Icon from a picrew by grgikau. Call me Tir or Julian. 37. He/They. Queer. Twitter: @tirlaeyn. ao3: tirlaeyn. 18+ Only. Star Trek. Sandman. IwtV. OMFD. Definitionless in this Strict Atmosphere.
I say this as someone who’s trained in internal self-awareness and adaptive internal resourcing:
The kind of Brain Tigers that living paycheck to paycheck gives you are nothing less than horrific.
It simulates being persistence-hunted.
You can’t think. You can’t hide. You can’t plan.
You can only run.
This is intentional on the part of our oppressors.
What’s Brain Tigers?
I’m glad you asked!
“Brain Tigers” are my way of describing the mental sensation of when something intangible activates my survival instincts. Evolutionary speaking, we are only supposed to feel dread when our lives are in immanent danger—like when there are tigers in the bushes.
But our modern society now has simulated threats, such as the threat of homelessness via living paycheck to paycheck. Because our survival instincts don’t distinguish between immanent danger and conceptual danger, it reacts the same way.
However, unlike real tigers, we have no means of directly combating these simulated predators, which means we can’t remedy our sense of dread. And also unlike real tigers, we can’t detect them with our carnal senses, which creates a pretty horrid sense of unreality within our minds.
Not only does this kind of dread shut down our critical thinking, but it also shuts down our free will. As long as you need to worry about making ends meet, you’ll never, ever be able to fully tap into your higher judgement.
I’ve been brainwashed and programmed. I’ve been warped by neurotoxins. I’ve been tortured for 22 years due to inflammation of my entire nervous system. I’ve had mind held in a mental cage nearly all my life.
But my jailers are saints compared to the mind-killer that is poverty. You can’t imagine the primal horror it causes until you’ve experienced it.
Peter Joseph on structural violence, from this video.
Brilliant
Spot on. Like Coretta Scott King said, I must remind you that starving a child is violence. Neglecting school children is violence. Punishing a mother and her family is violence. Discrimination against a working man is violence. Ghetto housing is violence. Ignoring medical need is violence. Contempt for poverty is violence.
Something I don’t think I’ve ever seen discussed much:
The intersection of poverty & fatphobia is fucking hell. I have literally been told that periods of food insecurity and malnutrition were “blessings in disguise” so I could “use up some of that fat.”
People in poverty are often fat, and food insecurity is a massive concern when you’re impoverished–but all people see is the fat. It’s somehow funny when fat people are desperate for food and clean clothes and hygiene items.
If you stink because it’s been months since you could do laundry? People act like the smell is because you’re fat. If your hair is dirty because you can’t access a shower, people act as if you’re dirty because you’re fat. If you’re starving, people will look at your stomach and assume it must actually be digesting a feast, just because you’re fat.
Fat poverty is scary, brutal, and doesn’t really seem to get much visibility, because the stereotype of what impoverished and hungry people looks like tends to skew waifish.
Jfc the idea that this isn’t obvious is nightmarish to me.
I spent years of my adult life without access to adequate work clothes, laundry facilities, or transport, and it’s no coincidence that those years coincide with my being homeless and starving.
Too poor to get an ID, too poor to pay the down payment for a bank account, too poor to have an address… … . .
A good way to know whether or not you have middle class privilege is if your family had a large stock of food staples just lying around.
I mean at any given time you’ve got a huge box of cans of tomato sauce, a huge bag of rice, a bunch of spices in your cupboard, a bunch of noodles and pasta just kicking around, and several cans of soup and frozen dinners for when you’re feeling lazy.
When one of my cousins moved out for the first time my aunt got her stocked up on staples. Flour, canned veggies, spices, sugar, rice, anything that doesn’t go bad in a few days. All that cost over $400 upfront.
After that initial investment in all that stuff though, living gets a lot cheaper. All your staples almost never run out all at once. So in one week you probably just buy some perishables like meat and veggies and maybe buy another giant bag of rice because your current one is sort of getting low.
