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When I was an adult, the Kansas legislature passed a law forbidding using cash assistance to buy tickets for ocean cruises, as though poor people are notorious for spending weeks in the Bahamas on taxpayers’ dimes. The same law limited the amount recipients could access as cash; regardless of their…

President Dwight Eisenhower, a native of rural Kansas, said, “Whatever America hopes to bring to pass in the world must first come to pass in the heart of America.” The countryside is no more our nation’s heart than are its cities, and rural people aren’t more noble and dignified for their dirty wo…

When I was a kid, the United States was a few decades away from reckoning with the reality that the next generation would be worse off, not better off, than the one before it. But my community had been facing dwindling odds for generations. They knew that children like me likely wouldn’t and should…

It’s a hell of a thing to feel—to grow the food, serve the drinks, hammer the houses, and assemble the airplanes that bodies with more money eat and drink and occupy and board, while your own body can’t go to the doctor. Even though no one complained or maybe even realized it, I could feel that the…

When the temporary job at Boeing ended, Dad found more work in Wichita, this time for a national company that supplied and disposed of industrial cleaning products. He drove a van around the city and surrounding small towns, delivering cleaning solvent and equipment to mechanics’ shops. He then col…