More About That Big Ol' Table with All the Homeless and the Homosexuals

Continuation of this post.

The third critique I want to get into here goes beyond Chick-fil-A or gay people or churches or conservatives or liberals or where we find ourselves in these divides: It is the fundamental fact that our own reliance on consumerism as a way of life, as a culture, and as an economic system is fundamentally destructive - literally, figuratively, physically, socially, spiritually destructive. It is consumerism, rather than creativity combined with sustenance, that is not just killing us in terms of health problems (obesity, diabetes, heart disease, strokes), not just in terms of the ecology (which indirectly but even presently affects all of our health in tremendous ways - from ice caps to greenhouse to toxins in the air, land and water), but in terms of actual starvation - specifically of third world children, women and men.

While we argue over whether or not we should support or boycott one fast food franchise, our habits of eating meats and processed foods are actively stealing necessary resources from the majority of the world, just to feed us more (and yet less) than what we need to remain healthy. If American Christians really cared about the starving of the world, we'd eat out a lot less, we'd drastically consume less meat, we would support community farms and gardening so as not to steal grains from overseas. Because when we have such an over-reliance on a small stock of grains (and specifically genetically modified ones), we erode topsoil and limit precious farming land - allocating what property and work third world farmers have towards the propulsion of our already full tummies.

But if we cared for the poor of the world and the US, we wouldn't just stop there. We'd not only not shop at Wal-Mart (which I've made a pretty good habit of boycotting over the last decade ever since I saw what they did to the small stores in my parents' town in Oklahoma. All the stores. Every last one), we'd cease shopping at any ridiculously low-priced store, any big-box, any retail location that doesn't pay living wages to its employees and doesn't pay its vendors enough to maintain a living wage for their employees. We'd shop locally, at little shops, at local machinists, at bakers' shops, getting ingredients from local millers and nearby organic farms, because that money tends to stay in the community - rather than going to some corporate office somewhere where it then goes into hiding. Our money should be circulated to afford more higher-paying jobs.

But then, the majority of poor and lower-middle class people who shop at Wal-Mart do so because it's exactly what they can afford with what little they have. I stock up on highly-processed foods from Aldi because it's 20-60% cheaper than buying from a major grocery chain, let alone a corner grocer, and a lot easier than making food from scratch - which is something that I'd like to do, but, like a lot of this country's poor, I run low on energy and/or time and/or resources when it comes to this. Generally speaking, the working poor cannot afford to shop at the farmer's markets, even when we're well aware how much better they are for us, even when they allow for TANF credits (though I just found out that TANF will match, dollar for dollar up to ten dollars, what is bought each visit to a city-sponsored farmer's market in Chicago - and these are in poor neighborhoods in Chicago such as Austin and West Humboldt Park), even when everybody tells us we should and why we should.

How do we allow for a place to address social-class, poverty, sexuality, racial, gender issues, though? Especially when some of those issues are self-perpetuating, or seemingly at odds with each other - when homosexuals feel that black men and women are working against their interests and black families feel slighted by non-black LGBTQ, or when African Americans are slighted by the service industry - whether they be police or waitstaff or banks - or when Black, Latino or indigenous students become distrustful of the very same educational systems that they are told are supposed to deliver them from poverty. These things do not happen without reason. They are not imagined problems.

I pledge a round table. No kings, no positions above or below. No servants, nobody is slighted nor unwelcome. A table of shared humanity and talents and skills where the learning and the restoring can begin.

We must discover this fact together. We must find out why they are not imagined. We must discover anew the fine art of friendship - extended beyond our borders and the limits we have manufactured to protect ourselves and our ways of life..

And when I say "we" here, I mean "we privileged." Whites, males, heteros, English-speaking, middle and upper class, educated, professional class, Christian, with able bodies and minds and all that stuff that many of us take for granted and in whatever area that we have privileges. Once we recognize our privileges - those bonuses in life that give us a distinct (though rarely recognized) advantage over others who do not share those identity traits - then maybe we are ready to sit at the table. But perhaps we should go over some ground rules before we shed our shoes, elbow up, and grub on down.

We'll touch on those ground rules in the next installment. Let's just say that those who've spoken will need to shut, and the currently shut down will open. Oh, and lots of work, and lots of sharing, and lots of good stuff. I promise. Soon.

But I'd like your ideas. What would be some good ground rules for a great gathering? For a place of learning and sharing? A place of equilibrium, of justice, of feeding.

Being Nickel and Dimed to Death

We're still fighting for basic affordable housing here in Chicago. But as I was finishing up Barbara Ehrenreich's masterful Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting by in America, I was struck by how this is all just right under the noses of most middle class and upper class Americans. The problem is, we're so struck blind by the sheer blindingly awesome affluence and its shiny objects are that we disregard those who have sacrificed, in Ehrenreich's terms, for our gain. Hopefully, these selections will convince you of the utmost need to read through and study this brilliant and yet sadly hilarious book, this sidewinder's undercover tale.

