Link to video interview with Tirado, and blog post about early life and the process of poverty:

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/linda-tirado/meet-the-woman-who-accide_b_4334428.html

Early on this semester we read an article by Linda Tirado titled, “This Is Why Poor People’s Bad Decisions Make Perfect Sense”. This video provided by the Huffington Post, was an interview with Linda about her life after her blog post went viral and the comments, thoughts, and gestures that people had in response to what she had to say. I was first off extremely happy with the background that Linda provided to go with the video. She provided as story of her life to give the readers a better insight into the ways in which her life had specifically been effected and characterized by poverty. She described growing up and not necessarily identifying as “poor”, she addressed the structural issues, issues of mental illness, of stress, of family issues, and of issues of compromise that a life in poverty prescribes. She talks about her life in way that I personally felt did a fantastic job of describing how people find themselves in poverty today. You don’t have to be born poor, you don’t have to be an addict, you don’t have to mentally ill, or abused. These are all factors that being unable to properly provide for yourself or your family can provoke in ones own personal lived experience. She describes how she knowns that she made mistakes, but how the mistakes she made didn’t put her in the places that she inevitably found her self in. While her blog post about her life leading up to the article provided the insight that I felt I needed to better understand her as a writer and as someone who identifies with living under the poverty line, the interview in the video did even more.

Linda starts of her interview being concise, smart, thoughtful, honest, and empathetic and maintains a sense of self assuredness throughout the whole video. I was overwhelmed with how wonderful she was. She proved that poor people are more than just people who are poor. She explained the realities of poverty and addressed some of the issues that readers had with her piece such as her cigarette smoking, having more then one child while accepting government aid, etc. She described these things in w ay that I think really allowed the viewer to understand the reality of life under the poverty line. Every decision that she made was scrutinized, yet her thoughts and her story remained ignored by all of the people who chose to judge her. Or society looks for the deviance, shame, and failure of poor and homeless people, yet I feel as is Linda is finally creating a platform for people to start to feel like they will be listened to. I think she addresses a lot of the issues that we have covered in class while using her own experiences as a means of starting a discourse about poverty that looks to understand poverty as a lived experience, instead of blame those who’s lives have been characterized by it.