I have been poor and dirty. We didn’t keep a very clean house growing up. My mom had multiple sclerosis, so it was often difficult for her to get around. There were the three of us with my brother and I sharing a two-bedroom, 900 square foot house. My mom was largely divorced from the hustle-bustle of society due to her affliction and often lived vicariously through programs on the television. Her parents were very strict growing up and this fostered in her a deep distrust of the religious institutions and hierarchical authority structures that attempted so intrusively to influence her childhood. It probably translated into her taste in guys and… as I said… it was just the three of us. We took advantage of her kindness. She didn’t like to discipline… this woman hated authority, so we pushed her until she disciplined in ways that made her cry for hours afterward. Us too.
I have been rich and dirty. The money I made when I was on the fire department was more than I had ever seen. More than I knew what to do with. Because of my position and the connections with powerful people I received side-jobs requiring little to no effort in the interview process. I got to be in charge of a classroom in the public school system and even teach EMS at the local community college. I worked hard at those jobs and gave my heart to them, make no mistake. I loved being an educator. I was good at it. But it’s not why I got the job.
And as I became more aware of the world around me, I saw that my small piles came with the knowledge of and complacency with the huge sacs of cash going out the back door. Hard-working every-day people’s money. Given to the friends of transportation secretaries who secretly run our city or retired bureaucrats collecting no-bid contracts on marked-up supply orders from the entire city’s departmental bureaucracy. Why that sounds like a lot of money, no? Legal money-laundering schemes the likes of a damn mafia movie. Rich and dirty.
I did not come from money. When I left my work at the fire department, I left the income that came with it. I left the socioeconomic status that came with it too. My severance cleared me of my own debts that had ballooned out of control and bought my family and I a few months of quiet contemplation, but it was a one-time check to balance the score, sort of.
The conditions that were my reality and were barely satiated when I was there - child support, utilities, groceries, rising fuel prices, etc. - have returned me to the grips of poverty whence, I came, and in short order. Now, however I wear the hat, not of the child lamenting his poverty, but of the parent who is in full command of every plan I wreck. And I know it.
Coming from money, also known as generational wealth, is enmeshed with the false narrative that “everything is going to be fine.” Comfort steeped in what we know. When the prescribed identity and financial lifestyle tied to a profession is gone, going broke has a different meaning to those with the means - or familial means - that is. Learning what reality is removes the veil.
For the poor buggers who, by no fault of their own, were born on the “wrong” side of that system, the Caste system of the United States becomes glaringly obvious. Generational poverty is not a consequence of poor morals or one’s failure to thrive in a meritocratic system. It was designed that way, friends.
I went from making $78,000 dollars a year to qualifying for the maximum allowance of food stamps. We are getting along, but I cannot help but wonder “Is this our idea of scholarship?” And in order to ascend from said poverty (a verb that implies through its opposite descent that there is something inherently bad from whence we came, something that must be discarded) must I agree to chain myself to decades of student loan debt that leaves me beholden to a new owner?
We have people in our society for whom the government and oligarchs need to be cogs. Those who follow the orders. And a need for the lever pullers too. Those who administrate the orders. And then there are those very few who pull the strings.
The positions change by their fiscal prerogative, bouncing between private and government positions to squeeze every last penny they can from the American people. They manipulate the fabric of the social order with divisive propaganda, trauma porn, and a self-serving tax code. Our dollars find their way into corrupt hands from the local office supply racketeering to the CIA funding right-wing terrorist militias the worlds over, while the FBI undermines black, brown, and politically dissident communities using the mafias as strong-men and drug dealers for the State. Say with me one more time… Rich and Dirty.
Is my scholarship not meant to look in this direction? It cannot be unseen. And there are few places in our society for people like that. The ones who won’t ignore or look away.
Many of my bills are still based upon when I was a respected member/worker/cog of society. The state does not believe that my ability to earn is inhibited by university, a degreed internship, or a new salary that qualifies my family for food stamps. That has meant a great deal of time contemplating where I am in my life… which usually includes a list of who doesn’t get paid this month. It is a balance… of sorts.
