Money for floods: poverty, humanity, and the social contract.
My name is Eliza; I live by the river.
My daughter Louise will be three in July.
If July ever comes; it’s beginning to feel
Like the water will never surrender the field.
Everyone knows
Rivers will swell
But they always find money
They always find money
They always find
Money for floods...
-- 'Money for Floods', Richard Shindell.
I am very sad and sick of heart right now. Before I can properly begin explaining why, I need you -- if you can -- to go and read this link:
Being Poor, by John Scalzi.
I can wait, and it's sort of important to the things I have to say.
Please understand that while I am a very passionate person, with opinions about just about everything under the sun -- my friend Jason and I once played a game where he asked me if I had opinions about random things, and the only thing I had no opinion on at all was the larch tree -- I frequently try to keep those opinions out of my journal, because there's always someone more articulate, more empassioned, and less afraid of alienating the people that they care about. I have friends on both sides of practically every divide, save for a few that are what I consider to be 'deal breakers'; I don't have friends who think it's okay to abuse children or animals, or to sell Missouri to aliens for a handful of magic beans. Almost everything else, however, leaves me with a certain measure of 'I love him/her, and if I don't have to start this fight, why should I?', because I, like most people, am sometimes a coward.
Right now, I don't have the luxury to be a coward, because right now, there is no money for floods. The rivers have swollen, and the water has the fields, and still, there is no money. And this breaks my heart, but sadly, it doesn't surprise me.
My whole life, I've heard people say things about poor people. Lazy. Dirty. Unconcerned with their appearance. Reckless. Bad with money. Unable to plan. Stupid. Violent. Cruel. Uncompassionate. Filthy. Dangerous. It's bad to be poor, it's bad not to have any money, and since America is a good place, full of intrinsically good people, where everyone has an equal chance at everything, well, that means the poor must be all those things and more, huh? Poor people deserve the scorn and the indignity and the mistreatment and the hate, because they wouldn't be poor if they'd just make a little effort. Put forth a little honest sweat from their brows, pull themselves up by their bootstraps, and endure.
And to the people who say those things, I have this to say: fuck you. Fuck you and the horse you rode in on. Fuck your privilege, fuck your attitude, and fuck your shame. Have you ever made cat food casserole for your kids, and hoped that they wouldn't notice? Have you sent your eleven year old to school with cardboard in her shoes? Have you listened to your thirteen year old daughter choking on her own mucus because the state won't give you her pneumonia medication?
Ever wandered through Chuck E. Cheese picking up leftover pizza from abandoned tables? Ever stolen food from a friend because it was that or spend the whole night listening to your baby sisters sob because they were starving? Ever had people make fun of your teeth when there was no money, no free dentistry, and frankly, if the choice was 'floss' or 'mac and cheese', floss always seemed to lose? Ever dug through the dumpster behind K-Mart for school supplies? Cut your daughter's hair in the bathroom? Given your last five bucks to the person two doors down who was worse off than you, and added more water to the soup? Could you identify every edible plant in an urban area by the time you were ten, just because it was something to eat?
If you think I'm exaggerating, I'm probably talking to you. If you're nodding and looking horrified, you understand.
My mother was a high school dropout who moved to California looking for a better life, and wound up with three daughters, trapped in a system that wouldn't let her help herself. Any job she qualified for would pay less than her benefits, and would cut off her food stamps immediately. Why didn't my mother get a job? Not because she was lazy. Because we would have starved to death. We ate rotting meat and covered it with catsup. We learned to cook with government cheese. And we stayed on welfare, because that way, there was at least a little protection from the wolves at the door.
Let me tell you about going to public school as a poor kid. All my clothes were hand-me-downs and charity donations. I was three seasons out of style, if I acknowledged that style existed at all. My mother cut my hair in the bathroom, and did the best she could; when my glasses got broken, they stayed that way for the two years we had to wait before the state would give me a new pair. I learned to hate shoes, because they dissolved around my feet and hurt like hell. In the sixth grade, they ripped my book in half and pelted me with mud because I was so funny-looking in my big-bell jeans and my 1970s-era ski jacket...and that was all I had to wear.
When I was in the fifth grade, a wealthy relative took pity, and bought me all new clothes for school. You wonder why I believe in Stephen King? Because the kids made me their Carrie White. How dare I try to dress like a real person. How dare I believe that I was equal to them. They tormented me so badly that I threw my new green dress away and lied about it until my mother stopped asking. The writing was on the wall: you're not human. You can pretend, but we won't let you get away with it. Don't try.
