Transcripts For CSPAN2 After Words 20141026

Somebody brought up you know the iphone with food stamps and what she said was i know i am not supposed to judge people for that. Somebody remind me why because im feeling a little judge enight and like i know this one. I fired off a response and didnt really think of it and i started to get a good response. Then i started to get a weird response and i got an incredible response and that i was on the front page of the huffington post. Russia called in israel called and i have a fan base in serbia which is interesting to me and then there was do you want to write a book and now im interviewed about that book. Host right, yeah. Here we are. Tell us a bit about that book. I mean about the essay. Why did you decide to give a thorough response to a relatively flippant comment that you have heard similar comments before. Guest i was at a and someone asked a question i thought i know the answer to this one and im incredibly worthy so i often wrote responses of that length. Maybe not quite that way. There was one but that one in particular for whatever reason i dont remember the original wording of the thing i was responding to but something about the wording made me think i can explain this and so i did. As much as i was capable of at 2 00 in the morning after a long shift, and not it was really a gut level yeah i know this one. Often i didnt give it nearly as much thought as people give me credit for. Host the essay like the book gives us a chore of the things that people are judged for, anything from diet to work ethic to lives and you got a lot of criticism. A lot of people thought how is this woman actually a low income person . She is so articulate. People started digging into your background. How did that come about because even the New York Times, they question your credibility. Guest yeah which is really interesting because in order to question the credibility of someone who says this is what port feels like you have to say you dont look for and to be able to say that you have to have an idea of what port looks like which is interesting to me. Working class folks near the minimum wage like a third of americans who dont look like anything. We look like everything and everybody because we are all over the place. So the criticism i think was more projection than it was anything because people wanted to be able to say poor looks like this other thing. Poor looks like that over there. Poor isnt skilled because we have an america talkers and if you are skilled you are going to be successful. Cracks dont exist in american that was really the genesis of most of the criticism and the backlash from people saying you are doing for them properly. That was strange for my parents who i didnt have those Family Resources. Hypothetically i didnt eventually be reconciled when my first daughter was born but in those years i didnt have the Family Resources and i didnt have a degree and i was working for Service Economy just like everybody else now. Is the fact that my childhood was more comfortable than many children being that i did not experience that in the Service Industry and mean that i dont understand what its like not fail to pay your bills . How many kirsti have to not be able to pay your bills before you can say this is my broad experience im allowed to stand up and say that . People asked me about the criticism a lot and i said i dont really think its criticism. Its a defense mechanism of being able to say you clearly, and i said in my title a lot of a lot of people grabbed on to that people grabbed on to that in a city made all the bad decisions and i like to say its kind of a mix of decision and blocked because if i had been in a position where i could cover for my mistakes like a lot of wealthy people can i never would have slipped to the bottom or if i had a spectacularly good looks i couldve made all the bad decisions i wanted and it would have mattered but if you dont have those things, given that the question and youre not equipped to make great decisio decisions. I mean i left home when i was 16 years old. How wonderful are the decisions of any 17yearold out on their own . I always laugh when people are like you just didnt do it properly. Okay ill tell you what think about yourself that 16. Now assume that you can do anything you want and you have no rules. How long do you think you would have done . Probably as well as i did. So the criticism is interesting to me because it tells you more about the person doing the criticizing than it does about you. I gave my welfare records to the nation. I gave them to the washington post. I gave an interview and i put my out on youtube. I do not have anything more to prove because all i ever said was a fax to work hard every day and never get anywhere. Thats a true statement whether or not i was a multimillionaire living in a condo or i never had a home in my life. Its hard to work all your life you never get anywhere no matter what you do. Host part of the problem is when people hear the poverty rate which has been set at 50 , last year was 14. 