Posted on by Fred

Finding Joy… Even in Poverty

The title sounds like some sort of seminar.  I can almost hear the enthusiastic voice of some 20-year-old guru asking for a show of hands. I can easily imagine him saying, “That’s perfect!  Great.  Love the involvement.  The message is really getting through.”

For the record, I would prefer to be stripped naked, tied to an anthill, and coated in honey than to do any such presentation.  Salesmanship makes my skin crawl.  I had to sell DirecTV for several months, and I would need to go home every night and try to remind myself that I was not inherently evil; I was just doing evil things for a little while so I could eat.  That sort of equivocation does little for one’s soul.

No, this isn’t a sales pitch.  If it were up to me, you would buy nothing ever again because money would cease to exist.  If you’re listening to this anywhere other than Patreon, you’ll have to tolerate a commercial in a little while, but I won’t be selling joy.  I don’t believe it can be sold.  “Life is pain, Highness.  Anyone who says differently is selling something,” as Wesley reminded Buttercup.

So, what the hell do I mean about Finding Joy Even In Poverty?  How stupid is that?  Shouldn’t I be ashamed of myself?  Frankly, I’m ashamed of myself for many, many things.  This just isn’t one of them.  Why?

I manage to find Joy even while I live only a few dollars above the Poverty Line.  I do that by recognizing the difference between what I need and what I want.  As it turns out, I don’t even want all that much anymore. 

I need a place to live and sleep.  I need food.  I need something to drink.  I need insulin and my other medications.  I need the needles so I can take my insulin.  I have those things covered.

I want the equipment to do my show well.  I want this computer so I can write.  I want enough soda to make it possible for me to exist.  I want enough cigarettes to keep from killing Speedy Shine.  I want a little weed so I can loosen up my brain and slow down my stress.  I have those things covered, too.

I wouldn’t object to having better equipment, but I think my show sounds great with what I have.  I wouldn’t mind having more space for my books, but I can get access to most of them now, anyway, so it’s fine.  I lost the desire for nice clothes seven years ago.  A friend sent me some new ones anyway a couple of weeks ago.  They’re the first I’ve had since I quit teaching.  I didn’t need them, but I’m certainly happy to have them. 

When you’ve lived without for long enough, you realize how much you don’t really need anyway.  I’m fortunate enough to have been all but killed by my Diabetes.  That seems rather antithetical to good fortune, but it’s allowed me to live what little may remain of my life in the way that I want to. 

No one can expect me to go to work.  I’ll be dead before the end of the first week.  So, the government gives me not-really-enough money on which to live.  I get by, though, just as Lennon and McCartney did, “with a little help from my friends.”  So, there are things I don’t need anymore. 

I don’t need a car.  I live in terror of other people, so I almost never need to go anywhere.  Using Lyft a couple of times a month is much cheaper than car payments, paying for parking, paying for insurance, paying for maintenance, and paying for any tickets I might get because I have no patience anymore.  And there is pure Joy in being freed of this need.  I don’t have to worry about my car failing to start when I need to get somewhere.  I don’t need to call tow trucks.  I don’t need to hope I can find a mechanic or hope that I can find someone to pass my car through smog checks when the check engine light won’t go off.  I don’t need to stop smoking up for 5 hours so I can drive safely.  The last time I had a flat tire, I had to have my best friend change it because I am incapable of such a feat.  All those problems are off my plate.  I’m many pounds lighter for their absence. 

Another glorious absence is the necessity of the alarm clock.  I still have alarms set on my phone, but they are exclusively for the things I want to do.  There is no more 5:37 AM disturbance that tells me to get in the shower and rush off to work.  When I am tired now, I get to sleep.  That luxury is extraordinary.  I used to dream of it.  I thought it meant needing to win the lottery.  It didn’t.  It meant being able to get by with less.  I’m more than happy to make that trade.  (Okay, it also meant having my body all but destroyed by Diabetes, but that’s the way it goes.  I would really prefer not to be Diabetic, but there’s nothing to be done.)  I’m tired this morning.  I’m going to go make some breakfast and lie down.  That’s one of the most joyous feelings I know.

Sometimes we need to lose things in order to learn not only their value, but also their weight.  Loss is a brilliant teacher that way; it can show us what’s important simply by creating space where it once was. 

— Mark Groves 

I have the space to pay attention to what matters to me.  I want to be a better writer.  I’m working as hard as I can to make that happen.  I want my words to move people.  I want my prose to make them recognize not only that the world should be changed, but that it can be changed whenever we decide we want it to be.  I need to be a better writer if I’m going to manage that.

Many people told me this morning that I’m wasting my time by trying to change the minds of those who are rooting for the demise of Democracy.  They may be right, but that makes no difference.  If I open one of their minds a quarter of an inch farther, I’ve done something. 

And now I have the time to devote to that goal.  In the most meaningful sense of the word, I’m Free.  I’m allowed to spend my time in the ways I choose.  I may think what I like.  I may do, for the most part, what I like.  (Okay, I’ll never be able to travel to see Sara Niemietz and Snuffy Walden again, but they rarely play together anymore, anyway, and I can see Sara once a week on Weekly Wacky Wednesday.  I see Snuffy being all happy in Europe.  That’s enough for me.) 

I get to be who I choose to be.  That’s what Freedom really means.

I don’t want to recommend that anyone become diabetic.  I’m not sure that’s something you can do intentionally, anyway.  I don’t know of any little kid who grew up thinking they want to be diabetic so they can stay home and write all day long, so long as they avoid both DKA and hypoglycemia. 

But that’s where I am.  I don’t like worrying about whether I’m going to overdraw my account every month, but if I’m careful I can usually avoid that.  I have a place to live.  It’s not the nicest place you’ve ever seen.  The furniture is unsellable.  I would have to pay someone to haul it away.  The carpet needed to be replaced years before I moved in.  One of the sliding glass doors won’t open at all.  But it’s safe.  It’s reasonably clean… by my standards, even if not by yours… and it’s mine.  There’s no one to tell me what’s wrong with me anymore.  I’m without a wife.  That makes my life much easier. 

I know people who would loathe living the way I do.  They can’t stand the thought of being alone.  I can’t stand the thought of being around people any more than is absolutely necessary. 

Freedom is, for me, the key to Joy.  Doing the things that are meaningful to me, ignoring the things that aren’t, and finding my authentic hat as a writer makes me happier than anything else I know.

This is why we need a Universal Basic Income.  Everyone should have at least what I do.  Let us do the work we want to do and not what someone else tells us to do.  We need to end Bullshit Jobs.

Wait, what?  What are Bullshit Jobs?  Did you just make that up, Fred?

Bullshit Jobs: A Theory is a 2018 book by anthropologist David Graeber that postulates the existence of meaningless jobs and analyzes their societal harm. He contends that over half of societal work is pointless, and becomes psychologically destructive when paired with a work ethic that associates work with self-worth. Graeber describes five types of meaningless jobs, in which workers pretend their role is not as pointless or harmful as they know it to be: flunkies, goons, duct tapers, box tickers, and taskmasters. He argues that the association of labor with virtuous suffering is recent in human history, and proposes unions and universal basic income as a potential solution.

— https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bullshit_Jobs

I’m not wise enough to determine who deserves what, but I assure you that all people, whether I like them or not, deserve a home, sufficient food, and appropriate medical care.  No, that won’t cripple society.  You can say any number of horrible things about me, but one thing you can’t accuse me of being is lazy.  I wasn’t lazy when I spent 60 or more hours a week teaching, either. 

