I am a communist. I get poverty. There is just no way that our capitalist abyss rock bottom hole we have dug into the ground as our reality, is going to save us from the cowboy paradigm that has evolved, particularly in terms of how it defines the sacredness of masculinity. I read the NYT, and what I read, from every publication, not just NYT, is a litany of You Have To Have Hope. Why. Hope is a cruel fantasy. Just give it to me straight. I prefer my legs on the ground. I have pounded on the Gates of Beautiful on my knees all my life. I have slouched my way toward Bethlehem and survived. The NYT seems to pin most problems on some kind of toxic sludge that lives under our creaking beds. Perhaps we should have more children. Sure, why not another hundred billion of them. I am reading trivia. I am reading camouflaged rhetoric. I am reading lists of how everything will be just fine. But what I am seeing in my mountain village are children who are hungry and old white men are gleeful about it, and these vapid political characters live in a timezone of the past, and the past just keeps whipping and whipping you. Poverty is the lens. Poverty is now education. Poverty is a public policy of limiting food to children at the astronomical level of humanity and support at the clever level of $1.39 per Snapped meal. You try living on $1.39. You try living through No Parents Home. They’re working. But who is minding the shop. Your kids are minding the shop. The heavy penalties are civil.