Emergencies really do crop up more often for poor people. Necessities, like vacuum cleaners or phones or bedding or shoes, need replacement or repair more often when you only buy the cheapest possible option.
Poor people’s health tends to be compromised by cheap, unhealthy food; stress; being around lots of similarly-poor contagious sick people who can’t afford to stay home or get treatment; inadequate healthcare; and often, hazardous and/or demanding work conditions.
So we get sick more. On top of that, many people are poor specifically because of disability. All of that is expensive – even if you just allow your health to deteriorate, eventually you can’t work, which is – say it with me – expensive.
When you’re poor, even the cheapest (most temporary) solution for an emergency often breaks the bank. Unexpected expenses can be devastating. People who aren’t poor don’t realize that an urgent expense of thirty dollars can mean not eating for a week. Poor people who try to save find our savings slipping away as emergency after emergency happens.
I don’t think people who’ve never been poor realise what it’s like. It’s not that we’re terrible at budgeting, it’s that even the most perfect budget breaks under the weight of the basic maths: we do not have enough resources.
Cos we’re fucking poor.
People who aren’t poor also have different ideas of what an emergency constitutes. The AC breaking in the middle of summer isn’t an emergency when it’s in the budget to just go buy a new one the same afternoon without worrying about how it’ll affect your grocery money; having to take two days off from work because you’re running a bad fever isn’t an emergency when you have paid sick leave.
So it’s no wonder the well off people of the world don’t get it when a low income person is stressed over something breaking or a minor illness. I know people for whom a crashed car – as long as no one was hurt – would just be ‘damn it I liked that car and now I gotta borrow my wife’s’ and I know people for whom it would be ‘I can’t afford to have this fixed but I can’t get to work if I don’t get it fixed and I can’t get it fixed if I don’t go to work hahhaha time to indebt myself to family members who I desperately wish I didn’t even have to interact with because they’re the only ones who can give me rides or loan me money.’
Two very different worlds.
This makes abusive situations infinitely more difficult too.
Being poor is isolating as all shit, and you have very little power to choose who you do and don’t interact with. Quite often, in the midst of all these emergencies, the only people who’ll offer a hand up are abusers or toxic friends, and their help will carry invisible conditions, or be contingent on you never speaking up or “acting out” against mistreatment. And where are there any other options, what can you afford to do about it?
Sometimes even good friendships can turn sour and toxic if there’s a major difference in wealth between two or more people. As the poorer friend needs help more and more often and options shrink under the expense of being poor, it becomes scarier and scarier to speak up on the occasions when your better-off friend who helps you out inevitably fucks up and hurts you, like friends do.
It’s a power imbalance that will almost inevitably be abused. Poverty can actively breed toxic situations between friends and partners.
so it starts with predatory recruitment. military recruiters visit high schools and sometimes even middle schools to normalize the idea that joining the military is no different from going to college. almost none of those kids can actually join, but they try to sell them on it anyway with talk of how cool it’ll be and what a badass it’ll turn you into, and stuff like that. the army even has even put out three T-rated video games about army life since 2007, the most recent in 2015.
it gets even more intense in high school, when they start contacting kids directly. when you take the SAT and ACT, your information automatically gets sent to recruiters and they start sending you recruitment literature that blends in really well with the letters you’re getting from colleges suggesting you apply.
then, once people are old enough to actually join up, the recruitment pitch shifts to more tangible offers with little to no intention of ever following through. one of the biggest selling points is the G.I. Bill, but it comes with a whole host of terms and conditions that no one ever mentions, which often results in the benefits being mostly (or even completely) unusable for a lot of people, with just under half of servicemembers ending up using any of it at all.
they also recruit heavily based on the idea that your time in the military will translate into work experience and make it easier to find a job when you get out, but most military equivalents to civilian jobs deal with highly specialized equipment that makes the experience irrelevant, and you don’t get any certifications or equivalencies.
another big draw is Tricare, which is, quite simply, the best insurance in the world. What they don’t tell you is that your dependents get a shitty knockoff, and you also get kicked over to that shitty knockoff as soon as they determine that whatever’s wrong means you won’t be returning to active duty. they want to protect their investment as long as it can fight for them, but beyond that, you can go fuck yourself. and that’s to say nothing of the nightmare that is the VA, which is infamous for multiple-month wait times for even basic care, which is very often poor quality when you eventually do get it.
once you’ve actually joined, a few things happen that the recruiter never mentioned. first and foremost, you’ve entered into a contract with the united states government, which means that any breach of that contract is a federal felony. in other words, everything in this post from here on out is 100% completely and totally unavoidable without utterly fucking up your life.
