A few months ago, it dawned on me: I hate poor people. It had spontaneously slipped out of my mouth as I was sitting at a light in my Lambo. Just kidding. I am hardly what the average American would call "wealthy." I speak from experience as a poor person, living among po' folks. Some of the reasons have applied to myself, before I changed my worldview, gained some self-respect, and stepped things up a bit. I realized that they had been working against me. These reasons apply to poor Americans of all races and ethnicities. They have to do with how poor people think and act, and are why poor people have been my worst friends and are their own worst enemies.
Poor people never have enough money for rent – but they always have money for cigarettes, and beer, and/or weed; with enough left-over for ramen packets. When they're really broke, they whine that they don't have enough for cigarettes, or beer, and/or weed. If some things are said to be bad for you, might they probably be? Maybe such times are when God's telling you that you should pay rent instead of fucking-up your health? No: they come by my apartment, asking if I'd have some money to spare – because they know that I'm not spending money on shit that fucks-up my health, of course, so I somehow manage to get my rent paid. Or they stand there, in my doorway, with a cigarette burning in one hand, polluting the air in my apartment, or with a wisp of smoke going right up my nose, when they know that since I'd stopped smoking I can't stand, and try to avoid, second-hand smoke. The whole purpose of my stopping smoking was so that I'd not breathe that shit anymore, so that it not fuck-up my health. They know all this, but they stand there, befouling the air in the sanctity of my domicile, expecting me to give them money so that they can buy food or something else that they could have bought if cigarettes weren't top priority for them.
One neighbor hadn't even had to leave her apartment to smoke-bomb my space: a menacing cloud of smoke from her window entered the door of my apartment, seeming to chase me around the room as I fled from it, until it finally caught-up with me, engulfed me, and forced itself down into my lungs. I felt sick from it for a day or two afterward. Later, I learned that it had been heroin-smoke. I'd never done heroin in my life; it was one of the things that I wasn't stupid enough to try; I'd prided myself on never having ingested it. But no, thanks to the borderline-personality bitch next door, my body had been tainted by the most evil substance on the planet. I swear, that cloud of smoke had seemed like a demonic entity determined to rape my soul. When that toxic trash next door finally OD'd, I didn't feel sad, I felt relieved.
She was but one of too many people at whom I've taken one look from a few yards away and immediately known that I wanted nothing to do with them. There's something about such people that's so self-evident that I can't understand why most people can't perceive it. It might be the behavioral characteristics of antisocial personality disorder, which a lot of poor people have. But then, poor people are a goddamn smorgasbord of mental illnesses and developmental disorders. I don't care if they'd had bad childhoods, been abused, never had this or that – their problems shouldn't be my problems, but they do what they can to make them so, and to perpetuate and malinger in their own derangement and misery. Their justification always has to do with how someone else is fucked-up or fucking them over. I pass by them on the way out to try to enjoy a beautiful day, and when I grant them some neighborly chat-time, I soon regret it, as I'd known that they would use every conversational trick in order to suck me further into a one-sided conversation with which they suck life-energy out from my solar plexus by going onandonandon about their misfortune and pessimism and personal hell. If they do stop of their own accord, it's only after their onslaught of fatalistic ideation eventually causes me to visibly cringe, whence a grin of perverse gratification crosses their face, and I am finally free to go.
They're screaming and throwing their visiting sister down the stairs at 4AM. They're bashing their girlfriend's head into the hood of her car at 1AM. They're slamming doors and yelling at each other, or throwing stuff out their window in a fit of frustrated rage, at 3AM. They're passing-out drunk at night, with a song blasting on "repeat," unable to hear the loud knocks on their door and people yelling, "Turn that the fuck down!" until they awaken at around 9:00 that morning. They're trashing the entire apartment until nothing in it is in its original place and all the windows are broken, and it takes four cops to ram the door in so that they can haul that big sack o' garbage, who'd had a heart attack while high on meth, to the hospital, while I'm supposed to be sleeping. At least he's gone, though. Nope – a month later, he's allowed to come back – and do the same thing again. (It's just what he does, it's how he is, y'know?) The girlfriend-head-basher was allowed to come back twice – until he finally went back to prison to do some real time for parole violations. With apartments so low in rent and located in a fairly decent neighborhood, the management could be selective as to the character of the tenants. But no – it has to be the place where such fuckheads have put it indelibly on the map, like a skidmark in tighty-whiteys, with the police, EMS, and fire department. The junkie girl had even called the cops on me for no reason but her delusion that I was stomping around "again" when I'd been sitting, near-motionless, at my computer for the previous two hours.
