I saw another hate-on-the-poors video today on Bluesky

​​https://bsky.app/profile/atrupar.com/post/3mgqa5yjxc22c

The tl;dv is Sen Jon Husted from Ohio stepped it in quite spectacularly by saying, 

"People living in poverty are just not very, um, experienced at navigating the real world, right? I remember talking to one young lady who said, 'Well, I don't really know how money works at a grocery store,' because she grew up and has lived all of her adult life using SNAP cards to buy groceries. You literally have to teach people how to budget ... the buzzword today, let's face it, is 'affordability.'"

For starters, I don't think anyone said anything of the like to him. Poor people know just as well as anyone else how money works at a grocery store. Have you seen what all you cannot purchase with food stamps? I digress. We're here to talk about poverty and hating on the poors.

Who am I to talk about it? I've been poor. Homeless poor. Picking up coins in the bar parking lot on Sunday morning poor. Terrified of losing my house and kids poor.

I've also been very comfortable. Go to Costco without a list comfortable. Have steak for dinner because I feel like it comfortable. Buy new tires with a shrug comfortable.

I like being comfortable better than I like being poor, but because I've been there I think I can translate for some of you who have not. And I think the clearest, most honest way to do that is to talk about what being poor looks like from the inside. This is not in any order.

• Every decision that may potentially involve cash in some way necessitates looking at your banking app and your purse. 

• You squirrel away every coin you find in a safe place. It won't stay there because you're going to need it, but the harder it is to get to, the more likely it will last until some existential threat arrives. 

• The existential threat will arrive by noon.

• You become very good at navigating bureaucracy and rules. (Side note – if you need someone who can read a document for loopholes, hire a mom who has been on welfare.)

• As part of that bureaucratic knowledge, you know where all the offices are and who is at them, and how they will treat you, and you will learn what masks to don to earn their favor.

• Sleep is divine when you can get it. When you're asleep you aren't hungry. When you're huddled in a blanket, you can ignore the drafts you can't afford to fix. Blankets are a poverty treasure.

• You learn prioritization and the nuances of Maslow's Hierarchy like you know your own breath. 1. Air. 2. Water. 3. Shelter. 4. Food. 5. Safety 6. Most days it doesn't go beyond 5. A lot of days 3 is a successful day.

• You become either completely invisible or the focus of all attention. There isn't much in between. You learn very quickly that invisibility is the preferred state. See #5. Safety

• If you lose hope, you lose everything. Some people don't have the scaffolding to hold hope. 

• Poverty consumes your reality. It makes everything so much harder. There is the well-known Sam Vimes theory of socioeconomic unfairness, but there is also Maslow's Hierarchy. Please read up on both, including the controversy around Maslow.

• You cannot pull yourself out of poverty on your own. Fun Fact: "Pull yourself up by your bootstraps" was a comedic phrase to point out the obvious impossibility of some tasks.

• Our society works so hard to prevent community from helping. It is increasingly criminalized to feed or help the poor. You must go through "official channels" which just means there is some sort of "Official" way to block you from getting aid.

• If you are fortunate enough have a job, you have to work so hard (so hard) to hide your life. 

• Benefits come on a set date, except when they don't. You learn to plan accordingly.

• You hold your breath many, many times a day waiting for some other shoe to land.

• The mental energy to track the knowledge of the system – including official rules, real rules, individuals running the system, how to navigate it, how the different systems bump into each other and check and benefit each other is as much energy as it takes to lead a team of 20 direct reports. I'm not even kidding.

• Everything will be your fault. But you will have no authority to change any of it. But also you must be the one to make any change. 

• Also you need a permanent address. It's illegal to use an address where you don't reside for many things, but you also must have regular access to the mail there. A PO Box requires a residential address. But you can't get some things at a PO Box, they have to go to your legal residence

• If you look poor, you get booted from every public space. That's called trespassing. Even if you bought the coffee.

• It's illegal to be poor. If you are charged with a crime, you can no longer get a job. But you'll need to be at the courthouse on time, dressed nicely and ready to agree to whatever the judge says. Nicely. With a smile.

Poverty is incredibly expensive to our society. 

I don't mean in the sense that aid programs are expensive, though they are that! I mean the financial costs, the loss of innovation, the cost of distraction, the societal structural costs. The human costs.

Children born into poverty are more likely to have very high ACE scores (a scoring framework for Adverse Childhood Experiences from the individual to community level). A high score here is a terrible thing. People with higher ACE scores are victims of their environment – they did not choose anything that contributed to the score, and yet they must carry the burden. Those burdens are numerous and life-shortening.

And for the person who has to hold all of that — plus navigate every system on that list above — the weight compounds.. Poverty literally owns your brain. Research is now proving what some of us already know – the cognitive load of poverty pushes out almost every other mental process.

The effect is that we lose the minds of some of our most brilliant people because they are busy fighting the trauma effects in their brains and bodies. They are navigating systems designed to remind them of their "place" whether intentionally or not.

The programs we build to patch some of the largest gaps become tools of oppression and fraud

The people who want to do a fraud with these programs have gotten very good at painting poverty as a moral failing, but I want you to go back up that list and tell me where the moral failing is?

I was INCREDIBLY lucky and had parents who loved and wanted me. I cannot overstate this enough. I started life being wanted and knowing that there was some way out of this. If you've never had stability, if you have no map for what it even looks like, it's like trying to put together a 3,000 piece, double-sided jigsaw puzzle with no edge pieces and no reference picture. If you were abused as a very young child, both sides of the puzzle are matte black. Also that puzzle needs to be done by noon. Get crackin’

I got out. I found a job that gave me some wiggle room. I bought a HUD house and fixed it up, eventually selling it at a tremendous profit. But the only thing I had was a background that helped. I had a college degree. I had advanced technical skills that helped me land good jobs.

 I. Had. Hope.

I used to think poverty was some huge problem to solve. That it was just so complicated and overwhelming, we'd never solve it. 

We may not fully but I no longer think it's some unsolvable puzzle. We've just over-complicated it.

Would it take time and creativity? Hell yeah. But not fixing it has caused a horrendous spiral. It causes very real human trauma. That trauma gets encoded in the brain and leads to people stuck in the cycle. Trapped animals behave in protective (and predictable) ways.

We actually know more about how to fix it than we think. Research on Universal Basic Income is showing what many people also already know – when people want out, they will use every tool at their disposal to rise. 

Head Start is very well researched and shows what incredible things can happen when intervention arrives at the right place and time. I am encouraged by all the work being done at state and community levels to implement research-backed programs and I know they will help.

One thing I've taken from my child development background is that humans are driven to advance. If you've had a child in your life you know they want to sit, crawl, walk, and generally be independent. Think about trying to tell a 3 year old they can't feed themselves. HA. We don't change just because we grow older. We feel a sense of pride and accomplishment when we learn a new skill or unlock a new "adulting achievement" because we want to belong. I strongly believe that a well-implemented program that is informed by research and real world conditions can have impacts beyond what we can imagine.

Stop listening to the people preaching hate and otherness of those who have less. Start imagining the far-reaching impact of 36 million Americans with the breathing room to raise their kids, find productive work, participate in their communities, and not need these convoluted programs we've created to "help".

And for the love of all humanity stop saying that people in poverty don't know how to navigate the "real world." You wouldn't last a day in the real, real world.