Being poor shouldn’t be a crime. Poor people are not the problem. It’s ridiculous things like this need to be said, but they must. By all of us. Loudly.

I can’t hear you over the din of corrosive rhetoric promising to “tackle” poverty by policing poor communities of color differently (with bloated fees, penalties, and bail systems). I can’t hear past the cacophonous, unholy celebration of Market fluctuations and job increases adding little beside stock buyback options and largerer numbers of working poor.

Millions of people work hard all over this country and still fall below the poverty line. Say it with me.

Shrug and confess with those who know James Baldwin’s truth too well: it’s extremely expensive to be poor. Tell me how expensive it is for predatory lenders to impound vehicles, for children to be taken from their parents, for lead to build up inside of bodies. Tell me how you calculate such impoverishing.

The overwhelming majority of poor people cannot reasonably access our court systems. An inability to pay a small court fee grows and finds its way into the hands of a collections agency. Licenses are suspended. Workers make the best of their situations and land more fines.

One mistake carries, even for the putative Middle Class, enough power to send millions of us cascading into the lower echelons of poverty. Even if that mistake is getting cancer. Everyone knows our medical bills are world class, but, to add insult to injury, only 15% of low-wage workers get paid sick leave. Describe for me how expensive illness is.

The government can blaspheme and peddle the notion we’ve cured poverty, but that is a damnable lie. The scales are tipped and the measurements are off.

What we need is a good war. Not the fabricated kind too easily sold on the American public, not fodder for the world’s most unholy iteration of the Beast out of the Sea (read: our bloated Military Industrial Complex literally reaching for the stars under this administration).

Rather, blessed be the poor in spirit, the meek, those who hunger and thirst for righteousness:

we need a war on poverty.

Or, at the very least, laws that work for poor people.

To hear a lively discussion on this and more, listen to the latest Irenicast episode on Poverty and Protest.

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