Saturday, May 7, 2016
Sunday, April 24, 2016
Poor White Power
My mom came down the hall as I was coming out of my room. "Prince is dead," she told me. And I was standing there just gaping and trying to compute the meaning of the statement when Diane turned and said, "Gee! You all lost Michael Jackson and now you lost Prince. Must be some bad drugs going around."
You all. Meaning, black people.
Nevermind that Prince didn't do drugs.At first I had to parse the statements out to know how to feel. Do I get pissed for her slight of Prince or for the ignorance or for the flat out bigotry? For a minute or so I debated getting angry but decided against it. Diane is just racist. Everybody knows Diane is racist. Diane knows she's racist. It's nothing to get upset about anymore. She's just a damn racist. I have to see her everyday and I always speak, I'm always polite. She is what she is. I even forgive what she said to my mom the first day we were here because honestly life is short, but it's still a curious disease that she has, and I watch her trying to understand what life is like for her. How can you walk around so ignorant and be a happy person?
Then again she's here in a homeless shelter with me and not many of us have anything to be happy about so maybe she isn't.
We were sitting outside beneath the smoking shanty talking and Diane began to relate a story about a friend in trouble. "Well they can mess with her if they want but I'll be at the door with the Klan if it don't stop."
They. Black people. The Klan.
And she was so matter of fact about it that there wasn't much to say so we just left the smoking shanty. There wasn't much else to do about it.
Thinking of Diane always puts me in a bad mood though, and watching Donald Trump clown around for the presidency always puts me in mind of Diane. The two are interchangeable in my thoughts forever now. I hate to say it but the entire Trump circus has me side-eyeing all the white people I meet. Because besides Ben Carson (who has been expelled from blackness, in case you didn't know) ain't nobody but white people voting for his crazy ass. How could white folks let him run around embarrassing the shit out of them? But that's just the thing, everybody ain't embarrassed. In fact some white folks are flat out elated.
But you have to wonder how it was even possible for Donald Trump to come this far if race weren't still so incendiary even in the so called post-racial era. And being poor and white has everything to do with his success. Nevermind that Donald Trump doesn't care about poor people whatever their color, he's able to tap into a rage and ugliness that translates into votes because he is "telling it like it is". And don't doubt that he isn't because he does indeed. He taps into not just fear and prejudice but arrogance. That old time supremacy that built the Black Codes and Jim Crow, that told poor whites that they would maybe always be poor but they would always be better than a nigger. Years may pass, presidents come and go but whiteness will always be defined by the power to rise above niggers. It's what white power is all about.
What intrigues me about Diane and people like her is that they overlook the the fact that poverty is blind. I've been rich in my life, very rich in fact, but this is my first time ever being poor and I had no true concept beyond the academic how poverty as a system locks people out of the rest of the known world. Watch television commercials; the pretty sleek car commercials always fuck me up. How the hell can I ever get a car if I can't even show enough collateral or credit score to get a car loan? How can I buy the newest drug put out by the pharmaceutical industry without insurance? How can you participate in a capitalist country without capital?
You can't. You don't. You sit in your personal shantytown and remain disconnected from the rest of society. And that disconnection is so total and overwhelming that you'll never know how the other half lives because the two halves simply don't speak to one another. What is there to say but I'm sorry. I'm sorry you're so poor and so ignorant and so dislocated but I have a home and a mortgage and a car payment and expensive insurance premiums and a job, and you don't and I'm sorry but I have to live my life. That's basically a one way conversation because it's very hard to communicate what poverty is like and how it functions. And anyway who's actually listening? I know this because it's the way I addressed poverty when I had everything and others had nothing.
The truth is that Donald Trump doesn't have to become president to win. He's already won. He wins with every rally, every time his constituents beat down a protester, with every bit of rhetoric because he's brought to light somethings that it had briefly become impolite to say and think. He's given poor whiteness a new language and a new rage and a new way to communicate. A new life for the twenty first century. All he has to do is command a television camera and he's won. For a certain sector of the United States he will be the King of Hearts for evermore. He's become the champion of poor whiteness all the while concealing the most salient fact; he's taken advantage of people who have no voice and who have no money and while they will always lose as poor people must, he sacrifices nothing and adds nothing to an already impoverished mindset. He wins over and over and over again.
The thing that Diane will never understand no matter what is that here in the shelter we're all poor; there's nothing to be gained beyond self satisfied spite by dividing our power. If all the poor people of the country could band together think then what power could be wielded for change. Think of how the fabric of capitalism would rend itself to destruction. There's so little to be gained from division of strength. But the power of white supremacy never speaks to this idea by its very nature.
