$2.00 a Day: Living on Almost Nothing in America

I can't find the source now, but last week I saw an image on Facebook that read something along these lines:
It doesn't matter if the shelves are empty, if you can't afford to buy what was on them.It doesn't matter if the hospitals are full, if you don't have health insurance or transportation to get there.It doesn't matter if you're told to stay at home, if you don't have a home to stay in.

I was thinking about that a lot as I read this book, and thinking about how the people within these pages would have responded to COVID-19 - because the fact is, little would change in their lives, because they couldn't afford (literally) to shelter in place or social distance. Not the woman who runs a business out of her house in Mississippi, nor the single mother in Chicago that's always trying to find work and scrape together necessities while staying in a shelter.

It's an immense privilege to be able to not only stay home, but to work from home, as I am doing, and my eyes are opened to that more and more the longer this goes on. And the ones who can least afford to be infected are the ones that often are, because of the impossibility of these measures for them.

Very glad I read this. 4.5 stars (I would have liked a little more depth, and also some aspects already felt a bit dated).