As I anxiously await the debate tonight, I am struck by an Facebook exchange on a friend’s Facebook page, which addressed one of the major issues that lies in the shadows, but is nonetheless very much present: poverty and public policy.

Anna Hsiao read Ayla Ryan’s wrenching autobiographical story, “What Being Poor Really Means,” and remarked:

I guess it’s easy to take money away from starving children when they aren’t yours. Right, Mr. Romney?

Eli Gashi, a mutual friend from Kosovo and a former student at The New School wondered:

How can people vote for Romney – I dont get it

Anna Hsiao responded:

It’s pure ideology… They’re voting for his money, because that’s somehow gonna make them rich, too.

Muma Honeychild, a friend of Anna’s from Poland, whom I don’t know, insisted:

but how, really?

Anna:

Like it requires rational cause-effect thinking! We are masters of voting against our own interest – Bush’s two terms, hello….

While, Aron Hsiao, Anna’s husband and a student of mine, offered a different theory:

People mistake the absence of misfortune and a hindsight of fortuity for moral and ethical superiority. It’s a monotheist and specifically Protestant tendency, to my eye. “You’re suffering? Well, I haven’t suffered. God and the universe have punished you and rewarded me. . . .

Read more: Romney – Ryan on Poverty: A Question and Exchange