as small as a world and as large as alone, lichgem: When people get mad that poor people...

4:19pm May 29, 2014

When people get mad that poor people get to have “nice things,” I wonder if the acceptable alternative, to them, is for poor people to have nothing at all. And then I wonder what the point of that is- is it that so they’ll forgive poor people for being poor?

It’s an attitude that ensures there is absolutely no upward mobility for poor people. Because as soon as we get something, we’re seen as ‘not legitimate enough,’ and have it taken away. But then it’s our fault for not trying hard enough.

What is the acceptable scenario here? To stay poor and miserable until suddenly you’re not poor anymore? When the laws and institutions continually hamstring us during any transitions we try to make from poor to not-poor?

People get so mad about Unemployment. Do they realize that a required part of being on Unemployment is meeting a certain job search quota every single week? That they make you go to orientations and classes, and make you sign up for job search programs? People on Unemployment are doing everything they’re supposed to do, but people are still mad they get any money at all. How are you supposed to go on job hunts when you can’t afford to eat? How are you supposed to get a job when you don’t have a cell phone or a mailing address?

Everything about classist attitudes is about destroying poor people. It has no basis in reality or logic. Because if people honestly wanted us to pull ourselves out of poverty, why would they keep doing things to keep us there?

I wonder if these people realize that even people in the poorest parts of the world, the poorest people in the world, spend a certain amount of their budget on recreation. Because that's part of humanity and you can’t take it away from people no matter how hard you try. If people can’t afford to buy it, they’ll create it. If they can’t create it, they’ll imagine it. You can’t take it away no matter what else you take away from a person.

Warning, this gets graphic and disturbing real fast:

I knew of a woman who was institutionalized in the community. And she’s one of the best examples I’ve ever known, of why being in your own apartment does not mean you’re not in an institution. They bought her her own house, owned in her name. Then they locked her in one room of that house. The room was completely bare. It had nothing in it, nothing to do, nothing to play with.

So she started taking a shit and playing with her own shit. Because people will find recreation anywhere. This, of course, was used to say that she was so severely mentally ill and mentally impaired in other ways (she had a developmental disability) that she couldn’t possibly take care of herself and needed to be locked in that room for the rest of her life for her own protection and the protection of others. (She’d also become violent toward her captors, and they were surprised by this, why?)

I played a tiny role in getting her out of there and she began to flourish as soon as she had freedom.

But what that showed me was that even if all you have to play with is your own shit, you will still play.

By the way, before the developmental service system got hold of her, she had been successfully living completely independently for years in San Francisco. They just didn’t like the way she was living. It was implied there might have been prostitution or drugs involved. But because she was autistic and had multiple personalities, she had no say in what lifestyle she chose to live, and she was kept under lock and key until a few of us managed to finagle a way out of there for her. (I mostly advised the person who was doing most of the finagling. So, as I said, my role was tiny. But present.)

I remember standing outside her house, feeling like I was standing outside the gates of hell, and wishing I could just break the doors down and free her, but knowing that would get us nowhere. She did need a lot of assistance with a lot of things, and simply letting her run off into the street naked and covered in shit wouldn’t have helped anyone. Plus I’d have gotten the cops called on me and then I’d have been useless. But fuck it was tempting.

If you ever, ever tell me that an institution is defined by the shape of the building, I wish I could put a picture of her life into your head and fucking dare you to tell me she wasn’t institutionalized, just because she was living in her own house that had no other residents.

(I knew of her because I got services through the same agency. That agency’s MO was to mostly get its clients straight from the state institutions, and then put them in apartments and treat them as if they were still in state institutions, as they wouldn’t know the difference. I call that a “distributed institution” – lots of inmates, but instead of all being in one building, they’re spread out into multiple houses and apartments. The agency was run by people who had no conscience at all and delighted in causing pain and suffering in as many creative ways as they could. They liked hurting their staff almost as much as they liked hurting their clients. And when one client and one staff liked each other, they would do everything in their power to separate them. Including, at one point, falsifying emails from a client who couldn’t read and dictated his emails, so that he was “reporting abuse” by a staff person he liked a lot. The descriptions of the abuse were taken from abuse I’d suffered at the hands of another staff person, who got promoted as soon as I reported the abuse.)