Don't bother.
Let me tell you about living in apartments that were sweltering in the summer and freezing in the winter, because you couldn't afford heat and there was no AC. There were four of us in three rooms; the living room and the kitchen were connected, and the bedrooms were small. My mother and I shared a bedroom, as did my little sisters; later, my mother moved her bed into the front room, and I had a bedroom to myself -- unheard-of luxury that came about primarily because my weak lungs meant I had pneumonia yearly, and I needed to be able to run a space heater. We gave up the phone so we could give me heat and orange juice and keep me alive. We lived in a neighborhood with the highest crime rate in Concord, we got robbed -- despite having nothing to steal -- three times a year, and still I walked to school alone in the mornings before the sun came up, and still we had to make it three blocks to a payphone if we needed to call the police, because we had no other choice. There was nothing better.
Let me tell you about choosing to go to school without a bath, because the water heater has been broken for three months and it's the middle of January and you can't afford to get sick again, because there's free lunch at school, and heat in the classrooms, and if you don't keep your grades up, you'll never get out of the trap you're growing up inside. Let me tell you about having the other kids call you a pig, because there's no money to wash the clothes, and deodorant costs three bucks a stick, even the cheap stuff, and sorry honey, three bucks buys your baby sister her asthma medication.
I know people who sold sex for money, because they got the sex for free. Poverty makes criminals out of people, even when the crime has no victims, only willing participants. Which doesn't mean that we were angels, because yes, we stole. We stole milk from the store. We stole meat. We stole fresh vegetables, because otherwise, there was nothing green in the whole damn house. We bartered with our neighbors for eggs and bread and cereal. I know my mother stole things other than food, although to her credit, she never once asked us to do the same, but if she swiped a bracelet from the store, she could sell it for ten bucks, and we needed the money more than she needed the pride. It was awful. It was degrading. Other kids got an allowance; I got my mother taking the pennies out of my bank so she could roll them up and turn them into the rent. Every six months, there wouldn't be enough pennies, and we'd move from one shithole to the next, and they just got smaller and smaller, and worse and worse.
Let me tell you about my high school English teacher buying me new glasses, because the state stopped paying for them when I turned sixteen, and I was damn near blind. About missing field trips, school dances, academic decathalons, birthdays, Christmas. Maybe that doesn't sound bad now, but to an eight year old? To a fifteen year old? That's heartbreaking. Let me tell you about boxes of food donated by local churches, about eating canned potatoes, canned chicken, canned everything in the whole damn world.
Let me tell you about dropping out of college because the money just wasn't there, because the scholarships were all for people of different backgrounds, races, faiths or creeds.
What did being poor teach me? It taught me that you're only worth what you look like, and how much you're willing to lie about whether or not that woman with the badly-dyed hair and the rotten teeth is your mother. Intelligence doesn't matter. Willingness to try doesn't matter. It's all about the cold, hard cash.
I used to tell people I didn't want to be human, because frankly, I didn't want to be a part of the way that humans treated one another. As far as most people were concerned, I'd already been less than human, and if they were going to treat me worse than they treated their cats, over things beyond my control, screw it. I wanted to be the cat.
Being poor doesn't always mean that you're lazy, or bad with money, or dirty, or bad. Sometimes it means you've just been trapped by your choices, and you have no way out. I remember people sneering at us when the first of the month would hit and we'd fill our grocery carts in an effort to feed all four of us for the next four weeks. Not because we bought rice and potatoes and bread; no, they'd sneer because there was a cheap steak in there, and a six pack of beer, and maybe some soda for me and the girls. Yeah, well, guess what?
If we didn't spend the money, someone else would steal it. If you don't give small children a treat once in a while, they go insane. If you don't have one meal a month where you feel like a human being with the right to eat something that tastes like more than ashes and decay, you get just as bad. If we used that money to buy more 'staples', they would go bad and decay. Who are you to judge, with your three gallons of ice cream and your credit card and your clean clothes? These are not excuses. These are the facts of life that I grew up with. Once a month, maybe, you get steak. You get soda. And people glare at you for it, because you're still the Carrie, you're still the fucking pig who doesn't bathe, and how dare you pretend to be a person?
That's what I learned from being poor. That's what I learned about being poor in America. And that's why I got out as soon as I could. I moved in with friends at the age of fourteen; I surfed couches, I slept in easy chairs, I walked away from my family, and I did it because I couldn't save them. I could barely save myself.
