poverty2: diminishment

When I started reading The End of Poverty two weeks ago, I made this request of Life: open me up. Make this more than an intellectual effort. Books are such portals, given the chance. It'd be well-timed with other openings in my little existence: show me, to whatever limited extent I'm capable of knowing it, more of the lack that so much of this world knows as living. Tune me in to the poverty frequency. If You think I can take it.

And Life, being ever so compassionate and creative at once, has answered that request in the most surprising and bearable ways. My job, just after increasing my hours, had a problem in accounting and only gave us half our earnings on the last paycheck. The other half will be along in two weeks, they said. In the meantime, every dollar gains just a little more value than it already had, becomes just a little more weighty and unwieldy. Every purchase a momentary cause for contemplation. Next, my apartment building, home now for three weeks, has to be replumbed. We're asked to clear space for the workmen, to put up with noise, and to expect them coming into our homes at random over one to two weeks' time -- just when I was starting to feel settled again. And finally, I asked my friendly neighborhood anarchists for a mattress to help with the chronic insomnia, and when they kindly gifted me with a most comfortable futon, it turned out to be home to a thriving population of bedbugs. At least I think that's what it was -- online research turned up a couple of simple fixes that worked well (steam-ironing and then vacuuming). And the work became a surprisingly joyful meditation on all the abundance that I have (even/especially the free and recycled abundance), as well as a prayer for all those living on the street (odds are this bed gave a homeless person rest at at least one point). All the men and women who don't even have the simple human option of bathing as often as they need to.

Okay, none of that's suffering, really: just stress. An upward twist on the control knob labelled 'Insecurity'. An accumulation of diminishment that's a threat to nothing more than tangible wellbeing. But then Life breathes in my ear: so, you're alright with the practical opportunities. How ready is your heart to open more? And then leads me to a dear friend in Santa Fe, who I haven't seen in several months. He's from central Mexico, but has lived in the States about half his life, pursuing that American Dream with a gusto and a struggle that most of us only heard about from our great-grandparents. Today he tells me that his younger brother, who lived with him for a time and then went to California, was recently deported. Like my friend, this 27-year-old had come here legal-fair-and-square, but unlike his brother who's by-the-book conscientious, this young man was living on an expired visa. He had a fairly successful contractor business going, my friend tells me, and had to sell everything. How long, I ask, over the sinking sensation of an empathetic punch to the gut. How long did he have to do that? 3 days, is the answer. They arrested him on a Friday, and by Monday he was back in Mexico.

If nothing else, he went back to family, and to a homespace. Their parents, unlike so many, haven't lost all of the old rancho that the grandfather left them. I never met the guy but I'm glad to think that at least he's not alone, or homeless. But an odd comparison occurs. Maybe it's because, at the moment I hear this story, I'm on the way to work at my dad's house. My dad began his meteoric career path with the government around age 40, after a bankruptcy and a nasty divorce. He's pursued his progress with the kind of wholehearted dedication usually expressed by immigrants, refugees, or others who in their own fates have previously lost everything. Just recently he accepted yet another fabulous promotion. I'm gearing up to play the personal assistant in organizing his next move, as I've done a couple of times already. This image crossed my mind (and not without equal sadness in contemplating): my dad, leaving work one afternoon, is accosted by armed men who tell him that he has three days to liquidate his assets, make a couple of personal calls or visits perhaps, and then he has to go spend the rest of his life in the depressed, backwater small town we all grew up in. He'll be free to move about once there, to seek employment where he likes (Wal-mart and the tourist industry have long been significant employers); he's even got family there, so he won't be alone. And this is all, unfortunately, necessary because a few months back he let his driver's license expire...

Is that fair? Is that far too simplistic? If so, somebody let me know why, cause I can't figure out the difference. Other than that one man and his laminated paper abstractions happened to be born here in the world's richest country, and the other wasn't. That one happened to have great-grandparents that made of their entire lives that struggle, so that by the time of his own birth he didn't have to. I realize there's some fundamental principle of political-entitlement-by-birth that I'm failing to include here, because I fail completely, as a human being, to grasp it. And sadness has my reason not exactly at its most expansive at the moment. While I'd never for a minute wish such a fate on my dad, I wish he could see for one second my strange vision of his life that won't happen. If only for the chance to reconsider the support and assent he gives, despite his generous nature and thanks to the culture of his workplace, to the deep toxicity of the extreme conservative agenda.

At the moment, I'm trying to remember that poem we all learned in high school. The 'no man is an island' one, you know? Which, okay, it's about a more permanent loss. But I'm thinking of 'Every man's death diminishes me'. Is that how the line goes? Personally, internally, I feel diminished for this story I heard today. It's one thing, and an easy one with our more and more, to talk of living with less. Another altogether to contemplate, essentially, the taking away of a person's life. Their chance at being alive, in all the ways we supposedly define it in this country. This reality, even as remotely and collectively as its tide washes me, is an aspect of poverty I don't feel remotely ready to tune in. Only empathetically, on the wave of sadness it brings.