How Could I Have Forgotten?

Today I live in a very nice house in a very nice neighborhood, but I didn't grow up that way. Today I have a good job with a nice income. Without checking the statistics, I believe that our family income puts us at a minimum in the top 10% of incomes in the United States, though it is less than $100,000 a year. The kids have grown and moved out. The house and cars are paid for, that is we have no debt other than credit cards, which we pay off monthly.

How could I have forgotten what is was like to grow up poor? I'm the oldest of nine children. The youngest child was born a few months before I turned 16. We lived in a 700 square foot home built just after WWII. It was drywall and studs set on a concrete slab on a postage-stamp sized lot in a development of identical comes, and I do mean identical. The neighborhood was lower income working class white when we moved in. By the time I moved out to get married, it was a mixed race neighborhood, still working class, but now with culture clashes between the few whites who remained and the blacks who moved in.

After I moved out, my father finally managed to move up to a job in computer programming, and the family started to have some money. But he refused to move out of his home.

When I was a kid, I remember saying at dinner one day that I believed Dad made $10,000 a year. My parents laughed and said he didn't make anywhere near that much. (I think there was a discussion at school about how much our respective fathers made in income.) I don't know what my father made--mothers generally didn't work back in the Fifties and Sixties; my father refused to allow my mother to work, in fact, until the youngest was in school. (My how the world has changed.)

My point is that while I didn't know we were poor, at least until I got into high school, I knew we weren't rich. I know that sometimes there wasn't enough money to get to the end of the week and that my mother had to fend off creditors more than once with tales of woe. But it didn't mean anything to me as a child growing up. Life was what it was.

Yet I look back now, especially from my vantage point of privilege in income and housing, and I realize that we were poor when I was a child. And I realize now that whatever I want to characterize myself, I'm not poor today, not by a long shot.

How would we have fared had we lived in New Orleans during this catastrophic time? Could our station wagon have gotten us out of town? Where would we have stayed? How would we have paid for that stay? Or would we have opted to stay at the Superdome or the Convention Center in New Orleans and ride the storm out?

Either way, the storm and the flooding would have wiped us out utterly. Dad would have had no job, and I don't know that he would have had any prospects for a job. How does one find a job without an address, in a strange town, in a strange part of the country? How would we have done in the Superdome for a week without food or water, with rumors flying rampantly about, with killings and rapes and just plain frustration and fatigue? How many of us would have survived?

I would break into a store to feed my family, if I had to. I know my father would have, too. If there was anything more important to this man who often worked two jobs just to keep food on the table, clothes on our backs, and a roof over our heads, I don't know what it was. He would have gotten a hold of a rifle or shotgun to protect his family, too. And he would have protected others around him from anyone who tried to harm them. I got those sorts of values from him.

The people who stayed in New Orleans didn't do so because they were lazy or good-for-nothing. They stayed because they had no choice (except for the very few who had a choice and chose badly). They went to the Superdome and the Convention Center because they were told to go there. There was nowhere else for them to go that they could get to. And when they got there, they found no food, no water, no nothing but other people. When the power went out, as it inevitably does during a hurricane, those places became unliveable, not because there was something inherently bad about them but because the situation quickly became horrible. They were reduced to doing what they could to survive. They had no idea what had happened or what was going to happen or when it was going to happen. I knew more about their situation than they did. Frankly, it amazes me that they acted as well towards each other as they did.

I can only begin to imagine how hopeless it must have seemed as the days dragged on with no food, no water, and no information. I can only imagine the horror of watching the very old and the very young die before me because they had no water, no medicine, no care. These are the very people society is most supposed to protect. We as a society let our young people and our old people down. Had I been through what they went through, I would be very angry and very frustrated.

How could I have forgotten that living so close to the edge of poverty, homelessness, helplessness is so scary? And what can I do now to help provide a safety net that will catch these people when they fall? It's my responsibility, and I believe it is the responsibility of us all.

Civilization And Chaos

One of the realizations I had when I returned from Vietnam was that the line between civilization and chaos is a very thin one. It took me awhile to be able to put this idea into words or even really understand it, but I had an almost instant realization that I was much more defenseless, much more at the mercy of my fellow human beings in America than I was in Vietnam. As I've gotten older, I've come to realize that my earlier understanding wasn't exactly true, as I have always been at the mercy of others and less in control than I ever thought.

This realization comes up for me again while watching the events in New Orleans and the Gulf Coast unfold in the past week and a half. I have seen many instances where the veneers of civilization have been stripped bare by the howling winds, driving rains, and rising waters in that part of the world. Many otherwise civilized human beings have reacted in decidedly uncivilized ways during this crisis, while many others have kept to the precepts of order and charity that are the hallmarks of civilization.