5, we tend to think its the same 15 of americans. We are cycling in and out of and only a small percentage of people are poor for the years where measuring. Guest seems like most people that are working class will be in poverty five or six times over the course of their life. It really depends. Did you lock into a good job or maybe your spouse is something awesome or maybe you got a taxfree date or your uncle died in lefty 20 grand. You can have those years and you can have bad years and they come and they go and thats what working class in america is. Host i want to read a part of your book that i think really captures what its about. What i can say for sure is that downward mobility is like quicksand. Once it grabs you they keep constraining options until it got you completely. I slid to the bottom for a mix of my own decisions and some seriously bad luck. I think thats true of most people are while it can seem like upward mobility is blocked the layer between lower middleclass and poor poor is horrifyingly porous from above. What does that conjure up for you because throughout the book it sounds like theres a level of anxiety that you feel about being in poverty, a level of fatigue and the constant fear that you are going to get below. Guest im so glad i came through. Host in hearing your own words back to you, what were you thinking when you wrote that . Guest i was thinking about the flood when i wrote that. When i was pregnant with my first child and we discovered we were pregnant and my husband decided to go back to school. We applied and the government to school. We were going to be living off of his stipend because with the g. I. Bill you get your books and tuition paid and they give you a living stipend which is dependent on the zip code of the school you are in. For us we were supposed to get somewhere between 12 and 1400 a month. It was enough to barely live on. We could make it through the semester. My daughter was due three weeks after that first semester and then the money never came. There was a paper works grew up somewhere. So every week to let go and asked if the stipend had come and they would say no come back next week. Eventually we both got jobs at burger king locally and picked up the craftiest apartment we could find because we thought it was temporary. Now we would see that huge check for the back bay and we would be able to put down a deposit on a decent apartment where we could live with our kids. The money just kept not showing up all semester long. He kept not showing up and we were living in this apartment. There was a summer storm and ohio. Those things are not kidding around. The drains were not properly maintained in the building and everything, we lived in the lowest apartment in the basement and everything we owned was pretty much destroyed in that flood. We had no money and we had no place to go so we went to the weekly motel right up from where we worked. We stayed there but they didnt have enough money to pay the rent on the motel and the rent on the apartment. Our landlord sued us for eviction on this apartment that was mold ridden because his version of taking care of the flood was to send someone in with a shop vac atop the windows open for a few days. If you have ever been in ohio in the late summer its not effective. There were some old 6 feet up on the wall so it was crazy. And that was what was in my he head, knowing that her baby was on the way and we had done everything right. We had done everything right. There was nothing we didnt do right. We went to school. We got jobs, and had an apartment. We were going to be moving forward and then there was this spring storm and all of that was gone and what we had was some of the baby stuff that we salvage when the last. That was what we had. Host you mentioned this earlier but one third of americans are a paycheck or broken car or sick child away from poverty. Your experience throughout the book i have to say and going into it on my skeptical reading a book where the person experiences supposed to represent a broader issue but you do a good job of saying this is what i saw but also balancing it with this is created for a particular reason. Its how our systems are so yes this is my particular experience but also a common one on many levels. Guest i like to say that im not representative, i am indicative because these are things that he will hear the variation of the flood from any poor person. Any time you talk to someone and say tell me anything that was totally out of your control the set you back by years and they will have one and it will be a flood. It will be a sick relative or the time that they got laid off. Itll be the time time they heard there back but everybody has more than one of them. And they are interchangeable. It doesnt matter. It doesnt matter which story you are talking about her which time because something happened and something is going to happen and something will always happen so its a question being poor or workingclass at this point because we have heard the word moving upwards. Its always knowing that something is going to happen. You just dont ever really know when and you dont know what its going to look like and you dont know how bad its going to be about one thing you can count on is that they are still going to take all the taxes out of your paycheck and something is going to happen. Host the quote i read also you mention bad decisions and bad luck. Bad decisions that you referred to throughout the book are Health Related like from smoking and drinking or other vices. You talk about having to deal with insurance after your car accident. Do you ever get worried about playing into that stereotype that poor people are doing it to themselves . Do you are candid about decisions that might not have