But I think a poor family MUST find and hold on to some kind of dream, defiantly: a farm, a store, a job, a business, something. You have to get very bitterly determined to find some kind of wormhole to slither through, some sort of kind people to help you up out of the muck, a lot of people giving a little help can be made to add up. The whole world was once homeless, by our standards, most people living hungry in ineffective shelters of various kinds. Things improved because they insisted on making it better, and did not give in or give up. You have to live in your dreams and on your dreams, and pretend you don't feel your stomach trying to eat itself. You have to find little counter-propaganda mantras to say to yourself silently, over and over. You have to NOT listen to the TV or the radio, which spew filthy lies designed to trap you through your social pride and physical appetites. You are part of a vast army, a soldier in a vast struggle. You have to remember that, if you fail, you will die knowing that you are one of the real champions. Even if nobody ever finds out about it, you have won part of the victory that will eventually come to the wretched of the Earth and therefore that victory is partly your victory. My mother must have looked totally ridiculous sitting with her four children in our shabby three-room slum apartment, after our bread-slice and rice "supper," sometimes in our coats, reading books aloud with us and talking about how we should "walk with your heads held high like kings and queens because you know you do not steal" and "make a better life for yourself WHEN you go to college." My childhood felt like a nightmare I couldn't wake up from. Yet we all DID go to college, at least for a year. Three of us made it (our youngest brother cracked up; I guess he had too much pain, too young; he spent his last years in a shelter I found through kind people). Books were our escapism and our escape route, and you could get them free at the public library. And you could sit in the warm library for hours, as long as you behaved yourself. Incidentally, the library has or can obtain for you a practical book on ANY subject you can possibly imagine: bookkeeping, computer wiring, raising chickens, car engine repair, foot reflexology, living on the streets. I know; I worked for interlibrary loans in the Chicago Public Library when I was young.
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