I give you four poems I composed as a young adult. Each of these four pieces were written when I was co-creator of a local open mike night in Jacksonville, Florida at a now defunct cafe called "Le Chat Noir". The first came as the result of a conversation I had with a kind, elderly gentleman while riding public transportation. The second comes from an insatiable curiosity and an obsession with questioning. The third is a love poem, but it's not what you think and the fourth was inspired by the scene in "V for Vendetta" wherein our heroine walks into the rain after discovering the identity of her captor. I offer these to you because they've been popping up periodically through the course of conversation, so it seems the universe is telling me to reflect on them. Message received.
Discuss on a Buss
I'm a young white woman,
he's an old black man.
We sit on the bus
and discuss.
We discuss our lives,
our trusts,
our shared belief that the man
is taking adavantage of us.
We see the world through different eyes
but come to the same conclusion
that our world is falling apart
and it truly, madly, deeply is breaking both our hearts.
.
He's an old black Christian man
and I, well I am not.
But in this life we're given
we'll give it all we've got.
We don't expect to save the world
perhaps change it -- for the better.
And as I ponder our connection
in my third row bus seat section
I wonder of the tears that fall.
Do they fall heavier than ever?
We talk of crack and road repair
and how misplaced priorities
make us want to pull out our hair.
And as we sit here on this bus
and it slows for his departure
we both take comfort in the fact
we know the others out there.
___________________________________________
By Word of God
By word of god you shouldn't
and you don't,
even if the word of god
by hand of man was wrote.
A new version, a new text
a new translation --
to fit the contemplation
of your sermon.
Pick and choose the lines you use,
just as you swallow a poets pill
to meet them in their madness.
Blinded by the faith your fed --
in truth it's not your will,
your faith inspires in me sadness.
For as you try to save my soul
it's you who will be damned.
Why not give up this battle old
I'm certain in my plan.
See, there's reason for my lacking
a choice of god or structure.
Intolerance for question
is a sin I'll never suffer.
___________________________________________
She
she
she's beautiful, articulate, chiseled
almost angelic in form
if I believed in angels
and I feel
inadequate
she casts her solid, cynically endowed gaze across the room
and seems to be unaware that she could have any man she chooses
and I writhe because she sets her sights upon my most admired
what tortures me more is this
that I adore her too
that her mind and eyes are such that one could be swept away
and she could hold anyone captivated for a time
for a time that could last forever
if she wanted it to
___________________________________________
Tomorrow
All I had was the rain
and it was beautiful
misting my face like a thousand kisses
from a love I thought lost
I find hope in those
kisses like a breeze
pulling me along
a path I cannot see
and I am unafraid
for I am ready to fight
I am ready to fall
to die
to dream of tomorrow
and there will always be tomorrow.
Sunday, April 26, 2015
Friday, April 24, 2015
Slutty, slutty, slut, slut. OR You do you, but at LEAST be honest about it OR Finding The Boogeyman in words
 |
| The Devil in disguise. |
 |
| You do you. |
I've also seen arguments that reduce her to sex symbol in both the context of the film and in context of her appearances in comics. However, Black Widow was never just a sex symbol. I disagree with that in a fundamental way. First of all, I don't have a problem with people being sex symbols - male or female - and that is part of her character. She embraces that and uses that. I don't have a problem with that, either, but I don't pretend she is a *good* role model. She's strong and unapologetic, confident, opinionated, and a good leader. That is much, much more than what she is presented as in many contexts I've seen. Every one can be a sex symbol. We are sexual beings. That is a good thing. It keeps our species alive.
As for the "catering to the male gaze" argument...Thor and Hawkeye and Captain America and Iron Man and Starlord, etc. taking their shirts off was what exactly? Necessary to the plot?
 |
| Hey, sexy. |
 | |
| Take it off! |
Black Widow is no more a "superhero" than Maria is and Maria has integrity to boot.
If I wanted to be like anyone, I'd want to be like her or Agent Colson. Or any of the other amazing female super heroes that exist. But, not Black Widow.
 |
| Bad ass woman with integrity. |
 | |
| Sex ACTOR, not sex object. |
I have also heard the argument that we shouldn't be comparing her to Maria Hill to legitimize her
worthiness because we shouldn't compare anyone to
someone else to legitimize their individual worthiness. But, drawing
comparisons in fictional characters is perfectly acceptable to me. They
are, in many ways, foils of one another in the film. Maria plays by the rules,
Natalia breaks them all. Maria is valued for her effectiveness as an
officer and contributions to her mission and Natalia is employed to
undermine the sensibilities of men (for lack of a better term). And if
that's the case, then it is feminism that is comparing her to a sex object. She is not a sex object. She
is a sex actor.
