I have known May for 20 years, and she calls me once a week to vent about her high pressure job ‘serving the poor’. May is a conservative corporate type who is just beginning to realize that there is nothing left to conserve. Her job, seeing to the needs of thousands of inner city Baltimore ‘poor’, was driving her up the wall today, so she called me on her break to see what I was reading, thinking that some of my esoteric concerns with arcane times and far away places might ease her day.

“So what are you reading today?”

“The Essential Yusuf Ildris, an Egyptian short story collection.”

“What kind of stories?”

“Mostly about being poor in a poor land.”

“Since when have you cared about the poor? You’re the guy that walks over panhandlers in the gutter.”

“I have my esoteric reasons. Why, might I ask, has your voice turned so harsh since I’ve mentioned the poor?”

“I could just not imagine reading a word about the poor! I’m up to my eyebrows in the poor. I struggle to make ends meet and the poor get free housing. I shop at the thrift store for clothes and the poor walk around in thousands of dollars worth of designer clothes, cosmetic enhancements and tattoos. I’m sick of the poor. They don’t work, don’t want to work, and treat us like shit as they demand, and demand, and demand, while we bust our asses to pay for it and make it happen!”

“Slow down girl. You have not described the poor. You have very nicely described the essential lifestyle of medieval and ancient aristocracy. May, you have never known a poor person—you live in America. I make less than half of what a typical welfare recipient brings home, and I’m doing fine. I’ve been reading about real poor people.”

“Why, it’s all bullshit?”

[I’m feeling guilty about bringing this up as I hear her suck harder on that cancer stick to stay calm, knowing that she called me to calm down with some pleasant conversation.]

“May, I would never read a book about ‘the poor’ written by an American. The characters would be sainted heroes and heroines. There would be a Scrooge-like bad guy. They would have designer shoes instead of cracked feet that had never been shoed or sandaled. They would be doing designer drugs instead of starving to death without ever having seen a doctor. There would be an agenda behind the story. This guy just wrote stories based on the poor people he knew in Egypt fifty to sixty years ago. His poor people have flaws. They are ashamed to be poor, not proud of the phony label slash meal-ticket.”

“I never thought I would get like this. My heart has hardened.”

“You’ve been living under The Lie for decades, being told you’re the problem with the problem. Becoming callous is just your defense. You need to get out of there and do something meaningful.”

“I guess so. Break’s over. Time to go back to saying ‘please’ and ‘thank you’, and explaining everything three times without ‘disrespecting’ some disgusting baby’s mamma.”

By now the book was in my backpack and I had gotten off the bus and headed home, thinking over the many lies about the so-called American poor. I used to think the leisure class poor were just the means for the rich to drain the working class with minimal friction, kind of like redistribution KY-jelly. Today though, after considering how living according to a vast lie that so few question has hardened one lady’s heart to the truth as well, it occurred to me, that perhaps the most necessary precondition for tyranny is a callous populace.