I was talking with a childhood friend a while back and we agreed that we—and all our friends—were “dirt poor” when we were kids. We also agreed, however, that we didn’t suffer from it because none of us knew we were poor. We thought we were just like other kids. It took television to teach us that we weren’t. We weren’t like the families of Leave it to Beaver or Father Knows Best, people who had nice houses, pretty clothes, a mother who stayed home and who tucked you into bed at night, a clean bed that you got to sleep in by yourself in your own room; a father who went to work every day and came home to play ball with his son and teach him things—who never drank or got angry or did hurtful things.

Someone came along and held a TV screen up to us like a mirror of what reality is and said it was us. But it wasn’t us. After that, everything changed. After that, we knew ourselves to be poor, deprived, outsiders, not normal. We were “other.” We were trash at worst, pitiable at best. Everything changed after that. “And the Lord God called out to Adam—where are you? He answered, I heard you in the garden, but I was afraid, because I was naked, so I hid. Then God asked: Who told you that you were naked?”

Who tells us, indeed. Back in the early seventies, when I was living in Europe, I read an article in the Herald Tribune about Vista workers in the Appalachians. Vista had been formed as a domestic version of the Peace Corps and all the altruistic college students from up north (those who could afford altruism) had heroically and charitably gone into the Appalachians to improve the lives of “others.” It didn’t work, however, because they were run off by shotguns. They had gone into people’s homes and lives and told them they were naked.

Similar arrogance goes on all the time amongst many caring people who want to dedicate their lives to raising others to be equal to them. It’s a socio-political philosophy that controls most of the country now.

The point is—what is deprivation? You’re not deprived unless you think you are. It’s a state of mind, not a real-life condition. We could argue till doomsday about what deprivation “really” is but the bottom line is that it doesn’t exist without the permission of the “deprived.”

When I was a child, my mother and I experienced a season of serious poverty. Before anything at all can be said about “poverty,” we have to know what we mean by the term, and what I mean here is that we lacked one or more of the “basic necessities,” which are food, clothing, shelter. Now these must be further defined: to lack food means to have too little to eat—that’s a quantitative definition, not a qualitative one. I don’t mean that we didn’t have a “balanced diet,” or “proper nutrition.” No—I mean there was no food to eat except half a box of raisin bran (no milk) and once that was eaten, there would be nothing at all. I don’t mean my wardrobe was lacking the latest styles for children; I mean it was 20 degrees outside and I had no coat. We did have shelter, sort of, not so bad as a cardboard box, but we rented a lady’s enclosed back porch for $9 a week, though we had to use outside stairs to go to a toilet shared with a couple who rented a room in her basement. I don’t know what my mother thought about this; I suspect she was too busy to think much about anything. She was working forty hours a week as a waitress while going to school full-time to be a nurse. I was eight or nine, a latchkey kid, and I thought I was normal.

Of course, there was my grandmother’s house in Florida. We could go there—because, as Frost tells us, “Home is where, when you go there, they have to take you in.” Yes, they take you in: Along with the fried chicken, mashed potatoes and green beans, there was shame and contempt. (Contrary to that socio-political philosophy, it’s not the indifference of an anonymous world that hurts us.) I sat at a dining table laden with food I could not eat. I was painfully thin. The doctor told my mother I was anemic and prescribed vitamins and malted milk. Anorexia was unknown in those days; all I knew was that I couldn’t bear the thought of opening my mouth and swallowing that food.

One’s idea of “basic necessities” gets altered with experience. We add things like self-respect, love, and then suddenly there’s no end to what becomes “basic.” The list gets ever longer until political parties make it policy. It gets so long that academic degrees are granted in it, fields of study and expertise in ever more specific areas of deprivation, people get doctorates in economics, politics, sociology, social work, psychology, and sundry brands of “education.” Entire ideologies grow and flourish in that remarkably fecund soil of deprivation. People even have wars about it—who’s more deprived, how they’re deprived, and what -ism will ensure more just distribution, and what should be distributed, anyway.

We can continue deprivation forever, if we choose to, and many do—they’re heavily invested in it (in a great many ways). We can go on seeing it in our own lives or in others, choosing to be eternally dissatisfied, always covetous, angry, and unhappy, never having enough time, or money, or love, or whatever, always pointing accusing fingers and arguing with each other about sharing, and about a lot of things that sound righteous but aren’t. Or we can say with the wise psalmist, “I shall not want,” and watch how a box of bran flakes gets sprinkled with sweet raisins and becomes a feast.