Even more perverse, there seems to be a broad sense that this is the way things should be. This is one of the secret strengths of right-wing populism. You can see it when tabloids whip up resentment against tube workers for paralysing London during contract disputes: the very fact that tube workers can paralyse London shows that their work is actually necessary, but this seems to be precisely what annoys people. It’s even clearer in the US, where Republicans have had remarkable success mobilizing resentment against school teachers, or auto workers (and not, significantly, against the school administrators or auto industry managers who actually cause the problems) for their supposedly bloated wages and benefits. It’s as if they are being told ‘but you get to teach children! Or make cars! You get to have real jobs! And on top of that you have the nerve to also expect middle-class pensions and health care?’

https://www.atlasofplaces.com/essays/on-the-phenomenon-of-bullshit-jobs/

I put not less than 60 hours a week just into this podcast.  I’m getting better at using the software, so I don’t need as much time to record a basic episode.  I still need help, though, on the big ones.  I had to get Chris from Interstellar Frequency to help me with “The Impossible Conversation.” 

That doesn’t mean I work less.  It means I can afford to put more time into the writing process.  It means I can invest my minutes more meaningfully.  Improvements in technology made this possible.

40 years ago, I had to use a typewriter.  If I made a mistake, I would think long and hard about correcting it because using liquid paper is difficult.  No matter how well you manage it, your manuscript looks unprofessional.  Erasable paper was expensive, and it tended to smudge.  Today I can rewrite with the backspace key.  I can move paragraphs with a couple of keystrokes.  I can save the same work in different versions, so I feel more free to take chances. 

40 years ago, the best I could do was a tape deck and a mixer to do anything remotely resembling a podcast.  The CD player was brand new.  You had to buy a whole CD to get the track or two you wanted.  Today I have access to an enormous library of music I can use legally.  I have a computer that lets me put it precisely where I want it at exactly the right volume.  I can make my voice do things I never would have dreamt of in 1983. 

Technology has made my work more efficient so I can learn to make it more effective.  And it’s cheaper than ever.  Even living a foot or two above the poverty line, because I get so much help from so many people, I can afford the technology I need to do my best work as well as possible.  Technology is one of the few things that becomes cheaper as time passes.  My first VCR cost $900.  I can get a Blu Ray/DVD player for less than $100 today, and I don’t really need it anymore because I can watch nearly anything with streaming services. 

That technology needs to be available to everyone.  We could easily ensure everyone has access to the internet.  With that access, people could make use of all that Artificial Intelligence is already beginning to do for us.  It won’t be long before AI can do nearly all the work of human beings, freeing all of us, and not just those who are sufficiently wealthy or sufficiently impoverished that they aren’t forced to do a Bullshit Job to make ends meet. 

Why, I wonder, do Bullshit Jobs exist?

Last night, for example, while in the midst of a fascinating conversation I was having with other writers from different parts of the country, my internet died.  Shockingly enough, I called Cox Internet to find out why that happened.  Of course, I got the automated response first.  Press 1 for this and 2 for that.  Okay.  That wasted my time, but no one else’s. 

Then I had to get transferred from one human to the next and the next and the next before I got an answer that could more easily have been given by the AI.  There was an outage they expected to have repaired by 9:48 PM.  When that didn’t happen, I used the text feature, and again I went through the automated response before I got to a supposed human being whose job was to thank me for my patience and tell me there is an outage, and the new time was expected to be 1:48 AM.  The same thing happened this morning.  I went through the same process to learn that it would be 5:48 AM.

People were paid to do what any decent AI should have been able to do.  And I think they secretly knew it.

Why would Corporate America pay people to waste their time and mine?  Graeber has some ideas on this:

The answer clearly isn’t economic: it’s moral and political. The ruling class has figured out that a happy and productive population with free time on their hands is a mortal danger (think of what started to happen when this even began to be approximated in the ‘60s). And, on the other hand, the feeling that work is a moral value in itself, and that anyone not willing to submit themselves to some kind of intense work discipline for most of their waking hours deserves nothing, is extraordinarily convenient for them.

— https://www.atlasofplaces.com/essays/on-the-phenomenon-of-bullshit-jobs/

We could free people from these Bullshit Jobs by dropping the mythology of the Puritan Work Ethic.  I don’t think anyone believes anymore that hard work and wealth have any more than a nodding acquaintance with one another.  We have more than enough resources to give everyone the life I have without requiring them to be mostly dead to get it.  Why not use those resources to help ourselves instead of employing our people to do nothing of any importance?

The economist, John Maynard Keynes, predicted in 1930 that by now we would all be working 15-hour weeks because that’s all that would be necessary to accomplish what needs to be done.  He believed that we would solve The Economic Problem, and that technology would free us from labor.  It would create the problem of what we would do with our leisure time, but he pointed out that the wealthy were, even then, scouts in that undiscovered country.  We could easily solve that problem.  He looked forward to being able to do away with the endless pursuit of wealth.

When the accumulation of wealth is no longer of high social importance, there will be great changes in the code of morals. We shall be able to rid ourselves of many of the pseudo-moral principles which have hag-ridden us for two hundred years, by which we have exalted some of the most distasteful of human qualities into the position of the highest virtues. We shall be able to afford to dare to assess the money-motive at its true value. The love of money as a possession -as distinguished from the love of money as a means to the enjoyments and realities of life -will be recognised for what it is, a somewhat disgusting morbidity, one of those semi criminal, semi-pathological propensities which one hands over with a shudder to the specialists in mental disease. All kinds of social customs and economic practices, affecting the distribution of wealth and of economic rewards and penalties, which we now maintain at all costs, however distasteful and unjust they may be in themselves, because they are tremendously useful in promoting the accumulation of capital, we shall then be free, at last, to discard.

http://www.econ.yale.edu/smith/econ116a/keynes1.pdf

Our social growth is lagging far behind our technological progress.  We should certainly have accomplished his predictions by now.  We would have, but we’ve gone out of our way to cement into the consciousness that the suffering of pointless labor and Bullshit Jobs is virtuous.  We need to serve some master, somewhere.  For some it is some form of God.  For others it is the Corporate Masters.  For some it is both. 

I am among the few who serve neither Master.  It’s long passed the time for the rest of the world to join me.  You’re welcome to serve God, in whatever form you believe He exists, but we need to stop serving the corporate masters who want to steal the minutes of your life.  We have the resources.  We have the technology.  We have the knowledge.  We lack only the will.  I’m hoping I might have ignited your will to change the world, and that you’ll ignite someone else’s desire to be Free.

The key to finding Joy, for me, is loving what I have.  It is the freedom that comes from being master of my own time.  I would be even more joyous if everyone had what I do.  What I have is something many people much wealthier than I will ever be will never have.  I have Enough.

    Posted on by Fred

    Willy Loman and Me

    WILLY: Oh, yeah, my father lived many years in Alaska.  He was an adventurous man.  We’ve got quite a little streak of self reliance in our family.  I thought I’d go out with my older brother and try to locate him, and maybe settle in the North with the old man.  And I was almost decided to go, when I met a salesman in the Parker House. His name was Dave Singleman.  And he was eighty-four years old, and he’d drummed merchandise in thirty-one states.  And old Dave, he’d go up to his room, y’understand, put on his green velvet slippers — I’ll never forget — and pick up his phone and call the buyers, and without ever leaving his room, at the age of eighty-four, he made his living.  And when I saw that, I realized that selling was the greatest career a man could want.  ‘Cause what could be more satisfying than to be able to go, at the age of eighty four, into twenty or thirty different cities, and pick up a phone, and be remembered and loved and helped by so many different people? Do you know?  When he died — and by the way he died the death of a salesman, in his green velvet slippers in the smoker of the New York, New Haven and Hartford, going into Boston — when he died, hundreds of salesmen and buyers were at his funeral.  Things were sad on a lotta trains for months after that.  In those days there was personality in it, Howard.  There was respect, and comradeship, and gratitude in it.  Today, it’s all cut and dried, and there’s no chance for bringing friendship to bear — or personality.  You see what I mean?  They don’t know me any more… If I had forty dollars a week — that’s all I’d need.  Forty dollars, Howard.  Howard, the year Al Smith was nominated, your father came to me and…  I’m talking about your father!  There were promises made across this desk!  You mustn’t tell me you’ve got people to see — I put thirty-four years into this firm, Howard, and now I can’t pay my insurance!  You can’t eat the orange and throw the peel away — a man is not a piece of fruit!