Where the hell was the money for the flood that never goes away? See the waterline? Fuck you if you think I lived there by some sort of choice. I never had a choice. Not until the water was closing over my head.
But here's the thing. I was underwater for most of my childhood, yes; I was miserable, I was flailing, and there are times when I nearly died. But I never did die. Do I feel that there should have been more options? Yes. My childhood is why I will always support free health care, free dentistry, sane support for mothers with children who are attempting to make sure they don't get stuck in that river forever, job counseling...the list goes on, and on, and never ends. And at the same time...
Societies exist to take care of their poor. We are failing. We have been failing for some time. We were failing twenty years ago, when I nearly died of pneumonia for the first time; we're failing now, and the cracks in the levee just keep getting worse and worse, while no one comes to fix them. Despite that, until Katrina, until New Orleans, I was starting to believe that we, as a society, possessed the maturity and the compassion not to treat the poor of the world like Carrie White.
I hate being wrong.
Why didn't they leave New Orleans? Because the money wasn't there. Because Katrina hit before the welfare checks came; because there were no cars, no buses, and noplace to go. If you'd told my mother, when I was eleven and we were trying to cling to the riverbanks, that there was going to be another earthquake and so we should leave, she'd have laughed in your face. Move three kids, and the cat the eldest won't give up, and the breathing equipment for the youngest, and their clothes, and the few beautiful things that make life worth continuing to fight for, and do it without a car, in less than two days, knowing that when you come back, even if the quake never comes, everything else will be gone? When there have been other quakes, other storms, other floods, and they were held back? No. Not happening.
Society told New Orleans 'there is money for floods; there are dams against the water'. Society told the poor 'you haven't got anything, so leave it behind', and forgot that the less you have, the more it matters. I give up jeans when they stop fitting me, but as a child, I wore them until they were so tight they literally chafed me bloody. That's the difference above and below the water. That's what the people on the surface can't see.
The people who stayed were the ones who will always stay; the ones who have so little to lose that what they lose will be 'everything'. They were the ones already living in the water, and they believed that we would save them. I would have believed the same thing, if I were in their shoes.
They won't make that mistake again.
Neither will I.
My daughter Louise will be three in July.
If July ever comes; it’s beginning to feel
Like the water will never surrender the field.
Everyone knows
Rivers will swell
But they always find money
They always find money
They always find
Money for floods...
-- 'Money for Floods', Richard Shindell.
I am very sad and sick of heart right now. Before I can properly begin explaining why, I need you -- if you can -- to go and read this link:
Being Poor, by John Scalzi.
I can wait, and it's sort of important to the things I have to say.
Please understand that while I am a very passionate person, with opinions about just about everything under the sun -- my friend Jason and I once played a game where he asked me if I had opinions about random things, and the only thing I had no opinion on at all was the larch tree -- I frequently try to keep those opinions out of my journal, because there's always someone more articulate, more empassioned, and less afraid of alienating the people that they care about. I have friends on both sides of practically every divide, save for a few that are what I consider to be 'deal breakers'; I don't have friends who think it's okay to abuse children or animals, or to sell Missouri to aliens for a handful of magic beans. Almost everything else, however, leaves me with a certain measure of 'I love him/her, and if I don't have to start this fight, why should I?', because I, like most people, am sometimes a coward.
Right now, I don't have the luxury to be a coward, because right now, there is no money for floods. The rivers have swollen, and the water has the fields, and still, there is no money. And this breaks my heart, but sadly, it doesn't surprise me.
My whole life, I've heard people say things about poor people. Lazy. Dirty. Unconcerned with their appearance. Reckless. Bad with money. Unable to plan. Stupid. Violent. Cruel. Uncompassionate. Filthy. Dangerous. It's bad to be poor, it's bad not to have any money, and since America is a good place, full of intrinsically good people, where everyone has an equal chance at everything, well, that means the poor must be all those things and more, huh? Poor people deserve the scorn and the indignity and the mistreatment and the hate, because they wouldn't be poor if they'd just make a little effort. Put forth a little honest sweat from their brows, pull themselves up by their bootstraps, and endure.
And to the people who say those things, I have this to say: fuck you. Fuck you and the horse you rode in on. Fuck your privilege, fuck your attitude, and fuck your shame. Have you ever made cat food casserole for your kids, and hoped that they wouldn't notice? Have you sent your eleven year old to school with cardboard in her shoes? Have you listened to your thirteen year old daughter choking on her own mucus because the state won't give you her pneumonia medication?
