And it took time to fix it. We were talking earlier about bob gates and mike mullen and one thing they got credit for is that it is a no way sexy at the outset and in the governmentwide security clearance if we sought help and had counseling and medication and this was the guest stigma there could possibly be because if you set guess you might not get your clearance and if you said yes you might lose your clearance because it is governmentwide into the biggest defender so they looked at this and they thought this is not. You could lose your clearance. Youre never going to change it. And the constant lobbying that pushed back against it very hard they basically argued against their colleagues had finally got changed this was a multiyear fight chugging along on the surface. They want that fight but it took a lot. You think about changing the question on a form and took several years. The kind of change they talk about with the best intentions. Its not quick and its not easy may be some things i can add that will help afford some clarity not suggesting that there is a disorder so that when you incorporate, something is out of order. On the stigma that is attached to this theres also a label and this label traveled with him like you just exemplified so you can compare that kind of scenario. For dont ask dont tell you are hiding pathology. Behavioral health is something that is a taboo especially with suicide and embarrassment and associated so you can look at it in that regard. There is a debate in the military and an illegitimate honest one and that is a nice way to wrap up the conversation. But the question is how do you commemorate a soldier that killed himself and on the other side they say these are casualties of war and they should be memorialized the same way. When i first met him they lost 168 soldiers to combat that another killed himself and when they came back to the Unit Division they had the names of the ones that die in combat died in combat and not told himself and to this day he said the biggest regret of his life that he did that but this isnt people say there is a difference between being shot on foot patrol and shooting your soviet people say that one deserves to be honored in one way and one deserves to be commemorated the other way. They are not bad people and this isnt some in that is blackandwhite. This lives in the gray and we should accept and can accept that these are real threats. As a society held to be fix it and there are other people trying to do just that but we have to remember that this is nuanced. You cant simply say give them a prosthetic in his life goes on and he is much better. We dont have that luxury anymore and for a country that cares we have to bear in mind this doesnt go play for the only for the person that has a candidate doesnt go away for a country struggling with suicide and for a family that lost two sons and tried to get out of bed in the morning. People do it, people find a way to try to help you keep those things in mind. There are people out there trying to make it better and with that, thank you all for your time. [applause] let me say a quick thank you for joining us in conversation and as we mentioned before, this book, which you can all see how important it really is too everything that we are thinking about these days it will be available to you all. So thanks again. [applause] up next on the tv after words with guest host tracy ross senior policy analyst on policy for the center for American Progress. This week linda and her first book hand to mouth living in the struck america. The selfdescribed average american and mother of two describes how she went from middle class to lower class to poor and argues that a safety net is needed for those on what she calls the bottom rungs of societys letter. This program is about an hour. Host i am tracy a senior policy analyst at the center for American Progress and im joined by linda tirado whose recent book hand to mouth was just released last week. Congratulations. I know that you have been on a whirlwind for discussing this book. But the book is really kind of a long time in the making and the reason were here is because of an essay that you wrote last year that was entitled why i make several decisions were poverty. Can you tell us a bit about that and it was actually a response. Guest i was having a conversation with my friends after work one night. What she said as i know that im not supposed to judge people for that. Somebody remind me why. I knew this one. I started to get a kind of weird response and then i kind of got an incredible response and i was on the front page of the Huffington Post and russia called and israel called and we had a fan base in india which is interesting to me and then there was do you want to write a book and i thought and now im interviewed about the book. And here we are today. Host tell us a bit about the book. I mean, speaking about the essay, why did you decide to do such a thorough response that you have probably heard similar comments before. Guest i was in the mood. It literally is it. I was on the last shift at work and some of the ask a question and i thought i know the answer to this one and i am incredibly wordy so i wrote responses of that length, he need not quite that length but there was a long comment and that one in particular for whatever reason reason and i documented the original wording of the thing i was responding to but something about the words made me think i can explain this. And so why did an as much as i wasnt capable of at 2 00 in the morning after lunch and that really was it like i know this one. So off it went. I didnt get near as much fun as people probably give me credit for. Host said the essay, like the book, kind of gives us a tumor of the things that poor people are judged for. Everything from their diets to work ethics sex lives, and you have a lot of ideas criticism or a lot of people thought how does this woman actually a low income person, shes so articulate. People started digging into your background. How did that come about . Because even in the New York Times they questioned your credibility. Guest yeah. Yeah. Which is interesting because to question the credibility of someone that says this is what porter feels like, you have to say you dont look were ended to be able to see that, you have to have an idea of what it looks like what is