    Willy Loman and I have much in common.  We both spent our lives doing what we thought was the best thing a person could do.  For him, it was selling.  I was never any good at selling.  I don’t think Willy was either, but I know that about myself, and I don’t think he did.  

    I spent my life teaching Elementary School because I thought it was the best thing a person could do.  It was a chance to change the world by influencing future generations.  I earned enough money to support myself in a modest fashion, and, at the height of my financial success, I owned a house.  Well done, me!  

    Funny, y’know? After all the highways, and the trains, and the appointments, and the years, you end up worth more dead than alive

    — Willy Loman

    Funny, you know?  After all the classrooms, and the students, and the meetings, and the years, you end up worthless either dead or alive.  

    Willy at least had life insurance.  I had a policy once, I think, more than 30 years ago, but I know nothing about it today.  When I die, no one gets anything.  My nephew might want the computer he built for me back.  I hope someone will wipe it entirely clean before anyone sees its contents.  On the other hand, I’ll be dead, so what of it?  I have a TV.  It might get you $20 at a generous Thrift Store.    It won’t cover the cost of getting rid of all my books, and movies, and music that no one else will want since you can get them all now on your phone and they require no physical storage space.  

    After 29 years of teaching, the government for whom I taught has decided I’m not worth the money it costs to pay rent in the cheapest place in town.  Forget utilities, ignore groceries, perish the thought of even owning a car, no money for entertainment of even the cheapest variety, and to hell with the dog.  

    Willy thought life was about being well-liked.  I never did.  On the other hand, for reasons passing understanding, I seem to be.  I say this because it’s only the fact that people love me that keeps me alive, both financially and psychologically.  

    I’m alive because my best friend’s boyfriend is renting me his old place for half price, which is the very maximum I can afford and still make it to the end of the month.  I’m a liability to him.  He could sell this place, pay off all his bills, and have enough money in the bank to live comfortably for quite some time without ever setting foot in a workplace.  I’m screwing up his life simply by being alive.  He would never say that, because he’s a kind man, but that doesn’t change that objective fact.

    And that isn’t enough to sustain me anyway.  I have another friend, who I really ought to call a Patron Saint in my Gratitudes if I can get her permission to do so, who sends me grocery money every month.  The state of Arizona believes I deserve $20 a month to buy groceries.  And then they cut it off, apparently, this month.  I didn’t even get that.  If not for my friend, I would live off nothing but ramen and pretzels. 

    The generosity of my landlord and my friend still isn’t enough to sustain me.  I couldn’t pay for my phone (one of The People on The Porch tells me I could get a free phone service, but I’m too scared to try.), my cigarettes (yes, I know I shouldn’t smoke.  I’m working on that.  Life is stressful when one’s existence is a liability.  Giving up an addiction of more than 30 years is more difficult than you probably think.  It doesn’t go well for Speedy Shine when I go too long.), any of the streaming services that are much cheaper and infinitely better than cable, or the ability to do anything extra.  I bought a DVD rack a couple of months ago, and my guilt is still overwhelming.  I nearly ran out of food because I did that.  It was $50 on Offer Up.  

    With Patreon and Anchor, I make enough to make it to the end of the month.  If I stopped doing my show, I would be psychologically and financially ruined.  Every time I lose a supporter, I go into a depression for at least an hour or two.  Speedy Shine has to remind me that I’m worth loving.  He gives me kisses sometimes, and he knows how to cuddle better than any living being I’ve ever encountered.  

    There is always a lot of talk about who deserves what.  I hate all of it.  I spent my life doing what I thought was right, and today I have no sense of independence.  I depend on far too many people just to survive.  And the minute I say that, you can be absolutely certain that someone is saying, “Well you should have…” or “Well, you shouldn’t have…”  Those words always make me angry.  And since anger is caused by fear, I must ask what I fear.  What do those words make me fear?  They make me fear that people will suffer.  They will be homeless.  They will be hungry.  I don’t like that.  And why do they suffer?  They suffer because of Judgmental Bullshit.  

    We have convinced ourselves that there is only one right way to live, and it’s ours.  Those who don’t conform to our standards deserve to suffer.  No.  They don’t.  

    I don’t know why someone made the choices they did at any given moment.  Maybe I would have made a different decision.  Maybe, in those circumstances, I wouldn’t have.  There’s really no way of knowing.  As it turns out, I’m not God.  Are you?  And, if you think you are, could you please send me a little of whatever you’re smoking?  It’s obviously better than what I can get at the Dispensary.

    My best friend of 13 years, who I know better than nearly anyone on the planet, frequently makes decisions that mystify me.  She dates men who don’t make her happy.  I know this because I’ve spent 13 years hearing about them.  She knows they make her unhappy, but she continues dating them for years after she knows this.  Is that the decision I would make?  No, I don’t think so.  So, shall I decide that she deserves to be unhappy, and should I therefore make no effort to help her?  No, I don’t think so.  She’s no better off for that.  I love her, so, even though she makes decisions I don’t understand, I do all I can to help her.  And she’s saved my life more than once.  

    If I can’t understand her choices when I’ve known her so well and so long, how am I supposed to understand the choices of a stranger?  How does it help me to pass judgment on the homeless.  “If they didn’t want to be homeless, they should have…” Are you kidding me?  How do you know why they made the choices that inevitably wound them up in a place where they have no shelter for the night?  And who are you to pass judgment on them?  

    I made a set of decisions that wound me up being entirely dependent on the kindness of strangers.  How do I know which ones were wrong?  Did I make a decision that caused me to become diabetic?  If I did, what was that decision?  How would you suggest that I go back and change it?  Q isn’t coming by this afternoon to offer me the opportunity to change a moment in my life.  And when he offered it to Captain Picard, it went very badly for Jean Luc.  Marc Antony offered me an opportunity in “Horace’s Final Five.”  You might want to listen to that to see how well that went.  (It’s Episode 50 if you’re new here.)

    “Well, you should make more money off of your podcast!”  

    I would love to do that, but I’m not a marketer, and I don’t want to spend any of the little time I have left in an effort to become Willy Loman.  I’m not getting on Discord and Twitch.  I don’t understand them, and I don’t have the mental capacity to learn anymore.  If someone wants to be in charge of marketing my show, I will be happy to split with them any extra money they make for me.  It turns out no one is offering to do that.  So, as Kenny Loggins is singing right now, “This is it.”  He and Michael McDonald seem much happier about that than I am.  

    Willy Loman had big dreams.  All of them were failures.  I avoid big dreams.  I can fail perfectly well without them, and I would prefer to save the accompanying disappointment.  

    I don’t say he’s a great man.  Willy Loman never made a lot of money.  His name was never in the paper.  He’s not the finest character that ever lived.  But he’s a human being, and a terrible thing is happening to him.  So attention must be paid.  He’s not to be allowed to fall into his grave like an old dog.  Attention, attention must be finally paid to such a person.

    We live in a world controlled by money.  It works out well for some, and it’s a curse for others.  It’s not the world I want.  I work to change it, nearly every week on this show.  I don’t get anywhere.

    What a proposition, ts, ts.  Terrific, terrific.  ‘Cause she’s suffered, Ben, the woman has suffered.  You understand me?  A man can’t go out the way, he came in, Ben, a man has got to add up to something.  You can’t, you can’t — You gotta consider, now.  Don’t answer so quick.  Remember, it’s a guaranteed twenty-thousand-dollar proposition.  Now look, Ben, I want you to go through the ins and outs of this thing with me.  I’ve got nobody to talk to, Ben, and the woman has suffered, you hear me? 