been the best in the world. Guest i think for anybody to try to say that i am human and i have never made a bad decision in my life, im a saint and you should be appropriately grateful for my perseverance and steadfastness. Theres not a person in this world that has not made a mistake. The difference between rich people and poor people is that when we make mistakes we cannot cover them. Ecn acted on the street. That is because hes not addicted enough to get into a Weeklong Program or their slots for him. If you seem addicted to rich person, you dont because they get rehab or they take personal time and go to rehab. Their insurance covers it and they are in a place where they can stay as long as any to get healthy. Its not that we make different decisions, is that we can cover them in the same way. We pay for our decisions immediately and we do it in a way that rich people will never understand because they never know what it is that if you screw up it could be the ruin of you. Thats what having a christian means. That is what comfort and privilege are. Never having to feel that fear that this is the day you screw everything up because that one time you made a mistake. Reflectively have i always make good decisions . Absolutely not but i always made that decision that made sense to me at that time and i havent always had a good solution. I have made decisions drunk, not going to say that hasnt happened but who hasnt . How many marriages started from a drunk person. Of course its stereotype for anybody who holds that stereotype and wont get rid of that stereotype of those people im going to hear what im saying anyway so i dont worry about them. If you are determined to find something in my history that explains the entire American Economy and why so many people are trapped in it he were living in a world. Get your tinfoil hat out and put it on and tell me about all of it. Host theres one part, i want to read another part that made me think of what we are discussing today said its ridiculous to make the argument that people should be able to predict every possible downturn in their lives in advance. Poor people are not uniquely and throughout the book you talk about how there are superhuman expectations for lowincome people while simultaneously being treated like subhuman and that comes across a lot in work situations that you describe, minimumwage work generally. I think many people know the minimum wage has decreased in value by 30 . Not only is it a low number, its worth less than it once was and yet you are expected to lift yourself up from your bootstraps. Can you talk a bit about your Work Experience and how hard this was . Guest sure. To begin with i use the bootstrap metaphor because to lift yourself up by your own bootstraps you need to be able to levitate. Your hands arent going to be free to study that latter so essentially they are saying do the impossible and least unsafe way possible and if you can manage that then you are okay. At work we are interchangeable. We are told how interchangeable we are. The vast majority of Service Industries especially Large Companies not the momandpop so much that the Large Companies have software that tell you within 15 minutes how many people you have to have on staff. So we are told that they need to be in here at 12 to 15 00 and we dont know how long we are going to keep you. Thats as much as we can afford to have you back we might need you to stay until 5 00 or its totally possible you make it here and we may send you back on again. Our profit margin is so valuable that we need you to dictate and plan your life around our profit margin. In exchange for that we are going to give you as little as legally possible and not only that we are going to make it cumbersome and onerous. We are going to have you sign contracts if they wont get a second job because we might want you to come in at 7 00 p. M. That night. I have signed contracts like that. We will give you 20 hours a week am in no more because then we would have to pay health insurance. There are no benefits or sick days. You are contractually obligated to come in whenever we call you. You have a 20 minute window to get here and if you get a second job you are fired. But we are paying you stab 7. 25. They expect us to make that work and people expect us to not rage. I dont understand how youre going to put restrictions on somebody like that. People have working brains that can see how ridiculous the whole thing as and to dehumanize them and tell them ill cook you complain there are another 100 of you outside the door. None of you have any more value than anybody else. How many times any servers working america can tell you they have heard i have a stack of applications and mile high. We are not allowed to make mistakes. We are not allowed to have lives. We are not allowed to have plants and if we do we are punished for them are thinking outside of our clock, but thinking about what the profit margin is. But then if we dont do it then we are not engaging and we theyre not earning it and we dont want it that much. So you know, work is indicative of the rest of our lives. Its another place that we are unhuman. Not inhumane but on human. We are drones. That is what they do. You have to go and you have to be friendly and not only do you have to be polite and nice but you have to welcome people as the one to your home and you have to make them feel warm and welcome. No matter what kind of day you were having and no matter how the customer treats you. They have actually done studies that tell us that performing that kind of emotion actually does your ability to feel it. You start having to lose contact between what you feel and what you are thinking. When work literally stops us of our ability to feel joy for 7. 