Fighting For Poverty

I am an illegal and sometimes I condone making false vows. I've lived in approximately eight apartments but have only signed two leases. My friends and/or I have signed leases with the full knowledge that we will not be true to our end—housing and cramming and feeding: more people inhabiting a space than signatures bleed on paper.

Uncle Sam makes it hard for me to be poor. When I think of the really impoverished, I picture families and groups crammed into rooms. In the midst of this most recent economic downturn, many of the “middle class” have realized and discovered and idealized aspects of poverty. In retrospect I can find in my personal history where the recession (whatever that means) happened. It involved me living in a sketchy, cold, unsafe and illegal house and not having enough money for food. I had one job at six hours a week and despite applying to EVERY where in town, no second job. This was the first time I didn't have enough food to eat. It would (and possibly will) happen to me again. I find that making WAY less than 5,000 a year allows me to live-what I consider- substantially well. A bunch of stupid looking buildings, representing over-paid, mostly white men, tell me I am impoverished; they want me to want what they have.

A typical stereotype about modern Americans is that we over-reach our bounds to consume and don't give jack thought to what going without is like. On my part—it's not for lack of trying. The Man keeps me down by trying to force me up.

I do not NEED to sleep in-of-doors; if I do NEED to sleep in-of-doors, I do not NEED a room, or a mattress or a couch. I certainly don't deny these things to others but after giving them up I do not seek to reclaim them. The government tells me I DO NEED. Surely, having a 7-member family share 1.2 rooms is a threat to sanitation and sanity but why do I have to have an address? Why do I have to live in one spot, defined by my habitation? If I am clean, healthy, maybe even happy, and I pay what taxes I can—how then, WHY then must the “land of the free” rape my freedom?

I find that being forced to live above my means an equal (and perhaps causal) denegration to being forced to live below them.