    BEN: What’s the proposition? 

    WILLY: It’s twenty thousand dollars on the barrelhead.  Guaranteed, gilt-edged, you understand?  

    BEN: You don’t want to make a fool of yourself.  They might not honor the policy. 

    WILLY: How can they dare refuse?  Didn’t I work like a coolie to meet every premium on the nose?  And now they don’t pay off?  Impossible! 

    BEN: It’s called a cowardly thing, William. 

    WILLY: Why?  Does it take more guts to stand here the rest of my life ringing up a zero?  

    BEN: That’s a point, William.  And twenty thousand — that is something one can feel with the hand, it is there. 

    WILLY: Oh, Ben, that’s the whole beauty of it!  I see it like a diamond, shining in the dark, hard and rough, that I can pick up and touch in my hand. Not like — like an appointment!  This would not be another damned-fool appointment, Ben, and it changes all the aspects.  Because he thinks I’m nothing, see, and so he spites me.  But the funeral… Ben, that funeral will be massive!  They’ll come from Maine, Massachusetts, Vermont, New Hampshire!  All the oldtimers with the strange license plates — that boy will be thunderstruck, Ben, because he never realized — I am known!  Rhode Island, New York, New Jersey — I am known, Ben, and he’ll see it with his eyes once and for all.  He’ll see what I am, Ben!  He’s in for a shock, that boy!

    That’s what comes of deciding that money matters more than people.  I understand the choice Willy makes.  (If you’ve never read or seen Death of a Salesman, Willy kills himself after this discussion.  It’s more than 70 years old, so I’m not going to listen to whining about Spoilers.)  It’s a decision I consider every night before I go to sleep.  It’s one Speedy Shine convinces me not to make.  No one gets $20,000 if I die, but lots of people will be financially better off in many ways.  If the world really is all about money, it’s difficult to conclude anything apart from the idea that world would be better off without me.  The government even gets to save $1363 a month.  

    Is it just possible that there is something that matters more than money?

    LINDA: Forgive me, dear.  I can’t cry.  I don’t know what it is, I can’t cry.  I don’t understand it.  Why did you ever do that?  Help me Willy, I can’t cry.  It seems to me that you’re just on another trip.  I keep expecting you.  Willy, dear, I can’t cry.  Why did you do it?  I search and search and I search, and I can’t understand it, Willy.  I made the last payment on the house today.  Today, dear.  And there’ll be nobody home.  We’re free and clear.  We’re free.  We’re free… We’re free…

    All the quotations in this episode are from Death of a Salesman by Arthur Miller.

    Click to access filedownload.ashx

    Posted on by Fred

    Are You Scared?

    A good friend (I’m going to refer to her as Lisa, but that’s not her name) called me today to point out something I had never considered, and she asked me to point it out to you.  I’m doing that now.

    When Lisa tells someone that she has a terminal diagnosis, they ask the clinical questions: “How long do they think you have?  What can be done?  How are you feeling physically?”  What no one ever asks is, “Are you scared?”  That’s really the most important question. 

    I am practically a Vulcan in my devotion to logic over emotion.  Logic is how problems are solved.  Logic is where we gain clarity about the world.  Logic allows us to examine possible choices and make the one most likely to grant us the outcome we want.  Logic is the basis of the science that I hope will save her life. 

    We are, however, all human.  Humans do what we do for emotional reasons.  Emotion is at the core of our existence.  It’s why we get up in the morning.  There is some emotional need we must fill.  Logic is, as my favorite Vulcan reminds us, “the beginning of wisdom, not the end.”  It is a tool to help us; nothing more.  Emotion is our motivation.

    Yes, my friend is scared.  Few of us can stare into the face of our own mortality without fear.  We are running out of time to do the things we still want to do.  When we’re gone from this life, we’re gone forever.  When we’ve been dead ten billion years, we will have been dead for only a tiny fraction of the time we’re going to be dead. 

    I don’t know whether there’s an afterlife, but I’m sure we only get one life to be the person we are today.  There isn’t a second one unless there’s a Big Crunch that reverses the Big Bang, and we live backward in time.  Perhaps when we’re dead we’ll go to Heaven or (as some of my Christian friends fear) to Hell because we didn’t choose the right set of beliefs.  Perhaps we will be reincarnated as some of my other friends think, but if we are, we won’t be who we are now in the next life.  Perhaps our energy will simply rejoin the universe from whence it came.  It won’t be reorganized into the people we are now.    

    Lisa is nearing the place she can pull her Social Security, and she intends to grab it all and go live while she can.  I completely support that choice.  When time is running out, make every day count.  There’s little to be gained by saving for a future that is unlikely to arrive.

    And then I began to think a bit wider.  I love Lisa.  I had a schoolboy hormone-hazed crush on her 40 years ago.  In the interim, both of us have had rich, full lives in which our paths only rarely crossed.  I wonder sometimes if our lives would have been different had I found the courage to talk to her in high school.  It’s irrelevant, though.  I can’t change the past. 

    I don’t know how much time she has left.  It’s not long enough.  At the same time, I don’t know how much time I have left, either.  I’m nearly 60, I’m a potentially brittle diabetic when my life goes South, I smoke too much (although I have managed to cut it back some), and I need both hands to stand up.  I would like to continue to exist for a while, but the odds are not good.  I’m learning from my friend.  I’m living the best I can while I can.  I have no plans for 30 years from now. 

    I started by thinking about her.  I moved to thinking about me.  Then I thought about you.  I hope you have another century to go.  But… let’s take a look at the world for a moment. 

    It’s hotter now than it has been in modern times.  It’s unlikely to get much cooler.    The extra heat requires extra air conditioning which adds extra stress to our planet.  Our water supply is running out.  Water is the basis of all life.  With no water, there can be no food.  Climate change is real, it’s nearing the point of no return (if it hasn’t already passed it), and we are, for the most part, just making it worse.  The planet isn’t going to support us for much longer.  The amount of money you have will be irrelevant.

    The world is flirting with nuclear war.  We won’t recover from it if it happens.  You won’t be taking your money to the grocery store to get yourself a steak.  There won’t be either a grocery store or a steak to be found.  If you survive, it’s not going to resemble the life you’re enjoying today.

    With each passing week, we move, in America at least, closer to an authoritarian dictatorship.  The division between our people is deeper than it has been since the Civil War.  There are more than a few people who believe a second one may come.  There are others who are hoping for one.  (I’m not among them.)

    The time we have left to enjoy the lives we have is probably running out much more quickly than we would hope. 

    On the other hand…

    At this moment, which is the only one in which any of us can live, I’m doing fine.  My dog is sleeping on the couch, and he isn’t even eating it.  I have enough food for the next few days, and I have the means to get more if I run out.  I have plenty of Diet Pepsi and a wonderful bed in which to sleep.  My air conditioning is keeping me cool.  At this moment.

    It’s my hope and assumption that you’re doing, at this moment, at least as well as I am.  This is the moment to enjoy.  Bad things may be coming.  They probably are.  While there may be some things we can do, worrying about them isn’t any of the helpful ones.  Ruining this moment with fear of an upcoming lousy moment doesn’t prevent the lousy moment from arriving.  I am simply denying myself of the chance to enjoy this one.  I would rather not. 

    I would love to change the world.  That’s why I do this show.  I have no great or intricate plans to do that.  All I have are ideas.  Logistics are best left to experts.  I’m not one. 

    What could we do?  We could unite behind a goal I think more than 90% of us share: let everyone their lives, their way, so long as they’re not hurting anyone.  If your way of life is being a serial killer, I will need to object.  If you’re different from me in some other way, I see no problem with that.  Why should anyone else?  Your sexuality might be different from mine.  That doesn’t hurt anyone else.  Your gender, your race, your age, your skin color, your country of origin, your body, and / or your soul are probably different from mine.  Neither of us chose that.  Why should we object to the differences?  Let everyone live their lives, their way.

