Do you know why I detest poverty?

I read this morning a thought by Afro-American writer Zora Neale Hurston.

There is something about poverty that smells of death. You dream about dead people who fall from your heart like leaves in the dry season and rot around your feet; impulses smothered too long in the fetid air of underground caves.

Although the deprivation of what is essential to living leaps to the eye, what makes poverty crippling are the “dreams that fall from the heart like leaves in the dry season and rot around the feet.”

It is about having to say no to your children when they ask to attend college, it is the awareness of opening your eyes for another day of fighting: and nothing else.

That is why I detest poverty.

After all,

the reminder of poverty hardly comes from people who live it.

Don’t you think so?