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Sep. 13th, 2005 10:07 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
sophiaserpentiaYou. Yes, you, reading my blog.
If you found yourself utterly penniless and without resources, would you be able to survive? I know some of you have already been there and survived it, or are surviving it now. Myself, i've never been quite penniless; i have been through times where i had $10 to last me a week, and i've been through extended rough periods of extreme bill-juggling, and still live basically paycheck to paycheck, but i've never been without resources. I've never been homeless.
I've been close enough to destitute, though, at times that i feel i have some idea how rough it would be to face life with no resources and no prospects.
So, picture this. You have no money. You own maybe a few changes of worn-out clothes and a few other personal effects. You have no training and no education. You were malnourished as a child (which is known to cause lifelong neurological problems) and were probably exposed to pollutants spewed out by some nearby factory. You have a kid who's starving. What would you do?
Start your own business? For that you need money. But who is going to give you money? Maybe someone in your family. But everyone in your family is as dirt-poor as you, or they are just scraping by in their own way. Maybe you could scrape together enough money to buy a mop and a bucket and a uniform and farm yourself out as an enterprising entrepreneur. That is, if you can find someplace which doesn't already have its janitorial needs covered.
Get a job, so that you can save up the money to start a business? People who have been homeless or destitute have told me of the immense hurdles they have to jump just to be able to find work. You have to have decent clothes. You have to have a permanent address. You have to have ID. You have to have people skills. You have to find an employer who is relatively unprejudiced against you. You have to be willing to suffer all kinds of indignities at the hands of supervisors who know you are entirely replaceable.
This scenario, of course, has left out the kind of misfortune that strikes worst against those who are the most resourceless. If you get sick, or your kid gets sick, you lose your job (you are that replaceable) and go back to square one. You can have your money planned out perfectly, only to have your secondhand car break down or your glasses break or your kid's school uniform prices go up. You can lose your job at any time. In my own experience, these unplanned calamities are what primarily makes it difficult to make lasting improvement in your life when you're down.
Those who have never faced that kind of adversity have no idea how challenging it is just to get by, much less to make improvements in one's life. They can't imagine being without backup resources like school or family. School? That has to be paid for somehow. Government assistance? Incredibly bureaucratic (you have all your papers, don't you?), undignified, and disempowering -- and frequently taken away from you at random even once you've been approved for it. Family? Having no family to call on for help is a huge factor -- which is why a disproportionate number of homeless people are queer.
It can take sustained assistance from a friend or family member for over a year to be able to climb out of the pit once you're completely down.
It is true that some people "climb out" of destitution and make a decent life for themselves. But in the United States there is a total lack of appreciation for the obstacles people face when they are truly destitute. It is acceptable and even traditional to blame those who don't have the luck to avoid calamity, who don't have family to call for help, when they are unable to weather severe adversity. (Never mind that in fact poverty in this country is expanding, not contracting; more and more of us are buckling under to the shocks of adversity.)
One in four Americans blame the poor of New Orleans for their predicament after Hurricane Katrina. One in four.
So, still imagining that you are destitute? Perhaps you've managed to get a roof over your head and have a little cash for food every week. Now imagine that you live in New Orleans and Hurricane Katrina is coming your way. You have $10 in your pocket, and no car. One of your friends has a car, but wants you to help pay for gas. Okay, great. Where are you going to go? You don't have the money for a hotel. So you're going to leave behind what little you've scraped together to go sleep in a ditch in North Louisiana? You go to your friend's house to find they've taken the car and left.
Fast forward two weeks. You don't know where your kid is, the two of you were separated during the evacuation. You waded through flood water for two hours, past floating corpses, and are now severely dehydrated. Some of your friends didn't make it; they're dead. You were shot at by Jefferson Parish deputies trying to walk out of the hellhole your city had become. Then you hear that one in four of your "fellow" American citizens think you are responsible for your own predicament.
If you lived in Cuba instead, there would have been provisions to get you and your kid safely out of the lowlands. You would not have been told by people around you that adversity is your own fault. So, alright, living in Communist Cuba you'd have other problems, but at least your society cares about you enough to get you out of the way of a frickin' hurricane.