Ever wandered through Chuck E. Cheese picking up leftover pizza from abandoned tables? Ever stolen food from a friend because it was that or spend the whole night listening to your baby sisters sob because they were starving? Ever had people make fun of your teeth when there was no money, no free dentistry, and frankly, if the choice was 'floss' or 'mac and cheese', floss always seemed to lose? Ever dug through the dumpster behind K-Mart for school supplies? Cut your daughter's hair in the bathroom? Given your last five bucks to the person two doors down who was worse off than you, and added more water to the soup? Could you identify every edible plant in an urban area by the time you were ten, just because it was something to eat?
If you think I'm exaggerating, I'm probably talking to you. If you're nodding and looking horrified, you understand.
My mother was a high school dropout who moved to California looking for a better life, and wound up with three daughters, trapped in a system that wouldn't let her help herself. Any job she qualified for would pay less than her benefits, and would cut off her food stamps immediately. Why didn't my mother get a job? Not because she was lazy. Because we would have starved to death. We ate rotting meat and covered it with catsup. We learned to cook with government cheese. And we stayed on welfare, because that way, there was at least a little protection from the wolves at the door.
Let me tell you about going to public school as a poor kid. All my clothes were hand-me-downs and charity donations. I was three seasons out of style, if I acknowledged that style existed at all. My mother cut my hair in the bathroom, and did the best she could; when my glasses got broken, they stayed that way for the two years we had to wait before the state would give me a new pair. I learned to hate shoes, because they dissolved around my feet and hurt like hell. In the sixth grade, they ripped my book in half and pelted me with mud because I was so funny-looking in my big-bell jeans and my 1970s-era ski jacket...and that was all I had to wear.
When I was in the fifth grade, a wealthy relative took pity, and bought me all new clothes for school. You wonder why I believe in Stephen King? Because the kids made me their Carrie White. How dare I try to dress like a real person. How dare I believe that I was equal to them. They tormented me so badly that I threw my new green dress away and lied about it until my mother stopped asking. The writing was on the wall: you're not human. You can pretend, but we won't let you get away with it. Don't try.
Don't bother.
Let me tell you about living in apartments that were sweltering in the summer and freezing in the winter, because you couldn't afford heat and there was no AC. There were four of us in three rooms; the living room and the kitchen were connected, and the bedrooms were small. My mother and I shared a bedroom, as did my little sisters; later, my mother moved her bed into the front room, and I had a bedroom to myself -- unheard-of luxury that came about primarily because my weak lungs meant I had pneumonia yearly, and I needed to be able to run a space heater. We gave up the phone so we could give me heat and orange juice and keep me alive. We lived in a neighborhood with the highest crime rate in Concord, we got robbed -- despite having nothing to steal -- three times a year, and still I walked to school alone in the mornings before the sun came up, and still we had to make it three blocks to a payphone if we needed to call the police, because we had no other choice. There was nothing better.
Let me tell you about choosing to go to school without a bath, because the water heater has been broken for three months and it's the middle of January and you can't afford to get sick again, because there's free lunch at school, and heat in the classrooms, and if you don't keep your grades up, you'll never get out of the trap you're growing up inside. Let me tell you about having the other kids call you a pig, because there's no money to wash the clothes, and deodorant costs three bucks a stick, even the cheap stuff, and sorry honey, three bucks buys your baby sister her asthma medication.
I know people who sold sex for money, because they got the sex for free. Poverty makes criminals out of people, even when the crime has no victims, only willing participants. Which doesn't mean that we were angels, because yes, we stole. We stole milk from the store. We stole meat. We stole fresh vegetables, because otherwise, there was nothing green in the whole damn house. We bartered with our neighbors for eggs and bread and cereal. I know my mother stole things other than food, although to her credit, she never once asked us to do the same, but if she swiped a bracelet from the store, she could sell it for ten bucks, and we needed the money more than she needed the pride. It was awful. It was degrading. Other kids got an allowance; I got my mother taking the pennies out of my bank so she could roll them up and turn them into the rent. Every six months, there wouldn't be enough pennies, and we'd move from one shithole to the next, and they just got smaller and smaller, and worse and worse.
