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In reply to the discussion: McDonald’s Advice To Underpaid Employees: Sell Your Christmas Presents For Cash [View all]Demo_Chris
(6,234 posts)For example, if you are well off and your kitchen faucet breaks you call your landlord and he replaces it immediately with a nice one, or if you are buying the home yourself, you motor on down to home depot and you buy a nice new one. You buy a GOOD one, like a Moen or something. But when you're poor and it breaks it's nto an inconvenience, it's a fucking disaster. Your landlord isn't replacing a damn thing, you have to buy it whether you are buying the house or not.
And you don't have the money for a fancy faucet like a Moen for a hundred bucks. Not even close. You have to buy one of those plasti-metal pieces of crap at Walmart or the corner hardware store. It's still fifty bucks you do not have, and you know when you buy it that it will be doing good to last a year and you are throwing that money away, but what else can you do? You have to buy it. And buy it again, and again, and again. The rich guy with his hundred dollar faucet is still going strong.
And this applies to everything. Your car, your lighting, your plumbing, your health, your job, everything. It's all poised to detonate like an engine screaming at redline. Something is always flying apart, and every time it does something else has to give because there's no slack, no extra room or money or credit.
So the poor guy stumbles from crisis to crisis, reeling, all to the chorus of helpers on the sidelines questioning the path and choices and offering suggestions. "So why don't you just buy a better faucet? It's only fifty dollars more, if you just quit smoking if you cancelled your interet if you just got another job or a few more hours maybe ask your boss or friends and you must have a few extra dollars tucked away..." And the poor guy just shakes his head, because explaining poverty to people who don't live there is like explaining color to the blind. And it's made worse in that same way... people think they understand poverty because they've been broke themselves at one point in time or another.
They don't understand the difference. Being broke is just being broke, it's nothing, it offers the same 'understanding" of POVERTY as closing your eyes does for the guy who can see. Being broke is being a tourist in a third-workd country, you're there, you look around, meet a few natives, pretend to share their experience, and then you're gone with an amazing adventure to recount to your friends. Poverty doesn't even begin until you hear the cell door slam shut behind you starting your life sentence.