So when people on the internet tell you that they can teach you how to make gourmet ramen for less than $3 they’re technically right but they’re also assuming that you just have a lot of these staples lying around and can afford to buy in bulk. Maybe the amount of miso paste you used only amounts to 10¢ but the entire bag cost $12.
If I only had 20$ to eat this week I’d already have a bunch of canned stuff and grains in my cupboard and I could probably afford to buy some cheap vegetables and meat. But if someone couldn’t afford to pay $400 to fill their cupboards up the first time they can’t rely on there already being rice when they only have $20 at the end of the month. They need to buy food as they want to use it. So in their situation it makes sense to buy a $1 hamburger from McDonald’s or a box of Mac n cheese and some milk to cook it with. Not vegetables that cost just as much as that box of Mac and cheese and won’t feed nearly as many people.
My dad and his siblings spent a good chunk of their childhoods being poor after their dad’s business went under and something they often tell me is that “the poor can’t afford to be thrifty.”
So anyways if you’re poor you probably already knew this but if you grew up lower to central middle class like I did you might not. And you might’ve wondered why people often get so mad in the comments of those videos that claim to make meals that cost less than a dollar. It’s because that bulk bag of rice from Costco you’re pulling from costs way more than a dollar and those videos don’t take that into account. They assume that everyone watching can afford to be thrifty.
I know hostile architecture is a specific thing, but I can’t help but feel that literally almost all cities are pretty innately hostile to humans living there. We already live in the world of Cars basically.
car centric infrastructure is like, inherently tied into environmental racism and segregation and trying to push the lower/working class out of existence entirely. no or little public transit pushes poor people off to the margins in car centric areas because they can’t afford it while at the same time cutting off their access to jobs because they can’t commute, and ofc theres the history of paving freeways right through working class and especially black/brown neighborhoods instead of investing in infrastructure that grants people equitable access to and ability to commute within high density areas where they would have heightened access to various types of public spaces (libraries, parks, ANY public service) and jobs
and even in places where public transit exists it can still be weaponized against the poor - last year the mayor of chicago literally was able to flip switches and cut off access to the city by putting up every bridge and shutting down every train between the merchandise/shopping district / rich people’s high rises and the working class who live in surrounding neighborhoods as a punishment for protesting (these bridges and trains being shut down also meant no one downtown that doesnt live there actually had the ability to adhere to the city wide curfew put into effect because they couldn’t get home, making mass arrests easy for the police)
Tbh it gets a little exhausting seeing so much emphasis on “Raise the minimum wage! Pay workers for their labour!” and then dead silence about unemployed people and people who are unable to work and disabled people. We deserve a liveable income too.
petition to move from “nobody working full-time should be unable to survive!” to “nobody should be dependent on the ability to spend 40+ hours a week at their job to survive”
I met this woman named Mae. She’s a van driver for a production company. She works 14-hour days but says she doesn’t mind, says she keeps one eye on the road and the other on the prize — a paycheck that has to last through the dead months.
We’re driving through a poor stretch of Atlanta. Dirty streets. Old houses. Plastic toys upturned in front yards, no kids though. The neighborhood is quiet. I live in L.A., land of nannies and gardeners where the hills are alive with the sound of toddlers and leaf blowers. I prefer Atlanta. You can find parking at the grocery store in the middle of the day. In L.A. it doesn’t matter what time it is, the Trader Joe’s is packed with SAHs and WAHs (stay-at-homes and work-at-homes.)
We pass a decades-old Buick Skylark. I point it out.
“You into cars?” Mae asks.
I’m not into cars, but my dad and I once abandoned one of those Buicks on the side of a Florida highway when I was a teenager. That’s how my family did cars — we bought them on their last leg and left them where they died. I tell her how I’d come home from high school and there’d be nothing in the fridge but a bottle of red wine vinegar and a head of lettuce. On the counter, there’d be a bag of potatoes and a bottle of olive oil from the Dollar Store. That was dinner, potatoes and lettuce.
