nothing todeserve it. Dave started stealing the little money Mom had, and sneaking out to play at endless days and nights at the arcades. He always brought Daniel along. It seemed like harmless boys' play at first, but it later got a lot worse. The one who had changed the most, however, was the one who was at the most tender age--me. My mother was devastated at the changed baby before her. When before, I would happily hug her and smile, eat and sleep peacefully, the baby now yelled at the top of her lungs, atenothing, and spent long nights screaming until she fell asleep. There were no more lullabies now, I refused to hear. There were no hugs now, I wouldn't be handled. Being with her once happy baby was now a chore for my worn-out mother. John, too, was changing. With Mom spending all of her time focused on me, he spent his toddlerhood as a sad little boy, left somewhere in the darkness of our gray lives. We eventually moved to a rented house in Waterloo, Iowa, a city with a quite a few people.

Mother grew to accept her changed children. She could do nothing, no matter how she tried. When I was three, she gave birth to her sixth and last child, Joseph. Joe brought me a little peace and happiness. I pushed him in the stroller, sang, cuddled him and kissed him. He was my dolly, my real dolly, and I loved him more than any other creature in the world. I spent endless hours with him, taking walks. I would push his stroller to some far-off land at the end of the block... It was at night, though, that we were forbidden to be outdoors. Our neighborhood was dangerous,and I took care to always be by him. But I could not protect him from everything, because when I was four and he a year, my parents separated. My father moved to the damp basement of a dirty, old apartment. Strange enough, though, my mother never spoke a bad word against him. They had grown apart. His self-esteem tested low on a hospital test he had taken. He scored four points out of one hundred, and he felt unworthy as a father. Mother wasn't much better, and their struggle together ended ashe packed his last suitcase into his friend's car. Through the half-torn screen door, I waved good-bye, and took Joe's hand and waved it, too. I didn't see him wave back, though. The car just drove away after he slammed the car door shut. Mom's depression got worse and worse. She laid in bed for most of the day, and once again, it was Deb's responsibility to see that all got done. Deb never missed a day of school, and when she turned fifteen, she applied for a part-time job as a waitress. Every paycheck went back to the family.

The child-support check was barely a dent in what we needed. Mom was given a check every month for fifty dollars for six children. She just accepted it with all of the other sadness around her. She gotwelfare, too, but that wasn't very much, either. Mother had grown up the daughter of a wealthy chiropractor who created special chairs and campers in his free time. She had always been well taken care of, as a child. The life she saw now pulled her still further into depression. We moved once again, to a better neighborhood, on the other side of town. The house had two stories (and a basement), and it was the ultimate playhouse for my siblings and me. When I was in kindergarten, we moved again, to a house on the other side of town. At this point, we had lived in three different ends of the city. I changed schools this time, and went to school with John. Toward the end of that year, mymother attempted suicide, and almost succeeded. John's second-grade teacher took us to her house. I'm not quite sure just how long we stayed with Ms. Navarro, but at some point, she took us to Chicago to visit her relatives. I found comfort there, in Chicago.

We stayed in a huge apartment building that was at least thirty stories high. We played on the elevator until the Mexican bellboy yelled at us to ride the elevator properly, or simply go to our apartment. We would then go outside anddash across the road to the playground across the street. We swung for hours, on the rusty, red swing set somewhere in the middle of the Windy City. Although my brother and I were the only white kids there, we were warmly accepted by the young black community. We spent the whole time outside, digging in the dirt and eating dusty Cheetos off the sand. Although we had all once been well-behaved, decent kids, David and Daniel were worse now, going rarely to school and always getting calls from the school. They were setting the pattern for John to one day follow. That summer, my sister left to go to 'Upward Bound', a program for poor kids, designed to make them aware that hope existed, that finishing college was a good way to escape the poverty. That voice inDeb's ear whispered 'Get out! Get out!' She went that summer, and in the meantime, we were waking up early to walk down to school for the free breakfast.

Within out city's poor community, all the schools gave free meals out in the summer to children under eighteen. Throughout the next few years (and even when we still lived in the bad neighborhood) I, myself, sank into a deep depression. I think I was about seven when I met Ruth, a friend of my mom's. They had met each other in the mental hospital and had a lot of the same problems. Ruth had once been married and had had a son named Tony. But after the divorce, Tony was taken from her, and she was left alone. She liked me,though, and always took me to her apartment (ironically) in the same town in which I was born. We went horseback riding, drew pictures, talked about our favorite subject--kittens. For her, I was like the daughter she never had. To me, though, she was my best friend.

