Here is an excerpt from the interview:
We should all pause for a moment in grateful recognition of how fortunate we are to live in a time and place where we can believe being broke is abnormal. For most of history, and in most of the world still, life is taken up with the struggle to survive, to find food and shelter. The idea that we, modern American folk, should be immune to such concerns is a tremendous luxury.
I would like more broke people to come out of the closet. I’d like to see a token broke friend on every TV show.
Right now we spend so much energy trying to hide the fact that we’re not making as much as we’d like to, or that we’re having trouble paying the bills. The problem is that this PR smoke screen leaves people who have a lot of company feeling very isolated. We close out the very large community of fellow broke people who could be a support to us. It’s human nature to try to keep up with the neighbors, but the neighbors are probably not leveling with you about how hard it is for them to make ends meet. So we drive each other to over-consume, and we fail to stand up for the things we really need because we don’t want to reveal how skint we all feel.
Read the full article at Real Detroit Weekly.
