“The working poor haven’t abdicated responsibility for their lives. They’re drowning in it.”

[SheilaT]

25. Sometime in the 1990's there was a series on

NPR, Morning Edition I think, about the working poor. I no longer recall any details except this: At the very end the reporter said that the problem with being poor was that you had no money. You had no money to afford a reliable car, which often meant you couldn't reliably get to a job. If you had a car and it broke down, you didn't have the money to get it fixed. And so on.

I have never forgotten that.

I've been relatively poor at various points in my life, but never on the edge of homelessness, and never without reliable transportation. Which means, in a certain profound sense I've never really been poor.

I have also observed many times that the hardest working people out there are the poor. They're the ones working two or three jobs, struggling to pay the bills, keep a roof overhead, and so on. People of privilege just don't get it.