the second is that you are now subject to two entire sets of laws that, most likely, you had no idea existed until just now. lots of those laws are standard federal law that only applies to military personnel (title 10, mostly), but the rest are called the Uniform Code of Military Justice (UCMJ). a lot of the ucmj is pretty straightforward stuff that you’d expect, like “it’s a crime to disobey orders” (Article 92) and the like, but there’s a ton of general conduct laws as well. for example Article 88 – Contempt Toward Officials, which says:
Any commissioned officer who uses contemptuous words against the President, the Vice President, Congress, the Secretary of Defense, the Secretary of a military department, the Secretary of Transportation, or the Governor or legislature of any State, Territory, Commonwealth, or possession in which he is on duty or present shall be punished as a court-martial may direct.
in other words, if you’re an officer it is literally a crime to criticize the government, even in private and even if you’re not in uniform. more generally, though, all military personnel have their political activity severely restricted by a combination of articles 10, 2, and 18 of us code, DOD directives, and military regulations. from this article, here’s a list of some things that you’re not allowed to do if you’re in the military:
Participate in partisan political fundraising activities, rallies, conventions (including making speeches in the course thereof), management of campaigns, or debates, either on one’s own behalf or on that of another, without respect to uniform or inference or appearance of official sponsorship, approval, or endorsement. Participation includes more than mere attendance as a spectator.
Use official authority or influence to interfere with an election, affect the course or outcome of an election, solicit votes for a particular candidate or issue, or require or solicit political contributions from others.
Allow or cause to be published partisan political articles, letters, or endorsements signed or written by the member that solicits votes for or against a partisan political party, candidate, or cause. However, letters to the editor are allowed.
Serve in any official capacity with or be listed as a sponsor of a partisan political club.
Speak before a partisan political gathering, including any gathering that promotes a partisan political party, candidate, or cause.
Participate in any radio, television, or other program or group discussion as an advocate for or against a partisan political party, candidate, or cause.
Conduct a political opinion survey under the auspices of a partisan political club or group or distribute partisan political literature.
Perform clerical or other duties for a partisan political committee or candidate during a campaign, on an election day, or after an election day during the process of closing out a campaign.
Solicit or otherwise engage in fundraising activities in Federal offices or facilities, including military reservations, for any political cause or candidate.
March or ride in a partisan political parade.
Display a large political sign, banner, or poster (as distinguished from a bumper sticker) on a private vehicle.
Display a partisan political sign, poster, banner, or similar device visible to the public at one’s residence on a military installation, even if that residence is part of a privatized housing development.
Participate in any organized effort to provide voters with transportation to the polls if the effort is organized by or associated with a partisan political party, cause, or candidate.
Sell tickets for or otherwise actively promote partisan political dinners and similar fundraising events.
Attend partisan political events as an official representative of the Armed Forces, except as a member of a joint Armed Forces color guard at the opening ceremonies of the national conventions of the Republican, Democratic, or other political parties recognized by the Federal Elections Committee or as otherwise authorized by the Secretary concerned.
Make a campaign contribution to, or receive or solicit (on one’s own behalf) a campaign contribution from, any other member of the Armed Forces on active duty.
Any activity that may be reasonably viewed as directly or indirectly associating the Department of Defense or the Department of Homeland Security (in the case of the Coast Guard) or any component of these Departments with a partisan political activity or is otherwise contrary to the spirit and intention of this Directive shall be avoided.
most of that list comes from DoD Directive 1344.10 (full text here) and while there’s plenty of stuff you can do, politically, but almost all of it requires you to be either anonymous or passive about it. so now it’s illegal for you to do anything substantial toward changing policy in any way, and possibly also to even so much as complain about the president or call congress incompetent.
so now that you’ve been properly restricted (and remember, the only way out of this without a felony is with a DD214 (discharge paperwork)) you’re put to work. on the surface, it seems like any other job, but there’s subtle differences. for one thing, literally every person who’s gotten more raises than you is your boss and you have to do whatever they tell you unless it conflicts with what someone who’s gotten even more raises than them already told you to do.
your orders can also be literally anything that’s not illegal. if your boss at starbucks tells you to always stand on one foot while you work the register, you might do it for like an hour or two, but then you’d stop bothering and if your boss got upset about it then that would be unreasonable. if your CO tells you to always say the pledge of allegiance in Farsi, then it’s your responsibility to learn how to say it in Farsi and always do so until that CO or someone above them give you permission to say it in english again, and if you don’t, that’s a crime.
what that means is that if you get assigned to recruitment duty, you can and will be ordered to look and sound excited about being in the military as you tell 13 year olds they should join up after high school, and you will legally have to do it.
and all of this is without even mentioning the missions. combat, and the act of killing another human being, are traumatizing even in the most ideal of situations. if someone breaks into your home to attack you and you push them back and something heavy falls on them and kills them, that’s still a traumatic experience for you. even legitimate wars for good reasons against enemies that really do need to be stopped are horrifying experiences for everyone involved.
