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.
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.
posted by Tom | 1:58 PM
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