    The number of people who disagree is startling.  Our job is to change their minds.  There are those who want us to live in fear because it helps them.  Money allows them to create that fear.

    Think of it like this.  If you had $100,000,000 in the bank right now, would you still go to work tomorrow? 

    If you would, you have a job that you find satisfying and that you enjoy.  I’m ecstatic for you.  You’re spending your minutes in the way you want.  You’re living your best life.  Well done.

    If you wouldn’t, you’re going to work tomorrow because you want to survive.  You’re scared of homelessness or hunger.  You’re scared of losing what you have earned so far. 

    Fascists love fear.  I love hope. 

    Fear will get you to do what you’re told.  If someone is holding a knife to your loved one’s throat, the odds that you will do what the criminal tells you to do increase exponentially. 

    If we live in a world dominated by money, one in which without money we have nowhere to live, nothing to eat, little access to medical care, and we are living with the constant threat of imprisonment simply for existing somewhere without proper authorization, we live in fear.  Those with lots of money know this, and they use it to force us to do what they tell us, with the same power the knife wielding criminal has. 

    My friend, fellow podcast host, (his show is called Interstellar Frequency, and if you want to his real name, you’ll have to listen to that.) and Person on The Porch, Miles O’Brien, told me this week that he was shocked to learn that the President of The United States receives a salary.  Why would a President need one?  What can he possibly want that he can’t get for free?  Money is freedom.  We evidently want the President to have more of it than he already has.

    A group called Rage Against The Machine, to whom I rarely listen, made quite a bit of money in the 90s (I don’t know how much.  My Google search didn’t reveal that information.) with a song called “Killing in The Name” in which they repeated a famously unpleasant phrase followed by the words “I won’t do what you tell me” over and over.  It turns out people don’t like to be told what to do.  We want the freedom to choose for ourselves.  Why is that such a radical idea?

    I’m choosing not to live in quite so much fear.  That’s bold talk, even from someone who’s not what Robert Duvall called “a one-eyed fat man.” I’m afraid to leave my own house.  I’m afraid of you.  Who am I to talk about living with less fear? 

    I’m an old man with a nice dog and enough to eat, who is replacing their fear with my hope.  There is much to fear.  I’m just not dealing with it in every moment of my life.  I do what I can to fight for freedom and justice, and then I enjoy what I can of my life.  There’s nothing to fear in this moment, and this is the only one I’m certain I have.  When I run out of moments, I have no more chances for happiness.  I’m going to enjoy the ones I can.  I hope you will, too. 

    If it helps, I’ll remind you once again… I love you.

    Posted on by Fred · 1 Comment

    COVID- 19: A Personal Perspective

    Coronavirus Disease 2019 Graphic. (U.S. Air Force Graphic by Rosario “Charo” Gutierrez)

    The world is a dark and scary place for many of us right now. A virus is spreading exponentially among us. We are seeing news of deaths daily. The number is always rising. We are afraid of dying from this. We are afraid of infecting someone else. We are afraid of infecting our loved ones. We are afraid to sacrifice our hard-won civil rights. We are unable to trust our leadership. We are a deeply divided country. And there is no doubt; we are in trouble. All of us.

    I have cause for despair. My income is gone until, at least, June 15, assuming I can work in May. I will certainly be facing difficult times. I have cause to fear.

    What I don’t have, as it turns out, is time to fear. For all the ugliness and horror in the air around me, I see more love than I have in a long time. I see people helping each other. Artists are giving away their services because, honestly, they are, for me, essential. People are continuing to go to work and stock the shelves, check out your groceries, and let you be pissed at them because they’re out of toilet paper, which is certainly the fault of the woman who is literally risking her life and the lives of her loved ones to make sure you can get whatever it is they still have for sale. I see neighbors reaching out to help one another. I see people loving each other and coming together by staying apart.

    There is much to debate about what we should have done, and when we should have done it, and from where the virus came, and whose fault, if anyone’s, this is. We can argue over over reacting. We can debate whether the economy is worth the lives of the 1 or 2, or, depending on whose estimates you’re hearing, 5% of the population that dies so that others can live and the money keeps moving. They were going to die anyway. They might as well do it now and reduce the surplus population. We have to save The Economy.

    I take issue with that. I’m happy to have a minority point of view. Others who have a different one can teach me. I’m always willing to learn. With that disclaimer, I’m diving in, but very briefly. Why is this form of The Economy so valuable? Is it really the only kind we can have?

    I want to start with what I believe is the function of any economy. It turns out humans do best when we work together. This began with forming tribes to help with hunting. It continues from there. We build villages. This is my village. It’s not yours. My town. My county. My state. My country.

    The function of the economy is to allow us to trade our talents and work together to create the best world we can. We have chosen to use an item we have simply all agreed has value. A bottle of water has more actual value than a hundred dollar bill, absent this social agreement for which most of us never signed up, and to which we certainly didn’t give our consent freely. Without the fact that everyone is willing to trade many bottles of water for this printed object, it’s just a printed object. I can’t eat it. I can’t drink it. I can’t make my crops grow better with it. I could, in an emergency, use it to replace the toilet paper that is actually worth more than the hundred dollars. TP provides a necessary function. We all have to wipe our asses. Yes, even in social isolation.

    The Economy, as it stands now, is fulfilling its purpose exceptionally well for some Americans, and, in fact, for some citizens of the world, but it is failing entirely for others. The number it fails is much higher than the number it serves. Listen to any Bernie Sanders clip of more than 3 minutes. He’ll certainly give you the numbers. And they will probably be accurate.

    Why do we work? Some of us do it because we are fulfilling a lifelong dream. We are pursuing careers that test our skills, cause us to grow, and make us feel valued, respected, and properly compensated. We have enough to live, and we are making a difference by doing what we do. I believe those in this category would go on doing precisely what we’re doing without these printed items. We would continue because it makes us happy. So long as we can live a decent life doing what we do, we will go on doing it.

    Some of us work because if we don’t, we have nowhere to live. We’re not fulfilling a lifelong dream. We’re selling DirecTV to unsuspecting old women on the phone. We’re dealing with drug addicts who park in front of the Circle K we’re working alone at 2 in the morning, and we’re wondering if they will wake up and take the needles out of their arms before the police arrive. A video camera records us when we go out for a cigarette. If this group could live a decent life without doing this, many of us would quit doing it. We would spend their lives creating podcasts, or writing, or singing, or painting, or playing video games (my former partner make money doing this, so you can’t say it’s not a profession anymore!), or researching something, or… whatever it is that we would really like to do if you would leave us alone and let us do it. And… there would be some people who would continue doing those jobs because we enjoy them. The work is necessary… well… I wouldn’t cry if DirecTV never sold another cable package, but, I suppose there are those who need it and value it, so… we’ll let it go. We certainly need someone to work in Circle K and at the grocery store and Amazon and all sorts of other places that pay very little for what we have now learned is “essential” work.

    Some of us work because we are only as valuable as the money we make, and money should be gained only by hard work. Hard work, for us, is a value in and of itself. It’s a sign of being a good person. We’re contributing to society. We’re taking care of ourselves. We’re not asking anyone else for help. We earn our place in this economy. We’re proud of what we’ve earned. We have a right to be.

    But, what would it be like without these printed objects? We would still have exactly the same resources we do now. We could go on living in our perfect economy in precisely the same way.

    No… We can’t. No one will work anymore.

    There’s an interesting point. You mean, in our perfect economy we work only because we’re afraid of not doing it? Just as there were some slaves who were treated better than others, based on their perceived performance and value to the slaver, there are some of us who are treated as more valuable than others. And you remember how slavery was… you know… wrong? Yeah, well, it still is.