Nobody had ever listened to me the way she had. She assured me that whatever I wanted to be -an artist- I would surely have success. She said I hadwhat it took to overcome anything. I loved her a lot. When I was eight, my mother drove me to Ruth's town. I hadn't seen her in a while, but the direction we were heading didn't seem to be right. We were driving to a funeral parlor, I later discovered, because Ruth had hung herself a few days earlier. I just blinked a lot and wanted her to wake up. I didn't realize she was dead. When I was eleven, my sister graduated college. She had succeeded and had been accepted to graduate school at the University of Michigan, five hundred miles away, to study social work and psychology. Her choice of career study probably stemmed from her own life's strange roots; it might seem logical. Dave spent most of his days with his friends. He had a love for alcohol and drugs. I think it stemmed from his foster care time. One time, I wondered about his experience there because Mom had often told me that Dave had really been changed, so I asked him. The big, six-foot-five man nicknamed 'Ogre' (also tattooed on his left shoulder), began to cry.

I saw tears forming in his eyes, and he quietly said 'I don't want to talk about it'. I accepted it, knowing that it must have really been bad. I understood him, a little, and it couldn't help to make me sad. In anycase, I never brought it up again. It was within my thirteenth year that I learned a lot. At Christmas time, my sister came home. She asked what had happened, and I just shrugged. Questioning my mother, Deb asked me then, if I would like to come live with her in Michigan. She had an apartment, she said, and although it was only one bedroom, we could take turns sleeping on the couch, and it would all be better. I smiled, and accepted. After theholidays, we were sitting in her apartment in Ann Arbor, Michigan, and I was registered for the second half of my eighth grade year at the local middle school. Adjusting was hard in the eighth grade year. The apartments where my sister lived were filled with people from all over the world. I rode the bus to a new school with many strange languages swirling around in the bus. The school I had attended in Iowa had molded me into who I was. I had been taught to be scared, actually, and the schools weren't very safe. With fights every day, weapons and horrible stories of what happened to stuck-up girls, I saved myself by just never talking, except to my friends. I never brushed my hair in class--that was too preppy. I never put make-up on in school--that was slutty. Giving anybody a hug would have been seen as a casual, relaxed gesture, and that sort of thing might attract a bully to take those good feelings away. I was just preventing what could eventually get me into trouble.

In Ann Arbor, however, everything was so much more peaceful. The students would walkdown the hallway and give each other hugs! They would brush their hair in class, and actually respected the teachers. Although it was wonderful, it was still hard for me to accept. It was just too strange. I only had a few friends, and I spent time with them just in the school. With my sister always at work or at school, I spent all of my free time writing long letters back home to Iowa. Thinking back, though, I don't think that I had too much homesickness. We visited home all of the time. But slowly, my sense of security was returning. Nothing was stolen from me, and I actually felt safer to voice my opinion in school. I stayed out in Michigan with Deb for my ninth grade year, and went again to Upward Bound afterwards. My tenth grade year, is when I decided I needed to do more activities in order to get into good colleges. My grades were nice enough, but I hadn't participated in a single sport. I applied to 'Wendy's'. I worked practically every day, and gave up my weekends, too, to work long hard hours. On top of that, Iwas participating in a group which met every Wednesday called S.E.E.D. (Students Educating Each other about Discrimination). Things happened.

Sometime in October, we got a call in the middle of the night that David had killed himself. He had been high when he did it, and he got into his 72' Ford and used a vacuum tube to force the exhaust back into the car. He was found, about five minutes too late, by Daniel. Going to the funeral, I just thought about how we had been such rivals, always fighting and quarreling. But we were also very close at the same time. He was twenty-three when he died--too young. I blame his sadchildhood for the depression that no pill could have soothed. He will always remain with me, and I must always be careful of what I see, I may start to cry... I have written this whole session of my life (although I can't remember everything and some things I just chose to leave out) because I am changing here. I am growing into an adult woman, looking back at where I've come from, and where I'm going. I don't know if anything good will come out of this year, but hopefully, I will look back at this not-so-good upbringing of mine and try to make sense out of it. I don'tknow what keeps me alive, actually. Maybe Dave was the sane one! Maybe what keeps me hanging on is my own insanity... Who knows, maybe I'll one day know.