Free The American Way of Poverty: How the Other Half Still Lives by Sasha Abramsky Page B

extra-curriculum activities in the school. The kids are feeling like they’re not learning what they need to learn; the teachers aren’t doing what they are supposed to be doing; the administrators aren’t doing what they are supposed to be doing; the adults aren’t taking care of the kids in terms of education; the parents aren’t involved in the schools. The schools are lacking in funding and lacking in resources.” Many of the kids simply dropped out, ran the streets, ended up in trouble with the law.
    “We have a lot of lockup of children in the Drew area. If they’re not going to Parchman, a state penitentiary seven miles north of Drew, they’re being locked up in town jails, county jails. A lot of it is for drug use. The parents have really given up. They say ‘We don’t know what to do, how to help these children.’ They are unemployed; they’re trying to find some ways to enjoy life. They enjoy parties and coronations and basketball games. However, when you talk about things that affect their lives—like politics and community organizing—most of them talk about ‘ They should do this,’ or ‘ You should do that,’ rather than coming together as a community.”
    Most of it, said Dickerson, was “generational poverty; the attitudes have been handed down from generation to generation. ‘I can’t.’ ‘It’s too hard.’ ‘Nobody’s going to hire me.’ Until people start to have hope and know that things can change, nothing’s going to change. Nothing’s going to change. So my part is working on the hope, and showing them that things can be possible in this town.We all have to come together in terms of people coming together and talking about ‘how can we turn this little town around?’ It takes work to turn this thing around. It’s a long-term process, but we just gotta keep working on it. We’re still fighting.”

    Overwhelmingly, in the aftermath of 2008 politicians of both major parties downplayed the struggles experienced by those such as Raquel, or by the rubber-room WEP workers in New York—those truly at the bottom of the economy. Instead, they declared their concern for the struggling middle classes. It was a turn of phrase that, while being imprecise and elastic enough to include the majority of Americans, couldn’t really be interpreted to include those out on the far margins: the long-term unemployed, the homeless, residents of trailer parks and shanty towns, patrons of food pantries and overcrowded free medical clinics.
    How, for example, could one consider 43-year-old Frank Nicci, a onetime chef who, in 2008, lost his leg to an infection related to his diabetes, his job because of his ill health, and his home in the hotel at which he worked once he lost his job, part of the middle class?
    In the fall of 2011, Nicci was back in the hospital, in the small town of Lewisburg, Pennsylvania, in the Susquehanna Valley, with another diabetes complication, the stump of his amputated leg hidden beneath the thin white hospital sheets. He and his wife, Julie, didn’t seem in any hurry to go home; after all, home was now a run-down trailer, and cash was so tight that Frank no longer even had the gas money to go see his 8-year-old son, who lived with his ex an hour or so drive away. Julie worked part-time in a store, Nicci got disability payments. Between the two of them, they brought in under $20,000 a year. “It’s very hard, from anyone’s standpoint, to make it from week to week, let alone from month to month. She has three children and I have a son. We try to get them once a month, per our custody agreements. But we can’t do that, because we don’thave the money to get them. Try telling an 8-year-old you can’t get them because you don’t have the money. It’s very devastating, very frustrating.”
    For Frank and Julie the most basic parts of daily living had become a constant battle. “We don’t have the money to put gas in the car. Some months we get behind, you use