Sarah Smarsh Quotes

The American economy is less like a dream supported by democracy than it is like an inconsistent god. Most of us, regardless of economic station, sacrifice a great deal to it.

I had no choice but to understand that people can demean and hit you and in their better moments love you, at once be a mess themselves and carry a deep pride in your strange togetherness. They suffered from weakness of character, yes-just like every other person, in every other income bracket. What really put shame on us wasn't our moral deficit. It was our money deficit.

In our obsession with home as a material thing, we forget that primal needs can be met even as the human spirit is hurt. Belonging is, on a psychological level, a primal need, too. It is often denied to the poor.

So much of childhood amounts to being awake in a grown-up's nightmare. Ours happened to be about poverty, which comes with not just psychological dangers but mortal ones, too.

I see it now as a day she barely survived because society valued productivity and autonomy more than it valued women and children.

Money was what made the world go around, I learned fast...money was a lie-pieces of paper and metal suggesting prices for goods, services, labor and human beings themselves in a way that often had more to do with profit than with true value.

I knew the difference between shelter and security. One eventually blows away, and the other exists only as a formless thing.

Your problems as a working-class girl would have included true peril.

What was still preventable in the 1980s would, in a couple decades, become manifest; what once was treatable would become deadly. I'm not sure my immediate family's brushes with death when I was a kid-mom's hemorrhage in childbirth, Grandma's collapsed lung, Dad's chemical poisoning-would be survived today. Mom would have been less healthy going into labor, Grandma would have been sent home too soon for lack of insurance, Dad would have been given a cheaper and less effective treatment. The morality rate for poor rural women, in particular, has risen sharply over my lifetime. Health insurance had been around for a long time, of course, but the power of that industry had swelled up fast, transforming access to care and all the costs that come with it.

Class, like race and all the other ways we divide ourselves up to make life miserable, is what I'd later learn is a "social construct." That's what my family calls bullshit, and there are places in a person that bullshit can't touch.

Even though no one complained or maybe even realized it, I could feel that the people around me knew they were viewed as dispensable.

Class was not discussed, let alone understood. This meant that, for a child of my disposition-given to prodding every family secret, to sifting through old drawers for clues about the mysterious people I loved-every day had the quiet underpinning of frustration. The defining feeling of my childhood was that of being told there wasn't a problem when I knew damn well there was.

Blue-collar workers" have jobs requiring just as much brainpower as "white-collar professionals." To run a family farm is to be a business owner in a complicated industry. But, unlike many jobs requiring smarts and creativity, working a farm summons the body's intelligence, too.

I see so many things differently now. But we did as we had learned.

Stealing was wrong, I'd been taught in church and everywhere else, but I had a feeling that the money system was wrong, too. I didn't think the world owed me everything, but it also seemed the world wouldn't give me anything that I didn't reach out and grab for myself. To do so, though, was both a mark of moral failure and something that could ruin my life, if I got caught.

Transience was my mother's family's way by necessity-in part because of poverty, and in part because of mental illness that went untreated, also a function of poverty.

We were so invisible as to be misrepresented even in caricature, lumped in with other sorts of poor whites, derogatory terms applied to us even if they didn't make sense. We lived on the open prairie, so we weren't "roughnecks" in oil fields; Kansas had a humble tap on oil thousands of feet below the prairie, but nothing like Oklahoma or Texas to the south. "Redneck" and "cracker" didn't quite translate, since their American usage was rooted in the slave South, against which Kansas had lit many of the fires that sparked the Civil War.

Grandma was right: I did think I was too good for the environment I'd been born into. But I thought she was, too. I thought everyone was. So my intention was to get as much attention as possible. Not because I reveled in it-I was a quiet loner, most often-but because I knew that was the only way I'd ever receive the chances I wanted.

That sort of alchemy, assigning a meaning---turning what some might view as the lowly act of foraging into a direct communion with God, for instance---is often the only sort of power a poor person has.

As with other terms that have derogatory histories, reclaiming "redneck," "trailer trash," "hillbilly," and so on is a sort of cultural self-defense, I guess. That is understandable enough. But I never would have put you in a shirt with any of those words on it. If such a trend existed when I was little, Mom wouldn't have put me in one, either.

Mom would sacrifice true ownership and financial footing before she would sacrifice standard of living. Better to be in over your head with the bills in a house than own a trailer outright, she reasoned. It was all a game anyway, she said. The people making the rules were screwing around with debt bigger than she ever could. I can't say that I completely agree.

...a poor child's agony is just as often for her parents as it is for herself. You could say that is still a selfish impulse, because in order for a child to survive, her parents must survive, too. But I felt my family's burden as my own well past childhood.