Editor’s Note: Allison Hepler is a Woolwich Selectman and a candidate for Maine House District 53, the seat held by incumbent Jeffrey K. Pierce, R- Dresden. Will Neilson of Arrowsic is running for that seat as well.

I teach history at a Maine college, and today I was both proud of and also alarmed by my students who, in a discussion of a novel about the American dream, concluded that, in the end, it was unattainable for a single black woman in the 1940s. As we talked why the main character “couldn’t make it” in the land of opportunity, students identified racism and sexism. Then the discussion turned to poverty as a reason for the character’s failure to achieve the American Dream. My students know this world all too well — one is on MaineCare but only until she turned 21, which would also be when her student loans start to come due. Her father is ill. Another student’s mother is disabled, and they receive food stamps. A third student lives with her parents, one of whom works nights. The other parent, if she worked at a minimum wage job, would lose MaineCare for her children.

What struck me was not only the challenges that these students face in trying to achieve some version of success in their own lives by going to college, but that they began to understand that structural forces in the fictional character’s life could also apply to them, and that their struggles were not theirs alone. They eloquently, by telling their own stories, acknowledged a broken system of social services in the state of Maine, and, with my prodding, I hope begin to fight for changes that matter in their own lives and those of their families and future families — for the expansion of MaineCare, for a livable minimum wage, for continued mental health services, and for reducing the stigma and the sense of shame that exists around too many poor and working class people in this state. We must do better by these young people. Their success helps all of us. And I urge people to keep this in mind as we consider social welfare policies right now.

Allison Hepler,

Woolwich