And it suddenly seemed that the world they envisioned, a world with clean streams and free health care, with protections for workers and women and children, wasn’t a place for our kind of people—people who smoked cigarettes to steady their nerves, who sometimes snorted a line of Lortabs with Dad because that was the most loving thing he ever offered. People who had babies they couldn’t love with men who didn’t love them. My liberal friend summed it up perfectly in class that day: They made their choice. They have to live with it.