interesting to me because the working class folks, people near the minimum wage, like one third, and we dont look like anything. We look like everything and everybody because we are all over the place. And so the criticism i think was more projection than anything because people wanted to be able to say were looks like the other things. It looks like that over there. Word isnt skilled because we have a meritocracy and if you are skilled you are going to be successful. Cracks dont exist in america. And that was the genesis of most of the criticism and the backlash is people see that you are doing for him properly. My parents were middle class and i was estranged from my parents most of my adult life, so i didnt have the Family Resources. Hypothetically, i did. We came to we reconciled when my first daughter was born, but in the intervening years now, i didnt have the Family Resources and i didnt have a degree and i was working in the Service Economy just like anybody else now. Does the fact that my childhood was more comfortable than many children and that i didnt experience that in the Service Industry and mean but i dont understand what its not like to pay your bills and how many years you have to not be able to pay your bills to see this has been my experience and im allowed to stand up and say that so people ask me about the criticism of lott and i dont really think its criticism. I think that its a defense mechanism of being able to say you clearly and i titled is why i make these decisions because im snarky by nature and a lot of people grabbed onto that and said while you made all the bad decisions and i like to say its kind of a mix of decisions and luck because if i had been in a position where i could cover my mistakes like a lot of wealthy people can, i never would have were it i had a good look i could have made all the bad decisions i wanted and it wouldnt have mattered, but if you dont have those things come if you dont have the cushion and you are not equipped to make those decisions and i left home when i was 16yearsold. How wonderful are the decisions that every 17 year old out on their own . So i always laugh when people are like you didnt do it properly. Okay, tell you what, find yourself think about your sofa to 16. Now assume you can do anything you want and have no rules. Youre alone. How well do you think he would have done . Probably about as well as i did. So, you know, the criticism as i was interested until you more about the person doing the criticizing dan ever does about you. Because here is what it comes down to. I gave the records to the nation, the washington post. I gave interview. I took my teeth out on youtube. I dont have anything more to prove because all i ever said was that it sucks to work hard every day and never get anywhere and that is a true statement whether or not i was a multimillionaire living in a con of war if i never had a home in my entire life it sucks to work hard and never get anywhere. Host i also think part of the problem is when you are near the poverty rate which is about 15 over the last several years, steer was 14. 5. We tend to think that its the same 15 of americans when really people are cycling in and out of a small percentage of people are poor for those few years that we are measuring. Guest those people that are working class will be in poverty technically five or six times over the course of their life. Most people get out in the over four years because it depends. If you have good health this year, did you get into a good job, maybe your spouse got something weve got a crazy tax rebate or someone died and left you 20 grand. You can have those good years and you can have bad years. They come and go and that is what being working class in america is. Host i want to read a part of your book that i think really captures what its about and what youve been saying. I can say for sure is downward mobility is like quicksand. Once it grabs you it constrains your options until its got you completely. I slid through the bottom with a mix of my own decisions own decisions and some curiously bad luck. I think that is true of most people. It can seem light upward mobility is blocked but the lady are between the lower middle class and the poor is porous from above. What does that conjure up for you . Because throughout the book, it sounds like there is a level of anxiety that you can feel about being in poverty with a level of fatigue and just kind of constant fear that youre going to get below. Guest im so glad that that came through. [laughter] host hearing your words read back to you, what were you thinking when you wrote that because it seems to capture that. Guest i was thinking about a flood when i wrote it. When i was pregnant with my first child, we discovered that we were pregnant and my husband decided to go back to school. He had been recently in iraq and so we applied if we got him into school. We planned to move to cincinnati and we were going to be living on his stipend because with the g. I. Bill, you get your books and tuition paid and they give you a living stipend that is dependent on the zip code of the school that you are in. And for us, we were supposed to be getting somewhere between 12 or 14 or a month. It was enough to barely live on. We could make it through the semester. My daughter was due three weeks after that semester and then the money never came. There was a paperwork screw up somewhere that they didnt put through some paperwork and so every week we would go and say that the stipend coming and they would say no not to speak. Come back next week. Individually we both got jobs at the burger king locally and we got the the craftiest apartment we could find because we thought it was just going to be temporary because now we were going to get a huge check for the back pay and we would be able to put a deposit down on a decent apartment we could raise our kids. And the money just kept not showing up all semester long. It kept not showing up and we were living in this awfully maintained apartment and then there was a summer storm in ohio the drains were not properly maintained in the building and everything in the apartment in the basement and everything we owned was pretty much destroyed in the flood and we had no money and no place to go see what it is sweetland to this little that was right next to our work and we stayed there but we didnt