Heartland: A Memoir of Working Hard and Being Broke in the Richest Country on Earth

by Sarah Smarsh

How can you talk about the poor child without addressing the country that let her be so?

If a person could go to work every day and still not be able to pay the bills and the reason wasn’t racism, what less articulated problem was afoot?

keeping government out of the private sector could lead to a different sort of oppression, it would turn out. Federal policies that had created a middle class in the twentieth century were giving way to corporate rule in which billionaires with political influence could be kings behind the scenes.

destruction of the working class: the demise of the family farm, the dismantling of public health care, the defunding of public schools, wages so stagnant that full-time workers could no longer pay the bills.

A society that considers your body dispensable will inflict a violence upon you.

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removing the Equal Rights Amendment from the party’s platform, dismantling aid programs that helped poor women feed their children, eroding reproductive health rights.

society valued productivity and autonomy more than it valued women and children.

Every adult I knew was addicted to something—mostly cigarettes or booze.

it amounted to money spent on something your body and mind could do on their own, for free and without side effects. Dad had a quiet inner life as a self-healer.

space of neglect where adults were too busy working or too drunk afterward to look after me.

The federal government had given them land to work as though the arid plains were just like rich eastern soil, as though it was a great deal. By and large, it wasn’t wealthy folks who took the offer. Those who managed to profit or at least subsist on their land soon saw the population tide turn.

I didn’t want to have a baby until I was twenty-six, a scandalously old age for a first child in some corners of rural America.

When unfit teachers occupy classrooms, certain children are most vulnerable—those with disabilities, who can’t convey mistreatment to their parents, and those whose parents are too negligent, too drunk, or too busy to ask how school is going.

In 1994, California created a costly electronic fingerprinting system for welfare recipients. It was unnecessary and would lose more money in surveillance than it gained in busting fraud,

America has an idea that people in poverty make sketchy decisions, but everyone does.

Reagan had built his first presidential campaign around shaming poor, unwed teenage girls

counties and municipalities were turning to income from minor infractions to pay the bills that state or federal funding had covered before the severe government budget cuts

like living next to a pile of things you need but can’t access—which is what it’s like to be poor in America.

concede personal failure and vote for the party more inclined to assist them, or vote for the other party, whose rhetoric conveys hope that the labor of their lives is what will compensate them.

one promising a good life in exchange for your labor and the other keeping you just alive enough to go on laboring.