I have lived all over this country. DC. Denver, Silicon Valley. Boston. And I’ve seen poverty.

But Mississippi poverty is a special kind of hell, a horror that the rest of the US is lucky enough to not know.

I’ve seen children living in shantytowns built out of scrap aluminum.

2/ I have seen a trailer park have a sewage line burst and the waste make a pond. And because there is barely any government oversight, I’ve seen poor residents have to keep living there breathing it, day in and day out.

3/ Mississippi had the second highest teen pregnancy rate when I was in high school.

Many of my classmates had children, and it was not uncommon for my classmates to bring preschool siblings to high school to babysit, because their parents were working.

4/ All of this is to say, it gets me really mad when people like Mayo Pete suggest the answer to poverty is a lack of role models.

It is so much more complicated and so much more horrible than that. It’s a result of a system failing them, not a person failing.