It's interesting to note that during President Obama's term the word racism itself has become such a reactionary word. White people hate hearing about it and that's nothing new but the fact that to label a white person as racist brings such howls of pain and anger that it's almost a dirty word. The yelps of protest you hear! But why is it so incendiary when the thing is so obvious? There's no need for the truth shy attitudes that surround such rhetoric.
At least if you're going to be racist then be like Diane and just own it. Trump plays coy all the while he plays ugly, feinting and tipping about like the emperor in his new clothes, bare but proud. When confronted with the truth he argues, lies, shrieks, clumsy and disjointed.
In a way, he's brought back a kind of racism that never went undercover exactly but that definitely became uncouth for many years. Now we're talking about it and plenty of people are touting the king. It's not new of course, it's familiar but re-cast with a special glow, reforged if not reformed. The bottom line is that white people have a problem and it's this: only they can stop Donald Trump and the Dianes of the world. The question is whether there's the will to do so.
God make it stop.
You all. Meaning, black people.
Nevermind that Prince didn't do drugs.At first I had to parse the statements out to know how to feel. Do I get pissed for her slight of Prince or for the ignorance or for the flat out bigotry? For a minute or so I debated getting angry but decided against it. Diane is just racist. Everybody knows Diane is racist. Diane knows she's racist. It's nothing to get upset about anymore. She's just a damn racist. I have to see her everyday and I always speak, I'm always polite. She is what she is. I even forgive what she said to my mom the first day we were here because honestly life is short, but it's still a curious disease that she has, and I watch her trying to understand what life is like for her. How can you walk around so ignorant and be a happy person?
Then again she's here in a homeless shelter with me and not many of us have anything to be happy about so maybe she isn't.
We were sitting outside beneath the smoking shanty talking and Diane began to relate a story about a friend in trouble. "Well they can mess with her if they want but I'll be at the door with the Klan if it don't stop."
They. Black people. The Klan.
And she was so matter of fact about it that there wasn't much to say so we just left the smoking shanty. There wasn't much else to do about it.
Thinking of Diane always puts me in a bad mood though, and watching Donald Trump clown around for the presidency always puts me in mind of Diane. The two are interchangeable in my thoughts forever now. I hate to say it but the entire Trump circus has me side-eyeing all the white people I meet. Because besides Ben Carson (who has been expelled from blackness, in case you didn't know) ain't nobody but white people voting for his crazy ass. How could white folks let him run around embarrassing the shit out of them? But that's just the thing, everybody ain't embarrassed. In fact some white folks are flat out elated.
But you have to wonder how it was even possible for Donald Trump to come this far if race weren't still so incendiary even in the so called post-racial era. And being poor and white has everything to do with his success. Nevermind that Donald Trump doesn't care about poor people whatever their color, he's able to tap into a rage and ugliness that translates into votes because he is "telling it like it is". And don't doubt that he isn't because he does indeed. He taps into not just fear and prejudice but arrogance. That old time supremacy that built the Black Codes and Jim Crow, that told poor whites that they would maybe always be poor but they would always be better than a nigger. Years may pass, presidents come and go but whiteness will always be defined by the power to rise above niggers. It's what white power is all about.
What intrigues me about Diane and people like her is that they overlook the the fact that poverty is blind. I've been rich in my life, very rich in fact, but this is my first time ever being poor and I had no true concept beyond the academic how poverty as a system locks people out of the rest of the known world. Watch television commercials; the pretty sleek car commercials always fuck me up. How the hell can I ever get a car if I can't even show enough collateral or credit score to get a car loan? How can I buy the newest drug put out by the pharmaceutical industry without insurance? How can you participate in a capitalist country without capital?
You can't. You don't. You sit in your personal shantytown and remain disconnected from the rest of society. And that disconnection is so total and overwhelming that you'll never know how the other half lives because the two halves simply don't speak to one another. What is there to say but I'm sorry. I'm sorry you're so poor and so ignorant and so dislocated but I have a home and a mortgage and a car payment and expensive insurance premiums and a job, and you don't and I'm sorry but I have to live my life. That's basically a one way conversation because it's very hard to communicate what poverty is like and how it functions. And anyway who's actually listening? I know this because it's the way I addressed poverty when I had everything and others had nothing.
The truth is that Donald Trump doesn't have to become president to win. He's already won. He wins with every rally, every time his constituents beat down a protester, with every bit of rhetoric because he's brought to light somethings that it had briefly become impolite to say and think. He's given poor whiteness a new language and a new rage and a new way to communicate. A new life for the twenty first century. All he has to do is command a television camera and he's won. For a certain sector of the United States he will be the King of Hearts for evermore. He's become the champion of poor whiteness all the while concealing the most salient fact; he's taken advantage of people who have no voice and who have no money and while they will always lose as poor people must, he sacrifices nothing and adds nothing to an already impoverished mindset. He wins over and over and over again.