25 an hour. We talked about the minimum wage. Do you know how many people are working for 7. 35 or 7. 50 . Our races are nickels and dimes. We dont get 1 dollar raises and on top of that you mention it can be fired for the simplest reasons. Host theres a belief that if you are fired to get something wrong. Imagine being fired. I dont know but was you or someone you knew this at the paperwork was done. Guest i personally had to fire someone because she had another job and her other manager put out the schedule more than a day before the workweek started. She was a great employee. She was one of those people that are not like me. She was a sunshiny person and she was fantastic. She couldnt keep up the schedule. She had to make it an often enough. We didnt need her often enough where often enough for she was trains over time she came and it was like the first time she had been in the door and she was making no progress. I had to let her go. There was a woman who was raising her own child. She was on her own and i had to look at her and say sorry i cant help you feed your baby even though you are fantastic. Host clearly you are sympathetic to that that given everything is set up it was out of your hands. Guest you have these labor targets to hit as a manager. You are allowed a percentage of your sales i can go to labor and if you dont you lose your job. Ive managed a restaurant. I made 28,000, which is not nothing. If you are working and 90 hour week for 20,000 and youre desperate enough to do that can you afford to lose your job and can they afford to lose there is . Probably not because its probably the best job you have ever had. The mentally torturous job at 90 hours a week for 20,000 is the best job you have ever had he can afford to lose that. Then you have to do these things for people. You know exactly what is going to do to their lives and you understand all of that and you do it anyway because you have your own family to feed. Host given everything that you know about how hard it is to work, how you can get fired for anything out of that make you feel about these fast food worker strikes going on because it seems like a huge burden on the shoulders of people who are working incredibly hard and made their wages raise and yet they are pushing the movement themselves also at the risk of being fired. Host guest we do everything ourselves. Nobodys going to help us. Are you kidding me . Nobodys going to help us. More than that you watch these people walk out. They are going to lose their jobs. They are going to be retaliated against. Its common knowledge. Nobody even dares mention without understanding that they are about to lose their jobs. When we hurt ourselves we dont go to work or whatever you call it that you are supposed to be able to get workers comp and see a doctor. You dont do that because very shortly you would find yourself being written up for the smallest infraction and they will have you out the door and a couple of months. These people are doing this and they are able to do it. They are able to stand outside of their work and say we are worth more more than s t will give us the respect we deserve because we keep this economy running. Oh my god the rest of being able to say that. Essentially what i do for living i can say i have more potential and i have more to give than this. And that deserve more than this because i have earned it and to be able to say that for the first time. The things these people are feeling. They are scared, they are lonely, they are shocked and frustrated but they are also for the first time standing up and taking the respect they deserve and thats a feeling thats very good. So i think that they are doing it because we need to change the Economic Situation but also because they can. Just to say it. Sometimes you just have to say it and id love to see that. I love it. I love every bit of it and i hope to god that everybody who has ever said i wished there something i could do walks up to those restaurant workers outside of those restaurants and says hey is a job waiting for you when you are done here. Host going back to the book itself, is organizing a really interesting way. Its not a memoir. Its not chronicling your experience. Its organized by what poor people are judged for her. Guest i actually just asked a bunch of rich people, so a poor person and we structured it that way because what i think happens is the poor are judged for human behaviors because again everything that we do is open for inspection. We have to report things to everybody constantly. Theres no such such thing as privacy. If you are poor we are used to being open so we are open about all of the things that we do, the good or the bad or moral or immoral. So i just took the things that i thought were the biggest and i say heres what he dont get to judge me on this and this and this. Host one of the chapters is on children and i think thats one of the things that you hear often. Why are they having so many ki kids . You have an interesting argument to this. Of course its hard to raise children but again we are you not unite glee