“I hear you,” she says. “We had ketchup sandwiches all the time growing up. We didn’t complain. We ate them.”
Mae’s voice is rich, melodic, it’s Maya Angelou meets Gladys Knight. I tell her about the time I borrowed red stirrup pants. (Remember stirrup pants from the 80s?) I borrowed them from my friend Marla. Her two older brothers drove Corvettes, one each. Marla drove a more sensible car for a 16-year-old, an Oldsmobile Cutlass Supreme. But it was new. And it was hers. She let me borrow the pants for a party in her neighborhood. (God knows I couldn’t go in my own shit clothes.) Long and short of it, the pants ripped in the calf. My mother wept like death had come, struggling with red thread, looking at me like I’d done the worst thing ever. Marla wanted $17 to replace them.
Mae invites me to sit up front with her. The traffic to my hotel is bad, we’re in for a haul. I switch out at the next red light.
“So her brothers drive corvettes?” Yup.
“One each?” Yup.
“Lord Almighty,” she says, “folks of privilege don’t understand how $17 can ruin you.”
Mae tells me how she’d come home from school and her mother would hustle her and her sisters upstairs to pick out clothes for the next day before the utilities cut off. Too many red notices.
I was poor in Florida. Mae’s from Detroit. I ask what she did to keep warm. “Poor kids just do what they gotta do. Privileged kids panic if they can’t have new this and new that, or if they can’t be on a sport team. Sports and heat, those are luxuries.”
I ask if she’s heard of John Prine, the folk singer. I sing his line: It’s a half an inch of water and you think you’re gonna drown. She howls, “Rich folks standing in a puddle screaming!”
I tell her about my parents shaking me awake in the middle of the night whispering, we have to go now. There’s a difference between going and getting out. What we were doing was getting out before morning, before the neighbors would see us evicted.
“I hear you,” she says. “Lord Almighty, I hear you.”
America loves helping the shoeless, iphoneless, voteless, bug-infested Street Jesuses. These are the lost-cause poor; all they want is your pocket change. (Bless their hearts.) But the working poor? Those who claim to not have enough money for food because they also need clothes for work, water for bathing and laundry, rent for housing, heat in the winter, money for daycare, a smartphone for their job, car insurance and gas — those are some shifty motherfuckers.
If you’re on food stamps America has every right to hate you, as evidenced by this angry conservative yelling at a father and child for using food stamps. This lady proves conservatives love a good hate like they love a good steak. I assume she thinks of herself as a nice person, a good person, a church-goer. We all think everyone else is the asshole, right? There isn’t a lot of self-directed road rage out there. How often do we key our own cars? It’s always okay to hate the other guy when the hate is justified — like child predators, rapists, and food stamp users.
Huddled round the Fox News campfire are those who love tall tales of poor people using tax dollars to buy drugs and alcohol and Gucci shoes. That’s not how it works. I’ve been on food stamps. The government doesn’t hand out wads of cash. When you qualify for food stamps you receive a plastic grocery card that only works for food transactions. Key word: qualify. You don’t just sign up. It’s not a tennis lesson at the club. What’s scary about the woman in the video is that she sees what’s in the dad’s cart (food for his kid) and she hates him for it.
Stupid fucking poor people. If only we’d been engineer majors in college. If only we’d gone to college. If only our parents hadn’t been poor. If only they spoke English. If only we worked harder. If only we were more like conservatives who believe everything they have today is a direct result from the sweat of their own brow.
When looking at a spider’s web can you point to the 8th spun web, or the 108th? There are those who claim this astounding ability — those who take full credit for crafting, spin by spin, a better life than ours, a life without aid. If you had help paying for college, if someone bought you your first car, if you had health insurance growing up, if your mom never cried over $17, you were lucky. The Hail Mary toss of birth landed you in a family that could put you on a soccer team and buy cleats as your foot grew. And someone was home to help you with your math and give you a gummy vitamin each morning. That’s called aid, by the way. And not all kids get it, but all kids should.
