Re: Being Poor
I think many of you guys are missing the point of this piece. It's an essay- albeit one in list form. It attempts to describe the experience of being poor. It doesn't mean people who aren't rich don't know the price of every item, or don't hope the toothache goes away. But the unspoken thing in these lines is the because I have to. I know the price of yogurt at every supermarket I go to because I eat a lot of yogurt, and it's better to spend $0.50 rather than $1.00. But when you have to know the price of every item- because the difference between $0.50 yogurt and $1.00 yogurt is going to break you- you're probably not that well off financially.
You can choose to take apart every single thing in the piece and decide you disagree with it. But I think that taken as a whole, it conveys what it's like to be poor in America. And I think that was its aim.
The thing that, to me, says everything, is that last line:
Being poor is people wondering why you didn't leave.
Yeah.
There's a lot of stuff between the lines here that you aren't going to see if you sit and dissect every little line to see if it's "true" or "false". Does this piece capture the experience of being poor? Seems from the comments on his blog, most people who've been poor think that it does.
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