    When you make us work only by threatening us with doom if we don’t, we are slaves. We have no physical chains. We are not whipped, at least not legally. We don’t face the physical horrors that slaves did. But, we are functioning under threat just as surely as if we had masters. If you are not a holder of many of these printed items, you are not allowed a place to sleep, food to eat, medical care, or a cellphone. Not even a flip phone. Sometimes you can be afforded a night or two in a homeless shelter, if you are willing to follow their orders, or a jail cell if you’re not. I don’t think anyone would argue that a jail cell represents freedom. This is a form of slavery. It is only slightly less brutal. And it is determined by printed objects whose only value is our agreement to their value.

    I’m not going to design a whole new world for you. But, I would like you to think a little while about how the world would exist if we decided that money no longer had value. Would we be able to exist? Would we be able to function?

    I think we would, but this is the time to examine what value we place on our economy. I hope we’ll use this time to consider changing our world.

    For the first time, we are realizing that poverty is bad. More and more people are tumbling into it, and now that there are enough of us, Congress has decided to act. Are we doing it correctly? Ask me a year from now. I don’t know yet.

    This time is economically frightening, but it’s personally gratifying.

    I’m seeing kindness pouring out around me. If you’re a fan of the show, you’ll notice our logo has changed. I got a painting from an artist friend of mine, Michelle Sylvester, who is as isolated as the rest of us. She’s a teacher. She has time on her hands now, and this was her way of helping. It was good for her. It’s good for me.

    I have a couple of friends working on recording a song I desperately need for what I hoped would be tonight’s episode. My friends are doing it to help out.

    Another friend, whose father is a bit of a philanthropist, brought over some groceries and left them outside my door. I had some cases of regular Pepsi Amazon had mistakenly sent us a couple of months ago, and I set those outside the door so she could donate them to someone who could use them. (I’m diabetic, one of my roommates has a heart condition that prohibits caffeine, and the other one just won’t drink Pepsi, so… we’re thrilled someone else can get some use out of it.) She included some cash with the burritos, and it will do so much for helping us through just a little while longer.

    Another friend sent us some dinners from Home Fresh. We can’t afford those even when we have our regular incomes.

    I have a friend who checks on me every day. (We’re supposed to check up on old people you know.)

    I see people saying kind things on Facebook. I see people understanding we’re all in this together.

    I hope when this is over we’re all still here. I hope all of our loved ones will still be with us. And I hope we learn enough to keep this from happening anymore.

    If nothing else, perhaps we will finally, finally learn there is no Them. We are all Us.

    Posted on by Fred

    To Be a Billionaire is Inherently Immoral

    Did you know that if you had a billion dollars, you could spend a dollar a minute, every minute of every day of every week of every month of every year for the next 1900 years? I looked it up. It’s much different from being a millionaire. If you’re a millionaire, you could do the same thing, but for less than 2 years. To possess a billion dollars, then, is to have more money than you could likely spend in 19 lifetimes. It’s more than enough for you and the next 18 generations of your family to be certain it’s unnecessary ever to do a minute of paid labor of any sort. You are as financially free as anyone could ever want to be.

    That’s great, Fred, but what’s immoral about that?

    When a person has more than he can possibly use, it seems to me, that person has an obligation to the rest of the world that has made this possible for him (or her). There are those who have recognized this, and I admire them for it. J.K. Rowling gave up her status as a billionaire by donating more than $150,000,000 to charity. She’s helping to improve the world. Good for her. Good for any billionaire who does what she does. Bill and Melinda Gates are also to be congratulated. But… here’s the thing: we still have homelessness.

    But, the homeless didn’t earn their money. Why should those who worked hard and earned money be required to help the lazy?

    “It is the eternal struggle between these two principles — right and wrong — throughout the world. They are the two principles that have stood face to face from the beginning of time; and will ever continue to struggle. The one is the common right of humanity, and the other the divine right of kings. It is the same principle in whatever shape it develops itself. It is the same spirit that says, “You toil and work and earn bread, and I’ll eat it.” No matter in what shape it comes, whether from the mouth of a king who seeks to bestride the people of his own nation and live by the fruit of their labor, or from one race of men as an apology for enslaving another race, it is the same tyrannical principle.”

    — Abraham Lincoln

    It’s true, I suppose, that billionaires have toiled and worked to earn bread, and that the poor and homeless are eating it, but the slaves are the poor, not the wealthy and the powerful. It has always been so. It will always be so.

    When you have more than you need, you can help others without hurting yourself. To fail to help is, to me, unwarranted selfishness. I have been the fortunate recipient of more help from my friends and family than I have deserved, and each time someone else reduced, by a not insignificant amount, their ability to do things for themselves because they did things for me. This is what it means to be a decent human being. It is the recognition that others are as important as you are. It is an understanding that each person’s suffering is, to some extent, your own. It is an understanding of what John Donne told us all those years ago:

    No man is an island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main; if a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe is the less, as well as if a promontory were, as well as if a manor of thy friend’s or of thine own were; any man’s death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind, and therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee.

    It’s estimated that Jeff Bezos is worth more than $115 billion. What does this mean? It means that he could spend enough, every minute, to send my roommates and me to Outback for dinner. And he could keep doing it for 1.9 millennia. We can do this, ourselves, perhaps 3 times a year.

    It’s estimated homelessness can be abolished for 20 billion dollars. Bezos has the money to do this 5 times over, and he would still have enough to spend $15 a minute until the year 3920.

    I don’t expect people to hurt themselves to help others. But, I really don’t see how Mr. Bezos could possibly be hurt by helping millions of people. I don’t know why Mark Zuckerberg, or Bill Gates, or any of a host of others don’t end world hunger, end poverty, and end homelessness all by themselves. If you can do good, and you can do so without endangering yourself, how is it possible to choose not to do it?

    Forbes claims there are 607 billionaires in the United States right now, with a combined worth of 3.111 trillion dollars.

    Yes, Fred, but those people did something extraordinary to earn that money. You have no right to demand they give it away.

    “You cannot legislate the poor into freedom by legislating the wealthy out of freedom. What one person receives without working for, another person must work for without receiving. The government cannot give to anybody anything that the government does not first take from somebody else. When half of the people get the idea that they do not have to work because the other half is going to take care of them, and when the other half gets the idea that it does no good to work because somebody else is going to get what they work for, that my dear friend, is about the end of any nation. You cannot multiply wealth by dividing it.” – Adrian Rogers

    I agree with Mr. Rogers to the extent that it’s wrong for one person to work for something without receiving the benefits of his labor. Where I disagree is how much that labor is really worth. In most cases, I think the labor is worth much more than it is paid. In many fewer cases, I believe the labor is unimaginably over priced.

    I congratulate Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg, Steve Jobs, and Bill Gates for their accomplishments. I am grateful to them for the things they did. They absolutely deserve wealth for their contributions to the world. But… THAT much wealth? They have (or had) more money than they could ever spend. It becomes pointless to have more. There’s nothing more for them to do with it. They can already buy anything they want at any moment in time. They’re never going to worry about having enough for a pack of cigarettes, let alone paying rent, or going out for an evening’s entertainment. I don’t deny they deserve that. I’m happy to contribute to that. Again, they earned it.

    But… when you have more than you could spend in 19 lifetimes, it seems to me that one is simply a dragon hording his treasure. It may be yours, but it doesn’t serve you in any way. It could be serving a much higher purpose than adding to itself. If you leave a billion dollars in an average savings account, doing absolutely nothing, you get 2,000,000 a year in interest. It’s just sitting there. It’s not buying anything. It’s not adding to the economy. And you get 2,000,000 for absolutely nothing. Jeff Bezos could have more than a hundred such accounts. That’s 200 million dollars a year for… what exactly?

    It’s not their job to take care of the citizens. It’s the job of the government.