uniquely psyche. Just as rich people can predict that they might get divorced we cant predict that we may become poor later on but there are tons of unintended pregnancies against amongst lowincome teens. While the over all the rate has dropped. How do you reconcile the fact that it is hard to the poor and have children with the fact that poor people should be able to lead the lives that they want . Guest there is an argument in and the first is its almost like you cant Birth Control and not expect people to get pregnant. Its almost like if you dont teach kids about they will be unintended consequences there. I would personally like to thank every moral crusader who has said we shouldnt say those words in a high school or inhuman biology. Then we are going to blame them when it happens. Thats incredibly silly. More than that i think the argument there is we dont think you are valuable enough to be able to reach children and their is where you say you cant even take care of yourself, how are you going to take care of acute . I would be perfectly capable of taking care of myself if you put in a situation where i could find work that would pay my bills. The trouble with poor people is we dont have much money. Its not that we lack integrity or knowledge and not that we lack intellectual capacity. We lack opportunity and if youre going to tell me that what qualifies me to be a parent i would point you to any number of terrible horrifyingly poor little rich kid stories that we hear. Being rich does not make you a good parent even more than being poor makes a bad parent. Thirdly how much money is enough to qualify you for parenthood . Give me enough. 230 grand or something or birth all the way through college. I dont awful lot of people who would compare themselves barely middle class who dont have 230,000. Should we require that if everybody and if not where are we going to draw that line . Host im glad you mentioned how rich kids are raised and how its not unique to poor people that they might run into trouble. I put a tab in the chapter where he talked about specifically and i wrote affluence on it. You do see these stories of the kid who lives was in a drunk driving accident and they say hes not used to being punished if we cant hold them accountable and send them to jail. Guest sewing his oats. Then you have a guy, two kids knocks up his girlfriend. One of them is sewing his oats and one of them is an incredibly responsible person who is going to be a monster. Really . Host this brings me to another topic that i want to talk about which is the criminalization of the poor. Guest you can go to jail for anything. Host i know that there have been a lot of headlines recently. Women who have been arrested because they kept their children in the car while they were getting a job interview, let their kids play in a park while theyre at work. In your experience how do you feel how this plays into the calculation of poor people on a daily basis knowing that its a crime to be poor essentially . Guest this is where race really comes into play. Its so much worse to be poor and black when you are poor and white when you talk about incarceration. I didnt get hassled by the cops nearly as much as my black friends. We know about the pipeline and we know that they are targeting folks in saying you were not working and we would rather warehouse u. N. Pay for you that way. Host the example you used is homelessness. Its illegal to sleep, to, to do anything if you are homeless. They criminalized it entirely and here is how it affects everybody. Say you are in a bar and you have one too many and tell me everyone hasnt done that at least once. Im talking about one night. You should not drive home. They are not in a big city or arra area of whatever and is too farda box. You think you can get yourself there that if you choose to walk, youre publicly intoxicated. If you choose to drive him you are driving drunk. If you sleep in your car you are sleeping in public. There is no good option for you to get home if you have one too many at the bar because we have criminalized all of these behaviors. It is a crime, you can be arrested for not it can be arrested for not paying your electric bill. You can go to jail for not paying your rent. We talk about america as though we have no debtors prison that i will tell you this. If you go to court on a fine because you couldnt pay a bill and he refused to pay that bill again so its not just a matter of money they will throw you in jail for contempt of court and you will sit there until you have enough money to bail yourself out. Let me tell you how much money youre going to make while you were sitting in jail waiting on that bail. Its insane. Now i will say this. If you have two people who have had one too many walking out of a bar and one of them is wearing prada shoes and one of them are wearing walmart shoes who do you think the cop was going to arrest . Anecdotally i will tell you you were treated better in the prada shoes. Host absolutely and i know you mentioned a number of different laws in there. In arkansas you can get arrested for not paying your rent. There was a lot going to the state legislature in louisiana that it makes it a crime to the homeless and you have to pay a 600 fine or go to jail for being outside. And another thing that was in the news recently, i dont know if you saw the New York Times did a story on subprime auto loans and now they