Pro-Life Politicians are Not Pro-Life
The legislative bodies of many states as well as that of the United States Congress is filled with enough politicians identifying themselves as “pro-life” to keep a ruling by the Supreme Court declaring abortion legal on unsteady ground more than half a century after that court decision was made. That amounts to a lot of power in the hands of those with the actual ability to alter the social condition of the country into one that puts the welfare of actual living children beyond the reaches of things like poverty, lack of health care, daycare, and education. Instead, they have spent all their efforts trying to protect the lives of those not yet born so that the social fabric of the country is mirrored in the story of the author and her absurd difficulties in providing shelter, medical care, affordable daycare and—potentially—an equitably affordable education for her very young daughter.
Those who continue voting for pro-life politicians are equally fond of reminding people that America is the richest country in the world yet the portrait of how it treats actual living and breathing children in need of basic necessities that is presented in the author’s story makes America’s social protection system look like something a citizen in a third world country would reject.
It's not the Poor who are Lazy
Those who immediately start talking about how it is their money in the form of taxes that is being used to support people too lazy to work by giving them government assistance continue to spout the myth that the reason people remain poor in America is because they are lazy. What the story told in this book reveals is exactly the opposite. The best job that the author can get to suit the particulars of her situation is cleaning houses of those who are significantly wealthier than her. And then, when she is finished cleaning their houses, she goes back to her apartment and cleans it.
Her story illuminates an overlooked fact about the American economy of the 21st century: the ability for tens of millions to make just barely enough money to live from one paycheck to the next is dependent upon people with enough disposable income to pay others to do things that they are more than qualified but simply too lazy to do themselves. The American economy would collapse if those who complain about the lazy poor started actually being responsible for their own necessities getting done.
Mourning for America
Ronald Reagan’s candidacy for President declared that with his election, it would be morning in America again. From his first day in office, Reagan systematically went on a mission to dismantle and destroy—or at least seriously crippled—every single social welfare program developed from the New Deal of the 1930’s through the Great Society of the 1960’s. His slash and burn approach to making America great again after the corruption and malaise of the 1970’s is responsible more than anything else for the difficulties that the author has in trying to keep herself and her daughter from becoming homeless street people upon being given by the boot out the front door by her lovely boyfriend.
Reagan’s successful deconstruction of the safety net that literally saved America from becoming a third world country beset by economic refugees from within as the result of the Great Depression and the financial collapse of America’s production economy through the 1960’s and 1970’s set the stage for a concerted effort to completely wipe all government assistance off the face of earth for the next two decades. The result is that the author’s story, harrowing as it may be, is actually more uplifting than many since she managed ultimately to discover a path out of a system designed to meet failure with failure.