    I agree. As I have written many times before, to the extent that any civilization includes homelessness, poverty, hunger, a lack of education, or insufficient medical care for all of its citizens, that civilization is a failure. It’s my opinion we should have been doing something about this 40 years ago. Instead of the clearly failed “Trickle Down Economics,” that increased the already, even then, widening Income Inequality, we should have been spending the money to make sure everyone had a place to live, food to eat, clothes to wear, schools to attend, and the healthcare they needed. I believe we should be doing much better at this by now. The government has the primary responsibility. But, many people will disagree with me on this. That is an argument for a different essay.

    This is not political. It’s personal.

    The fact that people with this kind of power allow homelessness to exist is simply wrong. There is no alternative case that I can see. If you can make a convincing one, I would love to hear or read it.

    They allow these things to exist in the world, when, with no significant effort, they could end them.

    I can’t save these children.

    I can’t give this man a place to sleep.

    I can’t get these kids a washer and dryer or a home in which to connect those appliances.

    All of this suffering is going on, right now, today, this very minute, and any billionaire could end it simply by deciding to do so. Failure to do so is immoral. What right have you to more than you could ever possibly need when others will never have enough to be sure that they will have a place to live next week? It doesn’t matter to me whether you earned it by saving the world or by enslaving your employees. You are equally morally bound in either case.

    When you are willing to recognize this old man’s right to exist is precisely equal to your right to exist, that his suffering is unnecessary, and that we should value him as highly as Bezos, Zuckerberg, and the rest, you will have begun to be morally enlightened, assuming you’re not already so. When the billionaires take positive action to end suffering, they will have erased my contempt, and they will have earned my gratitude and admiration.

    Until then, being a Billionaire is Inherently Immoral.

    Posted on by Fred · 1 Comment

    What You Probably Don’t Know About Poverty

    I believe it is difficult to understand poverty until you’ve actually lived it. Reading about it is usually insufficient. You can’t really understand it until you are hours away from homelessness. You don’t get it until you aren’t sure what you’re going to eat, and you’re excited you managed to get a quart of milk so you can survive on cereal a little longer. You don’t conceive it properly until you’re forced to live with others, do all the housework, and pray to a God in whom you don’t even believe, that they don’t throw you out because you can’t possibly survive on the money you can make.

    When you have to humiliate yourself twice a year at DES, you begin to understand. When you are doing your third GoFundMe, and being called an Online Panhandler, your understanding begins to dawn. When the car you had paid off gets repossessed because you had to borrow money on it, at obscene interest rates, to pay rent for one more month, your understanding deepens.

    When it becomes month after month, year after year, you understand. When friends and relatives tell you what is wrong with you repeatedly because you don’t have enough money, you understand how poverty really feels.

    It isn’t just hoping that things get better. It’s the fear that comes when they do. You realize this is almost certainly going to be followed by The Fuckening. It’s that unexpected catastrophe for which you had no opportunity to prepare. It always looms just around the corner. Your $750 car breaks down. Someone ends up in the hospital, and that costs work time, and that’s less money you have next month.

    The Fuckening is when, just when you finally are making it, and you have enough money to make it this month, your landlord sells your house, and you have to find a new one in which to live. It’s when they hit you with a $140 bill you didn’t know you had so you can’t pay rent that last month, and they won’t take a partial payment because they’re a corporation and not a person. It’s when you have to beg your best friend’s boyfriend to rent you his old house because your credit is so horrible that no one else on the planet will, and now that you didn’t pay your last month’s rent, you’ll never get a decent reference when you do apply. Poverty is when you don’t even dare to apply because it’s a non refundable $165 for the three of you. You can’t afford to lose a bet and your odds are lousy. Poverty is paying $1400 a month for a 2 bedroom house that’s not worth more than $1100 a month. You have to pay that price, though, because it’s the only deal anyone is willing to make.

    Poverty is having to show a friend your budget and pay 50% interest on a 3 day loan so you can put gas in your car. Poverty is your roommate getting chewed out by the cashier at Wal Mart because she’s using food stamps. It’s being belittled for not working hard enough, even when she works 40 to 50 hours a week, and she still can’t make ends meet. It’s when she gets to be humiliated by a cashier who is somehow, evidently, not on food stamps herself, because she must have some other source of income, and she needs to be better than somebody, and your roommate will do just fine. Sure, you can get her manager to chew the cashier out, and explain that’s not how she should treat her customers, but the damage is still done. And you can’t help but feel sorry for that cashier.

    They say Poverty can actually reduce IQ due to all the stress and anxiety. I like to think I’m no stupider than when I had almost enough money to live alone. But the longer I live in it, the slower I become. I feel a little less worthy, each day, and I have to keep reminding myself I’m doing the best I can. I have to try to stay out of the hospital. I have to remind myself that choosing not to eat and taking 50 units of insulin is not really the answer, no matter how tempting it sounds. It’s wrong to make someone wish they didn’t love you so they could have been spared the pain of your demise.

    The more you try to change the world, and the more you fail, the more you feel as though you really are as worthless as the Marketplace says you are.

    Sometimes, if you write about it, it helps a little. Not much… but a little. And when you live in poverty, a little is all you can ever hope to get.

    Posted on by Fred

    The Undeserving Poor

    “Don’t say that, Governor. Don’t look at it that way. What am I, Governors both? I ask you, what am I? I’m one of the undeserving poor: that’s what I am. Think of what that means to a man. It means that he’s up agen middle class morality all the time. If there’s anything going, and I put in for a bit of it, it’s always the same story: ‘You’re undeserving; so you can’t have it.’ But my needs is as great as the most deserving widow’s that ever got money out of six different charities in one week for the death of the same husband. I don’t need less than a deserving man: I need more. I don’t eat less hearty than him; and I drink a lot more. I want a bit of amusement, cause I’m a thinking man. I want cheerfulness and a song and a band when I feel low. Well, they charge me just the same for everything as they charge the deserving. What is middle class morality? Just an excuse for never giving me anything. Therefore, I ask you, as two gentlemen, not to play that game on me. I’m playing straight with you. I ain’t pretending to be deserving. I’m undeserving; and I mean to go on being undeserving. I like it; and that’s the truth. Will you take advantage of a man’s nature to do him out of the price of his own daughter what he’s brought up and fed and clothed by the sweat of his brow until she’s growed big enough to be interesting to you two gentlemen? Is five pounds unreasonable? I put it to you; and I leave it to you.”




    – George Bernard Shaw, “Pygmalion”

    What makes one person “Deserving” and another “Undeserving?” Certainly we would all agree those who hurt others deserve punishment in some form or other. Can we also all agree that, simply by virtue of having beaten incredible odds just to be born, we are all deserving of food? Shelter? Clothing? Medical Care? No, probably not.

    The Puritan Work Ethic has trained us all to believe that a person deserves only what he or she can earn by trading their time, and some form of effort, for rewards. To the extent we can contribute, we deserve something. This made sense for America’s earliest settlers. If Per Hansa and Beret didn’t work hard, frequently, and faithfully, their family would certainly perish. And their hard work was rewarded with the necessities of life. They were fed, clothed, sheltered, and to the extent possible in that time, granted the best medical care available. (If you haven’t read “Giants in the Earth,” I recommend it. It’s the story of Norwegian immigrants who settled in the Dakota territories in the 1870s.)

    But even they depended, to some extent, on other families in the area to help them from time to time. “Man is by nature a social animal; an individual who is unsocial naturally and not accidentally is either beneath our notice or more than human. Society is something that precedes the individual. Anyone who either cannot lead the common life or is so self-sufficient as not to need to, and therefore does not partake of society, is either a beast or a god.” That’s not new information. That’s Aristotle. We need each other from birth. Few and far between are the infants who can survive entirely alone.

