Linda Tirado also known as Killer Martini was just another struggling, lower-middle class American working two jobs and balancing school until she wrote a blog post about how poverty directly impacts her decision making. The 31-year-old Utah resident’s missive “Why I Make Terrible Decisions, or, poverty thoughts” — which she wrote under her commenter name Killer Martinis — lent some anecdotal evidence to scientific research published in August that found poverty influenced decision making and cognitive functioning. Tirado’s post struck a nerve and she has raised over $60,000 in the last week via GoFundMe.
The mother of two, who is keeping both of her jobs despite the goodwill towards her book project, hasn’t been without her critics in her short time in the limelight, receiving hate mail and menacing phone calls. Chronic stress and exhaustion, she explained, left her little bandwidth for good planning and decision-making, or for basic health and dental care. Her piece transpires in a grinding, perpetual present tense, both urgent and fatalistic: “You have to understand that we know that we will never not feel tired,” she wrote. “We will never feel hopeful. We will never get a vacation. Ever. We know that the very act of being poor guarantees that we will never not be poor.”
It’s a decent bet, however, that Tirado’s story is largely true, thanks to reporting by The Nation’s Michelle Goldberg, who interviewed Linda Tirado and one of her former employers, Ryan Clayton (who attested both to Tirado’s diligence and her damaged teeth). And plenty of fair-minded people, including her GoFundMe benefactors, could readily accept the idea that Linda Tirado —despite the house her parents helped her get, despite the advantages of social class and cultural capital that secure you a spot at Cranbrook or on the homepage of a Gawker Media site—believes herself to be “a poor person,” a thinker of “poverty thoughts.” But the fact is that Linda Tirado, the woman who explained poverty to the nation, is almost certainly not one of the 50 million Americans now living in poverty. “Broke” or “downwardly mobile,” maybe, but not poor. And that says less about Tirado’s credibility than it does about our stringent standards for defining poverty in America.
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