And last, but certainly not least, being accused of "internalized misogyny" is always fun. To me, it just feels like some old-fashioned, regular misogyny because there are assumptions being made that my opinions must have been manipulated in some way by "the patriarchy" for them to not to have a problem with what was said.
Agency is something we take for ourselves. Natalia Romanov has agency in abundance. So does Maria Hill. So do all the heroes in these stories.
And why does a female character have to be representative? I don't have to have anything in common with someone to empathize with their plight. Why are we trying to define what women can and cannot do or be?
Sex goddess or school marm. It's your choice. And both are perfectly fine by me.
And last, but certainly not least, being accused of "internalized misogyny" is always fun. To me, it just feels like some old-fashioned, regular misogyny because there are assumptions being made that my opinions must have been manipulated in some way by "the patriarchy" for them to not to have a problem with what was said.
Agency is something we take for ourselves. Natalia Romanov has agency in abundance. So does Maria Hill. So do all the heroes in these stories.
And why does a female character have to be representative? I don't have to have anything in common with someone to empathize with their plight. Why are we trying to define what women can and cannot do or be?
Sex goddess or school marm. It's your choice. And both are perfectly fine by me.
Thursday, April 16, 2015
So, here's what I see.
When the United States was 'founded', it was a bunch
of average Englishmen who decided they didn't want to take shit from
their oppressors, so they revolted. At this point, slavery had been
established and the relegation of the native peoples to lower class had
been cemented into 'the way of things', as with everyone else who wasn't
English (or Dutch, but no one really cared about the Dutch cause they
didn't bother anyone; they just wanted to trade their pelts). Some
native tribes fought for the British, some fought for the Americas (and
we even got help from France).
Fast forward to post-Revolution and we see a systematic structuring of who was and wasn't a citizen, who could own what, do what, say what, be what, and so on; i.e. the oppressed became the oppressor. The very thing that we hated, we became tenfold. We opened the slave trade and imported from tribes along the coast of Africa, many of them sold into slavery by neighboring tribes after conflict. When we decided we wouldn't "import" anymore, we still permitted the breeding of slaves, so it really only made things worse. This was a brutal period of our history and words cannot express the depths of depravity that we reached in subjugating human beings. We thought the English were bad...well, the apple didn't fall far.
The relaxation of such legal precedent and formally restrictive institutions was slow going with incremental inclusion that first extended to the Irish as to offset the influx of Polish and Italian immigrants. Then came the Slavs and Romanians, so we extended citizenship to the Polish and the Italians. And so it went until there were so many immigrants that we seized things completely, freezing our immigrant quotas to percentages reflected in the 1920 census; a policy we later changed to parallel percentages reflected in the 1907(?) census. This was in an effort to preserve that 'white culture' you're referring to. All the while, Asians were not allowed into the country to stay at all: Chinese and Japanese peoples were not permitted legal immigration status until 1943.
By the 1960s, things had come to a head - what with 'separate but equal' enshrined into law since the Plessy v. Ferguson case of 1896, Jim Crow laws, voting restrictions and tests, all sorts of other systematic discrimination (often justified by old white men by quoting the bible), and worse still: the violence. The number of slaves and freemen murdered simply cannot be calculate, but I am sure that if we could, we would find it not wholly dissimilar from the holocaust of the Jewish people by the Nazi regime.
Things were making progress then, after the 60s, for a short time, but things got weird. A backlash started, we freed people and made them equal by ignoring their differences. This was a mistake. Let me be clear: colorblind policies were a mistake. Why? Because they failed to address the structural inequalities that existed as a result of intentional policy prescriptions that disenfranchised entire groups of people based on arbitrary characteristics. If we are to make headway in this move to build a future together, we desperately need to reconcile ourselves with this history and wear it on our sleeve; not as a mark of guilt, but rather as a mark of a lesson learned. We can do better, but what we have NOW is a result of combination of color blind policies, deregulation of the market, emphasis on capital accumulation, and the rise of feminist rhetoric that disenfranchises yet another group based on an arbitrary characteristic: the Y Chromosome.
Fast forward to post-Revolution and we see a systematic structuring of who was and wasn't a citizen, who could own what, do what, say what, be what, and so on; i.e. the oppressed became the oppressor. The very thing that we hated, we became tenfold. We opened the slave trade and imported from tribes along the coast of Africa, many of them sold into slavery by neighboring tribes after conflict. When we decided we wouldn't "import" anymore, we still permitted the breeding of slaves, so it really only made things worse. This was a brutal period of our history and words cannot express the depths of depravity that we reached in subjugating human beings. We thought the English were bad...well, the apple didn't fall far.
