I just bought a giant-sized Hershey bar for a dollar
scalzi put this post on his blog, Whatever, called Being Poor, which has apparently made a couple of people on my lj friends list cry.

But you know what they say on the barstool, there's poor and there's poor. Or as the economists put it, there's relative poverty, and then there is absolute poverty. So here are a few additions for the list.

Being poor is being sold, by your parents, to a whorehouse that caters to wealthy foreign tourists. You're eight years old. You're worth $75. $50 if you have sprouted any pubic hair prior to sale.

Being poor is being beaten by your overseer with branches and bicycle chains, because your diet of unripe bananas and your living arrangements of twenty to a room, sleeping on wooden planks, makes your 12 year-old body too weak to efficiently harvest the cocoa bean with which chocolate is made.

Being poor is having a gun put in your hand and being marched 300 miles to exterminate some strangers in another village. You do it because you get a whole bowful of rice, actual paper money sometimes, and get to keep whatever you find in the huts of the people you've killed. Plus, people from that village were sent by the other warlord to kill your parents six months ago. Sweet sixteen.

Being poor is being represented by a number on the collateral damage sidebar of a magazine article discussing whether or not your killers are being supported sufficiently by SUV ribbon magnets and Jessica Simpson concerts.

Being poor is strangling your first born because she has a vagina, and you won't ever have the trade goods sufficient for a dowry.

Being poor is living in a shack made from trash and corrugated metal in the heavily toxic dump by the maquiladora in which you work to make dress slacks because your wages aren't enough to rent even the humblest abode. You look forward to your son -- the one who wasn't born with CP -- turning nine because then you'll be a triple-income family.

Being poor is having your wife and children shot while you watch because you tried to organize a union. They'd shoot you too, but then you'd need to be replaced on the assembly line. And you wouldn't be able to warn everyone else away from unionizing.

Being poor is depending on roots and magic for healing.

Being poor is avoiding the hospital even when there is one locally, because conditions there are absolutely septic. At least a magic spell won't kill you faster. (The roots might.)

Being poor is dying in a factory fire because you were chained to your machine. Kids your age have a disruptive tendency to crawl under their workstation to the floor and take naps if they're not properly chained.

Being poor is being left to drown in an inner tube on the ocean, because we have enough maids this year, thanks for asking.

Being poor is having your rectum searched for "stolen" diamond dust after a twenty-hour shift in the mine.

Being poor is working your whole life, sometimes with a gun to the back of your head, to create the goods which the poor of the industrial West can't afford sufficient quantities of to be considered middle class.