I have long wanted to write a series on what rich people do not seem to understand about being poor in America. The reason I have not posted in so long touches on the first one about which I meant to write, climate control.
But this one is about something happening in my life today: the impossibility of coping with the nonstop stress of poverty.
First, I need to define some terms. When I use the phrase “rich person,” I will mean someone who never has to worry about paying for the necessities of life. There is always enough money to buy basic food, clothing, shelter, medical care, and every other basic survival need for themselves and everyone else in their household. Such people usually have enough funds to indulge in conspicuous consumption.
“Poor people” are those for whom there just isn’t enough money to cover all the survival needs. It excludes people who can do so by means of a careful budget, even though such budgets are all but impossible to keep in practice. I guess those humans would be called “average people,” although there are now so few of them in the United States that the phrase is losing its meaning there. “Poor people” don’t have a budget because a budget is meaningless. Whenever they get any money, it immediately goes out for whichever of their survival needs is most pressing at that moment.
Further, there’s nothing poor people can do to get more income. Yes, I know many people don’t believe that’s ever possible, but it is for a lot of us. In my case, my Aspie indiosyncracies (which I cannot change) make me unemployable in the American workplace (which needs to change drastically if it’s not going to drive all the non-rich people insane), and depression makes it impossible for me to carry on many basic life functions. (And just for the record, most people disabled by depression became so while still working, so making work criteria to keep things like SNAP because “unemployment leads to depression” are putting the cart before the horse.)
Naturally enough, living the way poor people must is extremely stressful. It literally never stops. While they’re awake, they are always anxious not only about whether there will be enough money to keep them just slightly below water and whether any unforeseen losses are going to suddenly appear in their lives. They’re trying to find ways to make do with nothing (not just less). When they’re asleep, they’re having anxiety dreams about not having enough money to keep them just slightly below water, having unending unexpected expenses, and what happens when those things happen.
Restful, it’s not. I have never had very many happy dreams (I can go even a decade without one), but once I couldn’t cover basic expenses, the anxiety dreams got worse because the things in them could so easily happen. When I had just barely enough money (it was a brief period in my life), I had dreams in which things that a part of my mind knew were ridiculous happened. My loathed biomom is not going to ever be able to force me to live with her again, for example. In those dreams, the “watcher” part of my brain repeatedly said, “Yeah, yeah, this is a dream. It’s never gonna really happen.”
Now that there’s never enough money, nearly all the dream events could happen. I am forced to buy things without money and go so deeply in debt that I can never get out—which quite probably has already happened—and debtors’ prison has been re-instituted, only in the United States this time—which is frightening possible. Or I die suddenly—pretty likely actually—and my sister and the dogs end up on the street and tortured to death—none of which is preposterous either.
So after many nights of not-sleep, poor people find themselves strung tighter than a violin, which can at least make lovely music in the right hands. There’s nothing lovely about what follows, however. The people try to hold it together. They know they are trying to balance on a knife edge, with certain disaster if the balance is upset, just as with a cargo of shock-sensitive explosives. Tiny things inevitably happen—they break a dish, they spill all the orange juice they got from Meals on Wheels all over the place, the dogs insist on trying to help in all such minor mess-ups—and these beings overstuffed with concentrated stress just cannot contain the explosion.
[Insert your favorite onomatopoeia for a huge, resounding noise—or several of them—here.]
The fallout, of course, only makes things worse for the now exploded person. It frightens dogs, bystanding humans, themselves. Depending on how much self-control they have left, physical violence may not happen, but then again it might. And that’s when tiny things happen (which might happen several times in one day). When the big things happen—say, a dog on a walk has an encounter with a skunk, the dog has a passionate adversion to being bathed, and a trip to the grocery store (always a trauma) is vitally necessary…. Well, no one should have to live like this. No one can contain the stress forever, and eventually all reasonable methods for doing so fail.
That’s what drives so many humans to unreasonble methods for dealing with stress. Mine is overeating, but it’s this that makes people break down and become addicts of various chemical substances or become outwardly violent. I haven’t done either yet, but I have sometimes been nearly overwhelmed by the desire to just turn it all off for even a second or just strike out at whatever is currently upsetting me (and I’ve been a pacifist since adolescence).
Fortunately for me, I have had the foresight not to keep any alcohol in the house, I lack the social skills required to obtain street drugs, and I have a life-long commitment to nonviolence (helped along by the knowledge that I’m more likely to get hurt than anyone else if I start anything). Hence the overeating. Sadly, most people at least have the social skills; they may even be offered drugs without seeking them. They may (instead or also) have a lower inhibition to violence (particularly if it was modeled by a parent in their childhood home). I can completely understand how someone could lose sight of the future harm such actions can bring in the blinding blaze of a little relief now. (Hence, again, the overeating.)
That’s why criminalization will never significantly work to fight addiction or violence. People’s lives have to be de-stressed before resisting such urges can even be discussed. The human nervous system, neurotypical or not, can only handle so much.
Unfortunately for countries in which Anglo culture dominates, compassion is actively discouraged in such places. Humans are all presumed to have nearly the same abilities and nearly the same childhoods and nearly the same level of background stress, and so they must all conform to certain standards without exception. This is the sacred principle of the ruling powers in the United States, and it is just so obviously rot to anyone who takes a second look that I wonder that anyone actually does believe it. I suspect it is because ruling powers always have a strong vested interest in the status quo that alone makes it possible for this notion to pass basic scrutiny with anyone.
To steal a line from the admittedly utopian Camelot (the text by Alan Jay Lerner), violence is not strength and compassion is not weakness. If the United States are ever to have a realizable future, all Americans have to get their minds around these truths now. If we don’t, we’ve already defeated ourselves.