[blockquote type=”center”]What does solidarity with the poor look like when you’re trying to avoid generational poverty?[/blockquote]

This is a question I’ve been sitting with for awhile now. And I read this article earlier today that made me think some things.

I was born in 1981, so I’m just barely a millennial, and my daughter was born in 2001, so she’s just barely not a millennial. I find it fascinating that she was taking hundreds of selfies on her camera years before she knew what that word was. These generational pieces are interesting because I can see the divide between me and my older friends, me and my younger friends, and my daughter and her friends.

I see the mindset of the older generations and the bootstrap mentality and I know how *frustrating* that is in the face of economic reality, and I have immense fear about how in the hell my kids are going to survive in the future.

Because we got our family started young and my husband has a traditional white collar career, it looks like we’re living the life of 40 year olds. But because of our age, we’re also the unwilling participants in an economy that has screwed us over.

It’s funny that the article used the phrase ‘downward mobility’ the way it did, because I know people like Danielle who have intentionally chosen downward mobility as a vocation.

It can sound exotic for me to say we live in a lower-income neighborhood, when in reality, this is also what we can afford. We were intentional about looking up socio-economic demographics when we were applying for jobs, refusing to live anywhere that that wouldn’t be an issue, but when it came time to pick an actual neighborhood, money was the final decider. And for some reason, society seems to think that because we were almost middle-class once, we don’t deserve to be poor. (I’m going to just woosh right on by the idea of ‘deserve to be poor’, but that’s a post in and of itself.)

It sounds so…….I don’t know…..sacrificially trendy to say we are a one-vehicle family. When really, we can’t afford a second car, primarily because of inspections and property taxes. (I could go off on a nice long rant about vehicle inspections and their effects on the poor.)

And we have a job with a pension now, but the only way to get a raise is to get an offer from somewhere else, because even the method of getting raises has changed in a generation, so now we’re filling out applications? What kind of system is this? Bitter millennial – sign me up! My husband’s last job fired him, partly because the owner was a sexist, racist jackass, but also because they were seriously violating state and federal safety laws, and being millennials, we thought we could fight the system and win. We didn’t.

4 years ago we went through Dave Ramsey, even though his concepts were ones that we had grown up with. By that point we had realized that we could live a life devoted to debt repayment or we could, you know, actually live within our means, but live.  So we took our tax return and *in the middle of our FPU class*, went on a kick-ass 3-week family vacation. (You actually can do a vacation with 7 people for 3 weeks for about $1500-2000. ((Related: neither of us grew up with regular family vacations. Thanks Christian financial advisors!)) I think the people in our class were a little horrified.

So this whole discussion has a fun little word for it. Intersectionality. These are class issues, but they also affect race issues. And I think this is an important point to tease out, because as Broderick put it so succinctly at the Transform conference, in order to end systemic racism, white people will have to give up wealth.

I think this is an honest barrier for some people.

[blockquote type=”center”]How are economically-challenged white people ever going to *even theoretically* support economic reparations when they operate from a place of scarcity?[/blockquote]

How can people do that when they are fighting against cyclical poverty, and when it feels like by not trying to get out of that, they are hurting THE CHILDREN! And how can we be willing to give up personal wealth, and also give up ‘our’ federal money to others and be willing to change federal and state spending priorities when we are trained to desire the middle class? (Also, when we are trained to judge and control and feel superior.)

Whatever the hell happened in 2009, it turned us into the ‘under-employed’, drained our 401k, put us on food stamps, and eventually gave us a foreclosure.

So how do we live and find some kind of security in the midst of hard financial struggle and the stresses and trauma that it can cause?

While at the same time being in solidarity with the poor and marginalized, affirming that there is no shame in being poor?

While at the same time remembering what Elsa Tamez says: “…poverty is an unworthy state that must be changed. I repeat: poverty is not a virtue but an evil that reflects the socioeconomic conditions of inequality in which people live. Poverty is a challenge to God the Creator; because of the insufferable conditions under which the poor live, God is obliged to fight at their side.”

While at the same time understanding that we may (probably, definitely) have to give up the (white) middle class desires and values that society says is good, in order to enable racial justice?

Because while this article is about generational attitudes and money, it is also about the desire of the younger generation to somehow have the lifestyle of their parents. This is still a struggle about how to achieve the middle-class American dream.

I don’t know the answer to all of this tension. But I know the tension is real.

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