I come from a small town in a relatively rural part of upstate, and it is one fraught with the stuff of small town stereotypes. Poverty is predominant -- we’ve recently held the title of highest childhood poverty rate in NY -- education tends to be lowly, and the area is littered with failed and closed businesses from more fruitful times gone by. At one point we were the glove-making capital of the world, producing over 90 percent of the nation’s glove supply and with an equal percentage of jobs being supported by said industry.

When this manufacturing line of work became outsourced, things went downhill rapidly. Factories closed entirely, people were laid off in masses, over 90 percent of our economy was pulled from beneath the town’s feet. The poverty that ensued was at the hands of a larger socioeconomic cause, as it was systematic. Recovery never fully occurred, and it stands that over 96 percent of children in my old school district qualify for free or reduced lunch because they fall well under the national poverty line.

The story is fairly similar in some immediately surrounding counties, and the rates of social assistance received in my area are, of course, quite high. Government assistance is largely what keeps us afloat, as there isn’t much money to be had. It was because of all these circumstances I was granted the opportunity, wrought with hardship it may have been, to experience and learn from the issue of "poorness" on a personal level.

In spite of the institutional poverty that reigns in my hometown area, the tendency is to look negatively upon those who fall below the poverty line. I’d like to say that this always baffled me. The reality is, however, that there was a time when I fell subject to this popular school of thought, though I will indulge in defending myself with “I was young and impressionable.” Experience, however, always outweighs rhetoric and I found that personal growth, often times, comes in the form of becoming more sensitive and aware as the plights of those beyond yourself.

Where I grew up, it wasn’t uncommon to see children coming to school without proper shoes or coats in the winter. It is remarkably difficult for a business to survive and, therefore, for people to keep jobs. I will always remember the young “trouble” child who finally admitted to stealing school supplies so he could offer something that his family couldn't afford, toys, to his younger sister. Or, the remarkably sweet young man who admitted to me that his family wasn’t sure where their groceries were going to come from.

I will remember watching people struggle every single day in mass numbers, seeing children walking to school in December without the coats they couldn't afford, seeing the parents of my peers' losing jobs and had friends who looked at me with desperation in their eyes when they told you that they weren't sure they'd have a place to live next month. I've lived surrounded by boarded up factories, closing business, saw multitudes of the high school's graduates remaining in our hometown, if they graduated at all, working jobs that they do not like because they didn't have the resources to do anything else. I've seen a large portion of a town's population (barely) surviving off social assistance or minimum wage, and I've SEEN kids in school wearing ripped, tattered and dirty clothes because they couldn't afford anything better.

Those who are impoverished are just as human as the rest of us.

Privilege has been proven to boast the ability to cloud perceptions of reality (see the Monopoly experiment) and the ability to understand and emphasize with those outside your scope of personal privilege. This I understand, and I can acknowledge that I was one of the lucky ones. Not everyone is, however, and this is where I urge my peers, especially, to take a look beyond themselves. I still hear rhetoric every day that paints the impoverished, the working poor, the minimum wage worker, as the "lazy welfare queen," the "social leech," the person reaping what they sowed, the "money sucking fault of our economy."

I urge everyone to reject this and to instead look down from their own upper crust, look around at the unevenly distributed economic hierarchy of our time. I urge sympathy and for others, regardless of their own socioeconomic or sociocultural standing, to not be one who lives in what is the crux of systemic poverty and still believe wholeheartedly welfare and social assistance are useless and should be abolished, that those who are in need of such aid are undeserving and disingenuous. Please, do not live amongst the struggle and still dehumanize those who are merely scrambling to live. Do not forgo your empathy nor your humanity.

I am a sociology minor, I write about and work with poverty and in low-income areas and if that is my bias, feel free to call me out on it. But I will never forget what I have learned. It is my hope that more of us may soon realize what I once needed to be taught. We must all remember to leave ourselves open to change that may make us more human. I will always remember the childhood story of an old friend.

One in which he vividly remembered a moment in his youth when his family was enduring a specifically hard time, and they were sitting at the dinner table with little to eat besides some boxed macaroni and cheese. He recalls that, as they ate, his mother sat at the table going without food so as to make sure that they all had enough, and then still asked her children if they had had enough to eat.

This stuck with him. It stuck with me. I hope it sticks with all of you, too.