The problem of rents is easy for a non-economist, even a sparsely educated low-wage worker, to grasp; it's the market, stupid. When the rich and the poor compete for housing on the open market, the poor don't stand a chance. The rich can always outbid them, buy up their tenements or trailer parks, and replace them with condos, McMansions, golf courses, or whatever they like. Since the rich have become more numerous, thanks largely to rising stock prices and executive salaries, the poor have necessarily been forced into housing that is more expensive, more dilapidated, or more distant from their places of work. Recall that in Key West [one of the locations where Ms. Ehrenreich had moved for a short stint to find work and lodgings among the working class], the trailer park convenient to hotel jobs was charging $625 a month for a half-size trailer, forcing low-wage workers to search for housing farther and farther away in less fashionable keys. But rents were also sky-rocketing in the touristically challenged city of Minneapolis, where the last bits of near-affordable housing lie deep in the city, while job growth has occurred on the city's periphery, next to distinctly unaffordable suburbs. Insofar as the poor have to work near the dwellings of the rich--as in the case of so many service and retail jobs--they are stuck with lengthy commutes or dauntingly expensive housing.

If there seems to be general complacency about the low-income housing crisis, this is partly because it is in no way reflected in the official poverty rate, which has remained for the past several years at a soothingly low 13% or so. The reason for the disconnect between the actual housing nightmare of the poor and "poverty," as officially defined, is simple: the official poverty level is still calculated by the archaic method of taking the bare-bones cost of food for a family of a given size and multiplying this number by three. Yet food is relatively inflation-proof*, at least compared with rent. In the early 1960s, when this method of calculating poverty was devised, food accounted for 24 percent of the average family budget (not 33% even then, it should be noted) and housing 29 percent. In 1999, food took up only 16 percent of the family budget, while housing had soared to 37 percent. So the choice of food as the basis for calculating family budgets seems fairly arbitrary today; we might as well abolish poverty altogether, at least on paper, by defining subsistence budget as some multiple of average expenditures on comic books or dental floss.

When the market fails to distribute some vital commodity, such as housing, to all who require it, the usual liberal-to-moderate expectation is that the government will step in and help. We accept this principle--at least in a halfhearted and faltering way--in the case of healthcare, where government offers Medicare to the elderly, Medicaid to the desperately poor, and various state programs to the children of the merely very poor. But in the case of housing, the extreme upward skewing of the market has been accompanied by a cowardly public sector retreat from responsibility. Expenditures on public housing have fallen since the 1980s, and the expansion of public rental subsidies came to a half in the mid-1990s. At the same time, housing subsidies for home owners--who tend to be far more affluent than renters--have remained at their usual munificent levels. It did not escape my attention, as a temporarily low-income person, that the housing subsidy I normally receive in my real life--over 20,000 a year in the form of a mortgage-interest deduction--would have allowed a truly low-income family to live in relative splendor. Had this amount been available to me in monthly installments in Minneapolis, I could have moved into one of those "executive" condos with sauna, health club, and pool.

Ok, as much as I want to transcribe the next part--about the paltry rise in wages over the prosperous nineties, despite the incremental growth in wealth for the companies that are not raising wages--I should skip to the end and save myself the CTS and yourself the unfettered privilege of reading this work on your own.

According to a recent poll conducted by Jobs for the Future, a Boston-based employment research firm, 94 percent of Americans agree that "people who work full-time should be able to earn enough to keep their families out of poverty"** [Makes me wonder who the other 6% of monsters are]. I grew up hearing over and over, to the point of tedium, that "hard work" is the secret of success: Work hard and you'll get ahead" or "It's hard work that got us where we are." No one
ever said that you could work hard--harder even than you ever thought possible--and still find yourself sinking ever deeper into poverty and debt.

When poor single mothers had the option of remaining out of the labor force on welfare, the middle and upper middle class tended to view them with a certain impatience, if not disgust. The welfare poor were excoriated for their laziness, their persistence in reproducing in unfavorable circumstances, their presumed addictions, and above all for their "dependency."... But now that government has largely withdrawn its "handouts," now that the overwhelming majority of the poor people are out there toiling in Wal-Mart or Wendy's--well, what are we to think of them? Disapproval and condescension no longer apply, so what out-look makes sense?...

The appropriate emotion is shame--shame at own own dependency, in this case, on the underpaid labor of others. When someone works for less pay than she can live on--when, for example, she goes hungry so that you can eat more cheaply and conveniently--then she has made a great sacrifice for you, she has made you a gift of some part of her abilities, her health, and her life... As Gail, one of my restaurant coworkers put it, "you give and you give."

Someday, of course... they are bound to tire of getting so little in return and to demand to be paid what they're worth. There'll be a lot of anger when that day comes, and strikes and disruption. But the sky will not fall, and we will all be better off for it in the end.

*For reasons for this, may I humbly suggest you watch Food, Inc.? Now?

**"A National Survey of American Attitudes toward Low-Wage Workers and Welfare Reform," Jobs for the Future, Boston. May 24, 2000.