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What's So Bad About Being Poor

Deborah M. Foster

February 2024

DESCRIPTION:

My book is titled, "What's So Bad About Being Poor" because I started writing it in response to a college essay assignment to react to Charles Murrays essay, "What"s So Bad About Being Poor." His question made me so livid, I couldn't contain my rage for days.

But this book is about more than just responding to Charles Murray. It's a testimony to escaping fundamentalism using 1) public schools and teachers, 2) professional mental health services, 3) jarring and misguided government interventions, and 4) television. My book pretty much helps explain why all of those things are on the chopping block for the Republican Party. Christian Nationalists don't appreciate anyone telling their captives that there is another reality.

REVIEWS:

Excerpt from Nicole C on Facebook: "It took me most of this week to finish--mostly because it required a number of "I need some time to process this" breaks. It's heart breaking, brilliant, imminently readable. Mostly, though, it taught me to remember that every one of us only knows a fraction of another person's story--and we desperately need to cultivate a culture of listening, empathy, and compassion for others. We need to hear, understand, and believe people when they share their lived experiences and how those experiences have shaped them. This book, an autobiography written over many years by my insightful, intelligent, incredibly resilient friend Deborah Foster, should be required reading by social policy makers everywhere. Having lived over a half century at the intersection of serious mental illness, religious fundamentalism, and entrenched poverty, she understands the realities of systemic poverty in a way precious few policy makers or "experts" ever will. Miraculously, given the odds stacked against her, she also earned the academic and research chops to authoritatively push back against those (like Charles Murray) who like to view entrenched, generational poverty as the product of laziness, personal flaws, genetic disposition, race, IQ or any other number of horrific but convenient excuses used to avoid addressing poverty and mental illness as the systemic issues they truly are. After all, blaming the poor and mentally ill, individually, for their circumstances has allowed US lawmakers to side-step their responsibilities as civic leaders and cut to smithereens programs that might meaningfully address these social challenges rather than leaving the poor and mentally ill at the mercy of criminal justice, emergency medical, and education systems as they currently do. Flawed theories that focus on blaming and shaming the poor and mentally ill allow lawmakers to shrug their shoulders, wag their tongues and fingers, and cut, cut, cut supports (while gifting the wealthy additional tax breaks) instead of doing the civically responsible work of building robust family wellness, early childhood, and mental health care systems that really should be in place to support those in need.

I encourage you to pick up a copy of your own at the following link: What's So Bad About Being Poor?: Our Lives In the Shadows of the Poverty Experts https://a.co/d/fTqB7Q5"

Excerpt from review from Maria Ashford at Book-Shelfie.com:

"The book’s examination of religious fundamentalism’s appeal to the poor is another insightful element of this memoir. Foster shows how economic instability made her parents susceptible to fringe beliefs and cult-like groups promising certainty in an uncertain world. Their brief involvement with a polygamist Mormon sect illustrates how desperation can drive people to embrace extreme ideologies."

From Miles Garrett at Good Reads:

"The book contains thoughtful insights on molestation, mental illness, the medical establishment and pharmaceuticals, rehabilitation vs. condemnation, depression and hypomania, parenthood, childhood, the interrelationship of national politics with family values, destructive charitableness, the dangers of unthoughtful professionals in authoritative positions, abuse of government authority, race relations, white flight and white racism, racism in general, housing policy, detachment, nutrition, misplaced trust in conmen, self-deception and self-realization, spiritual search, religious cults, food, and poverty, to name a few."