vastderp:temporaldecay:eatprayvalkyrie:kaijuvsgiantrobotsvsme:ripplesfromawaterlily:fuck-me-barnes:t
vastderp:temporaldecay:eatprayvalkyrie:kaijuvsgiantrobotsvsme:ripplesfromawaterlily:fuck-me-barnes:tessalynn:A snippet from an article on Huffington Post about what it means to be working poor.Pretty spot on…I got into an argument today with someone who is a landlord, and they were outraged, outraged, to find that their evicted tenants owned an Xbox 360. Never mind that the console was ten years old and worth perhaps $50 on Craigslist, they were outraged that their evicted tenants did not sell it, along with the very clothes on their back, to pay their back rent. I tried to explain to him that when you are $1800 in back rent, $50 isn’t even a dent in that debt. Why bother? Why bother selling that $50 item if it isn’t going to get you any less evicted? If it’s not going to save you, you’ll hold on to it. Money becomes meaningless when you’ll never have enough to hold onto. You just let it flow like water through your hands. It’s all gone anyways, no matter what you do. It was gone before it ever touched you.The other day I got very mad at someone because their justification of why a family didn’t deserve their council house was because they had decorated the front of their house with xmas lights. DO YOU REALLY KNOW WHAT ITS LIKE TO LIVE WITH NO SMALL PLEASURES AT ALL?!?!? DO YOU REALLY?!?!This is one of the great end results of capitalism: we treat people as if the only thing they should care about are their mechanical needs but without things to nourish the soul or the capacity to talk about same, we fall apart.We aren’t meant to be things which sit in blank boxes waiting to be used by our employers. Nothing in nature acts that way. Nothing’s meant to.The source article: ”This Is Why Poor People’s Bad Decisions Make Perfect Sense”#um this topic makes me fucking furious#i will do a murder immediately#don’t#not only are small pleasures necessary to keep from SPIRALING INTO DEPRESSION WHEN YOU ARE POOR but they are STATUS MARKERS#you NEED a fucking phone to get a job#you need a fucking SMARTPHONE to be accepted as a normal person#you need nice clothes to be treated like you’re worth something#especially if you’re a poor poc#everyone sit down#think about this if you haven’t before#smashes a vase#fuck capitalismStory time with Fi!I was homeless, for about eight months, while I was in college. I was attending a really nice college too, Like, $850US a month for tuition that my scholarship covered. I was alone in the city and a string of bad luck landed me homeless with about a carton box worth of belongings, including among them a laptop.My boss at the time was kind enough to let me crash some nights - but not always - and I couch surfed with friends, when I worked up the courage to ask them to. More often than not, I was hitting local shelters and trying to make my clothes last enough no one’ll feel the urge to point out I’ve been wearing the same three shirts all semester.I got kicked out of a shelter once, over that laptop. I needed that laptop, to keep up the grades that kept my scholarship afloat, and with it the tiny stipend I used to pay for bare necessities. That laptop meant that when I was at school, I could work and keep up with the rest of my class, and I could also log onto the wifi and chat with my parents and friends - remember, alone in the city, heck, alone in the COUNTRY, trying awkwardly to deal with my situation without freaking out my parents who were at the time, dealing with something else that, in my mind, took precedence over my being homeless, I mean, I wasn’t dying, right? - and it was really the last nice thing I got to keep, before the previous sleazeball landlord evicted me and threw all my stuff away for no damn reason.I wake up one morning, and the sup at the shelter is running through my stuff, looking for my laptop, because he’s got someone willing to fork over a little bit more than it’s worth for it. A little bit more than it was worth was not enough to pay for a lease or get an apartment. A little bit more than it was worth, was not enough to get me somewhere safe.I said no.The shelter sup then proceeded to chide me as a spoilt child refusing to accept my reality - and my reality wasn’t even THAT bleak, when you get down to it, I had a steady if small paycheck from my jobs, plural, and no real debts, I only didn’t have a home because my douchebag landlord fucked me over and I didn’t have anything other than my box because all my stuff had been either taken or stolen; objectively, all I had to do (all I did) was endure the shit until I’d saved up enough to pay a new lease and then finally qualify for a credit card to buy new stuff to replace the old. But this asshole, who knew jackshit about me, beyond the fact I crashed into the shelter maybe two or three times a week, and slept for maybe four hours, tops, before heading out again? This asshole thought my reality meant I didn’t deserve to have a laptop - even though, looking back, without that laptop, I would have never been able to get back to my feet - and he felt entitled to take it away from me.I got a broken arm, over that fight, but I kept my laptop. That experience was what forced me to come out to friends and let them know I was kinda homeless and in need of somewhere to crash, because I was terrified of going back to the shelter. (Let’s not get started on how fucked up I was, when I tried to press charges or get some fucking law enforcement on my side, either for the landlord shit or the fact the jerkfuck BROKE MY ARM IN TWO PLACES, OVER THE FACT I DID NOT DESERVE TO OWN MY OWN FUCKING LAPTOP. Because then I’ll be mad.)BOTTOMLINE, you know jackshit, about people who are poor. You know jackshit about why they’re poor. You have no right to determine if they’re being poor “the right way”, or if they are allowed to have “nice” things. You know why? Because the only reason you care about any of that, is that you just want poor people to remain poor, to be “in their place”, below you.And if you think that way, you’re a sick sack of shit shaped vaguely like a human being and I hope you step on a fucking lego every step you ever take, you fucking asshole.THISSSSSSS -- source link
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