An Essay on Poverty

In the spring of 1998, a journalist named Barbara Erhenreich set out to see whether she could make ends meet as one of the working poor and eventually wrote a book about her experience, Nickel and Dimed. Starting with only a bit of money and refusing to rely on any family support, she scraped by while describing her subjective experience of working in low-wage, high-turnover jobs, finding them exhausting and occasionally demeaning. Some criticized her for not being properly able to capture the full experience of poverty because she always knew she could go back to her middle class life.

This is a ridiculous but true sentiment; we couldn’t hold anyone to a higher standard because being poor is a holistic experience that’s unreplicatable. She did as well as anyone could have done, but being poor is a complete experience that colors all aspects of one’s life.

Poverty is not a physical state, however. Poverty, the feeling of being poor, is very much a state of mind, a feeling of being on the ropes, of every moment being the moment that could send you over the edge. It is the feeling of driving down the highway and knowing, not worrying, but knowing that if your vehicle broke down you would not have enough money to have it towed, and that you would have to abandon it on the side of the road. It lives in the moment of the desperate yearning to turn in your name badge and walk out the door, and in the momentary feeling of freedom and power that the fantasy provides. It overtakes you with the knowledge that you should do do it--it would be the best thing; why don’t you just do it?--but that you don’t have the courage to face the unknown. This courage comes with a safety net, a fallback plan, which you don’t have.

For me, there is a particular “object-ness” or “place-ness” that poverty lives in. Although it creates a generalized fear, it is never born of that generality, but is localized in objects and situations. A car is poverty. A bill is poverty. The act of checking one’s bank account is poverty. Although the fear may, and does, anticipate this object or moment and may echo after its passing, it emanates from the specific. There is always the knowledge that if the specific could be removed, the fear would cease. Maybe I should just sell my car and take the bus to work. But then how would I get to ___ ? How am I going to make this month’s credit card payment? If only I could consolidate, refinance. Maybe I just won’t pay. Then I’d have some breathing room. But what about my credit score?

These types of thoughts, these “if only”s, are the most characteristic thoughts that accompany the feeling of not having enough money. Without them, the day by day struggles of actually facing your broken car or seeing that you do not have enough in a bank account to make a bill would be entirely tolerable. In fact, the actual firing off of the thing you’ve been worrying about is usually a moment of release and relief. Okay, it happened; now, what do I do about it?

Thankfully, I have not experienced the terror that must accompany being poor with children to support, but I can only imagine that the person you are without poverty either ceases to exist or is subsumed completely beneath living moment to moment and only reveals itself when it explodes. Having children is sometimes described as seconding your true self to your children’s well being. With fear and poverty this is also the case, and I cannot fathom the reaction I would have to being squelched so totally.

The Minneapolis poet and rapper Guante describes working while poor as feeling like “we are the servants entombed alive with the pharaoh, polishing someone else’s gold while our oxygen runs out, dutifully preparing a grand feast for a god who will never be hungry.” This is the political half of poverty, and it is a (rightfully) hate-filled place that I hope never to be. I cannot blame Guante or anyone for seeing stark disparities and sinking into that darkness, but I cannot be angry. It would betray me. It would give the feeling of poverty a power that would diminish me more than it already has. I have seen and felt that disparity, but it angers me no more than any of the injustices of the world, which is to say that it fills me with both a longing and a hope for a better world.

In all of these disconnected fragments I have tried to do something that I believe is impossible: to express the fundamental characteristic of poverty, the one that defines and colors all others. To explain it completely and totally would be as difficult as explaining the color red to a person born blind; there is no comparable experience. But to give a sense, to give an idea, might be as possible as describing the feeling of love; there are comparisons, insufficient as they might be.