OMG I can’t even! This is SO FUCKING TRUE. Everything from “If she’s poor why is she so fat” to every other habit you develop when you live in the poverty level half your life. I am just NOW, 10 years since we escaped getting over most of these!!
There’s been more research into poverty economics and how much energy it takes to survive when you literally cannot afford to stockpile or save. The psychology one develops when truly poor is something that is difficult to overcome, and I think this article does a good job of articulating why.
It’s not because people who are poor are stupid. It’s because they’re operating under a completely different set of circumstances than those of us who are not poor. And I think that this is something that can be difficult for people who have never been truly in need to understand.
This really seems to be a U.S.-centered list. When you grow up in a country that’s so poor, no one has a microwave, and it’s the 90s, there’s really no shitty food to nuke, nor help from the government, because—guess what! There’s no government. HA! Tax return? HA! Gift-giving? Kids need to learn patience, moderation, and humility, so HA! No gifts for yoooou.
Six pack versus twelve-pack of toilet paper? Don’t even get me started on the luxury of using actual toilet paper, and not, you know, old newspapers. (Those were very handy. You take it in, catch up on world events on the can, and then…re-use)
I miss being a child of the Soviet Union collapse.
Oh, definitely. And I think it’s also geared more toward urban poverty. Growing up in Appalachia, my family was on assistance (we qualified for free lunch and were on WIC) my mom made our clothes, we went barefoot in the summer to save on shoes, but I was never aware of being poor. We had a car, running water, central heat, and lived in a house in town with just our nuclear family and not a trailer out on the ridge with any number of friends and relatives circulating in and out.
I had friends who had none of those things. And yet, even their standard of living is higher than that of a lot of people.
I know I often take for granted the absurdly high standard of living that I currently enjoy. That I’ve enjoyed my entire life. The conditions under which human beings can live is astonishing.
I grew up on a reservation, and I know that this is not geared towards that. We went barefoot a lot in the summer for similar reasons, and sometimes the only reason we ate was because we were a family of tribal fishermen. Even if that meant we sold the fillets and lived on fish livers. Which are, for the record, the worst tasting of the livers. I’ve eaten a lot of liver, and will never do so willingly again.
But we had a septic system for our trailer, and while a lot of my friends lived in houses and not trailers, some of them didn’t have real floors or indoor plumbing. We knew we were better off, but it never occurred to me or my brother that we were bad off, not for years. We had WIC and the tribe provided what they called “commodities” which is basically a bunch of USDA packaged food (powdered eggs, powdered milk, some canned meat, and the occasional sack of potatoes or onions). It helped us get by, and even today I can bake using powdered eggs if I have to (though, where I would find them, I have no idea) and IHS provided most of our health care, and we were in the proper bracket to get the stuff that remained from the Health Department. You adapt when you are poor. Funnily enough a lot of the ways in which we adapted transferred over to the way I behave as a solidly middle class person. Same for hubby. We still eat some food that we grew up on because we are used to it. Tuna casserole for me, and he’s a huge fan of Hamburger or Tuna Helper, because that shit can feed a family of five for two bucks (if you use the shitty ground beef that is $.99 a pound). One if you were my grandmum and made it without the meat.
I think the only exception that I take is the way the OP describes extra money. We didn’t have the option to drop it on things that were so-called frivolous because it was so badly needed it gave us a heartbeat of breathing room. We replaced shoes filled with holes and pants that my grandmother had sewn lace onto the cuffs of so that it was harder to tell that I had shot up three inches in a single summer. Now hubby and I set a portion of our returns aside to spend on treats, but neither of us has lost that mentality that tax money is the money you breathe on for a short spell. It goes straight into paying ahead on bills because we are both so awarethat we could go broke at any time (though, admittedly, we have the privilege of a military paycheck — you can’t get fired from that job, but one bad deployment or injury could ruin our lives).
I think it is also the reason we don’t get huge into holidays and gift-giving occasions. We KNEW we were poor because try as they might, our single mums couldn’t hide the fact that the lights were off or the phone cut off. We stopped asking for things around ten (a few years after leaving the Rez), and to this day we don’t really know how to answer when one of us asks the other “so, what would you like for your birthday?”. Gifts for us were practical — socks, underwear, a winter hat because you had to hold on till Christmas to be able to get one. It’s one of the reasons that Kidspawn knows the gig with Santa. We never wanted to let the association between a lack of gifts and her supposed behavior (all poor kids must be bad and that is why Santa never visits them. This is a thing I honestly believed).
Before I keep going I am going to cut myself off. I have a lot to say on this topic, and there are probably people who would say it more concisely than me.
So, I hope this isn’t inappropriate, but this sort of conversation really drives home to me the difference between Australia and the US, and between class and income: I did grow up thinking of myself as poor, but under circumstances that afaict would be considered middle class in the US. We had an adequate house, nearby parks and amenities, a varied and filling diet (if mostly made of the cheapest bulk food mum could find) and mostly adequate education and healthcare, almost all of it provided or supplemented by the government. But simply feeling poor is actually a pretty big deal: I was convinced that I would never do anything with my life, that people like us never went to university or made any money etc, and people from nice areas pointedly looked down on us all as criminals and trash. Also, while I did manage to get out, the system did make it difficult: they give you enough to survive (as long as you and yours are healthy and able to work and don’t have any expensive habits) but if you try to save any significant amount you get penalised. And of course I was white and suburban and living back in the affluent 80s (and hardly the poorest in that group), everyone has it worse now, especially those dealing with the appalling conditions in remote aboriginal communities.
Anyway, I’m definitely not saying that I had it as bad! I just find the contrast illuminating.
