I’ve been poor and I’ve been (comparatively) rich, and if anyone believes the poor have easy lives, they experienced a kind of poverty that I’ve never seen, read about, or experienced.

Know how freeing it is to get to a point where you could quit your job and go live in France for a year or longer if you wanted to? To work somewhere because it’ll make your retirement more lavish, not to get your next meal or to keep your child from starving?

Being poor is a constant exercise in humiliation, calculating the incalculable, and the eradication of the self.

I remember my dad getting laid off from his job at Occidental Chemical in 1984 or so. That devastated us financially and the family emotionally. It probably led to my parents’ divorce indirectly. It meant the money for my future I’d saved which sat on my dresser in an old alcohol bottle disappeared without explanation. It meant nothing in the fridge. It meant my mom as in the cliché searching the couch cushions for enough change to put some gas in the car to get to her new waitressing job. And it meant young kids (my sister and me) worrying about what was going to happen to us.

That’s poverty. It’s not some life of leisure or indolence. It’s called “grinding” for a reason. And it’s horrible and abasing and no one should ever be subjected to it in such a rich country.