have this device that shuts down cars if you have not paid your car note or your loan payment. And yet you talk about in the book how dependent you were on your vehicle to be able to get to work. Its like all along the path towards independence for earning money but there is roadblock after roadblock after roadblock. Guest at one point somebody asked about the acronym og. [inaudible] he had this plan and its essentially Life Coaching. One of the things that i run into the most often with charity or Government Programs and something that my friends and coworkers anytime i have heard anything about it they assume that we are stupid and that we dont know how to do life properly so they are going to teach us how to get jobs. What does it that do for someone who is on food stamps which is welfare but already are working two jobs because there are plenty of those. The majority of food stamp recipients are working. We have military, active duty military personnel on food stamps. Tell me thats not condescending. When youre talking about generational poverty that might be supervalu and i know a lot of people who might benefit from Life Coaching because theres an opportunity there enters a societal difference. Different things mean different stuff. I cant tell you how many times i have behaved inappropriately and everyone is like well you have but what it does is it sets me apart. If it hadnt come up officially a poor person where everybody when i walk walked in the room knows that i dont know these rules it would exclude me from the job and those opportunities so in a lot of cases it would be a helpful program. The question that i have is how do we decide who needs those programs and why are we assuming that all poor people do instead of some poor people . Why are we not saying if you want this is available to you. Why would you make that a requirement . Is onerous and a waste of taxpayer money. What we do with all these programs and these charities that are wellmeaning and trying to change per peoples lives. Some of them are helpful but i will tell you this if you are living on charity and welfare it takes more time to do that reporting and make a patchwork of the programs available in the various requirements than it does to find work. You cant find work because you are so busy proving to the state that you cant find work. At one point in my life after the flood i applied for a Charity Program for furniture for no purpose and they said okay we will need 40 hours a week. I set for what . They said we have this paperwork to do. We need to do 20 hours of job searching. I said are to have a job. You have to do 20 hours of job searching every week or you dont qualify for the program. I set fire to cap work that im going to have a newborn and im working 34 hours a week. They said just take the paperwork, it will be fine. Host was counterproductive to the goals of the program. Guest thats the thing we really see a lot. The program is counterproductive to the goals of the program is really the way to put it. Host its funny that you talk about all of these progra programs. Theres also this conservative refrain of pay are going to be dependent on these programs and theyre going to game the system. Guest listen everybody desperately wants to work and be humiliated constantly every day. Would say thats the goal of the average american and its only the poorest people that have figured out. We are the smart ones of the rent. Honestly i dont understand why everybody doesnt get on welfare. Its super comfy. Rich people im telling you this right now. Quit your jobs and go on welfare. Super cushy. Host then you will have to find another job. Guest lets just not talk about it. Everybody quit their job and go on welfare. If it were so comfortable you wouldnt hear people talking about how uncomfortable it is. They run our economy and run our government they would be smart enough to take the opportunity. They are bootstrappers and entrepreneurs. They are smart businessman. Its really where they have an awkward their jobs and gone on welfare. Host you actually went to the white house was earlier this year . That is one way to be memorable i think. If there is a policy change or something they could talk to president obama about what would you hope for the remainder of the frustration . Guest i would like to see more talk about what america supposed to be. John locke would be really mad right now because what john locke said is when you have a government thats treats citizens as though they are not in charge of the government versus the other way round you not only of a writer responsibility fight back, that was the entire basis that i dont know the entire country. What we talk about as a meritocracy as though we still have that. All you need to do is show up to any job when they work hard and show up every day and be responsible and you would be very successful. That is not a true thing anymo anymore. But if anything its hard to know what set because it doesnt exist anymore. That is not what america is for a lot of us were one third of those, 45 million of us dont get the American Dream. To feel if we worked a little harder we would qualify for the American Dream and that is not the promised. Thats not the intent and what barack obama has is a passion to inflame the populace. What i would like to see is him give a speech talking about what it is to work in america and why we need to teach it. If you