Not so in the "land of the free," where it's perfectly okay to leave poor people to die.
If you found yourself utterly penniless and without resources, would you be able to survive? I know some of you have already been there and survived it, or are surviving it now. Myself, i've never been quite penniless; i have been through times where i had $10 to last me a week, and i've been through extended rough periods of extreme bill-juggling, and still live basically paycheck to paycheck, but i've never been without resources. I've never been homeless.
I've been close enough to destitute, though, at times that i feel i have some idea how rough it would be to face life with no resources and no prospects.
So, picture this. You have no money. You own maybe a few changes of worn-out clothes and a few other personal effects. You have no training and no education. You were malnourished as a child (which is known to cause lifelong neurological problems) and were probably exposed to pollutants spewed out by some nearby factory. You have a kid who's starving. What would you do?
Start your own business? For that you need money. But who is going to give you money? Maybe someone in your family. But everyone in your family is as dirt-poor as you, or they are just scraping by in their own way. Maybe you could scrape together enough money to buy a mop and a bucket and a uniform and farm yourself out as an enterprising entrepreneur. That is, if you can find someplace which doesn't already have its janitorial needs covered.
Get a job, so that you can save up the money to start a business? People who have been homeless or destitute have told me of the immense hurdles they have to jump just to be able to find work. You have to have decent clothes. You have to have a permanent address. You have to have ID. You have to have people skills. You have to find an employer who is relatively unprejudiced against you. You have to be willing to suffer all kinds of indignities at the hands of supervisors who know you are entirely replaceable.
This scenario, of course, has left out the kind of misfortune that strikes worst against those who are the most resourceless. If you get sick, or your kid gets sick, you lose your job (you are that replaceable) and go back to square one. You can have your money planned out perfectly, only to have your secondhand car break down or your glasses break or your kid's school uniform prices go up. You can lose your job at any time. In my own experience, these unplanned calamities are what primarily makes it difficult to make lasting improvement in your life when you're down.
Those who have never faced that kind of adversity have no idea how challenging it is just to get by, much less to make improvements in one's life. They can't imagine being without backup resources like school or family. School? That has to be paid for somehow. Government assistance? Incredibly bureaucratic (you have all your papers, don't you?), undignified, and disempowering -- and frequently taken away from you at random even once you've been approved for it. Family? Having no family to call on for help is a huge factor -- which is why a disproportionate number of homeless people are queer.
It can take sustained assistance from a friend or family member for over a year to be able to climb out of the pit once you're completely down.
It is true that some people "climb out" of destitution and make a decent life for themselves. But in the United States there is a total lack of appreciation for the obstacles people face when they are truly destitute. It is acceptable and even traditional to blame those who don't have the luck to avoid calamity, who don't have family to call for help, when they are unable to weather severe adversity. (Never mind that in fact poverty in this country is expanding, not contracting; more and more of us are buckling under to the shocks of adversity.)
One in four Americans blame the poor of New Orleans for their predicament after Hurricane Katrina. One in four.
So, still imagining that you are destitute? Perhaps you've managed to get a roof over your head and have a little cash for food every week. Now imagine that you live in New Orleans and Hurricane Katrina is coming your way. You have $10 in your pocket, and no car. One of your friends has a car, but wants you to help pay for gas. Okay, great. Where are you going to go? You don't have the money for a hotel. So you're going to leave behind what little you've scraped together to go sleep in a ditch in North Louisiana? You go to your friend's house to find they've taken the car and left.
Fast forward two weeks. You don't know where your kid is, the two of you were separated during the evacuation. You waded through flood water for two hours, past floating corpses, and are now severely dehydrated. Some of your friends didn't make it; they're dead. You were shot at by Jefferson Parish deputies trying to walk out of the hellhole your city had become. Then you hear that one in four of your "fellow" American citizens think you are responsible for your own predicament.
If you lived in Cuba instead, there would have been provisions to get you and your kid safely out of the lowlands. You would not have been told by people around you that adversity is your own fault. So, alright, living in Communist Cuba you'd have other problems, but at least your society cares about you enough to get you out of the way of a frickin' hurricane.
Not so in the "land of the free," where it's perfectly okay to leave poor people to die.