I'd actually had to post a sign on my apartment's door, with bullet points instructing these people not to knock between 10PM and 7AM (with "not knowing the time" being no excuse), not to have a cigarette burning, not to ask me for money, nor expect me to troubleshoot their computer. I even had to explain that I reserve the right to go to sleep with the light on, and that knocking "softly" is liable to wake me up. That's how goddamn maladjusted these poor people are. I reject the obligation to feel "less-than" because I'm not Andrew Tate, but poor people give being economically-disadvantaged a bad name.
The degree to which I've had to struggle and swallow humiliation just in order to cobble my rent together is unfrickinreal to me. Part of this was my going out and harvesting groceries from dumpsters in the neighborhood, and, after having carried 100 lbs. or so of food in two of those giant Ikea tote bags home on my shoulders, I'd not have enough space in my 'fridge or freezer for it all, so I'd pass about half of it around to my indigent neighbors, because it's what Jesus Christ would do if he were Mr. Rogers. After I'd given one neighbor two big frozen lasagnas, he promised me that he'd have me over to eat one of them. When I asked him, a couple days later, about that lasagna, he explained that he'd gotten so drunk and hungry one night that he ate the second one (and totally spaced what he was going to out of gratitude to me). This made me examine the situation: my going around to dumpsters in 100-degree heat, humping 100 lbs. of comestibles back home, redistributing the wealth among my impoverished neighbors – and none of them took the initiative to go out to even look in the dumpsters to which these people had the same access as I. I realized why rich people hate poor people.
Poor people abuse and use-up your empathy. They don't reciprocate thoughtfulness; they slurp-up your generosity. ("Oh, man, you are so cool for giving me that. Let me know if you come across any more.") They believe in sharing – your resources. When a knee injury kept me incapacitated for an entire summer, it took me 15 minutes to gingerly limp to the corner store three blocks away. How many of my deadbeat neighbors offered to go to the store for me or to pick something up for me on their way home? Zero. Poor people also actively harass you when you dare to demand civility of them. They'll deliberately make noise late at night, or stomp on the floor above your apartment, in retaliation for your having complained to the manager about their doing such. They are so unproductively narcissistic. Instead of a bloated sense of self-worth that compels them to aspire to acquire wealth, poor people's sense of entitlement involves accomplishing nothing, acting uncivilly, and punishing anyone who holds them to any standards of common courtesy, let alone of excellence. They resent anyone who expects them to be better than their path of least resistance leads them to be.
This comes to what I hate most about poor people: they hold each other back and keep each other down. They want none among them to do better than the rest. They're resentfully envious when someone has nicer things than they do. A woman I knew told me that, when she was a girl, the poor people in her neighborhood groused about a neighbor who had bought the lowest-end Porsche car, saying, "Who does he think he is?" He thought he was someone who wanted to own a Porsche – but hold on, cut him some slack because he could only afford the cheapest one. A poor person who's exceptionally talented will never receive any encouragement from his or her peers, who don't want to believe that anyone from their dung-heap would – nor should – be capable of rising up from it. Of course, if/when the talented person gains fame or fortune for their talent, his/her old loser friends boast about their "friend" who's famous now – the "friend" who never wants to see his/her loser friends again after having clawed his/her way out from under the oppressive forces of their naysaying and fatalism; who had told him/her, "It's just too bad you could never . . ., or you're not . . ." The same people who, when something unfortunate occurs to someone, tell the person, "It could be worse." What people who want the best for others say is, "It should be better." Instead of generously and compassionately envisioning better circumstances, all that poor people are prone to imagining for one of their own is how worse it could get for them. It tells them, "Remember, you are one of us; don't get your hopes up."