Barking to the Choir: The Power of Radical Kinship

by Gregory Boyle

A homie called me on the phone and broke down in tears, lamenting his terminally ill refrigerator. All the food in it had gone bad and he found himself at the very end of a very worn and tattered rope. When he showed up in my office some hours later for help, he apologized for having had, what he called, an “appliance meltdown.” Instead of saying this thing had been the “straw that broke the camel’s back,” he said, “And that’s what got the camel to fall.” It is a self-help maxim of the privileged to say, “Don’t sweat the small stuff.” But the folks at the bottom have to. What the privileged consider “small stuff” are precisely the trips and traps that foil the folks at the bottom: no bank account; no car, or one that can reliably get you where you’re going; no health insurance; several dollars short of a package of Pampers (and when you have a poopy baby and no diapers, I’d say “sweating” would indeed be in order). It isn’t simply that being poor means having less money than the privileged; it’s that being poor means living in a continual state of acute crisis. This is what they have to lug around every day. The poor are always one straw away from calamity and catastrophe. Homies who have now chosen to “play by the rules” often find themselves stuck in what I call the “forced-choice economy,” having to choose between, say, feeding their kids or paying their rent. Doing without heat and electricity or putting gas in the car. There is a good chance that the camel will fall f...