The relaxation of such legal precedent and formally restrictive institutions was slow going with incremental inclusion that first extended to the Irish as to offset the influx of Polish and Italian immigrants. Then came the Slavs and Romanians, so we extended citizenship to the Polish and the Italians. And so it went until there were so many immigrants that we seized things completely, freezing our immigrant quotas to percentages reflected in the 1920 census; a policy we later changed to parallel percentages reflected in the 1907(?) census. This was in an effort to preserve that 'white culture' you're referring to. All the while, Asians were not allowed into the country to stay at all: Chinese and Japanese peoples were not permitted legal immigration status until 1943.
By the 1960s, things had come to a head - what with 'separate but equal' enshrined into law since the Plessy v. Ferguson case of 1896, Jim Crow laws, voting restrictions and tests, all sorts of other systematic discrimination (often justified by old white men by quoting the bible), and worse still: the violence. The number of slaves and freemen murdered simply cannot be calculate, but I am sure that if we could, we would find it not wholly dissimilar from the holocaust of the Jewish people by the Nazi regime.
Things were making progress then, after the 60s, for a short time, but things got weird. A backlash started, we freed people and made them equal by ignoring their differences. This was a mistake. Let me be clear: colorblind policies were a mistake. Why? Because they failed to address the structural inequalities that existed as a result of intentional policy prescriptions that disenfranchised entire groups of people based on arbitrary characteristics. If we are to make headway in this move to build a future together, we desperately need to reconcile ourselves with this history and wear it on our sleeve; not as a mark of guilt, but rather as a mark of a lesson learned. We can do better, but what we have NOW is a result of combination of color blind policies, deregulation of the market, emphasis on capital accumulation, and the rise of feminist rhetoric that disenfranchises yet another group based on an arbitrary characteristic: the Y Chromosome.
Monday, April 6, 2015
Feminism in 2015
Yeah...I
think feminist evaluations of history is myopic in it's approach by suggesting that
men have always oppressed women and that men "have always had all the power". That
is simply not the case anymore...if it ever was. That fight is over. Rights are no longer
denied. Things are moving in the other direction. The oppressed are
becoming the oppressor. And MOST people throughout all of history have
been powerless to the forces that be. Feminism was and always will be a
movement of the rich; it is not founded on inclusion, it's approaches
are flawed, it's name is fundamentally valuing femininity over
masculinity, and I think it's high time we seriously consider just
getting over the name itself. I do not consider myself a feminist.
Let me be clear here: I am specifically speaking in context of the United States and other post-industrial societies. This criticism does not extend to issues that are beyond those borders. This is one of the reasons I criticize the myopathy of these rhetorical methods.
I believe in equality and I believe we're closer to achieving that than we ever have been. I think the patriarchy is finished. Those ladies won their war. Check out the work of Christina Hoff Sommers, Cathy Young, and Camille Paglia - all prominent feminists in their own right for more than 40 years and modern "third-wave" feminists are calling them heretics and gender traitors.
I've been called a "gender traitor" and been told I was "triggering" for daring to even discuss the inequalities in the application of various policies regarding domestic violence and rape. The idea that everyone feels the need to equivocate the notion that women are equally as violent as men infuriates me and every feminist I know does it. We discount the fact that men are four times more likely to commit suicide and ten times more likely to be homeless than a woman.
Feminists I see, not basement dwellers - mainstream media: The Huffington Post, Slate.com, SALON.com, Democracy Now!, etc...places I used to go...and feministing.org, feministfrequency.com, jezebel.com, everydayfeminism.com, etc...they're all littered with these ideas.
Jessica Valenti is invited over and over again to speak and she is the most classist, myopic, nit-witted, ninny-picker I've ever seen. "Women shouldn't be taxed on tampons and we're oppressed because we HAVE to wrap presents." No, you don't. Oh, should I also mention how she's a white middle class girl with two kids and her husband is a lawyer? Can we say, "first world problems much?"
Anita Sarkeesian is another one that feminists have allowed to take some honored place among their ranks, and various industries are rewarding her half-assed, hack work that hasn't even fulfilled the obligations she laid forth in her Kickstarter campaign. She's a con-artist and a liar and a cherry-picker and a pathetic excuse for an "academic". Her work on "the misogyny of video game culture" is a fucking joke.
I've already discussed her work, so you're welcome to read that here.