look at the numbers over the past four years we have had Economic Growth but wages are still declining. For the middle class is stagnant but it only grows for the top 5 . Guest the stock market is going gangbusters. America is fun. Host one of the things that you mention in the book almost in passing is that your husband was in the military. Is there any reason why you didnt dive deeper into the fact that you are in the military n now . Is something that i think people from both sides of the aisle would find disgraceful that a family who served their country could be living in poverty. Is there reason why you didnt want to dive into that . Guest a lot of families live in poverty and thats a story to tell. Understand i went viral. I didnt have a nice discussion and decide to write this book and its not my story to tell. I waited while he was in fallujah and he came okay more okay than a lot of guys. If we are going to tell a story about the military in poverty we are going to talk about the va scandal and talk about the millions of americans who served and served honorably and came home and didnt have medical care. The worst that happened to us is we didnt give our livings get our living stipend that thats the worst that happened to us. Should that have happened . Absolutely not. You bet i was really angry and i made sure everybody heard about it but thats not the worst of it. Not the thing anything like a normal life, and i did not want to step on those guys. I didnt touch on it very much because the story of the military and how we treat our returning veterans is so much bigger and so different than the story of how we Treat Service workers. I didnt feel like was initiated to talk about. Host the book is organized in terms of what people are judged for you talk about landlords who have had. There couldve been a section on so many Different Things but you included a section on what made you want to have that because its interesting. A lot of books talk about poverty and i dont think thats ever been a chapter or lease any book that ive read. Guest where restricting our sense of Birth Control and we are having these discussions about why poor people have children. We are not talking about the children. Why are they allowed to have and the thing that is important to me is to say we are allowed to be human. Sometimes it results in children and even when it doesnt you also cant say why are you in a relationship with that person . We hear that a lot too. Because i like them. Why is anybody in a relationship with anybody but more than that we dont have to be any more responsible than anybody else and thats the basis of the chapter. I have to be exactly as responsible as everybody else. How many one night stands happened swanky bars . A whole lot of them. The book itself is to say in that cannot moralize me when youre decisions are no better than mine. Host there theres a bit in the chapter where you talk about the people that you have asked if are going to be similarly poor talk about the pretty woman example. You are not going to meet a millionaire thats going to change her life and yet there are a lot of ideas and policies that poor people just need to get married and thats a silver bullet. Guest marrying someone that is not going to be supportive that you dont particularly care for just because marriage is what you should do, i encourage that in all cases. [laughter] look, we are allowed to be attracted to who we want to be attracted to on the terms that we set for ourselves. We did not have a lot of bodily autonomy. We have to ptn cups for jobs. We sell ourselves. That is what plasma banks are. You sell a little bit of yourself when you watch the blood go through the machine and a pump serb blood back and the whole time you were wondering am i literally selling myself . Yes, i am. Once you are on that level where you are literally selling your soul for money, why wouldnt you . You just came off of a long shift and gave away a bunch of your plasma. And so to be able to put that out there and sometimes i deserve it. Sometimes allowed. Its cool, everybody does it. Why are you freaking out so much about as though that were in an irresponsible position rather than a very human one. Why do we not need companionship . Do you have any idea what i go through in a day . Host theyre probably going to be people that may not be watching us but if they were hearing it would be offputting to them. Your audience must be people who are are working against or who do you hope is going to read this book lacks. Guest i hope the people who know what this book says get to read it and i hope that those people that we see one of the saying it out loud and publicly and proudly just like we are watching the Service Workers walk out. I hope theyre watching me in this book and watching me say things that are offensive or rough or offputting to people that we normally kowtow to an lower our eyes to and try not to look at them because we shouldnt exist in front of them. We are not allowed to have lives as humans in front of these people that are better than us. Not going to do it anymore. Im not going to do it anymore and i want them to see me. Now some people who are compassionate who are luckier still may be working in these industries are made working in service and social workers and things like this i can social workers read this and get anything from it im glad. If people get angry and offended im glad