Poverty, Personal and Political

There's something I've been hesitating to write about, but after reading this article and some of the commentary on it, I think I'm ready to come out.

I work for the feminist movement, and I've accepted charity to keep my family fed.

I earn significantly more than the median for a Latina with a Bachelor's degree, right around the U.S. median household income, but when we decided to send my husband back to school two years ago to finish his B.A., I became our sole financial support.

We aren't an extravagant family. We don't have cable, we don't drink daily mochas, we don't have high-definition anything. We don't entertain ourselves with shopping trips, we don't go out to the movies, we don't take a lot of trips. We also don't buy anything on credit unless it's unavoidable, and our car is over 10 years old.

But there are certain things we need, like high-speed internet so that I can work from home (saving us the cost of childcare), and cell phones since I need to be reachable during work hours no matter where I am. All in all, it was my husband's student loans that kept us financially afloat while he was in school. Then Murphy's Law intersected with his academic plans, and we ended up looking at a period of time not covered by loans or employment (for him).

So earlier this year I signed up for a weekly food box from Sacramento's Senior Citizens Services. We paid $20 a month and got two large boxes of food each week, enough so that our monthly food bills dropped to around $75 for a family of three. Enough so that we could continue paying our rent and utility bills.

We ate well. A lot of the food was surplus from places like Trader Joe's, like day-old bakery breads and cheese just past the sell-by date. I joked that we couldn't afford cheddar from the grocery store, but we had a pound of past-the-date brie in the fridge. I picked through pints of fuzzy blueberries and cut brown spots out of potatoes. I found new ways to use stale bread.

Even in the midst of feeling pinched by economic realities, I knew how good we had it. Half of all households in the U.S. are surviving on less. Poverty is a feminist issue, because poverty rates are highest for families headed by single women, especially if they are Black or Latina.

We made a choice to live on less, so that my husband could go to school and improve our family's economic future. We chose temporary loss of money for the sake of a future with a higher family income potential. We were privileged enough to be able to make that choice. That's the trade-off that many working families can't afford to make.

But when someone talks about how their rent is half their income or more, I understand, because I'm still in the same boat. When someone talks about the difficulty of navigating the welfare system, I understand because I've seen my friends go through it. And when a presidential candidate with seven houses, who thinks that anything under $5 million a year is poor, thinks he has anything to say about poverty in this country, and has the nerve to call Barack Obama insensitive to the poor, well, then I just need to sit myself down with my surplus brie and some day-old bread, because I literally cannot handle it any more.