Manplaining, manspreading, man-what-the-fuck-ever. It's a fucked up thing to say and contributes to the idea that these are "male behaviors". It is based on the assumption that the reason someone did something is because they are masculine, i.e. functionally a man. It's engendering an entire pattern of behavior that is not fundamentally gendered.
Approaching the problem of higher crime in black neighborhoods from the perspective of asking "what about them being black is causing the problem" is as unacceptable and as bigoted as "what is it about men that has caused them to commit crimes" that have been shown to be equal, all things the same. But I digress.
Many of the laws that were in place that denied rights were often at the thought of protecting and providing for women. Even anti-suffragists thought the primary reason women shouldn't vote is because politics was dirty work and women weren't meant for that. There were policies in place, but by and large history is made up of complex dynamics wherein both men and women held various stations above one another with rights and privileges associated with middle and upper class individuals. It wasn't simply a matter of men having all dominance in the home.
Unfortunately, many policies of recent date are proposing the same kind of paternal oversight into the private lives of others, such as affirmative consent laws here in California and I know this comes from both sides. The right with their resistance to gay marriage, for example...what do I care what you do in the privacy of your own home. But I digress...bring me any issue. I'll show you what we're doing wrong.
Campus Assault? Rape? Prison management? Suicide? Homelessness? Unemployment? Education? The school to prison pipeline? Affirmative Consent? Let's talk.
So, here's the thing for me...there are glimpses of history wherein a balance between the sexes was found (and in many cultures, plenty of space for gender nonconformity and intersexed individuals). I view the realms of femininity and masculinity were not seen as solid, concrete things to smash, but fluid, dynamic things that saw people come and go in their relationship dynamics, expressing more masculine or more feminine attitudes and behaviors depending on who they are interacting with. Think about it: in your relationships, there are some where you are more dominant, some where you are more submissive. Human beings are not static and we are a blend of these two spheres of expression, just as we are a blend of our parents DNA.
Let me be clear here: I am specifically speaking in context of the United States and other post-industrial societies. This criticism does not extend to issues that are beyond those borders. This is one of the reasons I criticize the myopathy of these rhetorical methods.
I believe in equality and I believe we're closer to achieving that than we ever have been. I think the patriarchy is finished. Those ladies won their war. Check out the work of Christina Hoff Sommers, Cathy Young, and Camille Paglia - all prominent feminists in their own right for more than 40 years and modern "third-wave" feminists are calling them heretics and gender traitors.
I've been called a "gender traitor" and been told I was "triggering" for daring to even discuss the inequalities in the application of various policies regarding domestic violence and rape. The idea that everyone feels the need to equivocate the notion that women are equally as violent as men infuriates me and every feminist I know does it. We discount the fact that men are four times more likely to commit suicide and ten times more likely to be homeless than a woman.
Feminists I see, not basement dwellers - mainstream media: The Huffington Post, Slate.com, SALON.com, Democracy Now!, etc...places I used to go...and feministing.org, feministfrequency.com, jezebel.com, everydayfeminism.com, etc...they're all littered with these ideas.
Jessica Valenti is invited over and over again to speak and she is the most classist, myopic, nit-witted, ninny-picker I've ever seen. "Women shouldn't be taxed on tampons and we're oppressed because we HAVE to wrap presents." No, you don't. Oh, should I also mention how she's a white middle class girl with two kids and her husband is a lawyer? Can we say, "first world problems much?"
Anita Sarkeesian is another one that feminists have allowed to take some honored place among their ranks, and various industries are rewarding her half-assed, hack work that hasn't even fulfilled the obligations she laid forth in her Kickstarter campaign. She's a con-artist and a liar and a cherry-picker and a pathetic excuse for an "academic". Her work on "the misogyny of video game culture" is a fucking joke.
I've already discussed her work, so you're welcome to read that here.
Manplaining, manspreading, man-what-the-fuck-ever. It's a fucked up thing to say and contributes to the idea that these are "male behaviors". It is based on the assumption that the reason someone did something is because they are masculine, i.e. functionally a man. It's engendering an entire pattern of behavior that is not fundamentally gendered.
Approaching the problem of higher crime in black neighborhoods from the perspective of asking "what about them being black is causing the problem" is as unacceptable and as bigoted as "what is it about men that has caused them to commit crimes" that have been shown to be equal, all things the same. But I digress.
Many of the laws that were in place that denied rights were often at the thought of protecting and providing for women. Even anti-suffragists thought the primary reason women shouldn't vote is because politics was dirty work and women weren't meant for that. There were policies in place, but by and large history is made up of complex dynamics wherein both men and women held various stations above one another with rights and privileges associated with middle and upper class individuals. It wasn't simply a matter of men having all dominance in the home.
