10,000 Words Part 84: Poor

We found that we hated the poor. It wasn’t sudden, exactly, it was more that it had crept up on us. And suddenly we knew it like we knew our own names. It didn’t matter why they were poor, only that they were. The circumstances did not make them any more human to us.
Work was the meaning of life and those who wouldn’t or couldn’t work were meaningless. Those who worked for less pay than us were worthless.
It wasn’t that we were angry with the poor. Nobody had felt anything like anger for years. We hated them dispassionately.