The thing that Diane will never understand no matter what is that here in the shelter we're all poor; there's nothing to be gained beyond self satisfied spite by dividing our power. If all the poor people of the country could band together think then what power could be wielded for change. Think of how the fabric of capitalism would rend itself to destruction. There's so little to be gained from division of strength. But the power of white supremacy never speaks to this idea by its very nature.
It's interesting to note that during President Obama's term the word racism itself has become such a reactionary word. White people hate hearing about it and that's nothing new but the fact that to label a white person as racist brings such howls of pain and anger that it's almost a dirty word. The yelps of protest you hear! But why is it so incendiary when the thing is so obvious? There's no need for the truth shy attitudes that surround such rhetoric.
At least if you're going to be racist then be like Diane and just own it. Trump plays coy all the while he plays ugly, feinting and tipping about like the emperor in his new clothes, bare but proud. When confronted with the truth he argues, lies, shrieks, clumsy and disjointed.
In a way, he's brought back a kind of racism that never went undercover exactly but that definitely became uncouth for many years. Now we're talking about it and plenty of people are touting the king. It's not new of course, it's familiar but re-cast with a special glow, reforged if not reformed. The bottom line is that white people have a problem and it's this: only they can stop Donald Trump and the Dianes of the world. The question is whether there's the will to do so.
God make it stop.
Sunday, April 10, 2016
Wednesday, March 30, 2016
Ever Wonder What Goes on in a Homeless Shelter...Well, It's Like This...
"Plead the blood, honey! Just plead the blood of the Lamb!" We're sitting outside beneath the rickety half sort of shanty that is the smoking section and Gina is instructing Diana how to ignore the downstairs drama.
There are three floors here at the shelter: the basement is made of three little apartments for the Emergency 30 day shelter; everyone who comes here is required to stay in the Emergency Shelter before a decision is made whether you can move up to the second or third floors for "transitional living" where you pay $290 rent per month for an individual room. Not everyone makes it to transitional living; sometimes people don't stay long enough, move on to other accommodations, home, other shelters. If you're tough and desperate and if there's enough room on the upper floors then as long as you don't cause trouble you can be reasonably sure you'll be asked to stay.
But God above the drama!! It's been twenty years since I lived in a dorm and all the drama that accompanies college dormatory applies to a bunch of poor women living in a homeless shelter but perhaps double. So that's what Gina was saying, plead the blood of the lamb and hope you don't strangle somebody.
I don't smoke as much as I used to simply because I can't afford it but a little nicotine goes a long way to easing some of the disorientation you suffer in this limbo.
"Danni needs to stop rolling cigarettes at the kitchen table, it's nasty --"
"--That bitch at the desk got one more time to say something rude to me --
"Why don't Susanna like to wash her ass? Seriously she stinks!"
"No honey I don't have anymore cigarettes to lend out, Shelley owes me four --"
There's all types of women but to my surprise most everyone is middle class. Or would be middle class if such a thing existed anymore. At least half the women have jobs, two jobs even but still don't make enough to afford to live on their own. The temping agencies always have plenty of labor from the ladies here but as long as there's no reasonable living wage to paid there will also be plenty of ladies in places like this. I'm in a special type of limbo here. After my third nervous breakdown in ten years I'm finally applying for disability, a process that takes years during which any attorney worth his fees will tell you not to work. Even without the disability proceedings it's still highly dubious that I'd be able to sustain a job at this point. But I'm not the only one here in this maddening predicament.
There's Deena who is in fact a social worker herself fallen on hard times; she worked with the very population that she now comprises, the "underclasses", the mentally ill, the homeless and the people who are so poor that they fly under the radar of everything from Obamacare to proper housing.
Then there's my friend Cyndi who has a car and a job and who's always available to take me to the store or to IHOP when Mom gets paid.
There's Shelley, a canny, crafty old former meth-head and shoplifter who walks down to the jail most days to see her son Norman; when she's not seeing him she's putting money on his books for commissary or the phone.