Unfortunately, many policies of recent date are proposing the same kind of paternal oversight into the private lives of others, such as affirmative consent laws here in California and I know this comes from both sides. The right with their resistance to gay marriage, for example...what do I care what you do in the privacy of your own home. But I digress...bring me any issue. I'll show you what we're doing wrong.
Campus Assault? Rape? Prison management? Suicide? Homelessness? Unemployment? Education? The school to prison pipeline? Affirmative Consent? Let's talk.
So, here's the thing for me...there are glimpses of history wherein a balance between the sexes was found (and in many cultures, plenty of space for gender nonconformity and intersexed individuals). I view the realms of femininity and masculinity were not seen as solid, concrete things to smash, but fluid, dynamic things that saw people come and go in their relationship dynamics, expressing more masculine or more feminine attitudes and behaviors depending on who they are interacting with. Think about it: in your relationships, there are some where you are more dominant, some where you are more submissive. Human beings are not static and we are a blend of these two spheres of expression, just as we are a blend of our parents DNA.
Saturday, April 4, 2015
Just...ugh.
I've been seeing a lot of prominent feminist websites highlighting the case of a young Indian woman named Purvi Patel whom they are *claiming* has been "sent to prison for having a miscarriage".
http://scroll.in/article/718081/The-Indiana-foeticide-case-why-Purvi-Patels-Indianness-matters
Let me be clear here: Purvi Patel is not going to jail for having a miscarriage. The jackasses in power are lying to you to gain political traction. She bought illegal abortion pills (from china), and went to the doctor who found an umbilical cord in her vagina. She denied it and claimed it was a miscarriage before recanting and telling them where the child was. The child was found in a dumpster then later died at the hospital. She murdered that child to deny the fact that she had ever been pregnant. She could have legally abandoned that child at any firehouse or hospital or police station, but denying it's existence and preserving her cultural myopathy was more important. She is not going to jail for a miscarriage. She is going to prison for fetal homicide. She lied.
Court Record: https://www.documentcloud.org/…/1280086-patelpcaffidavit.ht…
*EDITED FOR ACCURACY* The baby was not alive when it was taken to the hospital. However, the autopsy concluded that the child was alive when it was born and died from blood loss from the broken, untreated umbilical cord.
Also, the child was approximately 28 weeks old and the it was determined that with proper medical attention, the child could have survived. It was alive when she birthed it. It bled out. It's heart was therefore pumping. They reduced her sentence from 41 years to the 30 she's serving because they cannot determine if the drugs she knowingly took would have caused irreparable harm to the child.
Furthermore, the drug itself is illicit in the United States. She knew this, sought out the drug, discussed with a friend via text message the use of the drug, and paid for the drug online with the same credit card she uses to pay for her Cadillac SRX. So, the "she might not have access to abortion care because she's poor" doesn't hold water because she is from a family that is financial comfortable. This establishes beyond a shadow of a doubt that she knew what the drugs were, what they would do, that they were illegal, and the end result of having taken them. She left the child in a dumpster.
At the hospital, she initially claimed to have not been pregnant all and that she was experiencing unexplained bleeding. However, upon questioning (and finding an umbilical cord upon her exam) she changed her story to her having had a miscarriage. But she took the drugs. Knowingly.
There was also simply no legal, financial, or ethical reason to have done this at all. This was pure and simple to hide that she had become pregnant in the first place.
http://safehaven.tv/states/indiana/
http://scroll.in/article/718081/The-Indiana-foeticide-case-why-Purvi-Patels-Indianness-matters
Let me be clear here: Purvi Patel is not going to jail for having a miscarriage. The jackasses in power are lying to you to gain political traction. She bought illegal abortion pills (from china), and went to the doctor who found an umbilical cord in her vagina. She denied it and claimed it was a miscarriage before recanting and telling them where the child was. The child was found in a dumpster then later died at the hospital. She murdered that child to deny the fact that she had ever been pregnant. She could have legally abandoned that child at any firehouse or hospital or police station, but denying it's existence and preserving her cultural myopathy was more important. She is not going to jail for a miscarriage. She is going to prison for fetal homicide. She lied.
Court Record: https://www.documentcloud.org/…/1280086-patelpcaffidavit.ht…
*EDITED FOR ACCURACY* The baby was not alive when it was taken to the hospital. However, the autopsy concluded that the child was alive when it was born and died from blood loss from the broken, untreated umbilical cord.
Also, the child was approximately 28 weeks old and the it was determined that with proper medical attention, the child could have survived. It was alive when she birthed it. It bled out. It's heart was therefore pumping. They reduced her sentence from 41 years to the 30 she's serving because they cannot determine if the drugs she knowingly took would have caused irreparable harm to the child.
