Poor teeth, I knew, beget not just shame but more poorness: people with bad teeth have a harder time getting jobs and other opportunities. People without jobs are poor. Poor people can’t access dentistry—and so goes the cycle.

I am far less interested in calls for empathy toward struggling White Americans who spout or abide hatred than I am in tapping into the political power of those who don’t.

In recent years many have questioned a degree’s value and chastised those who take out big loans to buy one. Most of those critics, I’d wager, never worked a wheat field. Debt burden and being overeducated in an employer’s market is psychologically and financially crushing, yes, but an assured lifetime sentence to manual labor can be more crushing—

The most poignant aspect of Frey’s fabrications was that his internal pain apparently outstripped external causes he could offer for explaining it.

When it comes to economic risk, what appears reckless to the privileged is often the smartest bet to the poor.

I am on record in this fractured political era as a proponent of maintaining connection across gulfs of understanding, with the caveat that this civic burden falls to people whose social privileges allow them to engage safely with the other side. But seeking to understand dangerous behaviors and beliefs is quite different from permitting them.

It can be useful to acknowledge the cultural forces that carve us, or edifying to indulge in the tropes of our assigned narratives, but true distinctions of character, intelligence, talent, and skill exist at the level of the individual, not of the class—or the ethnicity, the gender, the sexual orientation, the religion, and so on.

Belief is a choice, however unconscious, and it self-sustains: we believe what serves our purposes, and the world we’re thus open to seeing validates those beliefs.

I dream of a world in which no child suffers for our country’s greed.