but when the war is bullshit and most of the casualties are civilians and you know all this and aren’t even allowed to say anything about it, let alone do anything about it? that combines with combat to royally fuck a person up.
this is the part where everyone who’s read this far gets ready to jump down my throat about how the people being bombed are the real victims and not the people dropping the bombs, so let me remind you that this anon was in response to a post i made that started with the words “The US Military is […] evil” and that im not in any way trying to say that the troops get the worst of it, just that they are being used and abused by the system.
because remember, those troops have been groomed to be recruited since they were five years old and asked their parents why they got veterans day off from kindergarten, and have been pursued more and more actively all the way up through high school. the military lured them in, is chewing them up, and will spit them out when it’s done with them without giving one single fuck about them.
and no matter how you cut it, that describes a victim.
Important post. I’m reliably told that security clearances are also a gilded cage – to the extent that sometimes I’ve wondered whether Trump is picking people who can’t be cleared on purpose so they won’t be as thoroughly monitored.
Yeah, recruitment campaigns are actively aimed at kids from poor communities. Which often means disproportionately communities of color. They prey on the people that don’t have a hope for college or networking or any sort of leg into a career. They tell impoverished kids that the military is a future, it is a career, it’s on the go training with good pay and requires no experience. And if they ended up not liking it? Well now they have all this experience and the GI bill to fall back on when they’ve served out their contract, so win-win, right?
When you’re other option is a life of wage slave Hell, it’s a proposition even those with the most rigorous moral opposition have a hard time saying no to. Much like prison industrial system, the military industry is built on the backs of this country’s desperate and disenfranchised.
I agree with most of this, but I would argue that most of the restrictions on political activity come out of attempts to avoid a politicized military, and boy howdy do we not want a politicized military. (And it definitely sometimes acts politicized now, but it could be so much worse.)
“Because the true root cause of hunger is inequality, any method of boosting food production that deepens inequality will fail to reduce hunger. Conversely, only technologies that have positive effects on the distribution of wealth, income, and assets, that are pro-poor, can truly reduce hunger.”
A common fat-phobic belief is that fat people are fat because they overeat. A recent submission to @facebooksexism perfectly illustrates this stereotype and the harmful classist attitudes it perpetuates:
Like most fat-phobic beliefs, this stereotype is completely wrong.
It is well accepted in public health science that food insecurity – which is the lack of consistent, dependable access to enough food for active, healthy living – predicts higher body weight.
Limited resources and lack of access to nutritious, affordable foods. Heavily processed, low-nutrition foods are usually cheaper, but are more calorie dense and less satisfying to eat.
Cycles of food deprivation and overeating. Low income people often run out of money for necessities like food before their next paycheck arrives, resulting in extended periods of hunger and starvation followed by periods of compensatory eating when the paycheck arrives. Such eating patterns cause weight gain over time.
High levels of stress, anxiety, & depression, all of which cause physiological changes resulting in weight gain over time.
Limited access to health care. Many chronic health conditions, like polycystic ovarian syndrome, thyroid dysfunction, and type II diabetes, cause weight gain when left untreated.
All of this means that systematic oppression causes people to be fat for reasons that are outside of their personal control, and that poor fat people are not lying when they report that they cannot afford to put food on the table. Stop spreading the harmful, oppressive, and fat-phobic belief that you can
judge a person’s nutrition or eating habits by the size of their body.
“If a society puts half its children into short skirts and warns them not to move in ways that reveal their panties, while putting the other half into jeans and overalls and encouraging them to climb trees, play ball, and participate in other vigorous outdoor games; if later, during adolescence, the children who have been wearing trousers are urged to “eat like growing boys,” while the children in skirts are warned to watch their weight and not get fat; if the half in jeans runs around in sneakers or boots, while the half in skirts totters about on spike heels, then these two groups of people will be biologically as well as socially different. Their muscles will be different, as will their reflexes, posture, arms, legs and feet, hand-eye coordination, and so on. Similarly, people who spend eight hours a day in an office working at a typewriter or a visual display terminal will be biologically different from those who work on construction jobs. There is no way to sort the biological and social components that produce these differences. We cannot sort nature from nurture when we confront group differences in societies in which people from different races, classes, and sexes do not have equal access to resources and power, and therefore live in different environments. Sex-typed generalizations, such as that men are heavier, taller, or stronger than women, obscure the diversity among women and among men and the extensive overlaps between them… Most women and men fall within the same range of heights, weights, and strengths, three variables that depend a great deal on how we have grown up and live. We all know that first-generation Americans, on average, are taller than their immigrant parents and that men who do physical labor, on average, are stronger than male college professors. But we forget to look for the obvious reasons for differences when confronted with assertions like ‘Men are stronger than women.’ We should be asking: ‘Which men?’ and ‘What do they do?’ There may be biologically based average differences between women and men, but these are interwoven with a host of social differences from which we cannot disentangle them.”
i was watching some talking heads on the bbc discuss the ‘splintered left’ and they all just kept saying that there’s a new strain of ‘anti-elitism’ that’s making it hard to organise and i was like hmm i wonder why…. HMMMMMM I WONDER WHY….