Furthermore, the drug itself is illicit in the United States. She knew this, sought out the drug, discussed with a friend via text message the use of the drug, and paid for the drug online with the same credit card she uses to pay for her Cadillac SRX. So, the "she might not have access to abortion care because she's poor" doesn't hold water because she is from a family that is financial comfortable. This establishes beyond a shadow of a doubt that she knew what the drugs were, what they would do, that they were illegal, and the end result of having taken them. She left the child in a dumpster.
At the hospital, she initially claimed to have not been pregnant all and that she was experiencing unexplained bleeding. However, upon questioning (and finding an umbilical cord upon her exam) she changed her story to her having had a miscarriage. But she took the drugs. Knowingly.
There was also simply no legal, financial, or ethical reason to have done this at all. This was pure and simple to hide that she had become pregnant in the first place.
http://safehaven.tv/states/indiana/
Wednesday, April 1, 2015
Trapped: For Want of the American Dream
We have to face facts: welfare has a reputation. Lawrence Mead (1986) would have you believe that the scorn for these programs are rightfully earned because they serve to prop up the reckless, lazy, and downright irresponsible. Charles Murray (1984) distills the system into a series of disincentives to work and claims that the welfare state is a bloated and inefficient system that rewards idleness and causes individuals to “cease to function”. Both decry a system that is deeply flawed, but what these gentlemen seem to fail to address is the overwhelming evidence that suggests that many of these disincentives are much more entrenched in the politics of the value of labor as a commodity rather than what they claim is a lack of desire to work. Mead and Murray both seem to seek a goal of moving individuals living in poverty into places where they are no longer in poverty. If the goal of these authors is to encourage this economic and social movement of these persons into a position of “full citizenship”, then individuals must have access to pathways that will find them well-paid jobs (Collins & Mayer, 2010; Leichter, 2001). If the value of work is the lesson that is to be taught to persons who are poor, by what logic does it stand that we undervalue their labor -- i.e. that they should ‘suck it up and take what you can get’ (as Mead would put it) when the economic pie is so wildly distorted in its’ distribution (Reich, 2007)?
Part One - I Know How to Work Hard
With infrastructure of the United States crumbling, why couldn’t the state simply hire people at a full, protected wage? (Hint: because then it wouldn’t be punishment.) Why are these same governmental bodies then permitted to outsource to companies that disenfranchise their labor through independent contractor loopholes (Brady, 2009; Kalleburg, et al., 2000)? A generous welfare state supported by a more equitable distribution of GDP growth is the best means by which poverty can be managed long-term because if we ensure that all citizens of a given society have the basic necessities, exploitative labor relationships would not be possible because in order for an individual to be willing to do dirty, nasty, dangerous, undesirable work, you’d have to make it worth their while (Brady, 2009; Collins & Mayer, 2010; Kenworthy, 2011). The truth is: these institutional bodies are set against a motivation to cut costs at all cost and to provide cheap labor for what is relegated as dreg employment and unless government functions as the mitigating force in the dispensation between individual self-interest and the common good, this form of imbalance is inevitable as non-unionized, low-wage service employment replaces unionized, high-wage industrial and manufacturing employment which once served as the primary means of middle class entry for low-skill workers (Wilson, 1996; Reich, 2015; Leichter, 2001). And human beings, for whatever advances we may have above all others in the animal kingdom, are still relegated by our base needs to eat and sleep.
Simply put: when people are desperate to fulfill those base needs, they are often willing to do whatever is necessary and it is the system that is structured to be exploitative. An underlying current of a Protestant heritage removed of all religious intent permeates American capitalism, denoting that the “capitalistic system [has] an attitude toward material goods which is so well suited to that system, so intimately bound up with the conditions of survival in the economic struggle for existence, that there can be today no question...whoever does not adapt his manner of life to the conditions of capitalistic success must go under, or at least cannot rise” (Weber, 2012, p. 30). The United States must reconcile with a multitude of heritages that promoted a religious framework as justification for acquisition and accumulation that ultimately saw the religion of that framework fall away, leaving a transference of devotion from God (and the implications of moral teachings) to work and the American Dream, which hinges itself on economic success.