Let me tell you about my high school English teacher buying me new glasses, because the state stopped paying for them when I turned sixteen, and I was damn near blind. About missing field trips, school dances, academic decathalons, birthdays, Christmas. Maybe that doesn't sound bad now, but to an eight year old? To a fifteen year old? That's heartbreaking. Let me tell you about boxes of food donated by local churches, about eating canned potatoes, canned chicken, canned everything in the whole damn world.
Let me tell you about dropping out of college because the money just wasn't there, because the scholarships were all for people of different backgrounds, races, faiths or creeds.
What did being poor teach me? It taught me that you're only worth what you look like, and how much you're willing to lie about whether or not that woman with the badly-dyed hair and the rotten teeth is your mother. Intelligence doesn't matter. Willingness to try doesn't matter. It's all about the cold, hard cash.
I used to tell people I didn't want to be human, because frankly, I didn't want to be a part of the way that humans treated one another. As far as most people were concerned, I'd already been less than human, and if they were going to treat me worse than they treated their cats, over things beyond my control, screw it. I wanted to be the cat.
Being poor doesn't always mean that you're lazy, or bad with money, or dirty, or bad. Sometimes it means you've just been trapped by your choices, and you have no way out. I remember people sneering at us when the first of the month would hit and we'd fill our grocery carts in an effort to feed all four of us for the next four weeks. Not because we bought rice and potatoes and bread; no, they'd sneer because there was a cheap steak in there, and a six pack of beer, and maybe some soda for me and the girls. Yeah, well, guess what?
If we didn't spend the money, someone else would steal it. If you don't give small children a treat once in a while, they go insane. If you don't have one meal a month where you feel like a human being with the right to eat something that tastes like more than ashes and decay, you get just as bad. If we used that money to buy more 'staples', they would go bad and decay. Who are you to judge, with your three gallons of ice cream and your credit card and your clean clothes? These are not excuses. These are the facts of life that I grew up with. Once a month, maybe, you get steak. You get soda. And people glare at you for it, because you're still the Carrie, you're still the fucking pig who doesn't bathe, and how dare you pretend to be a person?
That's what I learned from being poor. That's what I learned about being poor in America. And that's why I got out as soon as I could. I moved in with friends at the age of fourteen; I surfed couches, I slept in easy chairs, I walked away from my family, and I did it because I couldn't save them. I could barely save myself.
Where the hell was the money for the flood that never goes away? See the waterline? Fuck you if you think I lived there by some sort of choice. I never had a choice. Not until the water was closing over my head.
But here's the thing. I was underwater for most of my childhood, yes; I was miserable, I was flailing, and there are times when I nearly died. But I never did die. Do I feel that there should have been more options? Yes. My childhood is why I will always support free health care, free dentistry, sane support for mothers with children who are attempting to make sure they don't get stuck in that river forever, job counseling...the list goes on, and on, and never ends. And at the same time...
Societies exist to take care of their poor. We are failing. We have been failing for some time. We were failing twenty years ago, when I nearly died of pneumonia for the first time; we're failing now, and the cracks in the levee just keep getting worse and worse, while no one comes to fix them. Despite that, until Katrina, until New Orleans, I was starting to believe that we, as a society, possessed the maturity and the compassion not to treat the poor of the world like Carrie White.
I hate being wrong.
Why didn't they leave New Orleans? Because the money wasn't there. Because Katrina hit before the welfare checks came; because there were no cars, no buses, and noplace to go. If you'd told my mother, when I was eleven and we were trying to cling to the riverbanks, that there was going to be another earthquake and so we should leave, she'd have laughed in your face. Move three kids, and the cat the eldest won't give up, and the breathing equipment for the youngest, and their clothes, and the few beautiful things that make life worth continuing to fight for, and do it without a car, in less than two days, knowing that when you come back, even if the quake never comes, everything else will be gone? When there have been other quakes, other storms, other floods, and they were held back? No. Not happening.
Society told New Orleans 'there is money for floods; there are dams against the water'. Society told the poor 'you haven't got anything, so leave it behind', and forgot that the less you have, the more it matters. I give up jeans when they stop fitting me, but as a child, I wore them until they were so tight they literally chafed me bloody. That's the difference above and below the water. That's what the people on the surface can't see.
The people who stayed were the ones who will always stay; the ones who have so little to lose that what they lose will be 'everything'. They were the ones already living in the water, and they believed that we would save them. I would have believed the same thing, if I were in their shoes.
They won't make that mistake again.
Neither will I.