Poverty Is Not Simple

My husband would cut half a brick of Ivory into slices with a kitchen knife, then grate the slices with a cheese grater; he’d put the homemade soap flakes into the used dish soap bottle and fill it halfway with water, then shake until it was a bottle of suds. Then, with a great deal of scrubbing and elbow grease, he could do the dishes. But if he wasn’t extremely careful, there’d be an Ivory Soap residue, and that’s what got all over my dandelions and violets.

I don’t think that simplicity-loving affluent people can truly understand what it’s like to find a film of ivory soap covering your foraged vegetables, and eat them anyway, because you don’t actually have a choice.

And that’s just the inconvenience side of poverty. That doesn’t cover the fear. Poor people are always afraid. You can quote me Bible verses about sparrows and lilies of the field if you like, but my conscience is clear on this point. Poverty is legitimately scary even if you’ve got the Joy of the Lord within you. There comes that day, every couple of months, when you have to choose between getting further behind on the rent and getting your gas shut off again– or to choose between living without gas, electric or water. There comes a day when you have to take the bus downtown to walk up and down the main street between agencies, searching for someone who can pay off your water bill this time. And there’s no guarantee that anyone will.

There comes the day when your landlord refuses to fix the bathroom tiles that have broken up entirely, leaving a moldy hole in the floor where you can see all the way down to the neighbor’s apartment. Well-meaning people will inform you that he must because he’s legally required to do so. But you can’t make him. He’ll just evict you if you complain or sue. And no judge is going to take the side of a poor person behind on the rent, no matter what the landlord did.

There is nothing simple about any of that.

There’s nothing simple about not being able to sleep because your alcoholic upstairs neighbor is cursing out her boyfriend for his sexual inadequacies at two o’clock in the morning again, and the walls and ceiling are too thin to filter out any of the noise. There’s nothing simple about having to sweep used needles off the front steps before your toddler can play outside, or step over used condoms in the alley on the way to the bus stop. There’s nothing simple about walking five miles to Aldi and back, because you need groceries and that’s the cheapest place, but it’s the day that the bus in your small town doesn’t run.

Perhaps you can see why I’m annoyed with anyone who would try to make poverty seem romantic or trendy, or make it into a fashion. Real, involuntary poverty is not simple. It’s not aesthetic or healthy; it certainly isn’t sustainable or good for the environment. It’s scary, traumatic, dangerous and annoying. It makes your hair greasy. It makes you sick. It’s one of the most complicated things there is, and when you’re in the middle of it, people inform you that it is too voluntary– that you could break out of this if you’d just make up your mind to work harder and exercise more thrift.

For them, for people who drink at redneck-themed bars and build tiny homes for sustainability, it is voluntary.

For us, it isn’t.

And it sure isn’t simple.

(image via Pixabay)