Charles Murray (1982) seeks to eliminate the welfare state altogether, emphasizing that actors are responsible for their own successes. This stems from a perspective that promotes the virtue of suffering (Smith, 2015). Murray asserts that various changes to social policies that were developed by elites, presumably to aid the poor, have only made matters worse; he hates hand-outs. Murray (1982) claims that changes in AFDC regulations permitted unemployed fathers to remain unemployed and that eligibility checks and man-in-the-house rules ensured that individuals were not loafing off the system (Smith, 2015). Mead (1986) would assert that the policies that currently make up the welfare system encourages dysfunction and that oversight is necessary in order to hold individuals accountable to their “social citizenship duties” that insists on a social separation between the rich and the poor. Mead concludes that the welfare system is a means by which the government can maintain order among the poor and encourage specific ways of being (1986, p. 9). Both authors assume, however, that poor individuals are somehow lacking in either a desire to be productive or a drive to improve oneself. This is fundamentally contrary to human nature: given enough time on vacation, we can hardly wait to get back to the real world of work and thought and creativity. One of the most unique things about human beings is this deep capacity for curiosity and focused exploration. Even if work in the future does not look like the work of today, doesn’t mean we will ever stop exploring.
Furthermore, when researchers have made time to listen to the plight of the poor, you find that their struggles are less influenced by any lack of desire to succeed, but rather incidental barriers that contribute to their struggle. The experiences of Jackie York, 27, as she moves through the system that constantly feels like its’ hassling her demonstrates clearly this disconnect between the assumptions of the poor held by both Murray and Mead and who they actually are (Smith, 2007). Collins and Mayer (2010) found the same narrative with their participants: declining availability of well-paid jobs that provide enough both in economic compensation coupled with strong protections for injury, overtime, and retirement for individuals who have little to no educational experience -- or *gasp* even intellectual capacity for highly skilled work. One harsh reality: not everyone can be a rocket scientist.
Part Two - Economic Growth and the Welfare State
Herein lies the rub: we must provide every individual with the opportunity to pursue that however insignificant possibility of a dream that they might have, whatever it is. Even if the welfare state is to continue serving the functional mechanism of government oversight and control, as Mead suggests, wouldn’t that threat and reward system function more efficiently if the rewards for compliance were an elimination of poverty for that individual actor (1986, p. 10)? Automate the jobs no one wants and provide the basic means of subsistence and suddenly, you find everyone has a lot more free time to expand their own horizons: “we must massively assert our dignity and worth. We must stand up amidst a system that still oppresses us and develop an unassailable and majestic sense of values” (Tucker, 1978; King, 1967).
“We must develop a program that will drive the nation to a guaranteed annual income...dislocations in the market operations of our economy thrust people into idleness and bind them in constant or frequent unemployment against their will. Today the poor are less often dismissed, I hope, from our consciences by being branded as inferior or incompetent. We also know that no matter how dynamically the economy develops and expands, it does not eliminate all poverty… The fact is that the work which improves the condition of mankind, the work which extends knowledge and increases power and enriches literature and elevates thought, is not done to secure a living” (King, 1967).
These are not soft words, nor do I intend to handle Mead or Murray with kid gloves. Their suggestions are abominable and completely overlook fundamental shifts in the labor market, the structure of employment, the structure of pay, and the reality of the lived experience of being poor (Wilson, 1996; Collins & Mayer, 2001; Reich, 2007; Smith, 2015). The truth is that the majority of the poor are working, often more than 60 hours a week to still be living in poverty; 11% of the adult working population works more than 27 weeks a year, only 3% of the adult working population does not work in that timeframe (United States Census Bureau, 2015). This is exploitation, pure and simple. In an era where productivity has increased by over 200% of what it was in 1957 and that 97% of that growth has been captured by the 1% of our consumer base, how does Murray sleep at night at the suggestion that there in something fundamentally flawed in individual actors that set them into being poor (Reich, 2015)? Even the 7.3 million children in the United States who are living in poverty ?This is not a matter of laziness; this is a matter of constructed policies that denigrate and stigmatize individuals caught in a technological, industrial shift in paradigms.
Labor has changed in fundamental ways that undermine the very notion that the poor are responsible for their own lot in life (Brady, 2009; Collins & Mayer, 2010; Kenworthy, 2011; Leichter, 2001; Reich, 2015; Smith, 2015). If our wage is a reflection of the value of our labor, as it allows us to maintain our existence, then absolute terms of basic survival must be treated as an extension of that wage. “People must be made consumers by one method or the other. Once they are placed in this position we need to be concerned that the potential of the individual is not wasted. New forms of work that enhance the social good will have to be devised for those for whom traditional jobs are not available” (King, 1967). If social mobility is our primary concern as a meritocratic democracy, as suggested by the intense debate over inequality, then equality of opportunity must include the opportunity for full-time employment to provide an escape from poverty, not working full-time to live in it (Surowiecki, 2014). When we embrace that the free market is not truly free, that there is government intervention well and fully entrenched in whatever market exists, and we move to separate the basic “means of subsistence” from the rest of all capitalistic endeavors, then individuals will be able to demand compensation wherein they find dignity in whatever work they are doing. In more simple terms: in order to get someone to do that dirty, nasty, dangerous, undesirable work, you’d have to make it worth their while (Tucker, 1978, p. 70-81).