I'm in a small town, the smallest place I've ever lived in fact; it's like a really poor Mayberry but I came here with Mom because of the transitional housing program at this particular shelter. That's one thing no one ever tells you about homelessness, that sometimes you actually have to leave your own city where you're homeless in order to be homeless somewhere else where it's cheaper or where there may be other resources. However, generally those resources, where ever you go, don't include true secure housing. In my state especially the resources are thin and it's only through word of mouth that you find the scant handholds that keep you off the street. In the first shelter I stayed in a woman told me about this place so after a few months bouncing through two shelters Mom and I packed up with a few garbage bags and came here. We've never spent a night on the street though, so there's one small thing to be grateful for.
This is the one place in America where race truly does not matter; we're all homeless women what's the point in igniting race war here? But it's interesting to note that when politics does come up there are a few women who passionately dig Donald Trump. One of the dearest friends I've made here, Donna is her name, told me she likes Trump but she also told me that she never votes so that gave me small comfort at least. It makes no difference that Trump would be the last man on earth to help any of us.
This election season I'm voting for whoever doesn't cut off my food stamps, that's the single most important political point from my viewpoint. But that doesn't help the preachy types get it that we're not the demographic that the political candidates care about; we aren't pumping money into the PACs, we aren't a voting bloc that can be prettily posed with, we're poor women. And yeah, you can preach about Bernie Sanders to me all day long but to me? in this election cycle? they're all the same really.
"She charged me ten dollars in food stamps for a ride!" That's Belinda bitching about Vanessa.
"Yeah Ronella is shady like that--"
"Who does she think she is?"
"Is Roxy a lesbian?"
"Probably."
The days are slow but somewhere on the spectrum of visible light you can see us beneath the half-shanty talking and bitching and arguing and praying. Not many can hear us even though we're sometimes hard to miss. The phrase girl-power takes on entirely different connotations when you truly live in a community of women who are basically forgotten; the bottom line is that we only have each other. The number of people, me included, who have no family, have no support network -- it's staggering. You begin to see that even alone-ness has its many shades and shadows. Because we are alone. It's just the truth. But we have each other too and when the chips are down, as they are for us here constantly, it's we who help each other.
Even in the darkness there's a bit of enlightenment, room for self awareness. When the waters are rushing you hold out your arms to those who are pitching over the falls with you, you create a human chain.
"Have you seen Veronica's baby eating dirt?"
"Yeah he does it everday and she's such a stupid--"
"Jeffrey stop eating that dirt!!" That's Veronica yelling while entirely missing the conversation about the dirt eating.
"Can you loan me ten bucks?" That's anybody on any given day.
"Don't get paid til the first."
We've all got our hands out. There's just never ever enough money to go around. And just when you think that no one can help you at all, someone here just as poor as you holds out her hand. That's how it is. We've got us. That's all.
There are three floors here at the shelter: the basement is made of three little apartments for the Emergency 30 day shelter; everyone who comes here is required to stay in the Emergency Shelter before a decision is made whether you can move up to the second or third floors for "transitional living" where you pay $290 rent per month for an individual room. Not everyone makes it to transitional living; sometimes people don't stay long enough, move on to other accommodations, home, other shelters. If you're tough and desperate and if there's enough room on the upper floors then as long as you don't cause trouble you can be reasonably sure you'll be asked to stay.
But God above the drama!! It's been twenty years since I lived in a dorm and all the drama that accompanies college dormatory applies to a bunch of poor women living in a homeless shelter but perhaps double. So that's what Gina was saying, plead the blood of the lamb and hope you don't strangle somebody.
I don't smoke as much as I used to simply because I can't afford it but a little nicotine goes a long way to easing some of the disorientation you suffer in this limbo.
"Danni needs to stop rolling cigarettes at the kitchen table, it's nasty --"
"--That bitch at the desk got one more time to say something rude to me --
"Why don't Susanna like to wash her ass? Seriously she stinks!"
"No honey I don't have anymore cigarettes to lend out, Shelley owes me four --"
There's all types of women but to my surprise most everyone is middle class. Or would be middle class if such a thing existed anymore. At least half the women have jobs, two jobs even but still don't make enough to afford to live on their own. The temping agencies always have plenty of labor from the ladies here but as long as there's no reasonable living wage to paid there will also be plenty of ladies in places like this. I'm in a special type of limbo here. After my third nervous breakdown in ten years I'm finally applying for disability, a process that takes years during which any attorney worth his fees will tell you not to work. Even without the disability proceedings it's still highly dubious that I'd be able to sustain a job at this point. But I'm not the only one here in this maddening predicament.
There's Deena who is in fact a social worker herself fallen on hard times; she worked with the very population that she now comprises, the "underclasses", the mentally ill, the homeless and the people who are so poor that they fly under the radar of everything from Obamacare to proper housing.
Then there's my friend Cyndi who has a car and a job and who's always available to take me to the store or to IHOP when Mom gets paid.