because they may ask you how dare you assert your humanity and i love that question. When people come to say how dare you be human. On august i was brought forth to this world. Go ahead and delegitimize that. I dare you. People will read it or they wont read it and they will care about it or they wont hear about it and they will have their reactions if they have but the important thing is we never get to talk about it. We never have these discussions. You never have a poor person stand up and say im human and public square. We are not allowed to do it that frequently so that really is the nature of it. Somebody called me brutal and everybody talks about how angry i am. Its not that im angry. Its that people when they see somebody asserting their own selfworth, and you have to do it a little loudly and you have to be a little brassy because otherwise nobody will pay attention. You are automatically angry. And the marginalization is the same thing. You see it in sexual orientation. And the marginalization comes the second that marginalized population stands up and says no, no you are not allowed to do this everybody says why are you so angry all the time . I can imagine. I have no reason for that whatsoever. I mean come on. Host throughout the book and during our conversation you refer to and obviously your life is taking a big turn because of the book and you were on msnbc this morning and you are doing all of these appearances. How are you reconciling this change because it sounds like you strongly identified with being a working class or poor american but your circumstances are rapidly changing. Guest as an author has spent 10 years in the Service Industry. Look, clearly i am not scrubbing friars everyday for which i thank god but if you take the girl out of the out of the working class come he cant take a class out of the girl and i will probably stop saying leave when i stop feeling as though this is a fight that i am broadly included in when i have learned the entitlement of the upper classes. Thats really what it comes down to. I dont feel any different. Its just that my surroundings are pretty nice now which is awesome and lovely. But the things that i am saying are so broadly shared and i have experienced them for so long that its hard for me to separate from it. So you know what you are talking about ive asked that a lot. How might going to handle this and what will i do and what i find his im so nervous in the interviews that i cant think of any of those things are actually i like that because i was watching an interview that you did and someone the interviewer said its great youre talking about people like you and it didnt seem to faze you and interview at least by the look on your face that was kind of jarring to hear because it was as you said throughout a sort of americans are on the verge of going into poverty. Its not an us versus them kind of thing that most people know someone are in it. Guest i get these appearances and i talk to people and everyone of them has a horror story for me. They take me aside privately and talk to me about their relatives or their kids for this neighbor that they know. I wonder how can Everybody Knows somebody and we dont change anything . How is that possible and i realize its because we dont ever talk about it. Nobody knows that everybody is a poor relative. Its like having an abortion in your pastor something and its still 1970. Everybody quietly keeps it to themselves because they dont want to be associated with it. So very much, i walk into these rooms and people automatically are like oh at the poor girl. Working workingclass thank you because poverty is a different issue than working poor although they are intertwined together. Host what are you hoping his next for you . You said you are working on these issues now in your job. What are you doing guest i hope that i keep writing. That would be fantastic. I have recently partnered with realloc radio which is a Great Organization in d. C. To spotlight these issues a little bit more and i wound up in ferguson and have been incredibly impressed by their resilience and their grace under more pressure than i have ever faced in my entire life and the things that they are building and doing. So there are a lot of situations like ferguson that we dont get coverage of and i have been planning those and trying to platform them as much as possible. That is what my work is now, finding people who need to talk and giving them the platform because they gave me a giant platform over here and i have all these people who worked to get up on with me. I have a web site and what we are doing is having everybody i meet write something. Anytime i see something i can blog the same experience that i have but somebody elses version is a platform. The point is that isnt just me and im not at all representative. There are millions of us. We respond differently. One of my best friends goes to church and she is a terrible moral person i think shes crazy. That is how most of us feel at the pressure put that pressure at the same and the situations are the same and what we need to prove and we have to prove it is that its inescapable. Is that uniform and all the things are the same across income brackets, across generations and races. We all get the same pressure so my goal is to get as many thousands of us as possible to tell our story so we can say here you go america. Here is a microcosm of that. I