    So, it seems to me, that at some point, we must grant a person the right to rely on others. We do this, without much debate, at the beginning of life. The overwhelming majority of humans are born into some form of society. It may be a good society or a bad one. The infant has no control over the society into which he or she is born.

    We have a choice, as adults, about the society in which we live. We can either accept it, reject it, or something in between. We may criticize it, or we may seek another one in which to live. We may also seek to improve it.

    Some place between birth and adulthood we give up the right to rely on others. Is this morally right? I don’t know, but, at least in The United States in 2019, it seems to be true.

    Now, we must not only contribute to society in some way, but we must find a way that society values highly enough to pay us a living wage. None of us, anymore, is Per Hansa, chopping down the trees in the area to build the house in which his family will live. We rely on each other for roads, for the production of food, for schools, for military and police protection, for fire departments, and a host of other things. We are a social animal. We cannot live entirely alone. Our work is not for our benefit alone. It is to benefit the society in which we live.

    If someone is unsuccessful in that effort, we seem to have decided, that person is undeserving. And that’s where I have my problem . Why is a person undeserving?

    We seem to have declared that one must live a life within certain boundaries and norms. We now have the resources to treat every living person as though he or she were a newborn. We can provide everyone with all they need to survive.

    Robert Frost is a great poet. He made a living writing poetry. That poetry certainly improved my life. J.K. Rowling is a great writer. She made a fortune writing books that certainly improved my life. I have great respect for both Frost and Rowling.

    I feel sure, though, they would both tell you that there are other poets or novelists of whom you have never heard, of whom you never will hear, who are their superiors. And those poets and novelists will work at whatever jobs they can find to support themselves. They weren’t fortunate enough to get published. They weren’t fortunate enough to become popular successes. But they contribute in the same way Rowling and Frost do. Do they truly deserve less? Why?

    We’ve moved from philosophy to economic theory. Now we will hear from critics about the virtues of capitalism. It certainly works for some. There are those who amass great wealth under that system. There are others who simply can’t do as well. And so long as we subscribe to the idea that they don’t deserve any more than their skills and efforts allow them to earn, it’s not a problem that many people are poor, underemployed, and not able to pursue what matters most to them because they are required to try to find the funds to survive.

    But, what would life be if people didn’t have to do that? Why do we insist that they earn little pieces of green paper to be deserving of a decent life?

    I was fortunate to have what I think was an excellent childhood. I had parents who loved me, supported me, taught me, understood me as much as any parents can understand their progeny, and protected me. They allowed me to figure out who I wanted to be. And not surprisingly, I wanted to be Batman. That didn’t work out. I wanted to be Atticus Finch, Santiago, Holden Caulfield, and Aaron Sorkin. None of those worked out, either, though I like to think there are pieces of those men inside of me. Sadly, there’s not a trace of Batman to be found in me. There might be a little Captain Kirk, though. I also wanted to be a teacher. They helped me to work that out. I managed, after a fashion, to make a living.

    But, does that mean I deserve more than someone who had no parents, or whose parents were child abusers, or criminals, or simply didn’t love them? How is that the fault of the child? Why does she deserve less than I do?

    Certainly, we don’t all deserve jet planes and swimming pools, but is it really unreasonable to ask for the necessities of life for all people when it’s so easily given? If we could be done with, “I got mine; you get yours” I feel like we could begin to make the sort of society of which we can be proud. We provide for our babies because we love them. Is it really unreasonable to ask that we love everyone at least enough to let them live some sort of life?

    “You may say that I’m a dreamer
    But I’m not the only one
    I hope someday you’ll join us
    And the world will live as one.”

    — John Lennon
    Posted on by Fred · 4 Comments

    The Spiral of Poverty

    “I’ve seen the bottom, and I’ve been on top, but mostly I’ve lived in between…”

    Dan Fogelberg

    It’s easy to blame the victims of poverty for their state. They’re lazy. They don’t manage money well enough. They should get a better job. Those things can be true. Some of them are true of my poverty.

    Sometimes it’s something else.

    They get laid off. They retire. They change jobs. They have massive bills they hadn’t anticipated. Their health declines. Any of these can cause poverty. And they are, by no means, the only causes. The causes are as numerous and varied as its victims.

    My own poverty is nowhere near as bad as that of most others. I have been fortunate in that I have never had to go without a home. I have never gone without food. I have always managed (even if only barely) to keep myself in the insulin I need in order to survive.

    But since I can speak only for myself, I will use my own experiences to explain the spiraling effects of poverty.

    I quit teaching in 2016 because I couldn’t do it anymore. I had begun to hate myself because I thought that teaching students that reading is boring was immoral. And thus began my self contempt.

    Students whose eyes had once lit up with joy to start the next Sherlock Holmes story, to hear more of Shakespeare, to see if Rainsford could escape from General Zaroff, to see if Santiago could get his marlin back to shore, became students whose eyes glazed over with torpor when we had to do “Close Readings” of empty and soulless works. They soon discovered the only reason to read is to pass a mindless test on a computer.

    I fought against it. My principal gave me horrible evaluations because I wasn’t a “team player.” I wasn’t tracking data. I wasn’t updating the My Learning Plan website with “artifacts” to prove that I’m good. I was too busy trying to sneak in something to spark their imaginations. By my final year, all literature had all been banned from my classroom.

    Near the end of my career, I was borrowing money from places with neon signs just to make rent. I was working two jobs, and I had even found some roommates in order to reduce my expenses, but it just wasn’t possible to keep up. Why? Teachers make good money, don’t they? Uh… no. And that actually was the beginning of my spiraling poverty.

    In 2005, my second marriage, in Maine, where they pay teachers well, fell apart. My father was getting old, and I knew he wasn’t going to be around much longer. I came back to Arizona to be with him while I could. And I took a cut of roughly $12,000 a year to do that.

    Was that the right decision? I believe it was. You can, however, tell me that my poverty was, then, my fault. I should have stayed in Maine where they paid me a better wage. You may be right.

    When I quit in 2016, I pulled the only retirement I had left, (I lost half of it in each of my two divorces) paid off the neon sign places, and I lived, briefly, the life I had always wanted to live. I went several times to California to meet one of my heroes and see him perform. I took Mom there a couple of times. I wrote a screenplay. I made videos. I slept. My depression was kept at bay, and I looked forward to each new day. My contempt for myself, now that I wasn’t doing anything I considered to be immoral, was lessening.

    “You shouldn’t have done that, Fred. You should have saved that money.” That may be true. On the other hand, though I live in poverty now, I have memories of beautiful experiences I wasn’t going to have any other way. No one can take that joy away from me.

    But once you’re in poverty it spirals.

    You get sick and miss work, so your paycheck is short. You have to make choices about what to skip paying. If it’s your car payment, you save some money this month, but next month, you need to find twice as much, and, of course, you have to pay the penalties. Next month, your problem is twice as bad. Your budget fits one car payment, not two. So then they repossess your car.

    You don’t want to lose it again, so now you have to buy the cheapest functional car you can. And you have to get it to pass emissions, which, because the car is so old, you can do only if you know a guy who knows a guy who can get the check engine light off long enough to get the guy he knows at Emissions Testing to look the other way. What is normally a $17 bill goes to $117. It’s the price of poverty.

    It spirals.

    And now you begin to think of yourself as being worthless. You are beneath contempt because all too often you’re begging for help. You beg from friends, from the government, from charities, and from churches. And you hate yourself for that. It’s not what a person, particularly a man in our society, is supposed to do. And your friends are kind, and the government can be helpful if you can jump through all the right hoops, and charities and churches can be nice, too. But, inside, you feel as though what you are doing is no way to live. You spent your life giving. Now you spend it taking. And that’s contemptible.

    As I said, it spirals.

    So, when you see someone in poverty, you don’t need to give them your sympathy or your money. But you also should try to avoid giving them your contempt. Trust me, they have plenty of that for themselves. And it’s not what any of them want.