View from the Moon Pyramid to the Road of the Dead in the ancient Teotihuacán Pyramids in Mexico.Tais Policanti
This story was originally published in Spanish by HuffPost Mexico. A version of it has been adapted and republished here in English with permission from HuffPost Mexico.
Millions of tourists visit the ruins of Teotihuacán every year. They climb the pyramids, walk the Avenue of the Dead, and learn about the spectacular artifacts recovered from the ancient Mesoamerican city. Looking across the vast and remarkably well-preserved stone complex, built by hand by a pre-Aztec civilization, many likely assume that only a powerful despotic king—directing hordes of slave or serf laborers—could have orchestrated the construction of such a carefully planned city. Indeed, this is what archaeologists once believed. If tourists make the effort to visit some of the excavated residential compounds outside the main archaeological zone, however, they may start to understand why such assumptions about Teotihuacán society are changing. For these structures lie at the heart of our shifting perspective of the ancient city: namely, that it was far more egalitarian than we had previously imagined possible.
I began my archaeological career in the 1970s as an undergraduate examining artifacts at Teotihuacán. That first trip to Mexico cemented my love not only for the archaeology, but also for Mexican life and culture. In the decades since, I moved on to excavating Aztec-period sites in the provinces of that civilization’s empire. In 2015, when I was appointed director of Arizona State University’s archaeological lab in San Juan Teotihuacán, I got to return to my first love among Mexican sites, armed with new ideas about ancient cities and urban life. But after just a few years of work, I began to see Teotihuacán in a very different light.
Compared with the Aztec sites I have studied, Teotihuacán seems very strange, and not just because of its huge size (100,000 people, living in an area of close to 20 square kilometers). For one, it’s the only pre-modern Mexican city completely planned with a grid layout. For another, its residents lived in a form of housing—apartmentlike multifamily compounds with white lime-plaster floors, ornamented roofs, and porches—remarkably spacious and luxurious for the ancient world. These complexes are key to the conclusion of many researchers, including myself, that the city’s residents lived far more economically equal lives than any other known Mesoamerican society.
These new insights into Teotihuacán have come thanks to extensive fieldwork on the site. This includes decades of study from archaeologists excavating the pyramids and apartment compounds, who have helped to more fully reconstruct the architecture of the long-abandoned city and unearthed artifacts that are giving us clues about the lives of the people who inhabited it. It also includes work from anthropologists like René Millon and George Cowgill, who mapped the entire city and took more than 5,000 collections of artifacts from the surface of the ground. These materials are now stored in the lab I direct, where they are being studied by archaeologists.
NAME ANY SOCIAL ILL, and it likely has its most devastating impact on people of color. That’s why the results of a new study on one of this nation’s most persistent problems are shocking, but not at all surprising: People of color are far more likely than white people to be homeless.
The Center for Social Innovation, based in Needham, analyzed six communities, including Atlanta, Dallas, and San Francisco. It found more than 78 percent of those experiencing homelessness are people of color. Nearly 65 percent of them are black.
Such results are as obvious as they are disheartening for Jeff Olivet, chief executive officer of the Needham-based Center for Social Innovation, which launched the study.
“You look around with your own eyes in any community across the country and see massive numbers of people of color in the homelessness population, whether it’s in a shelter or the street,” Olivet said. “Yet you go to a national conference or read a report and there’s never any mention of racial disparity, disproportionality, injustice, or inequity.”
This just proves that Britain and British Colonies can’t grasp the concept of food despite killing millions for spices.
You’re saying the three normal ones of these are awful and shit because Britain in the past killed millions for spices without realising that this is what get eaten if we can’t afford food. This isn’t what the rich fucks eat, this is poor people shit, I remember having crisps in my sandwiches in primary school because we couldn’t afford sandwich meat. We get the concept of food, we just can’t fucking afford it.
The current poverty measure was established in the 1960s and is now widely acknowledged to be flawed.2 It was based on research indicating that families spent about one-third of their incomes on food – the official poverty level was set by multiplying food costs by three. Since then, the figures have been updated annually for inflation but have otherwise remained unchanged.
[…]
Food now comprises only one-seventh of an average family’s expenses, while the costs of housing, child care, health care, and transportation have grown disproportionately. Thus, the poverty level does not reflect the true cost of supporting a family. In addition, the current poverty measure is a national standard that does not adjust for the substantial variation in the cost of living from state to state and between urban and rural areas.
Urocyon's Jaunts 2.0 
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