A snippet from an article on Huffington Post about what it means to be working poor.
Pretty spot on…
I got into an argument today with someone who is a landlord, and they were outraged, outraged, to find that their evicted tenants owned an Xbox 360. Never mind that the console was ten years old and worth perhaps $50 on Craigslist, they were outraged that their evicted tenants did not sell it, along with the very clothes on their back, to pay their back rent. I tried to explain to him that when you are $1800 in back rent, $50 isn’t even a dent in that debt. Why bother? Why bother selling that $50 item if it isn’t going to get you any less evicted? If it’s not going to save you, you’ll hold on to it. Money becomes meaningless when you’ll never have enough to hold onto. You just let it flow like water through your hands. It’s all gone anyways, no matter what you do. It was gone before it ever touched you.
The other day I got very mad at someone because their justification of why a family didn’t deserve their council house was because they had decorated the front of their house with xmas lights. DO YOU REALLY KNOW WHAT ITS LIKE TO LIVE WITH NO SMALL PLEASURES AT ALL?!?!? DO YOU REALLY?!?!
This is one of the great end results of capitalism: we treat people as if the only thing they should care about are their mechanical needs but without things to nourish the soul or the capacity to talk about same, we fall apart.
We aren’t meant to be things which sit in blank boxes waiting to be used by our employers. Nothing in nature acts that way. Nothing’s meant to.
The source article: ”This Is Why Poor People’s Bad Decisions Make Perfect Sense”
#um this topic makes me fucking furious#i will do a murder immediately#don’t#not only are small pleasures necessary to keep from SPIRALING INTO DEPRESSION WHEN YOU ARE POOR but they are STATUS MARKERS#you NEED a fucking phone to get a job#you need a fucking SMARTPHONE to be accepted as a normal person#you need nice clothes to be treated like you’re worth something#especially if you’re a poor poc#everyone sit down#think about this if you haven’t before#smashes a vase#fuck capitalism
The need rich people have for poor people to constantly perform some sort of Dickensian display of abject poverty is so goddamn disgusting and proves that, yes, it is all about status markers. Rich people want visible proof that others are beneath them. It’s malicious and nauseating. And the kicker is that they’re usually too busy being impressed with their own wealth and sense of superiority to use their brains, because as already stated in the other comments, having technology or a couple of small pleasures is *not* a reliable indicator of income. This anti-poor people shit is revolting.
