withasmoothroundstone:

pullthepillarsdown:

eatprayvalkyrie:

kaijuvsgiantrobotsvsme:

ripplesfromawaterlily:

fuck-me-barnes:

tessalynn:

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.

And it turns poor and working-class people against each other.  Like I knew a guy who installed cable TV for a living and barely could make a living, and resented that some people who got cable TV were on welfare.  I tried to explain that you actually have to spend a certain amount of money in order to qualify for such basic thing as Medicaid – if you save money you’ll get thrown off the system, even though you won’t magically be able to survive outside the system with the amount of money you have to save in order to be thrown off it.  He didn’t care.  He told me poor people should be given nothing more than food, clothing, and shelter.  He grew up poorer than most poor people have ever been.  All this combination of shit made me furious and still does.  Not to mention the cultural ideals of being too proud to accept help of any kind and how people think this is a good thing even when it kills people.

The poorest people in the world forgo some amount of necessities for staying alive in order to have some money for recreation or things that connect them to the world.  During the Depression, many people surveyed said they would rather give up their beds than their radios – radio being how people stayed connected to the outside world in the same way Internet does today.  And does anyone need to bring up Rat Park again?  Holy crap this stuff pisses me off.

(– Poor person who has Internet & Netflix & smartphone & other so-called luxuries.  And does anyone really think the extra $100ish a month I’d get giving all that up would catapult me out of poverty and solve all my problems?  Not to mention the Internet has literally saved my life before.  As in, I was in the hospital being mistreated in a way that was life-threatening, and blogging allowed me and another poor person who was making decisions for me, to get other people to call the hospital and say “We’re watching you.”  Other poor people get food and rent and etc. money by asking on the Internet and receiving food money through the Internet.  Many people on disability supplement their income by selling art or small crafts online – how much you’re allowed to sell before they start cutting benefits depends on what part of the system you’re in, but it’s a common thing.)