Tim Barrus, New York Times
The Plot To Help America’s Children
Responding To Readers: New York Times
@Tom Yes. I took one thing and made it seem like another thing because it is. Capitalism is a religion. Not of sorts, but of ideology. I have been dirt poor my entire life. I find it almost impossible to describe. Because I do not know the context I can set it in. I have no idea what it’s like to have any money whatsoever. There is no eating from dumpsters here in Appalachia. The dumpsters are empty. We lift our children up – not by the bootstraps – but into the dumpster because they are small enough to crawl around in there. Poverty is, too, the accumulated small narratives of people who are struggling to survive, and whose stories are iconic but for our culture’s hands over eyes, hands over ears, and hands over the mouths of children we cannot feed. When you cannot feed your kids a hard ball of liquid metal sits hot inside your guts as you sit there thinking about what food we will find today. When I look around Appalachia, what I see is hunger, not as a context, but as an inability to move. You ration how you move about. A numb weakness has set in. Minimum wage buys you a dog collar to be pulled around with. And yet it’s all our fault. Appalachia is not a state. It’s a region. Yet it’s a state of mind. Our biggest covid numbers are not from parties and restaurants. They’re from church. When you are as poor as my own devastated mountain town is, it’s hard to reconcile mythology to what is real. Dying children is very real. School or no school. Poor children are not a theory. They’re children. Poverty is a sickness.