Trailer Park Morality
Jan. 10th, 2016 08:31 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
flamingsword-- PUBLIC POST --
I used to be poor when I was a kid. Not that I'm not poor now, but there was this whole stint I did in the middle class during high school. Anyway. Once upon a time we lived on food stamps and my mom used to not eat so she could afford to buy us clothes. Some of our neighbors had that hard-bitten look like even getting enough to eat couldn't ease the strain of constant worry from thinning them down to the bone, from working their fingers to the bone, from being made of bones that rattled in fear and anger.
There was a lot of anger, when I was poor. Being wrong is a thing you can afford when there's always enough to eat. When you can't afford it, no one can admit to being wrong because then it's your fault that someone doesn't get to eat, or have gas money to get to work, or ...
Being poor is eating a lot of shame. It's being constantly defensive against any sign of unworthiness, because you have so little respect afforded to you that any loss is a significant blow. Being poor is not being able to afford to take a risk with your own self-respect rather than dismissing someone else's. Being poor is doubling down on being wrong because you can't lose face, when your public face is so much of what you have that can't be stolen or traded or sold off in ever-leaner times.
Being poor is eating a lot of mac 'n cheese, and being eaten by worry. Having all of your free mental time taken up with deciding which of four important things gets the next dollar doesn't leave a lot of room for creative problem solving. Poverty is like that. Shame is like that. It limits the scope of what you can achieve by making every decision perilous. Even long after you are no longer living in poverty, you still live inside the shape of it like a bonsai tree that doesn't understand the field it's been planted in. You have no concept of the world outside of the hand-to-mouth existence that has consumed you.
Poverty teaches you that something is wrong with you. It holds you up to a yardstick and if you're not tall enough, it chops your feet off so that you know that you deserve to never measure up. I knew people who worked sixty hours a week to afford to live in a trailer park. They weren't allowed to be angry at their bosses for underpaying them, so they were angry at their kids for needing things. Angry at their spouses for being disabled. Poverty is seething resentment that you can't measure up, and that nobody you know can measure up either, and looking down on all of you rather than breaking the yardstick you can't reach.
Poverty answers all the big questions in your life with "you can't afford the answer." So you keep being wrong. So you keep blaming yourself, and keep being easy to shame and underpay and control through fear and anger.
And it's fucking disgusting that there are people who believe that poverty is a thing that should exist.
I used to be poor when I was a kid. Not that I'm not poor now, but there was this whole stint I did in the middle class during high school. Anyway. Once upon a time we lived on food stamps and my mom used to not eat so she could afford to buy us clothes. Some of our neighbors had that hard-bitten look like even getting enough to eat couldn't ease the strain of constant worry from thinning them down to the bone, from working their fingers to the bone, from being made of bones that rattled in fear and anger.
There was a lot of anger, when I was poor. Being wrong is a thing you can afford when there's always enough to eat. When you can't afford it, no one can admit to being wrong because then it's your fault that someone doesn't get to eat, or have gas money to get to work, or ...
Being poor is eating a lot of shame. It's being constantly defensive against any sign of unworthiness, because you have so little respect afforded to you that any loss is a significant blow. Being poor is not being able to afford to take a risk with your own self-respect rather than dismissing someone else's. Being poor is doubling down on being wrong because you can't lose face, when your public face is so much of what you have that can't be stolen or traded or sold off in ever-leaner times.
Being poor is eating a lot of mac 'n cheese, and being eaten by worry. Having all of your free mental time taken up with deciding which of four important things gets the next dollar doesn't leave a lot of room for creative problem solving. Poverty is like that. Shame is like that. It limits the scope of what you can achieve by making every decision perilous. Even long after you are no longer living in poverty, you still live inside the shape of it like a bonsai tree that doesn't understand the field it's been planted in. You have no concept of the world outside of the hand-to-mouth existence that has consumed you.
Poverty teaches you that something is wrong with you. It holds you up to a yardstick and if you're not tall enough, it chops your feet off so that you know that you deserve to never measure up. I knew people who worked sixty hours a week to afford to live in a trailer park. They weren't allowed to be angry at their bosses for underpaying them, so they were angry at their kids for needing things. Angry at their spouses for being disabled. Poverty is seething resentment that you can't measure up, and that nobody you know can measure up either, and looking down on all of you rather than breaking the yardstick you can't reach.
Poverty answers all the big questions in your life with "you can't afford the answer." So you keep being wrong. So you keep blaming yourself, and keep being easy to shame and underpay and control through fear and anger.
And it's fucking disgusting that there are people who believe that poverty is a thing that should exist.