Consider the looting that has been reported, and in some cases televised. There seem to have been two kinds of looting, or at least so it has been characterized by outside observers. There was survival looting that, we are told, limited itself to food, water, bandages, and medicines: the necessities of life that people who were not receiving help from the world outside of the devastated area took to meet their survival needs. And then there was the looting that has been characterized as thievery and thuggery by outside observers. This looting involved seemingly useless items like televisions, stereo equipment, and other electronics. This looting also included guns--rifles, pistols, shotguns, and automatic weapons--and ammunition. This type of looting has troubled people. Many see it as symptomatic of a sick society or of how "they" are different and morally inferior to "us."

I see the second type of looting as very similar to the first kind, that is survival looting. Weapons and ammunition are essential for self-defense in a lawless area. And for people who have no money, the electronics items might be barterable for food or water.

By now, it must seem to the gentle reader that I condone lawlessness. I do not. It is not my preferred way to live. Yet I submit that we are all a stiff wind away from chaos where we live. In my experience, people are not inherently good or orderly, nor are they inherently evil or chaotic. Most people follow the influences around them, and if they are afraid, I find that people will do things and justify things that they would not ordinarily tolerate.

Few of us, myself included, obey laws we feel inconvenience us. We routinely speed when driving or roll through stop signs without coming to a complete halt or squeeze through a traffic signal that just turned red. We are not above petty theft at the office--they'll never miss that ream of paper or those pencils or batteries or file folders or staples. We'll cheat on our income tax, either by commission, which seems rare, or by omissions such as accepting a payment in cash that we have no intention of claiming on our tax returns or not paying the sales tax we owe on our Internet purchases. And even if we don't do these things, we don't brag about it to others. To tell others is to invite scorn upon us as fools for not taking advantage. "Others do it; why can't I?" we say or we hear.

Admittedly, these 'crimes' are not on a par with murder or grand theft. I suspect though that they erode or regard for the rules of civilization and make it easier to take the leap from these small actions and the larger ones that arise in times of crisis. To expand on what I said earlier, our civilization is but a fire or earthquake or tornado or hurricane or flood away from breakdown. If I do not judge the actions of others harshly, it is because I know how close I am to doing what they're doing, should I feel the need arise.

Celebrating Ordinariness

I got up this morning at my usual time, 6:30 am. Shaved, showered, and dressed I went downstairs and pickup up the morning paper from the front walk. Then I took my morning pills for blood pressure, allergies, and depression, downloaded the days news from the Internet, grabbed my work materials and headed out the door for the drive to work.

In the car, I backed out and drove down the driveway, turned left onto my street past the yard waste and recyclable cans put out for collection each week. Another left and two blocks east took me to the main road. I turned right, slipped over into the left lane and turned left at the light. Following the road, I wound past the post office, the elementary school, the high school and some houses over to the next main road about a mile away. A right turn, followed by a left a block later and another quick right put me on the freeway to downtown. All of that took maybe five minutes.

Freeway traffic was a bit sluggish this morning. School started last Tuesday, and I've noticed it in the changing traffic pattern that always accompanies that start of the school year. But the traffic moved well. I cleared the usual bottlenecks around curves and major interchanges, and about ten minutes later I was off the freeway and onto the downtown surface streets. A few more turns and a light brought me to the parking garage connected to the building where I'm working now. I swiped in at 8:00 sharp for another routine workday.

Everything is ordinary here. Everything is working. The gasoline prices ran up fifty cents yesterday to $3.09 for the cheapest grades. That and the rain that passed through here Tuesday and left 3-5 inches of rain and some localized flooding are the only evidence of Katrina in my area. Life is normal and ordinary and safe.

I feel very lucky to be able to say all of that after spending an evening watching the struggles down south along America's Gulf Coast. It amazes me how much I take life for granted. My heart is near to breaking for those poor people struggling to survive down there right now, struggling to get back to what I have and take for granted: an ordinary day in an ordinary life.

God bless them all and watch over them in the days, weeks, months, and years to come. Their task is daunting. At the moment, like the hurricane that turned their world upside down, the media and government are focused on them and their plight. That focus will, like a hurricane, slowly drift off to other things over the next few days. It is inevitable.

Yet they will go on, striving to regain their ordinary lives. Let us rejoice and celebrate the ordinariness we have. We never know when our worlds will be overturned and our precious ordinary lives snatched away and we ourselves deposited in an alien situation to fend for ourselves as best we can.