Cognitive exhaustion

One of the things that really bothers me about Mitt Romney (and George Bush, way back when) is that he clearly has absolutely no idea what it's like to be poor. He has never, ever, ever felt the kind of anxiety you feel when you have no safety net for your life. I liked this Wonkblog post about Romney's perspective on personal responsibility, which reminded me of my bus commute. I ride the bus with a lot of people who are much, much worse off than I am and one of the things I have learned from that experience is that yes, "the poor use up an enormous amount of their mental energy just getting by." It's insanely hard, being poor. The people on whom I eavesdrop on the bus have to do a tremendous amount of organizing, negotiation, and maneuvering, just to get through their days. 

I can see how easy it is to dismiss poor people as lazy, stupid, or irresponsible. I hear people on the bus talking all the time about bad situations they are in, or trying to solve, or trying to help somebody else solve, and they sound awful. Sometimes the situations they are navigating involve making terrible choices, like leaving your kids in the care of a person you don't trust at all, or taking up with a boyfriend who treats you like absolute shit. Those choices, though, often are the best one that they can make at the time, given their circumstances. The scary babysitter is free, which is all you can afford. The boyfriend comes with a place to live. I'm sure that many of these people, like many people everywhere, are stupid or lazy or irresponsible in some ways. But I recognize that they are under the crushing, unrelenting stress of trying to tiptoe (or sprint) across the wobbly, jury-rigged structure of their life every day without shaking something loose. Something shakes loose all the time - a babysitter gets arrested, a boyfriend leaves when rent is due, a job is lost, a car breaks down, a bus doesn't show up - and there's never anything left to try to shore up or improve that structure, because you're just trying not to be buried in the rubble. I think it's astonishing that anybody escapes poverty. I'm absolutely sure that if I was living like that, I would perform pretty badly. I doubt Mitt Romney would perform terribly well, either. I'm confident he wouldn't be rich now if he had been born poor.

Mitt and I have lived our lives in a cozy, safe place, where any entrepreneurial, "maker"-type risks we might take are cushioned by a net of family and social resources. It's easy to improve your life when it's already easy, and it's easy to believe that you are an impressive, success-worthy person when you can bring all your mental resources to bear on improving your life, instead of just surviving. I went to an East Coast boarding school, so I spent a lot of my adolescence in the company of people* like Mitt and George W., people for whom success came easily because of all the resources behind them. I don't think any of them realized that their success wasn't entirely, or sometimes at ALL, merit-based. (Lots of them went into finance, as it happens.) 

I don't think the country should have a president who can't even begin to imagine what it's like being poor, and who believes that if you're poor, it's because of your personal failure. 

* I'd like to note that my friends from high school are great people. I'm not talking about them, or the many other people at my high school who didn't take success or good fortune for granted.