Walk With Me

Not so very long ago, someone called me a socialist.

I was supposed to take offense at this, but since I consider myself a democratic socialist, sort of, I did not.
 
Not everyone is capable of pulling themselves up out of poverty. I am in favor of a "safety net" that keeps people in their homes and off the streets, and if a few manage to outsmart the government and get more than they should (which happens because we've underfunded the positions needed to capture these folks, but that's another blog post), then I'm okay with that.

There aren't many democratic socialists in the government right now. I'm not even sure there are any democrats. Today it seems to me, the democrats in general are just old-school Republicans. Democratic socialists believe that both the economy and society should be run so that both meet public needs, and profits do not make just a few wealthy and leave the rest working three jobs to get by. (Think Norway.)

At any rate, I have often wondered how I came to this place in my mind. My grandfather was a democrat and a union man, so maybe it comes from there. But I think it is more because of my former work as a news reporter.

Being a news reporter meant that I could not stay in a specific circle or bubble. I had to visit people in their homes, wherever that might be. I think when we reach a certain stage - and many people are born into this stage and never leave it - where you have a nice suburban home and you see clean yards and homes, and nice vehicles, and then you drive back and forth to your job in your little cubicle, going out to the movies or the groceries store - you are in a bubble. We don't drive down the backroads and see the house trailers or the slums in a certain part of town. We instinctively avoid that because it is different.

But I could not avoid it when I was working as a reporter. If the story called for me to visit an older lady who lived alone in a home that was falling down, a place where the roof leaked and the furniture was purchased by her great-great-grandparents and she told you not to sit in a certain chair because the leg was broken, then that is where I went.

So I saw how people with different means live. I saw that people who had what seemed like good jobs - jobs paying more than I was making - lived in relative poverty. Maybe they had a spouse who couldn't work, too, or lots of doctor bills. Maybe they had five kids. Whatever the reason, they couldn't afford to buy a new vehicle or keep their house spruced up. Not only could they not afford it, they didn't have time.

Now some of the people were obviously doing something newsworthy - maybe graduating from nursing school at the age of 40, or had somehow built a roller coaster out of matchsticks, or they were beekeepers, or collected something of interest, or had won some award at work. Whatever the reason for the story, it gave me many chances to see how people live.

The circumstances sometimes astounded me.  And sometimes, I admit, I wondered why someone didn't simply purchase cheap paint and spend a weekend making something that looked awful a bit more appealing. But I think most people perform at the height of their limits, and sometimes, without a little assistance, they just don't know where to turn, what to do, or how to be a human being. They are so busy trying to support themselves or their family, - being human doings (some might call them corporate serfs) - they don't have time to think about how something looks, much less do something about it.

After walking around two local counties, including my own, and visiting folks in places that maybe appeared nice on the outside but the poverty was visible on the inside, or vice versa, or whatever, it became apparent to me that we are a cruel society. We condemn people who do not live up to expectations, though these expectations vary by gender, race, and other conditions (and some of the conditions are invisible, unacknowledged, and unknowable be the persons who are being condemned).

We expect everyone to be able to become a millionaire, but it isn't going to happen. A recent article I read said one out of every 6 retirees was a millionaire - if you counted the value of the home in that. These are folks who need Social Security and Medicare, both programs that are part of the social safety net that some people want to dismantle, even if they are worth a million dollars. I'm afraid with today's health care costs, $1 million isn't going to go very far.

I could put up charts and facts all day long, but instead, I want to issue a challenge. Drive down a road or two you've not been down before, or not been down in a long time. Look at a home where someone lives, one you might find distasteful for whatever reason. Practice empathy and imagine why the place looks that way, what the lives of those folks might be like, and how a little more support from the community (i.e., the government), could make their lives even the slightest bit better. You can't go inside, but you can imagine.

Walk in someone else's shoes for a while. Pretend you're a librarian making $22,000 a year and work up a budget to live on. Could you do it? How about working a part-time minimum wage job? Could you make ends meet? Could you make ends meet with three part-time minimum wage jobs? No?

I've seen this stuff. People hurt, and they don't know how to fix it. In this America, if you can't pull yourself up by your bootstraps, something is wrong with you and apparently you deserve to be wherever you end up. So we don't want to help (though I don't understand this type of thinking at all). Not everyone starts out with boots, for one thing, and it's hard to go forward from there. Sometimes you end up walking around in your socks.

I assure you, if everyone could retire a millionaire, most would do it.