When someone works for less pay than she can live on — when, for example, she goes hungry so that you can eat more cheaply and conveniently — then she has made a great sacrifice for you, she has made you a gift of some part of her abilities, her health, and her life. The ‘working poor,’ as they are approvingly termed, are in fact the major philanthropists of our society. They neglect their own children so that the children of others will be cared for; they live in substandard housing so that other homes will be shiny and perfect; they endure privation so that inflation will be low and stock prices high. To be a member of the working poor is to be an anonymous donor, a nameless benefactor, to everyone else.
― Barbara Ehrenreich, Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America.
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These people are not the morlocks, they are the pillars by which a current part of soceity lives. But what society is this were those that work the hardest and do the dirtiest jobs, earn the least amount? This pull will tear everyone apart, not just the poor. It is time, and all of us must do so, to pull these wonderful human being out of the shadows and make hunger and poverty disintegrate. Not by yelling at them, or telling them how to live life, but by listening and making actions on their needs as well as ours. The system must die and another rise in its place.
