I'm upset that the economy is shitty due to the strategic, purposeful miscalculations of rich greedy individuals in corporations and in power. I see that my concerns that these individuals who are the designers of a deficit have not been affected by any of the drastic changes that are turning people's pockets out, evicting them from homes, shuttering services and deeply shifting our experience in this nation. (Oh, fuck it, and globally.)
In my life and what I’ve seen others go through to get by on lack of credit, lack of consistent work and the check to check reality. We have attempted to pay back loans, pay off bills, eat, find a higher paying or more consistent job with benefits (hope, hope), and make the struggle tolerable with the amenities that cost us anyway.
I realize I’m an experienced adult suffering from generations of family poverty that came before me. My experiences of being broke is partly due to the lack of education about money and in the genders and colors of the darker skinned family members and women bearing the brunt of familial labor when husbands or male partners abandoned their wives or chias or my black ancestors used as slaves and blocked from accessing autonomy and power in their own communities.
I’m not the only one - my family and my neighborhood is made up of poor Black, Caribbean, Latin@, Asian, Arab/middle eastern folks working but unable to pay for healthcare on their own. We have our stories of rejection from credit card companies due to owed money to clinics, hospitals, rent, school, cell phones, and other small luxuries like cable, home entertainment and many more.
I know that when I imagine buying a car, a house, a new bed, I immediately imagine the barriers to getting one. When I imagine saving money I immediately understand that I might not be able to do so using a bank. I am part of the sometimes Direct Deposit, money orders, cash checking, prepaid phones, late bill payer due to this or that.
When it comes to a decision between paying my rent or the cost of transportation and food for an extra two weeks, I choose the latter. My mother continues to go through the same decision making process as I do. My neighbors still go through that process and for many of my friends we are bonded by that mutual struggle.
The idea that the lower classes are moving up into higher income brackets is misleading: a child born into a poor family, defined as the bottom 20 percent of the income distribution, has an infinitesimal one-in-a-hundred chance of making it into the top five percent income level and children born in the middle quintile (the 40-60th percentile of incomes in the country, $42,000 to $54,300) also have only a 1.8 percent chance of reaching the top five percent, a likelihood not much higher than in poor families. (Tom Hertz of American University, “Understanding Mobility in America” 2006)
I wasn’t born middle class, my mother raised three children on less than $20,000 salary for some of my high school years (school aide’s salary at $19,449 a year in 2002, DOE.) Education, race, health and state of residence are four key channels by which economic status is transmitted from parent to child. (Hertz)
My mother’s wealth has yet to manifest in her life so it isn’t a stretch to see why it hasn’t manifested in mine. Taking into consideration that my family is first and second generation Puerto Rican "Americans", born in the South Bronx (still one of the poorest urban / congressional districts in the nation,) and most of my elders including my mother have high school as the highest form of education, and in the health category, all of my family members struggle with some disease or affliction: hypoglycemia, diabetes, HIV, fibroids. Not including mental afflictions which I suspect are waiting to be diagnosed.
Even as American society has become more unequal and social mobility has declined, the myth of mobility has a stronghold on the psyche of folk from every economic background. The poor, middle and upper classes view upward mobility either with a distant thirst for their class shift, and/or the unceasing energy put towards pulling myself by my bootstraps because that’s the American immigrant way.
I find myself more with mixed feelings that the economic crisis has pervaded the rest of the nation. My life and the lives in my hood have gone on for years struggling to pay the bills on things we will never own, we have made full meals happen from meager ingredients and now, on the news, there's a complaining of the unfair system and a deep fear coming from folks who may now experience these symptoms of poverty for the first time or are going to re-experience it, I hear it in the news whispering its familiarity of scarcity.
I don't feel a ton of empathy for the folks covered by the media, showing how they are struggling to maintain their small amounts of wealth as the system deteriorates beneath them. I feel that it's something far too many folks including me have felt and fuck that, it's a betrayal of the media to cover the shit now. It's been going on for hundreds of years for the groups of people I'm ancestrally connected to and the people I'm currently a part of. The feeling of dismissal by people in power, the overlooking of our conditions throughout the culture of our country (and world) and the deafness when we have screamed from suffering and the repression from our direct actions.
Unfinished
We R the official tissue
suicide millionaires
chained to smiling paranoia
bank account stuffed into socks
taped to bottom of drawers
shopping at We B Toys
instead of Toys R Us
the bootleg black markets
fund resistance by
candy sold on trains
Fuck balling
Rent is due
Charge tourists for
live hip hop shows
dancing on neon streets
never requesting permission
from dominant culture
dressed in blue
pinning us to concrete
For too long the face of america
has been neglected
for what it should look like
rather than what it is