There's Shelley, a canny, crafty old former meth-head and shoplifter who walks down to the jail most days to see her son Norman; when she's not seeing him she's putting money on his books for commissary or the phone.
I'm in a small town, the smallest place I've ever lived in fact; it's like a really poor Mayberry but I came here with Mom because of the transitional housing program at this particular shelter. That's one thing no one ever tells you about homelessness, that sometimes you actually have to leave your own city where you're homeless in order to be homeless somewhere else where it's cheaper or where there may be other resources. However, generally those resources, where ever you go, don't include true secure housing. In my state especially the resources are thin and it's only through word of mouth that you find the scant handholds that keep you off the street. In the first shelter I stayed in a woman told me about this place so after a few months bouncing through two shelters Mom and I packed up with a few garbage bags and came here. We've never spent a night on the street though, so there's one small thing to be grateful for.
This is the one place in America where race truly does not matter; we're all homeless women what's the point in igniting race war here? But it's interesting to note that when politics does come up there are a few women who passionately dig Donald Trump. One of the dearest friends I've made here, Donna is her name, told me she likes Trump but she also told me that she never votes so that gave me small comfort at least. It makes no difference that Trump would be the last man on earth to help any of us.
This election season I'm voting for whoever doesn't cut off my food stamps, that's the single most important political point from my viewpoint. But that doesn't help the preachy types get it that we're not the demographic that the political candidates care about; we aren't pumping money into the PACs, we aren't a voting bloc that can be prettily posed with, we're poor women. And yeah, you can preach about Bernie Sanders to me all day long but to me? in this election cycle? they're all the same really.
"She charged me ten dollars in food stamps for a ride!" That's Belinda bitching about Vanessa.
"Yeah Ronella is shady like that--"
"Who does she think she is?"
"Is Roxy a lesbian?"
"Probably."
The days are slow but somewhere on the spectrum of visible light you can see us beneath the half-shanty talking and bitching and arguing and praying. Not many can hear us even though we're sometimes hard to miss. The phrase girl-power takes on entirely different connotations when you truly live in a community of women who are basically forgotten; the bottom line is that we only have each other. The number of people, me included, who have no family, have no support network -- it's staggering. You begin to see that even alone-ness has its many shades and shadows. Because we are alone. It's just the truth. But we have each other too and when the chips are down, as they are for us here constantly, it's we who help each other.
Even in the darkness there's a bit of enlightenment, room for self awareness. When the waters are rushing you hold out your arms to those who are pitching over the falls with you, you create a human chain.
"Have you seen Veronica's baby eating dirt?"
"Yeah he does it everday and she's such a stupid--"
"Jeffrey stop eating that dirt!!" That's Veronica yelling while entirely missing the conversation about the dirt eating.
"Can you loan me ten bucks?" That's anybody on any given day.
"Don't get paid til the first."
We've all got our hands out. There's just never ever enough money to go around. And just when you think that no one can help you at all, someone here just as poor as you holds out her hand. That's how it is. We've got us. That's all.
Saturday, March 19, 2016
Flashng Lights and the Rain
somewhere upon the spectrum of visible light
broken sleep hovers
dances a jig in the mind
like a runner hanging, suspended in flight
evading capture from oblivion
...wicked sense of play...
haunts filthy exhaustion
flashing lights and the rainTreasure Mine
a sharp white kiss with the drag of teeth
dusty fingers in a solemn half light
an undercover lover's shady movements and flight
call me your lover and never stop to think
and I'll come to you windblown in darkness with rich wine to drink
I am a stranger and a prayer too
with twine and a cross I will pierce me to you
I constructed this love from creative dreamtime and jewels
leached this power from the hearts of seventeen fools
and now we belong to a tribe of just two
a wealth possessed beyond gems
memory cannot escape this delusion
so stay here in my darkness where together we can hide
Northanger and soft
cocoon and treasure mine
with twine and a cross I will pierce me to you
I constructed this love from creative dreamtime and jewels
leached this power from the hearts of seventeen fools
and now we belong to a tribe of just two
a wealth possessed beyond gems
memory cannot escape this delusion
so stay here in my darkness where together we can hide
Northanger and soft
cocoon and treasure mine
Sunday, February 28, 2016
Wishing Well
suffering and sorrow are cash in the till
spent like hollow hope wishing to be filled
into sores and bruises who weep
white noise released into hands received
bitters salted by grief
cherished as good will and sleep
pleasure and pain nursed against all that you meet
unchanged always the eternal recipe
the cost of wisdom the remainders of bad dreams
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| by Natalie Shau |
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