One example to illuminate the fallacy of assuming those living in poverty are lazy: a few months ago, an article circulated that spotlighted a program in California where non-violent inmates can earn reduced sentences by volunteering to be a wildlands firefighter (Lewis, 2015). The work fighting wildfires in California is grueling and dangerous, but Demetrius Barr reflects on his decisions as a young man growing up in the ghetto with mixed feelings. He says he regrets dropping out of junior college after less than a semester, and laughs when he’s told part of the justification for sending him to fight fires is that he must learn how to work hard. “Of course I knew how to work hard before,” he said, “I was just working hard at something illegal” (Lewis, 2015). It wasn’t a lack of drive; it was a lack of viable options. Selling crack had more utility than flipping burgers at the local fast food joint.
The relationship between the welfare state and the economy rests in the experience of individuals. When you evaluate the likelihood of an individual who is poor moving to the top quintile of the economy, it makes sense (functionally) that some individuals would rather sell drugs and live large than smell like fry grease and take a bunch of shit from a terrible manager for a wage that has fallen significantly in terms of absolute value (Brady, 2009; Kenworthy, 2011; Reich, 2015; Smith, 2015). If the work was sourced through a temp service or if the worker is classified as an independent contractor or, worse still, associated with any of the work-for-welfare programs that cropped up after the PROWRA (Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act of 1996) changes in the Clinton administration allowing states to fiddle with their welfare formulas, your chances of moving beyond poverty drop to nearly zero (Brady, 2009; Collins & Mayer, 2010; Kenworthy, 2011; Leichter, 2001; Reich, 2015; Smith, 2015). But, no...clearly, these folks are just lazy and broken.
Part Three - Proscriptions and Prescriptions
Moving towards systemic understandings of poverty, researchers in the 21st century have begun to develop gaps in the literature regarding the long term neurological and psychological effects of poverty, or in the broader terms of authors Mullainathan and Shafir (2013). So now, compounding the clear negative impacts trapping those living in poverty to remain in poverty that all of this politically and ideologically motivated tinkering has wrought, we have an added element of developmental and biological mechanisms that are triggered to ensure survival. This element of scarcity, according to Mullainathan and Shafir, reduces the individuals ability to focus on anything other than the here and now; to remedy the problem at hand regardless of whether or not the actions to be taken will later create additional problems of their own. So, we “borrow and juggle” our time and resources (Mullainathan and Shafir, 2013, p. 111-128). Not so surprisingly to someone who has lived for many years in poverty, their research was able to demonstrate a certain savvy among the poor in managing a dollar, but oftentimes finding that this management includes a strong disregard for long-term consequences (Mullainathan and Shafir, 2013). The relevance this holds for deconstructing the argument that the poor have only themselves to blame is that their research demonstrates that this kind of utilitarian behavior can and does happen to everyone when pressed for survival.
So, we return to the dynamic of our animal needs versus our consumer economy. They have become so inextricably linked that the inability to work, for whatever reason, limits the capacity to which one can engage as a full citizen in the United States (Collins and Mayer, 2010; King, 1967; Weber, 2012; Wilson, 1996). In the most blunt terms I can conceive: in order for individual actors to be full consumers, the total income that the individual commands for his/her labor must rise above subsistence levels (Esarey, 2015, p. 7; Tucker, 1978; Hanlon and Barrientos, 2010). This is not rocket science.
To conclude, I leave you with an anecdotal Twilight Zone moment:
A very conservative family member recently posted an article to Facebook in support of basic income grants. This guy is a hardliner; we’re talking avid gun collector, commanding officer in the military, red-blood “AMERICA!” kind of guy. His friends were aghast and he had this to say in response, “I think it needs to be looked at. The coming technological advances are going to put an unprecedented number of people out of work - we already have 92 million not in the workforce. While [technology increases], economic output of the country will continue to rise, but unemployed consumers won't be able to buy anything. I don't like it, but haven't heard any better ideas and haven't heard a single candidate address it properly - instead it's all mired in partisan vitriol.”
Even the most modest estimates in growth of human productivity compared to widening wealth inequality show this is only going to get worse unless there is some collective support for the common good. Until we embrace that reality, we will be holding ourselves back.
Bibliography
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