Being poor in America is, in some respects, like having full-blown AIDS.
When you have AIDS, the virus compromises your immune system to the point where the most pedestrian pathogen can kill you.
When you’re poor, you can’t afford to fix small problems, which can then turn into huge ones. A leaky faucet. A flat tire. Illness. The list goes on.
There’s also the uncertainty that accompanies being poor, much like with any terminal diagnosis. That’s probably the scariest part of all. You can’t be sure where you’ll be a few months down the road. All you know is that it won’t take much for you to potentially lose everything, and that event is all but inevitable. It’s terrifying and exasperating. It’s hard to maintain a healthy and productive attitude with those thoughts and feelings beating down on you.
Plenty of people will never know this anguish, at least financially. They are the ones who, through whatever channel, have sufficient security to ensure that they can rectify a small setback. More power to them, but I hope that their situation does not detach them from the realities of struggle among others.
I hope I won’t ever forget what it’s like to struggle, either through my own observations or through the struggles of others I know and love.
The economic crisis in America is a preventable condition, but so many of our politicians treat it like AIDS. Not in the sense of urgency to treat the victims of the epidemic, but rather that it’s worth stigmatizing and marginalizing. “Live by sin, die by sin. If you aren’t smart enough to avoid affliction, then that’s your problem.”
Sick.
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