Unfortunately, what I realized over the past year, after a lifetime of being an impoverished adult, is that to be poor is to be abused more often than not. Being poor is not really about not having a lot of money to buy clothes or take vacations. It's not even about being a paycheck away from homelessness. It's about being vulnerable to abuse by people who know that there's nothing you can do about it. It's about the people who abuse you having the money to pay lawyers who will help them do what they want, even if what they want is to hurt you even more than they already have. It's about being threatened into silence, and being abused even more if you refuse to be silent. It's about the police not investigating your reports of crime. It's about a male judge who walks into the courtroom glaring at you, ready to verbally attack everything that you say, and even lying to you about whether or not he can help you. It's about a female judge who cuts you off mid sentence while you're telling her that, although you are the defendant in an eviction case, the eviction is happening in retaliation for you reporting being the victim of a crime.
It's about most, if not all, of the social services that are supposed to help you assuming that any conflict that happens in your life is your fault. It's about social service providers who don't think that what's happening is your fault having no power to help you.
It's about being condescended to and treated as if you're stupid, no matter how much work you do to prove that not only do you understand the situation, you are not expecting anyone to do all the work of your life for you. It's about being treated as if you're lazy and a pest if you ask people to help you, and it's about being treated as if you don't realize that you need help if you stop asking people to help you.
It's about being treated as if you're manipulative by abusive men who never cared about you. It's about being victim-blamed by women who don't want to think about the world as a place in which women can be abused for being women, and particularly for being women who tell men no about anything.
It's about a double standard being applied to your behavior; a double standard of wealth and poverty that transcends even gender. Although rich women don't have the power of rich men, rich women are not even close to being as vulnerable to the physical, professional and social abuses that poor women are. It's not that rich women are never abused, but they're not abused as often as poor women are.
Abuse is a way of life when you're poor; you can't avoid it. All you can do is try to cope with it, and you'll lose most of the time.
I don't resent being poor, but I know that I'm not supposed to be treated as if I have no rights, and I know that people aren't supposed to think it's funny for me to say that their habitual disrespect for me is the result of my not being able to stop them and not the result of my deserving to be abused. Respect which has to be bought isn't worth anything anyway.
Copyright L. Kochman, May 19, 2017 @ 2:23 p.m.