have enough to pay on the rent and own the hotel so our landlord sued us for an eviction on this apartment that was more driven because the person taking care of the flood was some handy guide with a shop vac that popped the windows open which if you ever been to ohio in the late summer, that is not an effective management technique there was mold 6 feet up on the walls. It was crazy. Thats what i was talking about is knowing our baby was on the way and we have done everything right. We have done everything right. There was nothing we didnt you write. We went to school, we of the had the funding in place, we had an apartment. Then there was this storm and all of it was gone. And everything we had was some of the vb stuff that we savaged. Thats what he had. As you mentioned this earlier but one third of americans are a flood or paycheck were broken car or sick child away from poverty. So, does your experience throughout the book i have to say going into it i am a little skeptical reading a book where the persons experience of almost supposed to represent a broad experience but i think that you do a good job of things and this is what i saw also balancing it with this is created for particular reasons as our economy is set up. This is my particular experience but its also a common one on many levels. Guest i like to say that i am indicated because youll hear the variation of the flood from any poor person can anybody ever completely screwed by something that was out of your control and that for all of your dreams away and set you back by years. That will happen and it will be a flood or sick relative or that kind that got laid off were the kind that hurts their back. Something that everybody has got more than one of them. And they are interchangeable. It doesnt matter. It doesnt matter which story youre talking about or which time because something happened and something is going to happen and something will always happen so it is the question of being poor or being working class even at this point because we have heard of move upwards, right. Its always knowing that something is going to happen. You just never really know when and you dont know what its claimed to look like and you dont know how that its going to be but the one thing you can count on is that they are still going to take over the taxes out of your paycheck and something is going to happen. But the quote that i read, you also mentioned bad decision and bad luck. So those decisions are healthrelated like smoking and drinking and other vices that you talk about having to deal with insurance settling after a car accident. Do you ever get worried about playing into that i guess guess the stereotype that poor people are giving it to themselves . Because you are candid about decisions that might not have been the best in the world. Guest i think that for anybody to try to say that i am human and i have never made a bad decision in my life, i am a saint and you should all be appropriately affordable for the perseverance. Thats ridiculous. Multiperson on this world hasnt made a few mistakes. The difference between rich people and poor people is that when we make mistakes, we cannot cover them. There arent are spots for them. You see an addicted rich person coming to you dont because they take a cab and they go to rehab where they take some personal pride and go to rehab and their insurance covers it and they are in a nice place and they can stay for as long as they need to get healthy. Its not that we make different decisions but its that we cant cover them in the same way. So we pay for our decisions immediately. And we do it in a way that people will never understand because they never know what it is to know that if you screw up even in the slightest amount, of time it could be the ruin of view ruben of you. The privilege is never having to fill feel that this year because that one time that you made a mistake i mean look which respectively have i always made good decisions . Absolutely not. But ive always made the decision that made sense for me at the time. And i have not always had good information and ive made decisions of drunk. Im not going to say that hasnt happened but who hasnt . I mean, how many marriages started drunk . Liked her coke so yes it is playing into that stereotype for anybody that holds onto it and wont get rid of the stereotype that those people arent going to hear what im saying anyway so i dont worry about them. If you are determined to find something in my history that explains the entire American Economy and why so many people are trapped, you are already living in your own world. Get your head out and turn it on. Host i want to read another part. To predict every possible, poor people are not uniquely psychic. Throughout the book you kind of talk about how there are all superhuman expectations for lowincome people while simultaneously being treated like subhuman and that comes across a lot in the different work situations that you describe in the minimum wage work generally. And many people know the minimum wage has decreased and its value by 30 . So, not only is it just a low number but it is worth less than it once was. And yet, you are expected to as the title suggested with your self up on your bootstraps. Can you talk a bit about your Work Experience and how hard this was . Guest i used this metaphor because to lift yourself up by your own bootstraps you need to be able to levitate. And your hands are not going to be free to study the latter is essentially what we are saying is do the impossible in the least to safely possible. And if you managed that, then you are okay. At work we are interchangeable and we are told how interchangeable we are but it hasnt filtered down to the mom and pop but the Large Companies to you within 15 minutes how many people you need to have. So we are okay you need to be inherent fault 15, not 12, 12 30, 12 15. And we dont know how long we are going to keep you because you are out of the schedule until i dont doubt, 2 30 because that is as much as we can afford to have you. But we might need you to stay until 5 00 workers a possibility that that youll get. It will be a slow day because your time is invaluable to us. The profit margin is so valuable that we need you to dictate and plan your life around our profit margin and in exchange for that we are going to give you as little as possible we a