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. It just so happens that, as I navigated this book this week, I also watched a documentary series on the rise of nuclear proliferation and the geopolitical consequences of the emergence of the atomic weapons industry. In it, documentarians claimed that TEN TRILLION American tax dollars have been invested, thus far, in the building, stockpiling, and upgrading of nuclear weapons in the United States--weapons every human on earth hopes will never actually be put to use. I can't help but wonder how much more peaceful and healthy our country might be today, had that ten trillion been used to treat mental illness, support children and families, and disrupt cycles of poverty and abuse. Thank you, Deborah, for sharing your story with the world. Now, if only our policy makers could read it, believe it, and use it to fuel actual progress and policy change.

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