It’s hard to sleep at night.  Your mind is so anxious with burning thoughts of how to survive can only be calmed by substances, preferable a $1.70 40 oz. of Ice House.  Being poor doesn’t justify violence, stealing, or vandalism but it affects every action you take.  It weighs on your mind like a burden, it forces a fatalism onto your every thought and spoken word.  It means walking your sneakers thin and wearing whatever you raided from Old Navy’s clearance rack for years.  You cling to all your possessions and your past because it’s all you have.
Your dreams are haunted with scenarios that you awake from relieved that it’s just your weary imagination. But then reality hits and it’s little better. You’re always on the brink, waiting for the next disaster that if it doesn’t kill you, desensitizes you even more. Thankfully, for now, living in poverty in America still provides many comforts, food is plentiful and cheap, the police guard your safety, there are public libraries, and tv or radio to inform and entertain. You probably don’t have a car, so you either adventure to work, school, or the store on unreliable, time-consuming public transportation; walk yourself scrawny, or car pool. Car pooling forces you to associate at work with whoever is friendly enough to take you, but most likely your fast-food job has a turn-over rate so high that soon you’ll fell like a car-whore. High-turnover jobs force you to become desensitized to the coming and going of the new same-old-face as they come and go.

But maybe instead of working retail of fast-food you’re a janitor, which is like being a better paid but less glamorous house-wife: you’re only acknowledged when you mess up. If you’re paid by the hour but improve your inefficiency you take home less pay, and for some reason it’s physically strenuous jobs like Fed-Ex package handling that don’t offer health-care.

Human beings are social animals, and that doesn’t change when you’re poor. We spend to conform in an attempt to feel secure and live comfortably among friends. The poor like everyone make stupid choices in an attempt to fit-in. It’s hard having to see the upper-middle class norm in tv shows, magazines, and movies and not become hopelessly envious which clouds our decisions. It’s equally hard to watch people drown in New Orleans or come back from Iraq minus a limb and resist the urge to give what little you have to charity when it may mean missing your rent. Our generosity and weaknesses are scientifically exploited by advertisers who prey upon our insecurities and desires. You slap “all natural” or “reinvested directly back” on anything and it’s hard for me to resist buying even if it costs an extra dollar that I really shouldn’t be paying.

Money is the prime tension between broken families and marriages, and it’s not hard to imagine why (except to the Bush dynasty I’m sure). Living with limited resources forces one to adopt a de-facto Social Darwinism philosophy that no matter how hard you try to combat keeps being proved again and again. You calculate a parents love by comparing what they do for you compared to another sibling. It makes men feel impotent and any sexual act becomes an expression of frustration rather than love. All your social relationships are affected. Any friendship will naturally wane when you can’t go out to eat or on that even-modest spring-break trip when others can. Soon you feel like a parasite and act out, hyper-defensively, to prove you aren’t straining the friendship even more. If you ever do crawl out of poverty you wonder if one of the countless friends that disappeared from your life will one day turn-up on your porch to ask for some ridiculous favor. You fear the sirens are coming for a friend who crossed that precarious line between desperate and criminal. People wonder why you don’t talk about yourself and its because you’ll just depress them and yourself.

And even though you might be white, strait, and male you too know what it’s like to be pre-judged negatively when your credit card bounces at the grocery store or you’re flagged and followed at Wal-Mart by “disguised” security guards because of your worn-out clothes. And it makes you fear taking control of your life and planning your future because your past is full of disaster. You lack job-skills because your family didn’t have that spare computer to tinker with. Your public school is full of both wonderful teachers and those who couldn’t care less about you because they have their own problems, let alone whatever potentially violent adventures you might face walking home or on the playground that day.

(Cross posted at Daily Prose.)