This is where I sit, doublebound yet without regret. As the book title by Samuel Beckket goes, I can’t go on I’ll go on. I’ll let you know when my hand starts filling up with hopes, but for now I’ll continue hope-free as opposed to filling the other up with the bullshit. So long as there are power structures that can enforce laws by the barrel of a gun, America will retain its own Caste system, at it’s top what George Carlin referred to as “The Big Club.” He went on to say this:
It’s a big club, and you ain’t in it. You and I are not in the big club.
The owners of this country don’t want [an educated public] that. The real owners. The big wealthy business interests that control things and make all the important decisions. Forget the politicians. The politicians are put there to give you the idea that you have freedom of choice. You don’t. You have no choice. You have owners. They own everything. They own all the important land. They own and control all the corporations. They’ve long since bought and paid for the Senate, The Congress, the state houses, the city halls, they got the judges in their back and they own all the big media companies, so they control just about all the news and information you get to hear. They got ya by the balls!
They want obedient workers. Obedient workers. People who are just smart enough to run the machines do the paperwork and just dumb enough to passively accept all these increasingly shittier jobs with the lower pay the longer hours the reduced benefits, the end of overtime, and the vanishing pension that disappears the moment you go to collect it.
That last line hit hard when its context found me where I was at in my life.
Someone far greater in depth of vision than I imparted this on me: “you are planting seeds now, and they are being planted in you. Be patient that this will make more sense in time. That which is on the tip of your tongue is still growing inside of you. Allow things to marinate.”
Perhaps this work will find value with folks in such a degree that money will follow. The class structures we have do not define the person. I can say that firsthand. The perceived worth the State had in me drastically changed with my tax filing status. As did the opinions from others. That was not me though, nor was the persona I and we put on to others and to ourselves. Our intrinsic value, the atman, is not the accumulation of our ideas about the world and ourselves.
This was and continues to not be about money. If it was, I would be going to get that instead of writing this. The value was always in the good works. Christ was on to something when he spoke to the Jews who wished to stone him at the temple in Jerusalem.
“Many good works have I shown you from the Father; for which of those works do ye stone me?” To which his would-be assailants answered him, saying, For a good work we stone thee not; but for blasphemy.” So why does our culture continue stone those whose good works blaspheme against where the perceived value lies? Is it blasphemy to point out what is so glaringly obvious in our troubled times? Is this sanity in an insane time?
Maybe I needed to feel it again, from this aperture. I still held undeveloped childhood emotions around poverty. I recall the old adage “be wary of unearned wisdom.” Perhaps this is where I earn my keep to speak on these matters as we trudge headfirst into the Anthropocene.
Now I am learning to live poor and clean. I have been in hundreds of houses over the years where the inhabitants hadn’t two nickels to rub together yet the house was immaculate. I have no money to my name, yet I have wealth abound. My friends and family. The people who come here to sit with me and the grand conversations that ensue. That is where the value is. The human experience. We are conduits of the undifferentiated consciousness. I have witnessed it firsthand through the kindness of my friends and family as through the kindness of complete strangers. It’s in the eyes. That was there all along, as it was for all of us. It is our birthright. If we let what we are told is more important to get in the way - money, status, face - when the money is gone, so will what didn’t require levying taxes on an already burdened working-class population, those very people for which we depend on the most.
The late blues singer Lightning Hopkins wrote a wonderful song; I cannot recommend it more. When I heard him from the grave come over the demon-box (cell-phone) I heard these words:
I just wanna live between rich and poor.
You know a rich man ain't got a chance to go to heaven and a poor man got a hard way to go…
When some people shuffle the mortal coil, their heirs are left with Asset Transfers, inheritances. The deaths of the rest of us are felt in the manner by which we lived our lives, the memories our descendants will have to remember us by, because if one thing’s for sure, it ain’t the money honey.