When Your Policy Becomes Your Reality

I think they should change the legal requirements to run for President of the United States.


There should be added a clause that every candidate must live as a poor person for 3 months. Freeze their assets. Make it impossible for their rich friends to give them money. Give them a bad line of credit and no savings. Set them up in an apartment where the appliances are so old that it’s dangerous. With mold in the ceiling and roaches in the kitchen and some weird smell that you can’t identify. Let them pay rent to a slum lord who couldn’t care less when the hot water suddenly stops working in the winter and refuses to replace anything. Give them a job* that pays minimum wage and no health care and probably leaves them eligible for welfare or some other government program and let them have to go through the system to get it. A job that requires being on your feet all day, where your boss ignores certain labor laws. Let them have to get a second job to make ends meet. Let them ride public transit. Let them have to choose between the luxury of electricity or a working phone. Let them have to eat cheap food that is inherently toxic for them, but at least it’s plentiful. Let them clip coupons and buy dented canned goods to save money. Let them learn to darn socks and patch jeans and sew buttons because new clothes are too expensive. Let them get sick and have to take unpaid time off from work and try to find a walk-in clinic they can afford. Let them stay in that world long enough to realize that they’ll never get “caught up”. Let them start out indebted and behind schedule. Let them lose sleep and wake up feeling downtrodden or hollow. Let them learn to suck it up. Let them learn that “picking yourself up by your boot straps” is even harder than it sounds. Let them feel the frustration of a government that tell them, in spite of all this, that they’re lazy moochers.


Then, and only then, allow them to run for office. Maybe they’ll have learned something.




*Hopefully they’ll realize that in the current economy, they’d be lucky just to have the worst job.







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