http://bachin221b.tumblr.com/post/66932778762/thechocolatebrigade-seananmcguire

If you want to read the replies that came with this, click the link above.  They were long, rightfully angry rebuttals that, nevertheless, made me (as someone who grew up poor) kinda uncomfortable.  Memories, I guess.

Basically, anybody who says idiot things like this has pretty clearly never been poor.  Look.  When your family is trying to make ends meet in order to make the rent, feed the kids, afford a car so that they can drive to the job that barely pays them enough to live on—you spend every day in survival mode.  Every day, every hour, you are counting money in your head, factoring how you can sort and juggle your life in order to make it to next paycheck (assuming you’re getting one).  You’re living in constant—and I do mean constant—terror that Something Will Happen—you’ll get sick, or there’ll be an accident, or any one of life’s million things that can tip the balance and financially ruin you and leave you with not even a roof over your head.

That is not fun.  That is not any way to live.  That is nothing but stress and fear and mental dirtiness and self-loathing because your life has conspired to make you feel like a shallow money-grubbing mercenary.  It’s really easy, when you’re poor, to start wondering why you keep bothering.

And then, once in a while, you manage to come by a windfall or gift or something.

And sometimes—most of the time—you squirrel most of that windfall away.  But you know what?  If you can’t do ANYTHING but survive with what little you have, there’s really not a whole hell of a lot of point to even trying.  So sometimes, you weigh your financial need against your need to have at least one thing you want out of life (or, in some cases, to give someone else something they want in life—being a dirt-poor parent is a special hell of its own), and you end up choosing something you WANT rather than something you need.

So when you trash poor people for owning an XBox or a nice dress or eating at a nice restaurant, what you’re actually saying to them is, “You don’t deserve to be happy because you don’t have money.”

And that is a special kind of shallow, head-in-the-sand elitist snobbery that I like to think most people have the fundamental decency not to knowingly descend to.  And now you know.