Don’t confuse aid with charity. Charity is old coats. Donating a coat doesn’t make you a good person but I bet it makes you feel like one. You didn’t even want that coat anymore, what you wanted was the closet space. Sure, you could have sold it at a garage sale and made, like, twenty bucks. It was an expensive coat, damn it. But you, with your heart of gold, gave it away. There’s a twinkle in God’s eye just for you.
What makes you a good person to others (and not just to yourself) is the same thing that makes me, or anyone who can afford the occasional $12 cocktail, a good person: Your vote. Not your coat.
Vote for a Living Wage for others. Vote for health insurance for others. Don’t get in the way of food stamps for others. Understand how important $17 might be to others. That poor stretch of Atlanta is quiet because people are working and paying for day care. They’re clocking the same hours you’re clocking, but they make a shit wage.
Take a good long look at your feet. If you were born at the starting line wearing a nice pair of running shoes, that was luck. Sheer luck. The most important thing you can do now is help those who had to start the race a mile behind you, barefoot.
“Just watched a lady pay with food stamps at the grocery store. She was wearing a very nice North Face coat that I can’t afford. Thanks again Obama.”
—
Found this gem on facebook. I don’t think people understand, it was just Christmas and people get gifts. But no, if you’re poor, you’re not allowed to have a North Face jacket because it might make someone else jealous. There should be a law that if you get a good gift that might make someone jealous and you also receive food stamps, that gift should be revoked by the government immediately and then given to said jealous person because how dare youuuuuu.
And if you dare save up for something expensive you should be allowed to buy it but then you are only allowed to give it to the jealous person who doesn’t receive food stamps.
But seriously, what is with people making automatic assumptions. “How dare you have your nails done if you’re poor!” “How dare you have a smart phone if you’re poor!” There is a certain standard that people have for those less fortunate. You must dress in squalor and if you dare dress nicely you’re feeding off the system and Obama should be ashamed.
So I said, “I think in these types of situation it’s best not to assume something about a person you don’t know but instead be grateful that you don’t have to be one at the store in a North Face jacket given to you by your aunt or someone nice being judged because you don’t look poor enough.”
You don’t see poor people doing the opposite. “OMG she can’t even afford a North Face jacket yet she’s buying food. SMDH.”
Just a quick point: Ever get a nice score at a thrift store? I have found Coach purses for $10, Sorel arctic weight boots with tags still on for $20, and a Michael Kors top for $4. Those are just things I can think of off the top of my head.
Also, that jacket or smart phone could be from a time went they were more financially stable. If you have a nice North Face jacket, you aren’t getting rid of that and buying a cheap Walmart coat just to appease the judgmental fucks in the grocery store. You aren’t going to sell all your nice stuff for whatever you can get just so people aren’t bitter when you use your SNAP card.
I pawned a Columbia parka in Wyoming for grocery money once and that was fucking stupid. I didn’t apply for food assistance because I was afraid of being judged. Instead, I wound up with $40, which lasted for almost four weeks, and no coat in -30°F weather. Would that be better? If your answer is yes, you’re an asshole.
I always see people whine about how a woman is on welfare but has her nails done and a designer purse. In case you didn’t know, interviewers judge your appearance when you go in to a job interview. If you appear put-together and have a nice purse and manicure, you are more likely to get hired over someone with the same qualifications but not dressed as nicely. It’s an investment. And there are salons that do manicures for only around 10 or 15 dollars. And who knows, maybe her friend does them for her, or maybe she has a deal with the salon. You just don’t know. So shut up about it. Do you have any idea how much of your taxes go to welfare programs? It’s a tiny percentage compared to what goes to the defense program. I don’t see people ever talking about that, though.
ALT
